June 6, 2017

Meet Dane Crozier of Chicago Percussion Lessons in West Town

Local Stories

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dane Crozier.

Thanks for sharing your story with us Dane. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’ve been playing drums and percussion since I joined my school band class when I was eleven years old and if you must know, that means I’ve been playing for 21 years! I have been truly fortunate to learn from some of the best teachers in the country and collaborate with fantastic musicians from around the world.

I was extremely lucky to start taking private lessons when I was twelve with one of the most passionate, energetic, encouraging music teachers ever to walk the earth, Vicki Jenks. Through Vicki, I became active with summer music camps, youth symphonies, percussion ensembles, and performance recitals which kept me hungry to explore the wide world of percussion in all of its settings.

Staying heavily involved through high school, I began to understand that I wanted to become a professional percussionist, and decided to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison for a bachelor’s in percussion performance. The biggest draw I had to the school was their amazing percussion professor, Anthony Di Sanza. Clearly, Vicki had set the bar very high and Tony was the perfect teacher for me to continue my studies with. His boundless energy, depth of knowledge, and excitement for music was awe-inspiring. Over my four-and-a-half years (we called the extra half-year a “victory lap”) I had the opportunity to study an enormous range of percussion instruments and musical styles, fortifying my love of music and introducing me to new genres that I was previously unaware of. I knew that with a life in music, there was absolutely no way I would ever be bored. Sitting in Chicago traffic is the exception, but that’s another story.

After finishing my degree at UW, I decided to continue on for a Master’s in percussion performance from the University of Michigan, where I was able to study with Michael Udow, Joe Gramley, Ian Ding, and Brian Jones. Each of these teachers are phenomenally talented as performers and pedagogues and have an impressive legacy behind them. The caliber of musician and strong sense of community at Michigan was something truly special and my two years there zipped by in a flash. My time at Michigan helped me reflect on how music has led to so many amazing experiences, friendships, and lasting memories that it’s difficult to illustrate just how much it has shaped my life. I am constantly inspired by my colleagues, mentors, and students.

When I moved to Chicago in May, 2010, I was fresh out of graduate school and didn’t know a single musician in town. I always loved teaching and wanted that to be a central part of my professional life, so I took a chance that the website ChicagoPercussionLessons.com was available, and it was! My big plan from there was to reach out to all the middle school and high school music teachers in Chicago Public Schools and offer a free percussion class for their students; this was a win/win, right!? I would be giving the teachers a break from an hour of classes and working with their kids to improve their playing, leave my information and the students would start rolling in! Unfortunately, out of the hundreds of CPS teachers I contacted, I only heard back from three or four. From those, I was able to line up a few free classes which led to zero private students. It was a bummer, but what a great learning experience!

I had to swallow some of my pride and take a retail job at Urban Outfitters while I reevaluated my approach and continued meeting local musicians. I went to shows around town, searched craigslist, and took any gig I was lucky enough to land. Before too long, I got my first huge opportunity. A drummer in town who regularly played at my girlfriend’s restaurant was about to head on the road with a traveling musical and leave a teaching gig at Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville. He told me that they would be holding auditions and interviewing candidates and gave them my info, so I put together a few pieces to play for the audition, polished up my resume, and crushed the audition. Instantly, I inherited ten students at a GRAMMY Award winning high school music program, and I can’t tell you how amazing that was.

Within a few months of landing the gig in Naperville, I found an ad for a new community music school in Glenview called Terra Sounds that was interviewing for instructors and I reached out to them right away. They were holding interviews that included a mock lesson where you had to give to one of the founders a lesson in which I taught a guitar player how to play the snare drum! We had a great time and they offered me a position as a percussion instructor at their school! I was thrilled to join the team, but as any new business, there was slow growth for a while as we built up our student roster.

As I was involved with teaching in Naperville and Glenview, I found a music studio space that I shared with a few bands where I was able to more officially offer lessons through Chicago Percussion Lessons. This was a HUGE step forward for offering more than at-home travel lessons. Over a few years, the bands I shared the space with changed personnel or disbanded and I was able to fully dedicate the space to a percussion studio which made my wife very happy, because I no longer had to use part of our apartment to (tastefully) display many of my instruments.

It was at this point that I was really able to shape Chicago Percussion Lessons into a fully functional percussion palace with two drum sets, six congas, a marimba, a vibraphone, timbales, bongos, cajons, bata drums, djembes, and many other instruments. I started a google ads account, Yelp page, posted flyers, and signed the business up for deals on Groupon. Slowly, but surely, students started contacting me for lessons and after a few years, I had almost filled my entire schedule while still keeping a day at Neuqua Valley HS and Terra Sounds.

From May, 2010 to April, 2016, Chicago Percussion Lessons was a solo operation. Thankfully, in that time I had the chance to work with a lot of other talented drummers and percussionists in the city and when my schedule filled up, I reached out to a few of them who I knew would be great additions to CPL and was thrilled when they all said “yes”! Now, after a year of making the team, we share the studio schedule and are able to accommodate almost any incoming student’s lesson requests. I couldn’t be happier with this group of amazing instructors!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
If there’s one word that has become synonymous with being a professional musician, it’s “struggle”. When I first moved to Chicago, I didn’t know any musicians in town, so I had to start from scratch. I reached out to every music teacher in all the CPS middle and high schools to offer a free class for their drummers and percussionists, thinking that it would be a great way to meet instructors and students around the city. Of the hundreds of emails I sent, I’m pretty sure I only got three replies. I went through years of saying “yes” to every single gig opportunity that I was lucky enough to find, often for free or almost no money.

If you play well and keep meeting new people who are involved with what you want to be doing, the struggle leads to bigger and better opportunities, and after two years of hustling, working retail and service jobs, and catching some lucky breaks, I became a full-time musician in this big beautiful city!

Chicago Percussion Lessons – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Chicago Percussion Lessons is a great resource for comprehensive percussion and drum lessons in Chicagoland. Our studio is equipped with a large variety of percussion instruments such as drum sets, congas, a marimba, vibraphone, bata drums, timbales, djembes, cajons, bongos, glockenspiel, xylophone and much more! We work with people of all ages and abilities where lessons are tailored to each individual student, building on strengths and introducing exciting concepts to improve their skills in percussion and drums!

We are constantly working to fine-tune our teaching material and learning atmosphere so that everyone gets as much out of each lesson as possible and walks away with a better understanding of their instrument and a hunger for reaching the next level.

We’re very proud of the depth of knowledge and experience that each of our instructors bring to the team, which allows us to offer expert instruction on a huge amount of percussion instruments and styles of music. Not to brag, but we’re also a pretty fun bunch of guys, so we enjoy creating a happy, comfortable learning environment where you get to bolster your love of music!

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Wow. This is a really tough question. There have been so many amazing moments on this journey, but one of my proudest as a teacher was during a lesson one of my adult students, who had been playing drums for over 40 years and had studied with several other teachers over the years. We were working through some jazz drum set material which he had been struggling with for a long time before we began. After a little evaluation and a change of approach, I saw the lights turn all the way on, and he was shaking his head. He said, “I can’t believe it was this easy the whole time! No one else ever explained it to me this way and I can actually play it now!” To be fair, the stuff we were working on wasn’t easy, but it was the fact that he truly understood it when taking another approach after struggling for so long that made me so happy for him and proud as a teacher.

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