DOCTOR'S LOVE FOR MUSIC TURNS TO JAZZ

Richard Moore was 19 and a student at Southeast Missouri State University when he got his first dream job: playing the piano with a group of jazz musicians at the Purple Crackle in East Cape Girardeau.

"I didn't have a very successful academic career here. I was too busy making music," said Moore, 55, an anesthesiologist at the Missouri Surgery Center in Cape Girardeau.

It was at the Purple Crackle that Moore began learning the finer points of jazz, and he is still learning today, he said.

"It's a never-ending search for something," Moore said. "I don't think you ever find it. The evidence is your own evolution."

While his musicianship flourished, his grades didn't, and he left Southeast to join the Air Force.

"I guess at the time it might have felt like a misspent youth, but in retrospect, it was a pretty good time," he joked.

For years he worked in groups playing "everything from country and western to jazz."

Now he only plays jazz. "Regardless of what your level of proficiency is, it's never good enough," Moore said. "Even at this facet of life, I still work at it as hard or harder than before. I hope people can see the difference."

Moore, who lives in Jackson, and pianist Beverly Reece of Cape Girardeau, drummer Steve Williams of Cairo, Ill., and bassist Phil Brown of Carbondale, Ill., will present their second annual "Evening of Jazz" Friday night to benefit Southeast Hospice.

The concert starts at 7:30 at Academic Auditorium on the campus of Southeast Missouri State University. Tickets are $5 and are available at Boatmen's Bank, Schnucks or through Southeast Hospice at 335-6208.

The concert will also feature "All That Jazz," a dance presentation choreographed by Kara Hammes and performed by students from the Academy of Dance Arts in Cape Girardeau.

"It gives us a chance to play and it gives the hospice a chance to raise a little bit of money," Moore said.

He and Reece met in 1983 and have been collaborating musically ever since. "She's a prodigy," Moore said. "She can play anything."

He started taking piano lessons when he was about 8, and learned to love classical music.

He got interested in jazz when he was in high school, and asked his band teacher, a clarinetist, how he could learn to play jazz.

"He told me, 'Listen to the radio,' and I thought he was being flippant, but he wasn't," Moore said.

Learning to play jazz, he said, is learning to improvise, or what Moore calls "composition on demand."

After he got out of the Air Force, Moore went to the University of Missouri-Rolla, where he studied engineering.

He was working toward his Ph.D. when his son was born. Doctors told them the baby had severe heart problems, and the baby died when he was 16 months old.

His son's death was another turning point. Moore left the engineering field and started medical school in 1974.

"I kind of felt like I needed to be doing more than the engineering," he said. "I went to night school, and then I made the application to medical school, and by the grace of God, I got in."

Balancing medicine and music isn't much of a stretch these days, Moore said.

"It's easy. The demands of the medical thing are considerably less than they used to be," he said, especially now that his practice is no longer hospital-based.

There's always the possibility he'll give up medicine in favor of the music.

"There's going to be a time when I retire from this," Moore said. "There are some opportunities out there in music that look promising, anyway."

Music "is already an avocation," he said. "I can't really see myself retired doing what the stereotypical retired person does, fishing and all that. I've got to have something going on."

But putting in 40 hours a week at the piano might not be the answer, he said.

"Once it becomes a job, it's no longer fun. You've got to balance it," Moore said.

The problem with life, he said, is that there's not enough time to do everything that looks interesting.

"I'm always finding something else I want to do," Moore said. He's kept up with developments in the engineering field and jots down ideas regularly, along with ideas for writing projects.