Longtime local a drummer first, on-air personality second

By Jerry Fink

Monday, May 11, 2009 | 2 a.m.

John Nasshan’s heart pumps music. Beats and tempos flow through his veins.

You might find the 53-year-old drummer performing with the Henderson Symphony Orchestra or with one of his three bands — Quintessence, The Monuments Trio and Coalition.

When he isn’t performing, he’s playing jazz and talking about it on KUNV 91.5-FM or interviewing local artists for his “Arts Alive” radio program.

“I knew I was going to be a professional musician from the time I was a little kid,” he says. “I never thought of doing anything but playing drums.”

Music was his destiny.

His grandfather was legendary percussionist Bobby Christian, who performed with Paul Whiteman, Sophie Tucker, the NBC and ABC radio orchestras and the Chicago Symphony. Nasshan sometimes would watch him rehearse on Sundays and learn.

But his grandfather never gave him lessons.

“He didn’t have the patience for it,” Nasshan says. “He was a perfectionist.” He sent Nasshan to study with his teacher, Roy Knapp, who also tutored Gene Krupa.

“My grandfather gave me one of his favorite snare drums and when I was in the second grade I was going to play a solo at a Christmas concert,” says Nasshan, who was born in Jamaica, N.Y., but later moved with his family to Chicago to live with his grandfather. “He lived in Chicago but happened to be in New York working at the time. Our house was a block and a half from school and he carried the drum and walked with me to the school and stayed for the concert.”

It was one of many defining musical moments in his life.

Nasshan got his first professional gig when he was 12 years old and joined the musicians union.

“I hooked up with a music act that played county fairs around the Midwest,” he says. “My grandfather had been writing their music for years. I went to correspondence school for the whole year.”

In high school Nasshan’s band director was a bass player who had worked with his grandfather’s band when Nasshan was a child. “He started using me at weddings and parties,” Nasshan recalls. “I wasn’t even driving yet, so my dad would drive me to the gig ... then he’d swing around and pick me up afterward.”

Before he was out of high school he was working in clubs in the Chicago area and doing recording sessions. He went to DePaul University and got a call to go on the road with “Gene Kelly’s Salute to Broadway,” starring Howard Keel, Ken Berry and Mimi Hines. “We did 75 cities in 84 days.”

After the tour he moved to Las Vegas in 1975 and transferred his union membership from Chicago. He was 20 years old. “Times were good,” he says.

His first couple of years he played in a lounge at the Sahara, backing up Penny France and Anne Sidney in an act called Penny and Annie.

“About that time I really got into jazz,” he says. “Vegas was full of jazz musicians. This was the jumping-off place for guys that had grown tired of being on the road with Woody Herman and Stan Kenton and Count Basie and Buddy Rich.”

After three years Nasshan quit the lounge scene to become a showroom player.

He’d go down to the union hall and play with “kicks” bands. Back then the union hall was at Tropicana Avenue and what is now Duke Ellington Way. It housed the union, a credit union and a private club where musicians played.

“They would start at 10 in the morning and play till 6 the next morning — all different bands, all day and night,” Nasshan says.

He started performing with the 10 a.m. band and eventually “graduated” to the 2 a.m. slot, when the hipper bands performed. He played there for eight months, selling musical instruments and giving lessons during the day.

Then he started getting calls to play showrooms of casinos such as the Sahara, Desert Inn and Golden Nugget. For about 15 years, he backed up vocalist and impressionist Bob Anderson.

“The funny thing about it is, all the work I was doing and I never had a permanent job in a house band,” he says. “I was running around town like a hired gun.”

He joined the announcing staff at KUNV nine years ago as a volunteer after surgery to remove a parotid tumor.

“They took it out and it upset my facial nerves. There was numbness and things and a bit of atrophy here and there,” Nasshan says.

Brian Sanders, who was the station’s programming director at the time, suggested he volunteer as an announcer because it would force him to speak clearly and help him to recover.

“I saw that as a chance to learn more about jazz while playing music for people,” he says.

About five years ago general manager David Reese made Nasshan a paid employee.

He never stopped working as a musician, performing with the likes of Jack Jones and Rich Little.

He is principal percussionist and timpanist with the Henderson Symphony Orchestra and plays with his own groups at local clubs and sometimes in elementary schools.