Jazz band leader Eric Mintel splits time between piano and the paranormal

Bigfoot. The Beast of Bray Road. Jazz legend Dave Brubeck.

If you believe one of these things is not like the other, they are actually all passions of pianist Eric Mintel.

For over 25 years, the Eric Mintel Quartet, featuring Mintel (piano), Nelson Hill (sax/flute), Jack Hegyi (bass), and Dave Mohn (drums) have been entertaining audiences with Mintel’s original compositions and excellent interpretations of Dave Brubeck. They are known for their Dave Brubeck Tribute and a popular holiday “Charlie Brown Jazz,” they have appeared on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz on NPR, and even opened for Dave Brubeck himself at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia.

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But on the side, Mintel produces and hosts a paranormal video series called “Eric Mintel Investigates” on Facebook. A history buff, Mintel travels around the country learning the stories of the towns he performs at. American history just happens to include a lot of ghost stories and cryptozoology.

“I’ve always loved the paranormal, ever since I was a kid,” said Mintel. “We live here in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, literally down the road from where George Washington crossed the Delaware. We’ve got a lot of historical places around here that always have a ghost story attached to them. What also got me into it, we would play these wonderful theaters across the country and without me saying anything, they would tell me this place is haunted. I wanted to do a show where we as a jazz quartet would play the gig and then after the gig we’d go back and investigate the place later that night. We tried to do something similar to that, but the guys in my quartet won’t do that. The drummer doesn’t want to mess with the spirits and the other guys are good, but they’re not really into it.”

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Mintel began the series in 2016 and later partnered up with his high school buddy and spirit medium, Dominic Sattele. The two investigators have looked for juvenile Sasquatch in the Jersey Pine Barrens, and in one harrowing video, captured the haunting cries of the Beast of Bray Road in Wisconsin.

“He’s supposed to be this upright canine dog-man werewolf type creature,” explained Mintel. “The farmer who we did the investigation on his property has thousands of pictures from trail cams of this weird mist that comes over this area that we call the bait area which is full of road kill. He’s trying to lure the creature in after he had his own encounter.”

On the video, Mintel and his cohorts are illuminated in green night vision, discussing the creature when suddenly they hear the beast calling from deep in the woods.

“I could not believe it,” said Mintel. “We were in the middle of a field. It was dark. The first thing that happened was we saw a UFO go over the field. You could see planes in the area, but this was a solid orb of light all caught on our video. It went over the field, did a 45 degree angle and then disappeared. Then right after that we heard these howls that were the most ungodly things you ever want to hear. It wasn’t a coyote or wolves. It sounded like a man screaming in the field. Right then and there my whole perspective was changed.”

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Earlier in his life, when he was 14 years old, Mintel’s perspective was changed when he made a discovery digging through his parent’s record collection. It was an old 45 of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” and “Blue Rondo a La Turk.”

“I put that record on and immediately had a connection,” recalled Mintel. “I knew that was what I wanted to play, even though at the time I didn’t know it was jazz.”

Mintel is largely self-taught on piano, having absorbed the works of Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, Duke Ellington, Chick Corea, and Bill Evans. He took a year of lessons, but realized he could learn more on his own.

“I went to the piano lesson playing ‘Take Five,’ this obscure, difficult Brubeck stuff, and my piano teacher is trying to get me play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’,” said Mintel. “Ever since then it’s been just time in the field.”

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Mintel’s love of Brubeck led to a long friendship and mentorship with the jazz great that continued from 1991 until Brubeck’s death in 2012.

“What a great guy he was,” Mintel said of Brubeck. “He mentored me and wrote liner notes for my CDs. I have handwritten letters, notes, Christmas cards where he would write out music for me with lyrics. Really cool stuff. He basically told me to stay the course and not give up.”

Another connection with Brubeck came with a performance at the White House in 1998 for President Bill Clinton (The Eric Mintel Quartet have performed at the White House twice, including once for President Barack Obama).

“That was really surreal,” Mintel said of his first time at the White House. “I think it was around the Monica Lewinsky situation, so it was crazy. It was really cool to meet him. He came out and shook my hand and I gave him a CD. I said, ‘Mr. President, you and I have a mutual friend in Dave Brubeck.’ He said, ‘Dave Brubeck is one of the guys that I loved listening to as a kid. I just gave Dave Brubeck the National Medal of the Arts Award. Dave said I was the only elected official that he knew who could hum the bridge to ‘Blue Rondo a la Turk’.’”

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Eric Mintel Quartet have performed at the Savannah Jazz Festival in the past, but this will be their first appearance at Tybee Post Theater. The quartet will perform a number of Brubeck tunes, as well as some of Mintel’s originals. Mintel has written some music based on his paranormal investigations including the songs “Bigfoot” and “The Beast of Bray Road,” but it’s not clear whether or not he’ll perform those at the show.

“Brubeck is just entrenched in my life,” said Mintel. “When we play Dave’s music, of course we do our own take of it, but the way I’ve always modeled this group is by the classic quartet—very tight, very crisp sound. We’ve worked together for over twenty years and we’re really reading each other’s minds. A lot of things are spontaneous and that’s what you strive for as a jazz musician, that unspoken creativity.”

“The way we present our music is very melodic. That’s what hooked me into Brubeck, strong melody and rhythm. I go out there on my solos, but I always come back to the melody.”

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Mintel looks forward to bringing his quartet to Tybee Island where they get to introduce themselves to a new audience, and who knows, maybe he’ll pick up a new ghost story or two.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Eric Mintel talks jazz and ghosts ahead of Tybee Post Theater show