Géza Keller picked up the guitar at 10, started composing his own songs at 16, and has since written more 50, styled after his primary influences: Steely Dan, Jackson Brown and Miles Davis.
As the founder of half a dozen bands over the years, including breakingthecode, Géza has had a long love affair with writing and performing music. He also has always tried to bring a sense of community to groups of friends who share his love for the played note.
Today, Géza plays lead guitar and sings lead vocals with breakingthecode, a four-person acoustic group he originally founded in 1997, which blends vocal harmonies with notes of jazz, blues, folk and rock. The current group performs a wide eclectic variety of singer-songwriter tunes, including Géza Keller originals, modern-day covers and catchy jazz tributes dating as far back as the 1920s.
Born in
The Keller
family relocated to Toronto for the next six years, where Maggie picked up various odd jobs available to political refugees until she landed a job at
the Toronto Star. She later returned to newspapers as administrative
assistant to the editor of The Sacramento Bee.
Géza F. played tunes by ear on the piano as he sang along with his
favorite jazz records by the Mills Brothers, Ella Fitzgerald and the Four
Freshmen. He also loved Big Band pianist Stan Kenton, trumpet player
Maynard Ferguson, and marimba player Xavier Cugat. Growing up, little Géza often heard his father sing bossa nova songs with Antonio
Carlos Jobim, Astrud Gilberto, and Sergio Mendez & Brasil ’66.
When little
Géza (Géza Laszlo) was eight, he saw the Disney movie “Almost Angels,” about the
Vienna Boys Choir. Inspired by music at home, and recognizing now that young boys like him could perform, he immediately joined his
elementary school choir as a soprano. He continued with choirs and
ensembles until the family left for San
Francisco two years later, in 1963. The family moved
again six months later to Sacramento ,
when Géza was ten. Because he was academically gifted, he started school early and
then was accelerated through several grades so he was two years
younger than his classmates.
Expanding his musical repertoire, Géza decided he wanted to be a drummer. His
father rented him a snare drum for three months, which wasn't such a great idea in an apartment complex. But by then he’d also showed an interest
in the saxophone, so he
tried playing tenor sax in his school band. Unfortunately, the sax went the
same way of the drums—still too loud for the neighbors—so Géza’s father bought
him his first guitar, a Stella.
Graduating a year early, he was recruited to attend New Mexico Tech, a
lower cost version of the California Institute of Technology, known as Caltech.
Just sixteen when he left his close-knit family in Sacramento ,
Géza took off for the new desert frontier and the tiny rural town of Socorro
with fervor, aiming to escape his provincial “white bread” life. There, he
studied math, played soccer, and pursued the Yaqui way of knowledge.
It wasn’t
until his junior year of college that he got hooked on guitar once again, honing his skills by listening to Steely Dan, the Grateful Dead, Traffic and
singer-songwriters such as Jackson Brown and John Prine. He also practiced the
guitar and sang like a fiend for at least six hours a day. He and some
classmates formed a band called Creamy Goodness, which later changed its name
to Island, after a book by Aldous Huxley about a Utopian place where everyone
is happy. During that period, Géza wrote a number of complicated songs with
challenging time signatures, inspired by jazz greats John
McLaughlin, Chick Corea, Stanley Turrentine, Ron Carter and the Don Ellis
Orchestra.
As a math
major studying logic, Géza studied the work of Bertrand Russell, the famous
mathematician and philosopher, which led to other great philosophers such as
Rene Descartes (“I think therefore I am”) and Maurice Nicoll, who talked about
achieving true self consciousness by developing and harmoniously integrating
one’s physical, intellectual and emotional centers.
“It is
like a guitar with many strings. To pluck one all the time is not to reach a
harmony,” Nicoll said.
Thus
inspired, Géza strived to integrate harmonies into his musical compositions as
well, hoping that listeners would also experience joy from them. That is still
true today.
“I want
them to feel the loooooove,” he says.
After
graduation, Géza worked on the first airborne laser at Kirtland Air Force Base
in Albuquerque , rode many hilly miles on his
bicycle through the Land
of Enchantment , and formed
The Jazz Sparks with some other Techies, who played covers and also some of Géza’s
original songs. He eventually ended up at the Los Alamos
national lab, working in the Laser Fusion Program and forming another band
there.
Even then,
the young lad became known for bringing musicians together to jam. He took
it on himself to encourage burgeoning talent, a community-building skill for
which he is still known at the college’s annual “49ers” reunion and the annual
SPIE optics trade shows he attends every year. And he takes immeasurable joy in
organizing the slide-rule contest.
At the
root, many of Géza’s original songs are about change. Many are also about
love—its many forms and repercussions—a universal theme to which he believes everyone
can relate.
Realizing
that many people didn’t have the attention span for his longer, complicated jam
songs, he set out to write his first commercial song, titled, “Let Me In,” in
1985. The song was inspired by the struggle that many young people experience,
trying to find their own identities, their purposes in life, their search for
love and their attempts to overcome their limitations amid the general chaos of
life.
Girl,
we’re all trying to live in a dream, life is not all that it seems, there’s so
much for you so believe.
“People
seek love and yet are troubled by love,” he says. “It’s both the answer and the
problem.”
Géza’s hope has always been that this song would expand his audience beyond the
musicians and artists who like music just for music’s sake; he wants his songs
to appeal to listeners who enjoy being more actively engaged in music, and even
want to get up and dance to it.
Finally tired
of the rural mountain life, Géza decided to go full tilt in the other
direction, and moved to Manhattan
to take a new job. In his off time, Géza wrote a slew of songs about a range of
topics, but focusing primarily on the search for the meaning of real love. One
of them is “Big City Lights,” which is about a sexual tryst, against the
backdrop of Manhattan .
During his
two years in New York
(and before he had children), he wrote “Baby Song,” which
was about how he thought it would be when he did have kids. Today, he has two
sons, who are 26 and 17. His older son, Cole, has joined the family business, runs an open mic night at the Stag & Lion Pub in Carlsbad, where he plays
guitar and performs his own original songs. His younger son, Landon, is an autistic
videogame savant and a talented but reluctant painter, which has prompted Géza
to ponder forming a 501c3 nonprofit organization to help foster the creative
and personal development of autistic adults.
“Baby
Song” was the first song that Géza and his partner, Caitlin Rother, sang
publicly together, because it is one of her favorite Géza Keller originals, and
they have since recorded it as a duet. Its bossa nova beat and heartfelt lyrics
make it a feel-good finger-snapping crowd pleaser as well.
‘Cause
you’ve got a way of making me feel
It’s
something special, doesn’t seem real
Now I
know how it feels to be in love.
Géza moved
to San Diego in
1988, where he worked at two optics companies before starting several of his
own. His first company was QSP Optical Technology Inc., of which he was vice
president. For the past 14 years, he has been the president and co-owner of
Infinite Optics in Santa Ana ,
a company that develops and manufactures thin film coatings for parts of
telescopes, medical instruments, and defense systems. On the same site, he started
Cibola Glass, a boutique glass tile company that dovetails with Infinite
Optics, by using similar technologies to create beautiful home furnishings. For
a time he also ran Optics Masters, a sister company in Poway ,
which he recently sold.
More
recently, Géza has been moved to write songs about tragic events that have
struck him in the heart, such as the death of his college roommate, Victor J. Saracini,
the pilot of Flight 175, whose hijacked plane was flown by terrorists into
second tower at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That monumental
tragedy inspired Géza to write “That Day,” a song about how our world view
changed in those moments that Victor and 2,995 other Americans were killed, and
6,000 others were injured, and also fostered an annual fundraiser and scholarship fund at New Mexico Tech.
And I
don’t think I’ll ever see, this life the way it used to be
While
all the things around me change, I know that I still feel the same
And I
won’t let your memory, fade into the history
Of all
the things that you and I believed
Géza wrote another airplane-related song titled, “The Storm,” only this time, he
eerily wrote it the day before the mysterious disappearance of Malaysian
Airlines Flight 370, which took the lives of 226 people and sparked a massive
search-recovery effort in the Indian Ocean in
2014.
The
Storm blew up from the south, that’s the day that she got lost.
Looking
back, someone says that’s really how it all takes place.
Géza has enjoyed playing live in many bands, also including a now-defunct electric group called FakeBook, which had several of the same members as breakingthecode. But he also tries to get into the recording studio whenever he can.
He started his own label and launched his first studio,2656 State Street in Carlsbad ,
then moved it to Poway as Studio 2656, with
his old friend and BTC bandmate Joe Rosignolo. Recording with other talented studio
musicians, including drummer Jack Nathan, guitar player Bob Harkelroad, and pedal
steel player Kirk Eipper, further reignited Géza’s passion to get back to playing
his own original music. Today, he regularly jams with Jack and others local musicians at venues throughout North County.
He started his own label and launched his first studio,
Nights and
weekends, Géza plays many other roles besides lead singer and guitarist, including
miniature golfer, bowler, video arcade monitor and homework tutor for Landon.
He and Caitlin also enjoy long-distance swimming in the ocean, and go on quarterly
creative personal development trips to the wine country in Sonoma and Napa , where they are
working to develop their mad wine-tasting skills, to write and rehearse new
songs. They are always on the lookout for good wineries or other venues where
BTC can perform.
Story by Caitlin Rother, photo by Richard Malcolm. To support BTC, please "like" their Facebook page. To join their mailing list, please email Caitlin at crother@flash.net.