Andrew Hickey

speaker

2,253 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Andrew Hickey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs · Song 185: “Peaches En Regalia” by Frank Zappa · 21 Jul 2026 podcast

Along with Mundy came a new keyboard player, who had actually been associated with Zapper longer than anyone in the band except Collins, and would go on to be the band's longest serving member, playing with the Mothers off and on until 1974.

Don Preston was from a completely different musical world than the original members of the Mothers, having his roots in jazz and experimental music.

Preston had grown up in a musical family.

His father was a trumpet and sax player who was an arranger for the house band for the local NBC affiliate in Detroit, where he was raised.

But it was when he joined the army that he first started to really grow as a musician.

Stationed in Germany, he was placed in the army band, which at the time included the great jazz flautist Herbie Mann.

At the time, Preston was a moderately competent piano player, and he also soon took up the bass.

But as he said later, Herbie Mann was very helpful when I first started playing.

I didn't even know what a bridge was, and after I learned what a bridge was I promptly forgot them a number of times.

The other big connection he made during his army days was with his roommate, a trumpet player named Buzz Gardner who taught Preston about modern classical and experimental music, particularly Berg, Webern and Schoenberg.

Preston was learning about all this difficult music, while simultaneously playing odd gigs with pickup bands where he'd play either piano or bass.

This gave him enough experience that by the time he left the army in 1953, he was good enough to play bass with Elvin Jones, the great jazz drummer who would later go on to great fame with John Coltrane's quartet.

Jones was leading late-night sessions, which would feature soloists like Yusuf Latif, Kenny Burrell and Pepper Adams.

and these sets would be so long that Jones's normal bass player, Ollie Jackson, would get too tired to play after about four hours, at which point Preston would take over for the rest of the night.

For most of the 50s, Preston was primarily a bass player, playing live dates with Shorty Rogers, Nat King Cole, Nelson Riddle and others.

Towards the end of the 50s, he formed his own band, Aha, which stood for Athletic Harmony Assemblage, and was definitely not the later Norwegian pop band of a similar name, which included Paul Beaver.

Beaver was already starting to get interested in the electronic musical instruments which would lead, as we've heard in other episodes, to him becoming the world's first session Moog player.

And yes, in this case there is a first for this very specific job, because he started it when the number of Moogs in existence was in single digits.

It's Beaver playing, for example, on Star Collector by the Monkees.

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