University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Dental school faculty member Barry Boyd worked his way through dental school by playing gigs every night. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE

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  “Music has helped my dentistry and dentistry helps my music,” says dental school faculty member Chet Gary. Click on the image to see a larger version. Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE

By DAVID J. HILL

Published: July 26, 2012

From the corridors and clinics of Squire Hall to the concert halls and coffeehouses around Western New York, folks in the UB School of Dental Medicine sure know their way around their instruments—both the dental and musical variety, that is.

The dental school has a wealth of talented musicians. To name but a few, Chet Gary, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Restorative Dentistry, has been playing the violin since age 5; Jill Uebelhoer, assistant to the chair of restorative dentistry, is a noted vocalist who’s been singing since age 7.

Michael Hatton, clinical associate professor in the Department of Oral Diagnostic Sciences, has played guitar for more than five decades. Elias Kaufman, associate professor emeritus in the Department of Pediatric and Community Dentistry, is a scholar in classic five-string banjo; he and his wife, Madeleine, have edited the American Banjo Fraternity’s Five-Stringer publication for nearly 40 years.

It’s been well-documented through clinical studies that music plays a role in significantly reducing the level of tension and anxiety patients feel while visiting their dentist. Some dental practices encourage patients to download a playlist stocked with dental visit-friendly songs. There’s even an Internet radio station that markets itself as “music for the modern dental practice.”

But why do so many SDM faculty and staff perform music themselves? For many, it’s a creative outlet. Still, there are parallels between playing an instrument and working in dentistry.

“Learning an instrument prepared me for the rigors of dental school because with an instrument you’re constantly aspiring to get better and you never settle for mediocre results,” says Barry Boyd, a clinical associate professor in the Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery. “Certainly, precision is necessary in both music and dentistry. If you’re not playing precisely, it’s going to be reflected immediately in the band’s sound, especially in an instrument with no frets on it.”

Barry Boyd and his bass guitar

A well-rounded bass player, Boyd worked his way through college by playing gigs every night and performing with numerous prominent jazz musicians.

He and several of his friends began playing bass guitar around the same time when they were teenagers growing up in Buffalo. “We saw it as a means to be popular and meet girls,” Boyd says with a laugh. He started taking lessons at age 14 and soon after his father took him to area clubs like the old Tralf and the historic Colored Musicians Club of Buffalo.

It was at the Colored Musicians Club that Boyd met some of his biggest influences. “Fortunately, I met a lot of really nurturing, older musicians, one of whom was Al Tinney,” he says. Credited with influencing the birth of bebop jazz, Tinney played in many of the original jazz clubs in New York City and was a cast member in George Gershwin’s opera “Porgy and Bess.”

Boyd was happy to return to Buffalo during summer breaks while he was in college at the University of Pittsburgh. “When I’d come home for summers, I was in a band that Al Tinney and another gentleman directed. It was a big band called the Al Tinney Bilal Abdallah Big Band, but since we practiced in the basement of a building at Main and Utica, we affectionately referred to ourselves as the cellar rats,” he says.

Despite the hectic schedule of dental school, Boyd earned a living playing music seven nights a week and sometimes twice a day on weekends. It was actually his DMD degree that got him kicked out of one band. “The first and only band I ever got fired from, the guys got together and decided I wasn’t going to work out because I was graduating from dental school and they thought that was going to be the end of the music for me,” he recalls, laughing. He got picked up by a jazz fusion band shortly after being voted out.

On a recent Friday, after finishing up a full day of submitting grades and overseeing cases in clinic, Boyd headed off to the Wegmans in Buffalo’s Black Rock neighborhood, where he was playing a gig with Rey Scott and Friends, one of several bands he’s in. “We play jazz that is a little bit obtuse, slightly free form,” he explains.

In addition to his bands, Boyd also enjoys performing in a chamber orchestra with his 11-year-old son, who is turning heads with his proficiency with the half-size bass.

Touching hearts, a song at a time

For staff member Jill Uebelhoer, music is a way for her to touch the listener’s heart, the way Barry Manilow and Barbra Streisand did when she was a child. Their records inspired her to begin singing at age 7 and, despite an absence of formal training, Uebelhoer has developed an enchanting voice.

“It’s all about feelings,” she says. “People ask if I get nervous and I do just before I go on stage. But when I get up there, I transform. I feel like a storyteller through music. You feel like an actor up there and you sing the song the way the writer intended it to be. I just like to relate to people and get them to feel what I’m feeling when I sing.”

Having performed at wedding ceremonies and in the annual SDM talent show, Uebelhoer is looking to take a big step by sending audition tapes to the hugely popular NBC shows “The Voice” and “America’s Got Talent,” and has already sent a tape to “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

The music-dentistry link

Others in the dental school see something of a correlation between music and dentistry. “They’ve helped me interchangeably—music has helped my dentistry and dentistry helps my music. Doing both has improved my skills at both,” says Chet Gary of restorative dentistry.

Gary took seven years of lessons in classical violin before teaching himself how to play the guitar in the 1960s. In college, he used music as an outlet to earn an income by performing in coffeehouses and at local colleges and high schools. After stints with Jade and the Party Time Band, Gary joined the band Essence, with Kate Engler as the vocalist. The band made two original records and sold several thousand copies.

Gary stepped away from the band to go into dental practice, eventually joining the Cheektowaga Symphony, for which he played second violin during the 1980s. Since then, he’s been performing at area coffeehouses and clubs.

He also plays guitar, violin and vocals with Central Groove, a contemporary rock band that includes three other dentists, among them guitarist John Nasca, a clinical instructor in the Department of Restorative Dentistry.

In addition, he performs occasionally with Boyd and has performed in the annual SDM talent show with Hatton.

For Gary, music has provided an enriching outlet of expression and creativity not available within the confines of dentistry.

“I still maintain now that I wouldn’t want to give up music because it makes me a better professional and a better person because of the ability to express myself,” he says, adding, “Music just opens up doors. I can help people in a different way and communicate with them in a different way. It’s a universal language.”

It’s a language in which the folks around Squire Hall are quite fluent.