Tesh to share music, inspiration in Toledo
Written by Vicki L. Kroll | | news@toledofreepress.com
Listening to John Tesh’s strong, familiar voice as he talks about his career, it’s easy to believe anything is possible.
“I even say this on stage: If the guy who used to read the celebrity birthdays on ‘Entertainment Tonight’ is sitting down at the piano and following his dream and you guys actually paid to come see that, then you need to go home and get your clarinet out of the closet because it can happen,” he said during a phone interview from his Los Angeles home.
The pianist and composer released several albums while co-hosting “Entertainment Tonight,” a gig he gave up in 1996 after 10 years.
“When I left ‘Entertainment Tonight’ is when [taking risks] began,” he said. “OK, you’re earning seven figures a year for working four hours a day, is this going to be the rest of your life when you really want to be a piano player and you really want to have a voice? It’s time to make a decision, and I think we all face that.”
Tesh made music his life — and his dream a reality. Now he tries to help others find and pursue their passions.
The blond offers encouragement and educational tidbits on “The John Tesh Radio Show — Music and Intelligence for Your Life,” which is heard on nearly 300 stations, including WRVF FM 101.5 in Toledo. He shares his story in his second book, “Intelligence for Your Life — Powerful Lessons for Personal Growth,” which was released earlier this year along with the CD/DVD, “ALIVE music & dance.”
“One of the things we focus on a lot on the radio show and even on our live shows and in the books is just try to be a force in people’s lives to encourage them not only to find the thing they were made for, their deepest desire of their heart, but also we feel like it’s our mission to encourage people to live outside, to find a ministry, not a religious ministry, but a personal ministry, that they can help people,” he said.
Ten researchers cull magazines, newspapers and books for useful information Tesh reads on his show. The idea hit him when he saw the stack of magazines he and his wife, Connie Sellecca, amassed.
“We get really excited about something and we say, oh, I want to come back and read that later and we never read it; I used to have sticky notes in magazines for years,” he said. “We were trying to come up with an idea for a radio show that was different and when I saw that, I said, well, here’s an interesting idea, let’s try this.”
Nobody was interested.
“They said that ain’t going to work. It’s way too expensive; people don’t want to hear that much talking on the radio. It’s only two-minute snippets nine times an hour. It’s going to take too much to put it on the air. So we ended up doing it ourselves.”
Tesh will bring his “Music and Intelligence for Your Life” show to Stranahan Theater at 7 p.m. Oct. 22. Tickets range from $22 to $102.
“It’s not straight music, it’s not straight lecture, but it’s just stories about a 56-year-old’s life,” he said of the show. “I think that when people see the show, there’s a great deal of passion — the people we bring, whether it’s my bass player, the singer or me or our hip-hop dancer, you see the passion on stage from people who have really followed their dream, and that is the message we leave people with.”
