With his wife’s help, Terence Conley walked slowly toward a piano on a recent Thursday at the Jazz Foundation of America headquarters in Manhattan.
“Play something nice,” Judith Conley told her husband as she eased him onto a piano stool.
Mr. Conley, 51, steadied his fingers above the keys, smiled across the room in the direction of his three children and began playing “Ruby, My Dear.”
“I’m glad he chose that tune,” his wife whispered. “It’s one of the hardest to play in all of jazz.”
For Mr. Conley, a former member of the Count Basie Orchestra, tackling those difficult chords was another small but important step in his recovery from a September accident that nearly killed him.
Several months before, he had taken a job as a driver for Federal Express to earn some extra money — decent-paying jazz gigs had been disappearing even before the recession.
“Things were drying up,” Mr. Conley said softly. “I needed to feed my family.”
On Sept. 29, the day before he was to interview for a job teaching piano at Lincoln Center, Mr. Conley was driving his FedEx truck in Midtown Manhattan when he crashed into the back of a bus that he says had stopped abruptly. He sustained major head injuries and was deliberately put into a coma for more than a month by doctors at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan who were trying to reduce swelling and stop the bleeding on his brain.
“We didn’t know if or when he was going to wake up,” Mrs. Conley said. “Either way, doctors were saying that he would eventually be sent to a nursing home.”
Then one day at Bellevue, in mid-October, Mrs. Conley leaned over to kiss her husband.
“I’m so sad that this happened to you,” she told him.
Though her husband could not speak, his answer came in the form of a teardrop that rolled down his cheek.
“Play something nice,” Judith Conley told her husband as she eased him onto a piano stool.
Mr. Conley, 51, steadied his fingers above the keys, smiled across the room in the direction of his three children and began playing “Ruby, My Dear.”
“I’m glad he chose that tune,” his wife whispered. “It’s one of the hardest to play in all of jazz.”
For Mr. Conley, a former member of the Count Basie Orchestra, tackling those difficult chords was another small but important step in his recovery from a September accident that nearly killed him.
Several months before, he had taken a job as a driver for Federal Express to earn some extra money — decent-paying jazz gigs had been disappearing even before the recession.
“Things were drying up,” Mr. Conley said softly. “I needed to feed my family.”
On Sept. 29, the day before he was to interview for a job teaching piano at Lincoln Center, Mr. Conley was driving his FedEx truck in Midtown Manhattan when he crashed into the back of a bus that he says had stopped abruptly. He sustained major head injuries and was deliberately put into a coma for more than a month by doctors at Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan who were trying to reduce swelling and stop the bleeding on his brain.
“We didn’t know if or when he was going to wake up,” Mrs. Conley said. “Either way, doctors were saying that he would eventually be sent to a nursing home.”
Then one day at Bellevue, in mid-October, Mrs. Conley leaned over to kiss her husband.
“I’m so sad that this happened to you,” she told him.
Though her husband could not speak, his answer came in the form of a teardrop that rolled down his cheek.
