Is this the catchiest name for a boutique recording studio you’ve ever heard?  Almost certainly not, but it is a name picked in fond reverence for the late Joel D. Schnaper (MGS founder Joel L Schnaper’s paternal uncle). He was a San Francisco landscape architect of some renown and MGS’ colorful garden theme is dedicated to him.  Anyway, after Joel D passed away there was a nice, if now dated website made to show the “Joel Schnaper Memorial Garden” that had been installed in 1995 atop the East Harlem Terence Cardinal Cook Health center, thanks to the generous efforts of Joel D’s brother Harry. For the first few years of my career in music, no matter how hard I tried, the first few results for “Joel Schnaper” on Google were articles about the leafy recuperation garden in New York.  These articles made no mention of me or his burgeoning efforts as a trumpet player, and may have even convinced at least one googling headline-skimmer that I was the one who had passed away.  

As the years have gone by, I suspect that a distribution service like Distrokid probably has some sort of lesser known feature where it puts a 10 year-old picture of me under the word “Musical artist” (tellingly capitalized in context as such.) As proud as I am of the outdated resume, defunct personal website and ghost town of an IMDB page (for now!) that are to be found there, I wouldn’t be able to live with being the reason that Joel D was pushed from his rightful throne of search engine optimization.  

This recording studio and its website serve as a place where Joel David Schnaper’s joyous memory lives on, so if you’ve read this far and care to, feel free to browse any of these informative articles about the original Joel Schnaper and his Memorial Garden: