Nathan Day

You can follow it like any inherited characteristic - like brown eyes, or curly red hair, or an allergy to cats. In the Day family, it's a passion for music.
Understand this: It's not a fondness for music, or a tendency to like a particular style of music. It's an unbroken, unwavering life-altering passion for music. Any music. All Music.
Hard rock. Classical art song. Big Bands. Hawaiian string orchestras. Hundred-voice choirs.
In the last 90 years, the Day family has filled Portland with the sounddsa of music, and Nathan Day is excited about carrying on the tradition.
He just never envisioned it would be as the manager of the Day Music Co.
Up until 18 months ago, Nathan, who's 28, was rocking hard with the band he founded, Big Island Shindig. The band's mix of Southern rock, bluegrass, world beat, jazz and rock made them popular in the Northwest. The were about to go on the road.
Nathan loved the music, enjoyed the band members, loved the lifestyle. "Having a band was always my passion and my dream," Nathan says. Paying the bills by working in the guitar department of the family music store on Southeast Foster Road had always been "just my means of getting there."
He knew, of course, that his great-grandfather L. Carroll Day had founded the family music company nearly a century ago, with support from Carroll's own father, Harry L. Day. And he knew the company had been run by Carroll and then Carroll's son Dick Day. Nathan knew his own father, Jim Day, and his uncle, Robert Day, had run the company since the 1980s.
But now his uncle had retired, and his dad had had a kidney transplant and couldn't run the business.
Nathan didn't know it, but he was about to make a decision made by men in many generations of the Day family before him: Should he take his music dreams and hit the road or give them up to run the family business?
"It was the hardest choice of my life," Nathan says today. He left his band and became manager of Day Music. "It was necessary, to take care of my family and my son and the elders."

Like any new manager, Nathan set about making the business his own. His firsts step was to clean out and refurbish the auditorium in the western half of the big building.
"We've had something like 10,000 recitals there," says Nathan's dad, Jim. "Thousands and thousands" of musicians have sweated through performances, their families looking on.
As a performer, Nathan could see the space had potential as a concert venue. It has great acoustics. It has a huge lobby.
Then he began cleaning out offices. The family business began in downtown Portland but moved to its Southeast location in the late 1950s. In 50 years, a lot of history had been stuffed into office corners and heavy safes, file cabinets and boxes in the basement.
Nathan, who's young and hip and who hadn't thought much about history, was fascinated by the treasures he was uncovering.
He found a scrapbook of photos and clippings about grandfather's 1940s big band, Dick Day and the Dukes of Downbeat. The band had been hugely successful, he learned, backing up Duke Ellington and the Mills Brothers.
He learned the company had once run a music publishing house and discovered L. Carroll Day had founded national music organizations.
"I was excited," Nathan says. "I was intrigued. I wanted to know more." His dad and uncle didn't know much. So Nathan went to visit his great-aunt Dora Day Graham, Carroll's daughter. And then he sought out his grandmother Carolyn Day, Dick's widow.
What he learned amazed him. Far from being the first Day man to have chosen between making music and running a music business, Nathan was only the most recent.
L. Carroll Day, the founder of the company, had had undeniable talent as a composer, arranger, conductor. In the end, he'd stayed in Portland to run a music business.
Dick Day had quit his band to run Day Music in the late 1940s, Carolyn told him, "because she was pregnant with my dad, Jim," Nathan says. "He had to make the choice, just like I did, and tell the band."
Jim Day has advanced degrees in music composition and is a published composer and music professor. He came back to the company business.
Now it's Nathan's turn. A guitar player, he has worked hard to learn about pianos and the other aspects of the business: instrument sales, repair, instruction and sheet music. "Were a full-line music store," he says with pride.
Nathan says he doesn't regret his decision to join the company. His grandfather Dick died before Nathan could ask, but he feels sure Dick never regretted the decision to leave his band, either.
Nathan loves to go to work these days. He loves that nearly all his employees make music in their off-hours. And there's something else he loves, which you wouldn't expect a twentysomething to embrace: his family's long tradition of support for the Rose Festival.

In the dusty archives, Natha - The Oregonian - June, 2nd 2007