Time Off: Precious Moments

Band of Professionals

On Wednesday nights, after he puts his children to bed, Greg Moore heads over to a local law firm where — along with a lawyer, a telecom executive, and a teacher — he routinely raids one of the firm's nondescript closets. Instead of garnering ballpoint pens and whiteout, however, Moore's foursome scores a cluster of musical instruments, which they subsequently practice on until midnight. On Saturday nights, Moore — the band's drummer — plays along with his colleagues at local night clubs.

Few things offer him greater satisfaction than being a drummer. Although playing the drums is not "the greatest love" of Moore's life — that unique endearment is reserved for his wife — it surely is his longest one, inasmuch as he took it up as an 11-year-old.

"When I'm playing the drums, I'm the happiest," says Moore, 34, senior consultant at the Purcellville, VA's office of Huthwaite, Inc. "My soul connects with it."

And while he gets a lot of personal satisfaction playing the instrument itself, the high really comes when he is playing live, with his rock band, Slider, and watching people dancing and enjoying his music.

Moore's older brother was already playing the guitar when his mother, thinking of her favorite uncle who played the drums, asked her son if he'd like to take up drumming. His first year with sticks in hand, he got involved with middle school programs such as jazz band and symphonic band. After being heavily involved with various rock bands and music programs through college, he tried to put the drums aside to focus on family life.

"In the consulting world you travel a lot, and when I'm home, I need to be home," says Moore, a father of children 8, 6, and 3. "I knew that if I were going to pursue a hobby, it had to be one I did on the road or one I could do during nonchild hours."

Moore, who has had his original drumming published in Modern Drummer magazine, sings, too — but nobody hears him. "I have a mike but they never turn it on," he quips. "My voice has never emerged out of that puberty stage. It squeaks. I sit back there and sing, and people may think they're hearing me, but they're not."

From China to Central Park

It's safe to say that Brent Habig, the founder and CEO of Tigris Consulting, is one of the few piano-playing consultants who is fluent in Mandarin and sings with the New York Grand Opera.

"I love opera," says Habig, who founded Tigris in 1996 and is a frequent Grand Opera chorus member. "To be on stage and have performed in so many Verdi operas gives me a very different perspective than I would have if I were in the audience, conducting, or playing excerpts on the piano."

That perspective has now led Habig to become executive producer of a CD titled The Complete Verdi Opera Overtures. Having lived 28 years in the shadow of New York's two other operas, The New York Grand Opera, as conducted by its founder Vincent La Selva, is now hoping that the CD will enlighten opera lovers about its wealth of talent. If purchased through the opera's Web site, http://newyorkgrandopera.org, part of the proceeds will benefit the opera company.

Habig, who studied at Juilliard under La Selva, has a degree in Chinese literature and piano performance from Oberlin College. After college, he lived in China as a research fellow studying anthropology.

"The point of studying Chinese is that it gave me access to a wide body of literature and poetry that I couldn't access without the language skills," says Habig, regarding his Mandarin fluency.

"It was very similar to my studies in music, in that I wanted to create an opportunity for the rest of my life to have access to a beautiful world of poetry and literature," he says.