Sometimes teens can teach us how to best bounce back from despair.

        Take Tim “Jigga McSweet” Geeslin, Steve “DJ Insomniac” Shockley and their army of musically inclined buddies at St. Xavier High School.

        Two Decembers ago, Tim discovered there was a deadline on his life. Doctors said his migraines were caused by a cancer that had spread through his lymph system and had left tumors in his head and neck.

        Doctors attacked with all their guns — surgeries, chemotherapy, Interferon. Just before Valentine's Day 2001, Tim fell ill again, and doctors discovered a tumor in his spleen. With Stage IV melanoma, the chance of surviving just five years after diagnosis is 12 percent.

        Tim is only 17.

        “Now he's looking at other options,” Steve says.

        Steve's first priority: Fulfilling a lifelong dream to press a CD of his own music, a vast and growing collection of eclectic music styles, compositions, arrangements and performances.

        He figures he'll sell it to raise money for cancer research. To help, his family is building a recording studio in his basement. This Saturday, his friends and fellow musicians are hosting a “Jigga Fest,” a 10-hour outdoor concert in Burnet Woods on Clifton Avenue to help pay for it. The free event begins at noon.
       

A Jigga dude

        What's a Jigga? I'm not sure, but Tim's friends use it as a sarcastic reference to hip-hop performer Jay-Z's popular hit, “Jigga What?”

        Steve, the DJ in Tim's circle, explains: Among the serious musicians at St. X, hip-hop performers like Jay-Z are considered too commercialized. Their music says little, musically or lyrically.

        “It's all about bling-blingin' and smokin' up.” (Translation: It's all about showing your reflective jewelry and smoking dope.)

        Some of the most popular artists, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs and Will Smith, for instance, “rely on recycled rhythms atop regurgitated beats,” Steve says. Whole melodies are from somebody else's works, he thinks.

        They're not authentic, Steve says. Tim's just the opposite.

        A classically trained pianist, who also plays guitar, bass, drums and other instruments, Tim has composed a broad array of work — jazz, acoustic, progressive rock, reggae, hip hop, electronic, heavy metal.
       

No slackers

        Steve's favorite Tim tune is a 30-minute jazz piano piece with a classical chord structure. Tim simply calls it “Steve's Song.”

        “Tim is an amazing musician, and I thought that if I am going to do anything for him, it is going to be with music,” Steve says. “Tim has musical genius.”

        Last year, after an operation, Tim's friends bought him a fake pope's miter and wrote “Jigga” atop it. His pep band became Jigga McSweet and the Jesuits.

        “All his friends understand the Jigga thing,” Steve says.

        The musical youth at St. X are plenty. Eighteen teen bands, all but one from St. X, applied to perform Saturday. Only 10 could fit.

        “It's showing adults that high school kids aren't just a bunch of slackers,” Steve says. “We can put together and organize a semi-professional show for a good cause. There's all this talent just sitting around us in the these big pools. You're just not looking at it.”

        Many of these kids are serious about music, even if they have no illusions about turning professional. Steve, 18, wants to be a writer. Music is a release.

        “When you're sitting there, playing, you're working out all the problems of the day,” he says. “It's a way to get free from everything else, to say what we don't have words for.”

       Denise Smith Amos can be reached at 768-8395, or e-mail damos@enquirer.com.
       

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