By Greg Hassell, Houston Chronicle Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News
May 22--When David Harris pulled his battered Chevy Impala into Houston, he had $600 in his pocket. In his head, he carried dreams of making it as a jazz pianist.
The Michigan native knew almost nothing about the city, other than the bare-bones basics -- it's a big place with major league sports and is a whole lot warmer than the frozen northland of his native Kalamazoo.
'I had been on tour with a band, and we passed through Houston. The people seemed very friendly, so I moved here and rented a one-room efficiency apartment,' Harris said.
Twenty years after that long drive South, Harris sat where he'd hoped to find himself in Houston -- onstage, at the piano.
He was headlining a concert at a local jazz club, performing with some of the city's best jazz musicians. Every song had been written by Harris, and every piano solo was greeted with howls of approval from the packed house.
Even the rooftop room was worthy of a dreamlike evening. Scott Gertner's Sky Bar commands an impressive view of Houston's bristling skyline. As the orange glow of sunset settled on the skyscrapers, Dave Harris and Friends plowed into a smoky slice of jazz called Going, Going, Gone.
While it's tempting to see the moment as a validation of his ambition -- even the song title conjures up images of triumph -- a funny thing happened on the way to the Sky Bar.
Harris' career took a turn that few could have envisioned. Not his friends in Kalamazoo, not his wife and not Harris himself.
Instead of becoming a professional jazz musician, Harris is a professional stockbroker. And a pretty good one at that. At age 45, he's been recognized by an investments trade journal as one of the nation's Top 10 retail brokers. He and his partner, Lewis Metzger, manage about $700 million on behalf of their clients.
Music is now a hobby, albeit one practiced at a very high level by Harris, a senior vice president of investments at Salomon Smith Barney. Most of the 150 people who crowded into the bar are his clients. They're fans of his investment acumen, and it really doesn't matter if they know their Thelonious from their Monk.
'I have an audience that is predisposed to liking what I play,' Harris confesses.
Some clients flew in from as far away as Chicago, Cincinnati and New Mexico for the occasion, a charity fund-raiser for the Anti-Defamation League.
'Chicago is loaded with brokers, but I'd rather come 1,000 miles for a broker I trust as opposed to going two blocks for someone I don't trust,' said Mike Goode, a defense lawyer who flew in for the concert. 'It's for a good cause, and David asked me. That's why I'm here.'
Harris has been his investment adviser for 12 years, during which time Goode estimates his sizable portfolio has grown 350 to 400 percent.
'After last year, my buddies were screaming and crying. One guy's portfolio was down 40 percent. My portfolio was up 56 percent last year,' the red-haired Irishman said with same kind of smile that comes easily after a good meal. 'The good thing about David is not just the stocks he recommends, but the investments he keeps me out of.'
Contributions from friends and clients like Goode raised about $90,000 for the Anti-Defamation League, which is nearly three times the amount Harris had originally hoped to raise.
'Music is one of the most uniting forces in the world. It is a language everyone understands,' Harris said. 'It brings people together, so it's a great for a Anti-Defamation League benefit.'
Music also is a uniting force in Harris' strange career trip.
After playing music through high school and college, Harris started touring with a pop group that brought him through Houston. After moving here in 1981, he found plenty of work playing in big bands and with the late saxophone great Arnett Cobb.
'Back then, all David wanted to do was music,' said Doug Meeuwsen, a professional trumpet player who has known Harris since his Kalamazoo days. 'He was real pure about it. He didn't want to make money. He wanted to be a jazz musician, and an esoteric one at that.'
Work was steady. But Harris, an intensely driven man who thinks sleep is overrated, decided to supplement his income with a day job of selling pianos. He took a job in a small store with an inauspicious location -- it had once been a liquor store and is now an adult bookstore.
Needing only a couple of months to realize he could do better, Harris tried to get on at Holcombe Lindquist, a powerhouse among local piano retailers. Harris quickly became a top salesman at the company, making more money than he did as a musician.
In fact, he earned enough to start dabbling in investments. He pored over publications like Barron's and Value Line.
'When I get interested in something, I devote hours a day to it,' Harris said.
He hired brokers, whom he simply assumed had graduate degrees in finance and economics. He was shocked when he learned that they didn't and sometimes knew less about the market than he did.
Figuring he'd provide better service than he was getting, Harris decided to become a broker. The senior partner in charge of hiring at Drexel Burnham Lambert just happened to be close friends of Harris' boss.
'Don Holcombe is to this day a great friend of mine,' said George Stark, who still works for Burnham Securities and is president of Stark Capital Management. 'I called Don and he said, `If I were you, I'd hire him, but it is breaking my heart to tell you that.' '
In an attempt to keep Harris, Holcombe Lindquist offered to open a store in Austin and make him part owner of the location.
'Luckily for me, I'd never been to Austin and didn't know how beautiful it is,' Harris said. 'If I did, I might have never left the company.'
Stark gave Harris a job at Drexel, even though Harris knew next to nothing about finance and investments. Stark was willing to take a chance on the piano player because it was obvious he had other essential skills.
'He is a great people person. He was a superior piano salesman,' Stark said. 'And he is so bright and so quick. He has a great and deep intellect. I knew he would be able to learn the financial services business.'
After getting the benefit of Drexel's extensive training and Stark's personal tutelage, Harris started making trades and building a client base.
In his first year, he earned Rookie of the Year honors at Drexel. His income was six figures, an astounding sum for a first-year broker in those days.
He enlisted many of his clients through the grueling process of making cold calls. Goode was one of those many cold calls, checked off a list of attorneys Harris was working from.
'I told him to give me three recommendations. If they worked, he could call me back,' Goode said. 'They all worked. When he called me, I said, `Give me three more.' '
An annoyed Harris coughed up three more recommendations, all of which turned out to be winners. The next time he called, Goode agreed to become a client, which he remains to this day.
'It is his niceness, as well as his competence, that keeps me coming back. Everyone I send to him loves him. I've sent him my friends, my family, everyone,' Goode said. 'David is completely trustworthy, and he takes good care of them.'
Mark Parsons is one of those second-generation clients. His father, a petroleum geologist in Midland, got one of those cold calls and became one of Harris' first customers.
'Myself and my sisters, we all have accounts with David,' said Parsons, who traveled from Santa Fe, N.M., to attend Harris' concert last week.
'One reason I was willing to come is David flew to Santa Fe for my 50th birthday,' Parsons said. 'He played the piano at my birthday party. He flies hundreds of miles to be with his clients.'
When talking to Harris' clients, the conversation quickly gets around to technology stocks. Harris hates them. He steered his clients away from most Internet-related investments, arguing that they were grossly overvalued and unreasonably risky.
Following Harris' guidance, Goode avoided most tech stocks, except for one tasty little gainer -- Sun Microsystems, which he snapped up at $4. Other clients were more determined to surf the Internet tide.
'We had a big battle on tech stocks,' Parsons said. 'I made a huge amount of money for a while. Then I gave all the gains back.'
While Parsons knew Harris well enough to know about his jazz background, most clients were not aware of his rare aptitude for both finance and fine arts.
'Clients who've known me for 15 years had no idea that I play,' Harris said. 'I maintained separate worlds, one for my work and one for music. For years I promoted my business aggressively, but I did nothing with my music.'
Now the two worlds are coming together, and it feels good. He recently produced a compact disc of recordings he made -- and promptly forgot about -- years ago.
He hands out the disc to clients and friends, giving them a better understanding of the man they thought they knew.
'It's a good record, especially considering the circumstance,' said Paul English, a local jazz musician who helped restore the damaged master tapes. 'It is very good music recorded on a limited budget.'
In addition to respecting his musical ability, English appreciates the support Harris has extended to the local jazz community. Harris poured tens of thousands into a jazz club, which ultimately failed, and helped finance some local musicians' jazz CDs.
'No one in their right mind invests money in jazz,' English said. 'It's not all about money for him. He's helped me and a lot of other musicians.'
Although investments and improvisation seem like two separate worlds, finally bringing his avocation and vocation into closer harmony has helped Harris to realize they aren't so different after all.
'My investment philosophy is to avoid crowds. It's not contrarianism, it's just about filtering out all the noise of conventional wisdom,' he said. 'That's what a good musician does. They don't follow someone else's vision.
'They create their own.'
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(c) 2001, Houston Chronicle. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
