Mark Burnell looked lost on stage Thursday night.
Fingers rippling the piano keys, head bobbing, eyes closed, he looked lost in the music — in a way that seemed hard to imagine only three months ago.
“His best friend is music,” Anne Burnell, his wife and musical partner, told an audience of friends and fans at the Gateway Lounge tucked into the Northwest Side’s Copernicus Center.
For about a week last Easter, the Chicago jazz pianist lay in a hospital bed with a keyboard in his lap and what resembled a giant sock on his head, concealing 14 tiny holes drilled into his skull through which electrodes probed his brain.
As the 69-year-old stroked the keys, his wife sang softly at his bedside. A few feet away, one of his doctors, in green scrubs, bobbed his head and jiggled his hips to the music.
This wasn’t some new age approach to medicine.
“I knew that music could heal because I’ve been healed by music my entire life,” Mark Burnell said.
Three months after a cutting-edge surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Florida to combat a brain injury that almost killed him and that Burnell worried might end one of his two life’s passions, he was preparing for the Gateway Lounge concert — his first major post-operation gig.
Burnell, who gives off a slightly nerdy vibe that brings to mind actor Ed Begley Jr., said he was anxious about the gig, one of thousands he’s played during his career.
“I am, but I’m excited. The two loves of my life are music and this amazing woman,” he said of his wife.
Burnell, who lives with his wife in a town house in Wicker Park, grew up in Pittsburgh, began playing the piano at 8 and played his first gig at 15.
“My life would be almost meaningless if I couldn’t make music,” he said.
A six-foot grand piano dominates the couple’s dining room. They eat in their kitchen. With even the least provocation, Burnell breaks into song, snapping his fingers to George Benson’s version of “On Broadway.”
Name a jazz club or piano bar in Chicago, and Burnell has probably played there: the Green Mill, Andy’s Jazz Club, the old Signature Lounge among them.
He and his future wife met in 1993 while they were playing with different bands on a Chicago River dinner cruise ship. They got married a year later.
He plays jazz, gospel, cabaret music. He’s studied classical. He’s also a jazz vocalist.
For all of his adult life, though, a discordant note has lurked sotto voce in the background of his life. He was a first-year student at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University when, in a freak accident, he fell backward in the grass and struck his head on a manhole cover.
He spent a week in a coma. When he came to, he had double vision for a few weeks but no other symptoms.
“Years went by, and I literally forget that it happened,” he said. “Because I just went back to normal life.”
One night 23 years later, in the middle of the night, he had a severe seizure. Doctors put him on anti-seizure medicine. Four years later, his wife came home and found him sitting on their kitchen floor, unable to get up. She rushed him to the hospital. Doctors put him into an induced coma to halt a repeat of seizures. His heart stopped twice. He spent several days in a coma, his doctors struggling to bring him out of it.
Two dozen members of the Gorham United Methodist Church choir in Washington Park, where he played gospel music for 25 years, filed in to visit him in intensive care. They prayed and sang around his bed. He came out of the coma the next day.
“That was God’s work,” Burnell said.
Seizure medicines worked for a time. Then, a few years ago, Burnell started having what he calls “tiny” seizures.
“They would just last eight or 10 seconds, and I would just blank out,” he said.
Fear set in that he’d have a seizure while performing.
“It did happen three times, and the third time was pretty embarrassing,” Burnell said.
He and his wife got to a point at which they thought he’d just have to live with the seizures.
They were touring in Florida in January when the seizures doubled in frequency, he said.
Pete Szujewski, a drummer friend from the South Side, came over for coffee one day and said, “I got a guy.”
It turned out he did. Szujewski put the Burnells in touch with doctors at the Mayo Clinic’s campus in Jacksonville, Florida, where doctors diagnosed Burnell with drug-resistant multifocal epilepsy — meaning different sites in his brain were likely triggering the seizures.
“Over time, his quality of life would likely worsen,” said Dr. William Tatum, a Mayo neurologist who was one of the doctors seeing Burnell.
The jazz musician might well have had to quit performing entirely at some point, Tatum said.
To locate the triggering sites, a surgeon drilled 14 tiny holes in Burnell’s skull, inserting electrodes in each that ranged from one to four inches deep. The data from those electrodes was fed into a computer. Surgery would involve heating the electrodes so they essentially could destroy the seizure-causing brain matter.
Before they could do that, though, doctors had to be sure they weren’t also destroying vital parts of Burnell’s brain — including those controlling his ability to play music.
That’s why Burnell found himself awake, propped up in a hospital bed and playing a compact keyboard. Anne Burnell was there, too, as she had been with him on so many previous occasions.
“Oh, yes, we loved it,” she said. “We’ve used music to heal for so many years.”
Dr. David Sabsevitz, a neuropsychologist, led the team “mapping” Burnell’s brain. Doctors applied electrical current to temporarily disrupt brain function in various locations.
And they encouraged Burnell to play complicated pieces packed with roller-coastering notes while they worked on him. One piece in that set list: “If I Only Had a Brain” from “The Wizard of Oz.”
“When we stimulated him, if he would miss a note, if he would forget lyrics, we’d pay attention to that,” Sabsevitz said.
That meant the doctors had hit a no-go area.
When they were confident they’d found the triggering sites and that those sites were safe, they burned away the troublesome tissue.
The seizures probably won’t cease entirely, but “his quality of life will be significantly enhanced,” Tatum said.
On April 21, a week after he’d been admitted to the hospital, Burnell was released. Soon after, he was home in Chicago.
“My first concern was: Can I still play piano? So I went directly to the piano,” Burnell said.
The pain in his head from the surgery hurt “like crazy,” he said.
“I started to play songs by memory, and they were there,” Burnell said, his voice hushed.
On Thursday, with his wife on vocals, he played flawlessly — a jazzed-up rendition of Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue,” an a capella version of “On Broadway” and 1960s and 1970s favorites for the mostly baby boomer crowd.
After two hours on stage, Burnell thanked those who came to hear him play for their support and prayers.
“It was so exhilarating, so rewarding,” he said. “And I wasn’t afraid anymore. I felt the energy from the crowd and the love pouring onto the stage.”
