Jazz Guitarist Peter Mayer
This interview originally appeared in International Partners in Mission's newsletter. It is republished here with their permission.

Peter Mayer and his seven brothers and sisters were raised in India, the children of Lutheran missionaries, Jim and Sammy Mayer. (Jim Mayer was one of the founders of Partners in Mission, which became Christians Linked in Mission.)

In addition to a successful recording and performing career of his own, Peter's band, The Peter Mayer Group, in which he is joined by younger brother, Jim, is the stage band for international recording artist, Jimmy Buffett.

In Peter Mayer's music and life, the abiding influence of his Christian faith and his early years as the son of missionary parents are strongly evident.

Peter, his wife, Patricia, their son, Brendan, and daughter, India, recently relocated to Nashville, Tennessee from St. Louis, Missouri.

Peter's new album is "Romeo's Garage" on his own Little Flock label.

Mayer: Yeah, I have a lot of memories of India. Basically, when we were little kids, we had time to roam and dream in India. We'd actually leave the compound and go out into the peanut fields and just spend our days like that. And we lived just a half-mile from a little village called Vaniyambadi, which was like any village in India, just teeming with people. And we would ride our bicycles into town and all over the place...

Mayer: The dangers we had were in scorpions and snakes, which grow to mammoth proportions over there.

Mayer: We were influenced by both. My dad had a lot of phonograph records, classical records, and he used to play those. But because of the British influence in India--we got all the Beatles early releases, and that was a huge influence on me. I can remember being in a marketplace once and hearing the Beatles’,"Please, Please Me", and the minute I heard it, I flipped. I knew that there was some strong connection here that I felt and didn't know why, but I knew that I was going to pursue something along this line.

Mayer: I remember every year at Christmas my father would put up a big Gauze and wood star with a light behind it on the top of the hill, and the people from the village would come up the hill with their drums and their tambourines, and my mom would serve them cookies and hot coffee, and they would play Indian Christmas carols for us. And they sang with the most incredible wailing sound. I sometimes joke with people and tell them that was my first experience with the blues.

Mayer: You know my dad had a lot of kind of hurricane force energy, and he liked to keep moving. I still remember one evening he came home and he'd fallen off a roof of one of the churches he was building, and he was flat on his back for two days.

So it wasn't the stereotypical image of a missionary going out into the fields, going to the service preaching and then going home to his family. It was getting directly involved with these people's lives and helping them build their homes and their churches.

And all kinds of strange stuff would happen that go along with carrying the word of God to people.

Mayer: Like running over a farmer's cow and having to compensate him, because in India all the animals ran across the road at all times. Or getting stuck in a river because there were no bridges, and spending all day to get the Jeep out...

Mayer: And I think it profoundly changed the idea of mission for him and my mom, as the years went by in India. They had been over there with this idea of, "Our mission is to take the word of God to these people" -- that noble mission. But after working there he used to say, "We learn as much from the Indian people, as they learn from us."

Mayer: I actually think it was harder on my folks...

Mayer: I mean it was really an adventure. The first thing I remember was all the electric lights, and the amount of wealth here too was just astonishing.

CLM: Were you a musical prodigy, and actually what is a prodigy?

Mayer: Well, I think first of all, you have to have this great love and feeling for music. For me it was more like an actual need. I needed to play, and hear music, and be around it, and it just j kept calling me.

But I think there's another strange element that comes into play, and that is being crazy enough to feel deeply for it and keep going, even though most of your sense says, "I should just be a teacher' or "I should be a stockbroker" or whatever. It's that deep feeling, that sense of blind faith of "I’m going to keep doing this regardless."

Mayer: I guess you could call it that. I mean it's jetting around the country in private jets and going to play Aspen, where Hollywood hangs out, and meeting Harrison Ford, and all that...

Mayer: (Laughing) Yeah. That was in Boston, and one of the backup singers was dating Ted Kennedy, and we were always suspicious about the truth of I this, but one day she said, "Ted's invited us all out to Hyannisport." So we ended up going out there to the very place where Joe, and John, and Bobby and all the other Kennedy's hung out, and he served us a wonderful lunch with wine, and said, "Okay, we're going yachting!" So he took us down to his sailboat and took us out to sea.

Then afterwards, we came back and he said, "Okay now it's time for entertainment", and he made us all sing for him. And my brother, Jim, didn’t feel like singing a song, so while someone else was singing he got up and started dancing. (laughing)

Mayer: Ten years.

Mayer: Probably about four. Four months with Jimmy, and then probably another two or three months by myself.

Mayer: It depends on the group you're with. With Jimmy Buffett, he's handpicked the people that are with him. And my compliments go out to him on this, because he's really picked wonderful people. In fact, I've got strong spiritual ties to a lot of the people in Jimmy's group, even though they may come from different faiths, different walks of life.

Mayer: Exactly. It's very simple, because he commands such a huge audience that he can basically ask for whet he wants. And there's a lot of ego there. It's more than money; it's power. People with great sums of money tend to not have so much interest in the money after a while but just in the fact that they can wield their power.

Mayer: It would be very easy to get into that stress scene and play that game. But I just turned forty, and I'm at this age where I feel like my calling is really to be a servant, in the sense that I'm going to play the best music that I can for people, and make the best music that I can for people. And I used to see it as a conquest, like, "I'm going to have a hit song and people are going to love me, and they're going to buy my albums. ' Now I feel like I need to speak what is in my heart and share that with people. If they choose to hear it, great, you know, we'll be in this communion together.

Mayer: I've learned a lot that maybe I wouldn't have learned, if I had just stayed in my own little group. Like we have a singer in the group who's Islamic, and there's another singer who actually came from a Lutheran background.

There's just this incredible mix of people that really feel open about expressing their faith in their own different way. And I feel like it's my job to be as open as I can, because like my dad in the mission field, I'm being sent into this new territory for a reason. And that's not only to share and spread the Word, but it's also to listen.

Mayer: Yeah, sometimes. You know, a lot of stuff goes on in the Jimmy concerts that wouldn't be condoned in any church. So a lot of people question us like, "What are you doing here?" And I would say, "Well, I'm basically called into this situation for a reason." And that doesn't mean I have to condone or do everything that I see in front of me. But I'm called into it, because I somehow play a part in this, and I have to bring some kind of light to the situation in there. But yeah, there have been times when we have been the brunt of jokes.

Mayer: And I really think that's where most of the exciting changes take place, because you're pushed to your limit, and you're somehow made weak.

Mayer: Some of my heroes come from way back. I mean the Beatles are always high on my list and people like Joanie Mitchell, for their writing ability. I'm a big Sting fan and Peter Gabriel. And I like some people who kind of border on that Christian/contemporary thing.

Mayer: I kind of have trouble making that distinction. I can distinguish sacred music from secular music, but to me, music is about speaking from the heart. And the message we get from God is so varied and so incredibly rich that to quantify it or qualify it in just this one narrow category is just really shortchanging it. I believe that there's so much to say about the world. You know that God empowers us to do that.

I've been able to work with James Taylor on a few occasions, and I remember an interview with him, where they asked him, "Why don't you speak more about political issues." And he always felt that music is a message of healing, and it doesn't have to be any certain thing. I think he's right.