The keys to heal: Chicago jazz pianist returns to the stage 3 months after brain surgery

Mark Burnell looked lost on stage Thursday night.

His 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," his wife and musical partner, Anne Burnell, 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.

Some three months after a cutting-edge surgery 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 last week for the Gateway Lounge concert — his first major postoperation gig.

Burnell, who has a sweet, slightly nerdy vibe that brings to mind the 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, chatting to the Chicago Sun-Times in the couple's Wicker Park town house, grew up in Pittsburgh and began playing the piano at age 8. He had his first gig at 15.

"My life would be almost meaningless if I couldn’t make music," he said.

A 6-foot grand piano dominates the couple's dining room; they eat in their kitchen. At the least provocation, Burnell breaks into song, snapping his fingers to the beat of George Benson's classic, "On Broadway."

Name a jazz club or piano bar in the city, and Burnell has probably played there: The Green Mill, Andy's Jazz Club, the now shuttered Signature Lounge — just to name a few. He met his wife in 1993, while they were playing with different bands on a Chicago River dinner cruise ship. They married a year later.

He plays jazz , gospel, cabaret music. He's studied classical. He's also a jazz vocalist.

But for all of his adult life, 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 the most freakish of accidents, he fell backward in the grass, striking 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."

Twenty-three years later, in the middle of the night, he had a severe epilepsy-related seizure. Doctors put him on anti-seizure medicine. Then four years later, his wife came home to find 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 repeating seizures. His heart stopped twice. He spent several days in a coma, with 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 into the ICU; 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, but 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.

Then a fear set in — he'd have a seizure while performing.

"It did happen three times, and the third time was pretty embarrassing," Burnell said.

The couple hit a "dead end" in Chicago and felt like they'd simply have to live with the seizures.

They were touring in Florida in January, when the seizures doubled in frequency, he said.

A South Side drummer friend came over for coffee one day and said, "I got a guy."

It turns out he did. The drummer, Pete Szujewski, put them in touch with doctors at the Mayo Clinic's campus in Jacksonville, Florida.

Doctors diagnosed Burnell with drug-resistant, multifocal epilepsy, meaning different sites in the brain were likely triggering the seizures.

"Over time, his quality of life would likely worsen," said Dr. William Tatum, a clinical neurologist at Mayo and one of the doctors on Burnell's team. The jazz musician may 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 into each one — ranging in depth from 1 to 4 inches. The data from those electrodes was then fed into a computer. The surgery would involve heating the electrodes so that they essentially destroyed the seizure-causing brain matter. Before they could do that, doctors had to be sure they weren't also destroying vital parts of Burnell's brain, including those controlling his ability to play music.

So that's why Burnell found himself awake, lying propped up in a hospital bed and playing a compact keyboard. Anne Burnell was there too, as she had been at other venues on so many previous occasions.

"Oh yes, we loved it," Anne Burnell 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.

Doctors encouraged Burnell to play complicated pieces packed with roller-coastering notes. One piece on the 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 team had hit a no-go area.

When doctors were confident they'd found the triggering sites and those sites were safe, they burned away the troublesome tissue.

The seizures likely 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, Burnell was released and soon after returned home to 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 in a hushed, reverential voice.

And Thursday, with Anne on vocals, he played flawlessly — a jazzed-up rendition of Neil Diamond's "Song Sung Blue," an a capella version of "On Broadway" and countless other 1960s and 1970s-era favorites for the mostly baby boomer crowd.

After two hours on stage, Mark Burnell thanked the audience for their support and prayers.

Still giddy and with the house lights up, he said: "It was so exhilarating, so rewarding — and I wasn't afraid anymore. I felt the energy from the crowd and the love pouring onto the stage."