Playing the blues brightens accountant's day

A forensic accountant by day, Jay Korngold cuts loose at night by strumming his electric guitar.

BY JENNY STALETOVICH
jennystaletovich@bellsouth.net

When he was in fourth grade, Jay Korngold joined his first garage band. By 14, he was so consumed by Hendrix and the Beatles that he played, to his parents' distress, eight to 10 hours a day.

But until a few years ago, this inner Eddie Van Halen never saw the light of day.

"For a long time, it was a secret. It was my thing, and I kept it quiet, and I didn't let my two worlds intersect," said Korngold, 49, a partner at the accounting firm of Mallah, Furman whose auditing interests tend toward complicated forensics and the always popular Sarbanes-Oxley compliance programs.

Then in 2000, Korngold's father died, and Korngold decided life was too short not to pursue a passion that dominated so much of his private life. In a fairly quick and unspectacular way, the CPA found himself playing alongside a drum-banging client for Chris Rehm and the Rabble Rousers and doing gigs at Tobacco Road, the Fort Lauderdale Blues Festival and Miami Beach's Hot Wheels Cool Blues festival.

What he has discovered since is that being a rock-playing, button-down business jock isn't so unusual after all.

NOT ALONE

"There's a whole bunch of us," Lenny Chesal, a drummer and executive vice president at Host.net, said as he watched Nova Southeastern University's business school dean, Randy Pohlman, play guitar with the legendary Nokie Edwards at a fundraiser last month. In fact, Pohlman organized the night to headline the community's business leaders. In addition to Korngold, performers included Transworld CEO Andrew Cagnetta, restaurateur Anthony Bruno and Pohlman, who taught himself to play during his sophomore year in high school by listening to Edwards on his dad's records.

UNIQUE NETWORKING

'We're at that stage in life where people who grew up with rock 'n' roll are now the same people who are the decision makers and principals in business in South Florida," Korngold said. "Some people play golf. Some people play tennis when they talk business. Or go to the club or gym. This is my preferred recreation with other business people."

Korngold was born into a musical family in Miami: his grandfather played violin and his great-great-uncle was Eric Wolfgang Korngold, a 20th century European child prodigy who moved to Hollywood and helped pioneer the modern movie score. Korngold, the younger, started playing the violin at age four but discovered he lacked the dexterity. When he heard the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, he knew he'd found his instrument.

"I got my first electric guitar when I was 11 or 12. As a matter of fact, it was 1969 and it was Woodstock," he said. "I was into Jimi Hendrix and the Who and Alvin Lee."

By his teens, he was playing with a community of young musicians around South Florida.

BIG COMMUNITY

"There was a group of probably 70 to 100 guys in and around Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and North Dade that were bass players, drummers, guitar players, and we all played as groups of people and kind of shifted between people," he said.

Initially his parents worried he spent too much time on music, but Korngold kept up his grades at Miami Norland Senior High and then applied to the University of Florida, where he discovered his second great passion: numbers.

EVERYTHING CLICKED

"I had bounced around from major to major, in physics, oceanology, meteorology, and I wanted to be a musician but musicians don't eat very well, so I ended up taking an accounting class and I absolutely loved it," he said. "Music is mathematics with an arts overlay on it."

He graduated magna cum laude with an accounting degree in 1980 and returned to South Florida, where he spent nine years with Laventhal and Horwath before joining Mallah Furman. His passion is forensics, with his work concentrated on real estate and the hospitality industry.

Over the years, he has periodically considered taking up music professionally.

"This guy is very modest, but back in the day, he was considered one of the best in South Florida," Pohlman said during a break in the Nova show, after a quick performance by a mortgage broker-by-day, Elvis impersonator-by-night.

"It's a very tempting thing to do," Korngold concedes. "But the obligations of family and kids going off to college, that's what we're doing now," he said. And since his older daughter -- he has two, 18 and 14 -- wants to be a genetic scientist, he's got years of tuition bills ahead. So he plays on his own. Every day.

"If I couldn't play the guitar every day, I would waste away," he said. "They may as well just pack me up and ship me off to another planet."

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