Music School founder Vicky Fulop finds new challenges

From its inception in 1995 until the pandemic closed its Clearwater campus 25 years later, the Players School of Music was the hurricane-eye of jazz instruction in the bay area. The best local players taught there, and many more from the international ranks dropped in to conduct master classes.

Students arrived from all over the world, each armed with an I-20 “non-immigrant” visa and an unquenchable thirst for learning. They stayed for months at a time.

Co-founder and CEO Vicky Fulop still operates the Players School, although its presence has been online-only since 2020, when the federal government was forced to disallow foreign visitors for a while; the loss of that income led to the loss of the physical campus.

It took several years to video-record lessons in guitar, bass, keyboards, drums and others from jazz’s instrumental arsenal, along with complex lessons on subjects like composition and music theory, but these days, they’re available to anyone in the world – no visa or travel required. As are live online lessons with the bay area’s best.

“I have so many amazing memories from our campus,” Fulop says. “We never stopped, for 25 years. One short break between semesters. My teachers, my staff there were all wonderful. And I have great memories of the master classes. Those were the best.”

Players business no longer takes 100 percent of Vicky Fulop’s time. “In a way, I think things happen for a reason,” she muses. “Life sometimes throws you left hooks, right hooks. A tsunami. Something!

“It felt like a tsunami. I said OK, well, maybe life – or God, if you believe in God – is trying to tell me something. That I should open myself to other possibilities.”

Soon after Players School pivoted to online-only, beloved music director Matt Bokulic died of cancer.

Fulop received a call from the late Chick Corea’s manager. The jazz keyboard visionary, who lived in Clearwater, had passed away, also from cancer, in February 2021 – just 10 days before Bokulic’s death.

Vicky Fulop and Chick Corea. Photo provided.

Corea liked Vicky Fulop – she’d helped him, through the school, curate an online piano workshop – and now his representative was asking if she’d be interested in organizing the late musician’s expansive archive of manuscripts and memorabilia.

“One idea,” says Fulop, “is to make a jazz museum. And I think it will be amazing, because Chick played with everybody. He was one of the greatest.

“Imagine touching letters that Chick Corea wrote. First drafts of his music. A letter that Bill Evans wrote to him. A birthday card from Herbie Hancock. I treasure it. So maybe destiny just wanted to bring me here.”

Next came a query from Dr. Robert Entel, owner of the 560-square-foot Penny Lane Beatles Museum in Dunedin. The radiologist’s memorabilia collection is extensive – less than 20 percent is on public display -and he decided to get it all digitally catalogued.

Entel asked Vicky Fulop, whose organizational skills were well-known, if she’d like to oversee the lengthy process.

As a life-long Beatles fan, she couldn’t say yes fast enough. She is researching, measuring, photographing and writing detailed descriptions of every piece in the catalog.

A native Venezuelan, Vicky Fulop went to summer school in Great Britain, where she learned to speak English. She earned a BA in marketing.

She was playing piano and singing in a Caracas band when she met jazz bass fusion player Jeff Berlin (her group was his group’s opening act). They were married soon after, and moved to California. “He was then touring with Paco de Lucia and John McLaughlin,” Fulop recalls.

The American-born Berlin had made his name as a member of former Yes and King Crimson drummer Bill Bruford’s solo project, the band known as Buford. He also played with British guitar wizard Allan Holdsworth (another member of Bruford), and the Yes spinoff Anderson Bruford Wakeman Howe. Among many others.

The couple soured on Los Angeles life, and in 1989, at the suggestion of musician friends, they moved to Clearwater. “For me,” says Fulop, “it was better because it’s closer to Venezuela, geographically. The flight there from L.A. took a whole day.”

The Players School of Music was a success right out of the gate, mostly due to Berlin’s reputation. ”Sometimes a hundred percent of our semester was foreigners,” she marvels. “From China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Europe. And eighty percent were bass players!”

For several years, Fulop wrote a monthly musician interview column for Bass Guitar magazine.

She and Berlin amicably divorced in 2013, and she assumed full ownership of the Players School. “It was ironic,” Fulop reports, “the year after he left I got more students than we ever had. I don’t know what happened. But then students would say to me ‘No, I didn’t come for Jeff Berlin. I came because someone recommended Players School.’”

Their son Jason Berlin is the drummer for the progressive metal band The Mourning.

The Chick Corea project is ongoing, and the Penny Lane Beatles Museum will move to Ybor City in 2025. Vicky Fulop will most likely have a larger curatorial role at that time.

She reports several inquiries into purchasing the Players School, with all its contacts and contracts.

Will that happen? She can’t say for sure. Maybe she’ll hang on to it.

“No more campus, at least for now,” Fulop says. “I’m not closed to the idea. It would have to be a collaboration with somebody. And we would have to have a good music director. I’m not ruling it out.”