Choosing a New Path: Joe Reid '75, from Lawyer to Pianist

By Becca Gillis

These days, Joe Reid ’75 begins his mornings practicing Chopin or Mozart, warming up for the day before heading to a gig, helping students perfect their technique, or some of both. But forty years ago, Joe couldn’t imagine his love of music paying the bills.

“I grew up in Cambridge with two doctors as parents,” Joe says. “And so you think, ‘Okay, law school or medical school, maybe business school.’ It was a cultural thing: unless you’re going to be Yo-Yo Ma, don’t be a musician.”

With a natural interest in policy and a brief stint on Capitol Hill under his belt, Joe decided to go the J.D. track, graduating from Northeastern University’s School of Law in 1985 and kicking off a fifteen-year career that never quite seemed to fit. “I was very tense a lot of the time for different reasons,” he recalls of those days, when his work primarily entailed corporate law and real estate. Between the demand of a competitive job reliant on perpetually bringing in more clients and frustrations over the need to “chase the money” through obligations like golf outings with the mega-wealthy, the burnout became unavoidable by the late 1990s. “I wasn’t happy,” he says.

But what to do with a law degree and a career fifteen years in the making? It was a question of “figuring out what I really like to do,” Joe says—and, despite a certain amount of eyebrow raising from the people around him, Joe decided his future lay in the passion that had been a source of joy and identity for him since his days at Commonwealth: music.

“The musical environment of Commonwealth was life changing for me. I was sort of known as a musician there,” he recollects. “I was in the Orchestra, the Madrigals, the Jazz Band. It was a perfect storm: wonderful music teachers, enthusiastic and talented classmates, and opportunity. I wrote my college essay to get into Harvard about my experience of Commonwealth Orchestra and Jazz Band. I realized that that was me; where I was mentally at Commonwealth, I came back to that.”

The challenges of pivoting to a career in music when his entire adult life had been spent in law were not lost on Joe, but, as he describes it, he decided he’d simply have to put in the work as if he had gone to a conservatory instead. “I basically said, I am going to do this no matter what, and no one is going to stop me,” he says. “I lost a certain number of years not working on my technical abilities, but at some point you just have to not look at that and work on your strengths.”

That’s exactly what Joe did, focusing all his efforts on polishing the piano skills he’d been honing throughout his life. As performance opportunities began to multiply, he soon distinguished himself in the Boston area as a respected jazz musician. Now, in addition to teaching piano at the New School of Music in Cambridge and from his Belmont home, Joe plays around 150 gigs per year for jazz clubs, churches, choirs, and more.

Between practicing, teaching, and gigging, Joe estimates that he spends more hours per week on his music career than he did on his legal practice, but says the stress that once consumed him has largely melted away as he’s taken on work that feels true to who he is. Settled into a life centered around the craft he’s held most dear since high school (and, he notes, even recently included reuniting with saxophonist Paul Klemperer ’75 for several gigs), Joe urges young people—and people of any age—to not be afraid of the hard work required to make a risky career move, echoing his own mantra from when he decided to make music more than a way to unwind from a day at the law firm: “I want to do this. I’m not afraid. If you’re telling me this is a bad idea, I’m just going to work harder.”

Becca Gillis is the Communications Coordinator at Commonwealth School. This originally appeared as part of an article in the winter 2025 edition of CM, Commonwealth's alumni/ae magazine.