He’s an experienced musician, composer and producer. He’s a published poet. He’s a university scientist and medical researcher with widely recognized expertise in hematology and authorship or co-authorship of numerous academic papers.
Among other things.
Whether you know him as Jim from the Old Market or Jimmy the musician or Dr. James Salhany, Jim Salhany is a dynamic, amazingly multifaceted individual who manages to find a perfect balance between his highly scientific and prolifically creative halves.
“I don’t sleep much,” Sakhany says, wryly. But he insists there’s no magic to how he manages to integrate his many interests into the same 24 hours the rest of us have each day; it’s just how he is. “For me, there was never a time when I didn’t have the humanities and science, to various degrees, as part of my life,” he explains.
“I was born in Detroit and grew up in the suburbs—the row house kind of suburbs—and I got my first guitar when I was like 12 or 13. “It was one in a junk store that my mom gave me ten bucks for,” he says. “We played a lot of two-note chords, which you could get away with in the ‘50s, and the drummer had a kick, a snare, and a cymbal—and that was it. And our bass player had a crummy little amplifier and we played in this little garage. People started coming around to listen to us, and that started becoming fun.”
And then there was that other big interest.
“I was also really into science, too,” he continues, “and Sputnik went up when I was in high school, thereabouts. Anybody with a math and science sort of inclination was turned on by this whole thing. It was just very exciting.”
Salhany continued to play in bands (with some interesting names like Penetrations and City Dog) as he pursued his education and launched his career, earning his undergraduate degree from the University of Florida and his Ph. D. from the University of Chicago. He also did postdoctoral research at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey before landing in Omaha, joining the University of Nebraska Medical Center faculty as an assistant professor in 1975. He was a full professor in UNMC’s departments of internal medicine and biochemistry and molecular biology by 1989, and also did scientific research with both a magnetic resonance heart laboratory at the Med Center and a blood laboratory at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center.
“I’m officially retired. They give you the emeritus status,” he says, but their isn’t anything “emeritus” about his music. Salhany regularly works with his vocalist/flutist wife, Christine, on various projects. And he still plays with a couple of local ensembles, adding to the long line of collaborations he’s enjoyed over the years.
“It’s been a blast,” he says.