I Gave Up on Jazz Three Times
But it’s still part of who I am
Music at my house
I grew up in a musical household. My dad was an opera lover and my mom played piano and violin. I don’t remember jazz being among the types of music heard around the house. What we had for “on-demand” music were stacks of 78 rpm disks of operas and classical orchestral favorites. Each 12” disk could hold about three minutes of music. Watching a record player while it played, for example, an entire movement of a symphony could be quite interesting. There would be one revolving disk on the turntable and a 3- or 4-inch stack of disks waiting above it on the player’s spindle. As soon as the player finished playing one whirling disk it would slam the next one down the spindle onto the turntable, whip the tone arm back to the starting position, and drop it onto the disk. It was wham-bam, one disk after another, until the music finished.
Musicians make a virtue of necessity
Popular recordings from the origins of sound recording in the 1920’s through WWII were forced to do whatever they were going to do in the three minutes or so that a disk could accommodate. In some cases this imposed a discipline on early jazz musicians that resulted in tightly structured performances that are still admired today. Two outstanding examples are Louis Armstrong’s West End Blues (1928):
and Coleman Hawkins’s Body and Soul (1939):
LPs initiate a new era of recording and listening
“LP” (long-playing) records appeared in 1948. Each side of an LP could hold about 20 minutes of music, so it was not unusual for an entire symphony to be contained on a single record. LP record players were less frantic while they were playing because there was no stack of disks and the playing speed was only 33 rpm, less than half the speed of the old 78’s. At the same time the technologies of both recording and playback had undergone a dramatic transformation. Hearing state-of-the-art recordings played on the new “high-fidelity stereo” sound systems was a whole new experience. This was the musical environment I grew up in.
Jazz musicians respond to the new LP format
The dramatically increased playing time of LPs had a pronounced effect on jazz. Jazz players could really stretch out and take long solos, and it was not unusual for one side of a jazz LP to contain the performance of a single piece. Lengthy solos became the norm for live jazz performances as well. At the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Duke Ellington’s tenor sax player, Paul Gonsalves, soloed through 27 choruses on Ellington’s Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue. Rumor has it that Ellington forced Gonsalves to play for such an exhausting stretch as punishment for showing up late for rehearsal. But the crowd loved it. The Ellington Orchestra, whose popularity had been in decline, suddenly found themselves jazz fan favorites again.
Discovering jazz
I think I first became aware of jazz as a distinct musical genre in seventh grade (1954–55). I had been listening to Jean Shepherd’s nightly radio show on WOR (New York). Shepherd was an actor, raconteur, and author. Most people have probably seen his “A Christmas Story” (1983) which is now shown on TV every year at Christmas time. One evening he mentioned that there was a live jazz show every Saturday night on WOR. The show, “Bandstand USA” (not to be confused with Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand”) featured remote pickups from jazz clubs all over the Northeast. My favorite was trumpeter/cornetist Bobby Hackett’s group, which broadcast regularly from the Voyager Room of the former Henry Hudson Hotel in NYC.
My first jazz heroes
Bobby Hackett could play any kind of jazz with style, gusto, and consummate technique:
On this video, for example, you can hear Hackett performing three jazz classics with other jazz titans Bob Wilber, Urbie Green, and Dave McKenna. Non-jazz lovers may know Hackett as the romantic trumpet soloist on Jackie Gleason’s mood music albums, such as Music for Lovers Only.
Nearly all of these albums went gold. I also came to know and enjoy a similar kind of jazz played by trumpeter Red Allen and an all-star group that performed regularly at the Metropole Café in NYC:
Today all of this music would be considered old-fashioned by jazz fans, but I’m still drawn in by the energy and joy it exudes.
At this point I began collecting and studying jazz LPs. My growing interest in this music had the effect of putting a cultural and psychological wall between me and many of my contemporaries, who were listening to the music of Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, The Cadillacs, and — to my disgust — Pat Boone.
Forming a band
Inspired by what I was hearing, I decided to take music — and jazz in particular — more seriously. I had played trumpet for a few years without any real interest in it. I asked my parents if I could take drum lessons (I figured that was the shortest route for me into jazz). They said yes, and I lucked out and got as my teacher a former drummer with the Sauter-Finegan orchestra, which was a popular big band in the 1950’s. My teacher, a Juilliard graduate, ran me through a traditional course of percussion techniques along with jazz drumming.
As my skill increased I got together with my trumpet-playing friend Billy and formed a dance band with a couple of musician friends. I’ve written about this experience before in The Memoirist:
Our band had to play dance music for paying gigs, but when we just played for our own enjoyment it was all jazz. The police sometimes came to break up these informal jam sessions at Billy’s house because an Eastern Airlines pilot who lived across the street claimed that we were interfering with his sleep and thereby endangering his passengers. The sessions typically ran from 7PM to 9PM, hours that had been approved by all of the band parents.
My mom actively supported the band. She bought me and Billy tickets to concerts by Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, Louis Armstrong, and the Modern Jazz Quartet. From time to time she would call upon her encyclopedic knowledge of pop standards — tunes by Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, et al. — to make suggestions of tunes for the band to play.
The band continued together through high school, but I switched to playing piano when our original pianist left for college. I had developed an interest in music theory and composition, and piano was the logical instrument to support that interest.
The first time I give up jazz
OK, so when did I give up jazz for the first time? It was when I got to college and decided to be a music major. The music curriculum had little-to-nothing of interest to jazz musicians and there were few opportunities to get together and play with other jazz musicians. A couple of times I played gigs, but I was never able to form a group and develop a repertoire.
In graduate school the situation got even worse. For music theorists and composers the program was all about a type of modern music known as “academic serialism.” This form of music was in its final death throes at that time. Almost nobody wanted hear or play it, but you needed to know about it to get your degree. I was so depressed I gave my entire jazz record collection to my then-girlfriend, thinking I would never need it again (I got all the records back when I married her two years later).
Another opportunity appears
I didn’t pick up jazz again until I had spent a few years teaching at the local state teachers college. The program had nothing to do with jazz, but the Music Department had an extracurricular jazz band that needed a faculty advisor. I forget now whether I volunteered for the job or if the Chair assigned me to it. But I do know that when you’re a young faculty member worried about getting tenure you don’t say “no” to any task the Chair asks you to do.
I give up jazz for the second time
I continued directing the student band for a few years, writing arrangements and occasionally performing with them. But as the years went by we had fewer and fewer students interested in jazz. The newer students were all rock musicians. In the end, we couldn’t put a band together for sheer lack of the right instrumentalists. The department orchestra, an official credit-bearing ensemble, had the same problem. We had a vast oversupply of rock guitarists, electric bass players, and drummers. So I gave up on jazz for the second time, but this time I gave up altogether on music as a career. As a former math and science nerd I had an opportunity to join my university’s newly formed Computer Science Department, which offered a variety of interesting possibilities.
Embarking on a new career
I spent the rest of my career, except for the last year, in Computer Science. I continued practicing piano at home, mostly because I found it relaxing. As I was nearing retirement, my wife was taking singing lessons at the local arts center. I found out that the center had a jazz big band that was directed by a well-known Boston jazz trumpeter. The band needed a pianist. I figured, what the heck, I’ll audition for the job — it might be fun, and anyway I had nothing to lose. I got the job.
Another opportunity comes along
I played with the band for two years, but I and two of my bandmates in the rhythm section — the bassist and the drummer — decided to split off and form our own jazz trio. This worked out very well. All three of us wrote arrangements and original music for the group and we had many opportunities to play and record our music. I’ll never forget a gig we played at the New England Aquarium in Boston. We were situated on a small platform that projected a few feet out over the first floor pool, which is home to the Aquarium’s penguins. The penguins were a very attentive and appreciative audience. They watched us intently for about two hours, and at the end of each number made some soft sounds that I took to be approval. But suddenly the head penguin issued a command and all the penguins fell asleep simultaneously. Further playing didn’t disturb them or wake them up.
The third time I give up jazz
Like all good things the trio had to come to an end. My drummer retired and moved out to Santa Fe and my bass player became seriously ill and had to quit. At about the same time my dad died and I had to have surgery. So, for the third, and probably final, time I gave up on jazz in 2010.
Was it all worth it?
Now in my 80’s I look back on this experience with gratitude. The camaraderie with the musicians I played with and the opportunities I had to explore my musical ideas were priceless. But jazz is a young man’s game and perhaps I overstayed my welcome. In any case, I don’t want to try to recreate any of that past experience now. I’m content to let it be what it was. But I would still encourage young people to find out about this music and try their hand at playing it. I’m always on the lookout for new talent and, happily, I continue to find great young jazz musicians appearing here and there all over the world.
