Though I’ve written quite a bit here and there about my general experience as an improviser I’ve also written more specifically about learning to improvise in three previous posts:
My Early Jazz Education 6: Dave Dysert
My Jazz Education 7: Learning to Improvise, Part 1
High school jazz [It wasn’t done]
Though Dave Dysert is one of the most important teachers I’ve ever had – he’s one of the five fathers to whom I dedicated my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil – and he laid some of the foundations on which my improvisational skills rest, he never actually worked with me on improvisation. This seems strange in retrospect, but at the time it’s just how things were, as I remark in this recent post, High School jazz [it wasn’t done]. The Part 1 post covers what I learned up though my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins and a couple of years beyond, which my major experience was in playing with a jazz-rock band, The Saint Matthew Passion. This post picks up with the dissolution of that band in the spring of 1971 or 1972 when the founders of the band – Jon, Mal, and Steve – graduated from Johns Hopkins.
I continued practicing the trumpet, which would have included improvising along with records. I don’t recall whether or not I had purchased any of the Jamey Aebersold play-along records at that time. These are records of jazz tunes played by a rhythm section, but without any horns. A horn player could then practice improvising along with the record. Whether or not I’d started working with such records, I eventually would and, in time, built up a modest collection.
In the Spring of 1973 I signed up for trumpet lessons in the adult preparatory division of the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. My teacher was Harold Rehrig, who had spent most of his career playing with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Though he had some familiarity with jazz – he knew of Dizzy Gillespie – he wasn't an improvisor. That's not why I was studying with him. I wanted to improve my technique. He helped me with that; in particular, he worked on my breathing. We also worked on the Haydn Trumpet Concerto, for which I composed two cadenzas.
Then it was off to Buffalo. I had been accepted into the Ph.D. program in the English Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo for the Fall of 1973. As I also wanted to continue working on jazz improvisation I checked the catalog and discovered that the music department listed a jazz improvisation workshop led by Frank Foster. I’d never heard of him, but looked him up in Leonard Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz and discovered that he’d spent a decade with Count Basie and then worked with Elvin Jones, Sarah Vaughan and others. He was free-lancing in New York and flew out to Buffalo to conduct the workshop (and, I assume, teach other courses).
At first I was very self-conscious in the workshop. (I didn’t take it for academic credit, but simply audited it.) To be sure, I’d had a lot of experience improvising solos in The Saint Matthew Passion. But that had been a jazz-inflected rock band. None of the tunes had complex chord changes; I was mostly improvising over one- and two-chord vamps. I assumed most of the players in the workshop would be music-majors. Could I hang with them?
Yes, after a bit. The workshop met for a single two- or three-hour session a week. There were, I don’t know, 20 or so players in the workshop at any one time, which was a bit crowded. It meant that no one got much playing time. We’d do two, maybe three, tunes in each session, with each person taking a solo. Frank would write a tune on the chalk board, melody and chord changes, explain important features of the tune, including how to relate scales to chords – “harmonic relevance” was Frank’s term – and we’d run it down.
I remember that in an early session, perhaps the first, we did Herbie Hancock’s “Maiden Voyage.” I thought I’d acquitted myself reasonably well. But another player in the workshop, a tenor sax playing, pointed out to me that another trumpet player was hitting the changes. Implying, of course, that I hadn’t been. Whoops! And double-whoops, because that tune doesn’t have complicated changes. I felt intimidated by another trumpet player in the workshop, Billy Skinner, because he was so good. I don’t know whether or not he was formally enrolled in the workshop or was just one of the local musicians who’d show up every now and then.
I’d write each tune down in a music notebook and then work on them. I often wrote out exercises based on the chord changes for a tune. We must have gone through I don’t know how many tunes in a semester; I believe I hung out in the workshop for at least two, if not three, semesters. At this point I don’t remember which tunes we covered, but there was “Blue Bossa,” “St. Thomas,” “Dexterity,” “Giant Steps,” and several of Frank’s tunes, including “Simone” and “Who’s That Rockin’ My Jazz Boat.”
I’m sure I hung out in that workshop my first two years at Buffalo (73-74, 74-75) and perhaps my third year as well. That workshop was perhaps my central educational experience in learning jazz improvisation. That’s where I came to terms with chord changes and with bebop, which in many ways remains the central jazz idiom, though it has long been eclipsed by other styles. I spent as much time working on tunes I picked up in that workshop as I spent on the courses I was taking the English Department, where I was getting my degree. Of course I also continued playing along with records. I did that a lot, and have done so most of my adult life. I pretty much assume that anyone with a serious interest in jazz does it.
The school also started a big band, which I played in, sharing the lead and second trumpet parts with others. This was led by Milton Marsh. We played standard professional charts, some tunes arranged by Marsh, and maybe even a Frank Foster tune or so, I don’t remember.
Independently of the school I played in a quintet organized by Simon Salz, a guitar player I’d met at the workshop. We only had a handful of gigs, one a New Year’s gig at St. George’s Table, a fairly well-known Buffalo club and restaurant. We were fronted by a female vocalist and the band more or less existed to support her.
I also played in a Saturday afternoon jam session at the home of Mike Fuda, a physics professor at SUNY Buffalo. Mike played drums and there were a handful of other musicians including Ed Wood on bass, a tenor player named, I believe, Sammy Calveteri, and his friend, Angelo Briandi, on trumpet. We played a lot of bebop. Sammy was excellent – he'd been a full-time pro at one time – while Angelo was not so good. He played the heads very well, but couldn’t improvise. However, he did have good weed.
These were very informal sessions. We’d show up at Mike’s house in the early afternoon. When enough musicians had shown up, we’d start jamming. If Sammy was there, he’d call the tune. If I didn’t know the melody I’d sit out for the first few choruses and then, when I’d had time to absorb the tune, I’d play a couple of choruses. After we’d played three or four tunes or so we’d stop playing and gather around the dining room table to chat (and smoke weed). Then we’d play some more tunes, break to chat and get high, and so forth.
We did this for fun. We weren’t getting ready for some performance. And, while there were generally others around who weren’t playing in the jam session, we weren’t performing for them. We were just making music and hanging out. I figure that this is the basic, the most fundamental, music-making arrangement. A situation that is clearly divided into performers and audience, that’s a secondary, a derived social arrangement. To the extent that this secondary arrangement predominates in our society, to that extent we have lost our way.
How do we recover that basic situation?
* * * * *
One final note. Late in the Spring of my last year at Buffalo one of my musical compatriots heard of a big party where there’d be a jam session.
“Charlie Keil will be there.”
“Charlie Keil, the Charlie Keil, the man who wrote Urban Blues?”
“Yes.”
“He’s here at UB?”
“Yes.”
I’m not reporting the exact words of the conversation. I’m just making them up. But something like that conversation took place. I was rather taken-aback that I’d spent five years at UB and didn’t even know that Charlie Keil was on the faculty there. I’d read Urban Blues sometime late in the 1960s and, like many others, had been bowled over with it. And now I would be jamming with him. Little did I suspect how closely we’d be working together in the 21st century.
More later.
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