JazzCore1/part one

JazzCore1/part one

Legacy n: something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past

Many languages are no longer being learned by new generations of children or by new adult speakers; these languages will become extinct when their last speaker dies.

     Linguistic Society of America, “What Is an Endangered Language?” 

            (2012)

It is time to explain myself….let us stand up.

     Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855)

Play along with me:  Consider jazz a language.  As we grow up, we imitate the language we hear around us. We make it our own eventually, finding our voice and learning to improvise in our countless conversations with ourselves and others.  So do musicians playing jazz together converse with each other in the language of jazz, improvising in the moment, responding to what they hear, drawing on what they feel and know.

Like the language you and I speak and hear, write and read, the language of jazz crosses generations.  Jazz in our lives begins as a legacy passed down to us by the musicians and listeners who played and heard it before we did. Those of us who hear jazz now--and want to keep the music alive--preserve and invigorate it by playing it, teaching it, listening to it, caring about it.  

I’m betting you are one of us.

Years ago, I read jazz-piano-playing sociologist Howard S. Becker’s book, Art Worlds (1982).  He would call our jazz community an “art world” because “All artistic work…involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people” (1).

Who are we? We are musicians and listeners, family members, venue owners and staffs, other musician-hiring employers, arts organizations’ staffs and volunteers, philanthropists, instrument dealers and technicians, music merchants, studio chiefs and recording engineers, PR people, local jazz-radio staffs, teachers and their students, writers and their readers.

I call us St. Louis Jazz World.  The project whose premiere you are reading now—JazzCore--will focus on St. Louis-based jazz musicians at the heart of that world. They help keep the language of jazz vibrant by receiving the legacy of jazz, embracing it, making it their own, sharing and saving it for us now and others yet to come.  All of us help shape and transmit that legacy.

Each of you can play along now.

In fact, let’s take a jazz group as our ideal of collective conversation, listening and responding to each other the way jazz musicians do.   As you read JazzCore1 and those to follow, what do you notice? Wonder about? What do you want to say?  Share your experience, tell your jazz story and expand your participation in the collective activity of St. Louis Jazz World.  Jazz is speech, communication, connection—among players and listeners past and present. Talk back.  Play your solo in the comments section at blog's end.

Let me start the talking-back: Why this project?

The past plays deeply and often unpredictably in the present.  So JazzCore began long before I knew it had begun, long before I realized that jazz is a conversation I want to enter by listening to the music, playing it, talking and writing about it. 

      
Like the musicians you will meet here, playing music was a vital gateway for me that would lead I knew not where. I began on a rent-free clarinet in fourth grade at Glenridge School in Clayton, my hometown.  Without ever having thought (consciously) about it, I’d raised my hand the day the music director stood before us and asked who wanted to start playing.  

A few years later, favored by serendipity, I switched to the seasoned, nickel-plated alto saxophone my uncle had played in his college jazz band and now offered to me.  Just when I was tiring of clarinet and the district said I needed to provide my own instrument, my long, still lively love affair with the alto began, one jazz generation linking to the next.

I played the horn through elementary school into high school in various non-jazz district ensembles.  Meanwhile, my environment was comping ("Accompanying a jazz musician's improvised solo with supportive chords, rhythms, and countermelodies"), inviting me to solo. That saxophone had found me, and, as I approached high school, I began to hear the jazz in my world, starting with my uncle, aunt, and mother, siblings and dedicated jazzers all.

The pleasures of playing and listening to jazz were there for me to notice.  My saxophonic uncle also played jazz violin, and I remember hearing him and other local musicians jam at his U. City home with pianist Ralph Sutton whenever he was in town (sometimes joined by clarinetist Edmund Hall).  My mother and aunt later made a pilgrimage to Dick Gibson's Jazz Party in Vail so they could hear Ralph play with "The World's Greatest Jazz Band."

      
I saw (and heard) my mother and my aunt listen happily to their 78rpm recordings of swing players such as Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, and Benny Goodman.  When Teddy played at the Coal Hole in the Coronado Hotel, my mother and aunt were there. In later years, they went to hear Dizzy whenever he came to St. Louis.  On one of her last outings, my aunt and I heard McCoy Tyner at Just Jazz.

      
Both my mother and aunt played piano, too.  My mother stopped playing by the time I began high school, but I can still recall watching and hearing her play tunes from the Rodgers and Hart songbook that was always perched on our living-room piano.  My aunt played for as long as I can remember—mainly classical, some jazz.

      
Noticing my interest in jazz, nourishing it, Mom gave me my first jazz lp:  Coleman Hawkins’ “The ‘Hawk’ Talks,” released in 1955 (my freshman year at Clayton High) and the start of my big collection of jazz lps and discs and a lot of happy listening.  Around the same time, I got hip to “Moonglow with Martin,” the great jazz radio show out of New Orleans.  I tuned in regularly.
     
Soon after, Mom presented me with a brassy, new Kohlert alto saxophone that I played in Clayton High’s concert band (very few high school jazz bands in those days!), where we did do some jazz charts our director wrote especially for us.  I also began playing in The Starliters, a five-piece combo that gigged locally. In college I jammed  with a fellow student who played great piano, I played in a few bands, and I had a weekly jazz show on the campus radio station.  Almost 60 years later, I still play that Kohlert alto—a living link to my jazz past--in various local groups, including Silk Pajamas, Chamber Jazz, and OASIS Jazz Ensemble. 
     
Born in 1941 (just this side of the swing-bebop divide), I embraced the jazz of my time.  In high school I began getting together with a few friends to play and listen to that music. We fancied ourselves hard-boppers, spicing our speech with “hip,” “cool,” “man,”  “groovy,” listening passionately to Coltrane, Miles, Horace, Monk, Jackie McLean, Sonny, Art Blakey, Charles Mingus. 

         
That music was the most exciting blend of heart and head, feeling and thought, I’d ever experienced—at once exhilarating to hear and challenging to understand.  I worked (with moderate success) to give my alto sound the Coltrane-McLean edge that so turned me on.

I started a student jazz club at Clayton High for the relatively few of my (all-white) classmates who cared about the music and wanted to experience it together.  One high spot: arranging to have local jazz DJ “Spider” Burks speak to us one day about jazz in his life.    

Thanks at first to my mother’s taking me there, I also relished spending Saturday afternoons listening to the (mostly white) Jazz Central ensemble at Medart’s on Clayton Road, where Fred Del Gaudio’s sweet sound on alto inspired me week after week.  My student jazz club arranged a Jazz Central concert at the high school during my senior year.

Then, when I had wheels--through my last two years of high school and into college--I immersed myself in local jazz. I looked forward to weekend nights at northside and eastside clubs, hearing great (mostly black) local players such as Freddie Washington (a favorite!), Don James, John Mixon, Phillip Wilson, Grant Green, John Hicks, Sam Lazar, Bobby Danzig, and John “Red” Chapman, and later listening at The Dark Side and Jorge’s on Gaslight Square.

I grew to see jazz as a way out of the Clayton monoculture and a portal into the urban, multi-cultural creativity and energy that jazz embodied and I’d come to savor. I moved to St. Louis City as soon as I was on my own and then took a teaching position at Harris-Stowe State College.  Fifty-plus years later, my wife and I are longtime residents of the Central West End.

Like an improvised solo, each jazz player’s or listener’s unique history builds on what came before to create what happens now—in short, a conversation. What I heard—learned--from my jazzy elders was a passion for the music:  Find the jazz you love—let it find you--and make a place for it in your life.

That’s what I began to do and still do, staying in touch with jazz both by playing it and listening to it.  The listening endlessly nourishes the playing (and vice versa), and both have been enriched by my serving as a Jazz St. Louis volunteer for many years. I have come to see the language of jazz as a way of belonging, of connecting to a community, linking to others through music. 

Over the years, I learned the truth of what James Lincoln Collier pointed out in 1993:  Jazz criticism and history have concentrated on the “big names, the stars, and the famous clubs and dance halls where they worked,” leaving the impression that “these great players were jazz history.” The fact is, Collier says, “perhaps ninety percent of the music has always been made by unknown players” on the local scene—players of the kind I’d grown up with--ranging from professional and semi-professional musicians to “out-right amateurs” (Jazz [1993]).

As one of those unknown players, I would describe myself as an enhanced amateur.  I never considered becoming a professional musician (I taught a different language—English--during my career), but I have tried to keep up my alto skills over the years through listening, studying (most notably, lessons with Webster University’s Paul DeMarinis), and playing (both out and in).

Yes, since 1993, we have had gratifying books about local jazz players, including Lars Bjorn’s Before Motown:  A History of Jazz in Detroit, 1920-1960 (2001), Jay Goetting’s Joined at the Hip:  A History of Jazz in the Twin Cities (2011), and, of course, Dennis Owsley’s indispensable City of Gabriels:  The History of Jazz in St. Louis, 1895-1973 (2006).

So why JazzCore?  Two additional reasons: I want to create a close-in sense of this moment’s community of local musicians, the St. Louis-based players you’ve heard or may still hear—what I call “thistory” rather than ”history,” not chronology but collage: portraits of local artists we can hear now who have made a place in their lives for playing jazz.  

And I want to include the full range of jazz players Collier described, from the best known to the least, professionals to amateurs—a core sample, a JazzCore.  You will hear from players in their own words, based on my interviews with them.  

The first core sample—JazzCore1—comes in five parts.  You are about to meet Adaron Jackson in this first part.  Then, in the four postings to follow soon, you will meet Phil Dunlap, Dawn Weber, Danny Campbell, and Jim Jeter.  Each portrait tells a story both shared and unique: How the legacy of jazz came into the player’s life and how each embraced it by making a place for playing the music and passing it on. I wish you happy reading.

My hope is that the musicians’ words will inspire yours, as jazz is a reciprocal, collaborative language.  Make JazzCore a conversation in which you take part.  Tell us how jazz has entered—is entering--your life and why it remains there.  

I also hope that reading JazzCore and hearing local players talk about jazz in their lives will affect you as it has me--by enriching the experience of hearing them play jazz.  What else matters? Let me know what you think.

Finally, the project expresses my gratitude and respect for the sweet music and the great adventure St. Louis’ local players have treated us to over the years, right up to last week at the Bistro--and my hope that all of us continue to keep St. Louis Jazz World lively. 

 

Adaron Jackson

Mary [Lou Williams] became [Bud] Powell’s mentor.  At Café Society, the show included comedienne Imogene Coca.  Mary wrote, ‘I had quite a bit of trouble trying to get Bud to play the show music which was not too modern. He kept saying that this type of music was too corny and it was an insult to his musical ability.  I told him that a musician was only considered great who played everything.  It finally soaked in and he promised to let me show him how to play Imogene’s music, eliminating the modern harmonies.  I insisted he play it as written.

     Linda Dahl, Morning Glory:  A Biography of Mary Lou Williams (1999)

I am where I am based on all the personal choices that I’ve made, but I always want to be better.

I was first introduced to jazz in high school, so it was more so following people’s directions…. So I would not say when I was first introduced to jazz I was a student of the music or I was a jazz musician, because I think in order to be a jazz musician,  you must make yourself a student and study the music.  I was only introduced.  It took a while before I had the…’determination’ isn’t the word…the motivation to do it.  I think you have to do it on your own.  That’s what can then make you a jazz musician as opposed to being told what to do. 

There are some groups I play with, but the majority of my playing is not with one specific group at all. And I found that that’s what I need to do in St. Louis at this moment in order to make a living. 

          --Adaron Jackson

Yes, the past parents the present, but how, when, by what means?  An improvised chorus of “Night in Tunisia” will likely be a blend of the predictable and the surprising.   Both the piano and piano-playing were in Adaron Jackson’s family, so the gift of piano came into his life before the gift of jazz, but who could have predicted that the one would prepare the way for the other? His discovering what he calls the ”infinite possibilities” of playing jazz piano would come, as would his figuring out how to create a life in music that includes playing jazz.  First was his memorable encounter with the piano itself and his choosing to play.

When Adaron was in fifth or sixth grade, he recalls, “my mother bought a piano, so that’s how I started taking piano lessons. She bought a piano and she’s like, ‘I’m buying a piano, and you will take lessons.’  So that’s how the music started.”  It continues, that piano a disguised blessing in the sometimes-unpredictable ways of legacy jazz.  Indeed, in what must be an energizing legacy ritual, that first piano still stands in his mother’s living room, and “I still go over there, and I play it.” 

There was a hint in the family past:  Adaron’s grandmother played piano.  She died when he was young, so Adaron never heard her, but he was certainly told about her.  It “wasn’t necessarily, specifically jazz,” but she played, as Adaron one day would. His mother “didn’t play at all, and my father didn’t either. I think he may have played drums when he was in high school, but they didn’t really pursue music at all.”

Maybe that’s why the idea of the next generation’s taking up music appealed to Adaron’s parents.  Whatever the reason, the opening was pure serendipity, a moment that Adaron heard and embraced when it presented itself, learning from the process as improvisers do.  

He, his sister, and the two cousins who, he says, “were raised in the house,” began taking piano lessons--classical piano.   “Music was interesting to me at that point in my life,” Adaron recalls, “but I didn’t know what jazz was. I had been studying classical music, so I was immersed in that, in terms of studying that, practicing that, doing all of that.  So it wasn’t that I was disinterested in jazz as much as I was just focused on the lessons that I was taking, which was classical music.”

The important thing is, Adaron and the piano clicked.  “It took a second,” he says, but “I did feel a connection to the piano.  At first it was a new thing, and I had a piano teacher that, you know, the first few lessons we talked, we didn’t play.  You’re in grade school, so we’re talking about ‘This is C,’ so that was a bit tedious, and my mother had to make us…we had to practice an hour a day.  That was the piano teacher’s rule: On days that you didn’t have lessons, you practiced an hour a day.”

Signs of what was coming: Adaron, his cousins, and his sister all had their hour on the keys—then Adaron started to want more, what he calls “the switch.”  He tells it:  “So we each had these different times that we would practice because there’s only one piano!  So everybody had an hour that they had to practice on the piano.  Well, it just got to a point where I would go past that hour—like the other people would stop with their hour. For me, one hour was not enough.  I kept practicing and kept doing. I would continue to do it past that.  I don’t remember when the switch happened.  I just know that it did” (perhaps an early sign of that “motivation to do it” that would later propel Adaron’s career.) What would happen next?

For his sister and cousins, high school was the end of the piano line:  Lessons ended, playing ended. Not so for Adaron, who looks back now and notices: “All four of us took piano lessons—private lessons—and I’m the only one that still—that actually made music a profession and still plays.”  How did that happen?

Several streams converged. First was the “steer toward jazz” that now began to emerge, what Adaron terms “my first introduction to jazz music, other than hearing it on the radio but not actively playing the music.”  That required the active receptivity that came when classical-piano-playing Adaron met high school jazz, another bit of sweet serendipity.  “I had been studying, and I wanted to be a part of the music program.”

He remembers: “When I got to high school, I decided to join the band program,” which meant playing in three bands.  That, he says, was “the unspoken rule”—as well as an early sign of Adaron’s versatility.  He played percussion in the marching and concert bands--bass drum (and later drum major) in the one, marimba and xylophone in the other--but piano in the jazz band.  

Necessity continued to favor him. Once he’d moved toward jazz, Adaron was fortunate in his mentors.  He attended East St. Louis’ Lincoln Senior High School, so he had the opportunity to come closer to jazz and the study of music under two masters: Ron Carter, the school’s jazz-band director, and pianist/teacher Reggie Thomas, whom Adaron met while in high school and--one good thing leading in time to another—later studied with at SIU-E. “Studying with Reggie Thomas,” he recalls, “was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

All in all, Adaron remembers the solid support for his pursuing music into high school.  First, he says, “having both my parents  and two incomes in the home” was “a big source of stability.  Looking back, I mean music was a part of that, but would they have been able to afford a piano on one income?   Or the lessons?” Plus they were able to send young Adaron to a number of summer music workshops that focused on jazz.

He also remembers the “tons of encouragement” he got in high school—from his teachers, yes, but from his parents as well.  The high school had “a very active Band Parent Association, and my father was the president of it for a period of time.  So, yes, I mean, the encouragement was all--my parents, everybody became involved with it.”

Two other early-life events would help Adaron move towards becoming the legacy jazz musician he is today—one who creates a musical life in which playing jazz has a place and who also passes on the music both by playing it and by teaching it to others.

One event:  Adaron’s discovering early on that, to be a successful musician,  “You have to be able to do a lot more than one thing.  At the time I was playing classical music, I was also playing in my family’s church, and so I was playing in that growing up.”

The other event:  His parents’ concerns about music as a career.  “After all the support my parents gave me in music, they didn’t want me to necessarily major in music in college. It comes out of concern for your future and welfare.” Still, says Adaron, who has created a life in music that has pleased himself and his parents, “they didn’t stop me from doing it.  There was hesitation definitely on their part that they didn’t want me necessarily to do it, but they’re fine obviously with it now.  They’re not supporting me financially.”

After earning his B.A. in jazz performance and his M.A. in piano performance with an emphasis on jazz at SIU-E, Adaron began creating that life in music, what he calls “my professional life.” As if hearing his parents’ concerns, he embraced what he’d begun learning as a young classicist playing in church and pursuing jazz piano in high school: versatility and growth.

If you want to be a “full-time musician,” he says, “it’s hard to do one thing and make a complete living doing one thing, at least in St. Louis.  So, no, I don’t only do jazz by any means.”  Adaron’s currrent church gig, now three or four years on, has blossomed since the one he had when he was younger. “Right now I work for a church full-time, and I get paid a salary to be there every Sunday and to coordinate all of their music, all of their worship arts.” Plus he gets the chance to play sacred music on both the piano and the organ.

But there’s more: “I do gospel music, I do pop music, I can do R and B, I’ve done country music, I’ve done all kinds of music—to classical accompaniment because I studied classical music, too. So jazz isn’t all—performing jazz is a part of my professional life.”  And as a jazz player, he says, “I don’t fit specifically or necessarily into hard bop or into bebop or into what would be considered Latin jazz or anything like that. I’ve played all of them. My knowledge of hard bop or anything like that would probably be better than Latin jazz, but I do them all.”

“There are some groups I play with,” Adaron notes, “but the majority of my playing is not with one specific group at all. And I found that that’s what I need to do here in St. Louis at this moment in order to make a living.” Thus, while Adaron is probably best known for playing piano with Good4TheSoul, “Out of all the gigs I had last month, only one of those was Good4.” As for “strictly jazz gigs,” they comprise only “a small amount of the total compared to other things that I do because the gigs for straight-ahead jazz are limited.”

Putting together a musical life such as this requires more than versatility. It also requires a passion for learning, and Adaron has had that, too, since he started playing piano and now as a full-time musician who plays jazz jobs when he can.

The process started slowly, because when he met jazz in high school, playing the music mostly meant  “following people’s direction—you do this, you do that, it wasn’t me going out and seeking the information or going around listening or amassing all these recordings and finding out the history behind this or the history behind that, the lineage of the music.”  

Since then, Adaron has become what he calls “a student of the music.”  Yes, he majored in jazz performance in college and, he says, “that’s one way I believe myself a student of it.” But his study continues as a professional player “by transcribing, by listening to the music, by being immersed in it.  Those elements I think would make one a jazz musician, in the broadest sense of the word.”

To play the music for others is another way to study and learn the music, to take the risk of pushing yourself forward in a performance setting.  Adaron had a challenging chance at that when he did “A Triumph of Trumpets” at Jazz at the Bistro and embraced the opportunity to play behind three big-name trumpeters: Jon Faddis, Terrell Stafford, and Sean Jones. “It was a good gig in a lot of ways,” Adaron recalls.

It powerfully confirmed his commitment as a jazz musician to the learning process. ”Those guys…Faddis is still learning, Terrell is till learning, Sean Jones is still learning. I have to be still learning because I’m not on the level of Faddis in my personal opinion.  I’m not on the level of Terrell Stafford in my personal opinion.  Or honestly Sean Jones.” 

He recalls talking to the three of them during the gig, excited about the “chance to learn from them.”  They were all “just talking about music, and I was like, ‘OK, how did you feel about that or any feedback you can give me.’” Their responses were the same:  “Continue to make yourself a student of the music—how they were all still learning, still growing.  I mean, it just doesn’t stop.”

The gig also honed and confirmed Adaron’s skills as an attentive, conscientious accompanist. His “job as a piano player,” he says, is “to accompany, to help people sound the best that they can, to contribute in a positive way to the overall goal of whatever the music is or whatever the situation or the setting is.” His hope:  That “when people play with me, they feel that I have contributed in a positive way to the performance.  If the measure of that recognition is the fact that I’m working still, then I guess the answer’s ‘yes’.”

The answer that night at the Bistro was clearly a “yes.” Adaron was accompanying three of the top trumpet players on the scene. Moreover, he had “never played with Faddis, and I certainly never played with three trumpet players on the stage.”    The risky challenge to his versatility: “trying to play behind each one because each is a different player, which means that my approach can’t necessarily be the same for each.”

Adaron says he was “maybe a little bit” nervous, mainly because “I wanted to rise to the occasion and didn’t want to let anyone down.  I didn’t want to be the reason why we couldn’t do something, that we would have been unable to achieve something. And I wasn’t.”  A “good gig,” he says, because “we were able to do what they wanted to.   It was really enjoyable.”

But Adaron learns—and stays connected to the jazz legacy--not only by studying and playing jazz but also by teaching it, the piece that rounds out his rich relationship with the music he first studied in high school under memorable musician-teachers.   He is an adjunct instructor at his alma mater, SIU-E, where he teaches a jazz keyboard course in the jazz studies program.  It’s “a piano class for music majors who are not piano players.” He also coaches student combos and gives private lessons to some students in the program. 

Adaron has been an adjunct at Washington U. as well. “I was doing accompanying and teaching vocal music—I do some vocal work but not a whole lot.  These were more stylistic things.  I wasn’t necessarily teaching them fundamentals.  These were people who were in the program and who could sing—more stylistic things than me teaching them techniques.” He rounds out his teaching by working with a group of high school musicians in Jazz St. Louis’ JazzU program.

Next time you hear Adaron, remember that he has created the life he wanted: “Full-time in the music business, which includes teaching and playing.   There’s no work I do that’s outside of music in any way, at this time.”

Remember as well that so integrated a life also makes him the ideal legacy jazz musician, the essence of which is to be what he calls “a student of the music” who continues to play, to learn, and to teach others. The source of Adaron’s vitality?  “A love for the music that compels you to commit the necessary time to be a student of the music.  Listening, being immersed in the music:  The process,” he says, “is never ending—the process of growing as a musician.  It should not be ending.”