JazzCore1/part three

JazzCore1/part three

Come in and meet Dawn Weber, the third of five musicians profiled in JazzCore1.  Comments always welcome.

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One never knows, do one?

   Thomas “Fats” Waller

Dawn Weber

I don’t think anybody knows that they’re going to be a musician or want to be a musician before they’ve even played an instrument.  Maybe there are some, because you don’t know that you’re going to have a connection with that instrument or that music.  You have no idea. It’s like you don’t know what’s ahead of you.  So…you just have to stay prepared.

I am definitely a success story.  I’m not like a famous rock star, but I grew up poor as poor can be, and I am a single female, I own a home, I’ve had a college education, I’ve got a full scholarship to grad school, my business is successful.  I’ll have a lot of my debt paid off in a few years, and I’ve got a retirement plan and everything like that. Last year I had just bought myself some patio furniture, and I was sitting out in my back yard with this beautiful sunset and beautiful night, and it just hit me.  I looked around at everything I had and everything I’d done, and it was all because of my trumpet.  Everything that I have today is because of that trumpet.

      --Dawn Weber

Like improvised choruses—their unpredictable directions, one new note or figure the foundation for others--jazz lives can surprise, each one in its own way:  Adaron’s, Phil’s, now Dawn Weber’s.  The foundation was there, but who knew what Dawn would build on it? In fact, uncertainty about what lies ahead seems part of what ended up attracting Dawn to jazz and improvisation.

She grew up in Waukon, Iowa, a little farm town near the Minnesota-Wisconsin border.  “Yes, we were poor farmers up there,” but her father was also a musician—and, as his daughter would one day be, a versatile and hard-working musician.  “He was a saxophone player and an accordion player, and he was in a band that played five nights a week, besides being a farmer.  That’s how he fed the family.”

“They were popular in the area,” Dawn recalls, playing the taverns and cafes in the “many little towns spread throughout the farm country.” Plus they had a varied repertoire:  from polkas and schottiches popular with locals of Norwegian and German descent to mainstream waltzes and fox trots.

As if building on that family foundation, the fortunate unexpected happened, the big connection:  In fifth grade, at 11 years old, Dawn began playing trumpet, the available trumpet that somehow was there for her to notice:  “I thought I was going to pick the flute…because my friends were going to pick the flute, but…we had a trumpet at home, and when they were testing us out on the day where they put an instrument in your hands…I couldn’t make a sound on the flute, but for some reason I could make this beautiful tone on the trumpet.  So they—the band director and my parents-- talked me into playing the trumpet.”

The connection happened. What Dawn remembers is that  “it’s more like the trumpet ended up picking me.  I didn’t pick the trumpet, it picked me, and once I started playing the trumpet, it came easy, I loved it, I didn’t want to put it down, I practiced like two hours a day…. Since the first day that I started playing the trumpet, I never wanted to put it down.  And that’s kinda how you know that you’re probably going to be going into music, because that’s all you want to do—you just want to play your trumpet.”

Yes, her friends “thought it was weird” that she practiced so much, “but I was good at it, so they understood, because they didn’t like practicing their instruments, but I did.  My family thought it was weird because it could be Christmas Day, and, as soon as we were done opening presents, I’d want to go up to my room and practice my trumpet, and they didn’t understand.  You know, they’re like, ‘Can’t you take a day off?’ and I’m like, ‘No, I can’t.  I won’t get better if I take a day off.’”

Dawn learned early what commitment to her instrument and growing into music meant:

“If there’s a trumpet player who wants to be serious about playing trumpet and if they want to be a trumpet performer, they need to be practicing no less than 3 to 4 hours a day, and they need to be busting their tail, and anything less is unacceptable. If you don’t like to practice, don’t go into music because you will not be successful if you don’t practice hours and hours and hours a day.”

What a potent mix: the desire and the ability to get better and the thing to get better at.  Dawn remembers playing volleyball in school.  “I was having trouble serving, getting my serve over the net, so I got a volleyball, and I would practice serving against the barn—trying to practice my serve—and I would be out there practicing my serve for an hour.  So it just depends.  If there’s something that I want to do and really want to get good at, I’ll work hard at it.”

So music and the musician’s life were there, from the start, in Dawn’s early life.  The future, though, was murky:  Early on, Dawn recalls, “I was kinda misunderstood.  Like my family didn’t quite understand me…. I wasn’t a troublemaker, but my family saw me as a troublemaker.   I crashed my grandmother’s car driving too fast on a gravel road.  You know, stuff like that.  Staying out past curfew, so they thought I was just a crazy, mixed-up kid.”

The next step in her life might have seemed to confirm that thought.  Certainly it was a big and unexpected step, yet it grew out of Dawn’s passion for playing, for independence, and for taking risks:  She got a full scholarship to North Carolina School of the Arts, a performing arts high school in Winston-Salem. She boards a Greyhound bus at 16 and heads, once again, into the unknown.

“It was a culture shock.  The school had students from all over the world and from all over the country, but outside school, it was the deep South, and I was a Northerner…like, you know, from the Wisconsin-Minnesota area, so it was very interesting. I worked a job to help me pay for my living expenses, just to have money and stuff, and the Southerners for the longest time at the place where I worked thought I was a foreign exchange student from Scandinavia because my Minnesota accent was so strong.  When I left home, I had no idea I talked that way. I was there for four years.”

That “troublemaker” had done well: “My parents came down and they saw the school, they’re like, ‘I think our kid actually has a good head on her shoulders.  She’s not as crazy and messed up as we thought she was,’ because then they saw I knew what I wanted to do, I was just a driven and stubborn child.  That’s all it was.   They’re like. ‘She’s just determined and stubborn, and that’s just her.’”

The high school was just right for Dawn: “Yeah, it was an amazing experience.  I mean, you live in dorms, you have a roommate, there’s a ballet school, there’s a modern dance school, there is a drama school, an art school, a music school—a visual arts school and a music school.  And so you have all of these high school kids that are talented at what they do, all going to this school to be serious about their art.  And so the thing is, you end up going to school with people who are like you.  They’re different from you, but they all have this common ‘I love doing this thing so much that that’s all I want to do and that’s all I want to be.’  So it was a pretty cool thing.”

Dawn also knew—or thought she knew—what she wanted to do, and jazz wasn’t in the picture, not yet.  “I left home early because I knew I wanted to become a professional trumpet player.  But I thought I was going to be just a classical player, an orchestral musician,” and “most of my studies were all about classical trumpet.”  (Remember Adaron and Phil’s classical roots?)

Most but not all: Adventurous Dawn decided to play in the jazz band at North Carolina. It was a beginning, small though it was: “I was very square-sounding, I couldn’t improv at all and didn’t even care about it.” More to come.

 “I mean, at 16, I knew I wanted to be a musician—I wanted to be a professional trumpet player—so I found a school and got on a Greyhound bus and left home and didn’t know what was ahead of me.  You always kinda think that you know what you’re going to do and what’s ahead of you, but then you find out that you don’t.  You don’t know where life is going to end up taking you.”

The improvised life, like the improvised solo: you don’t know where it will go, how the unique mix of time, place and potential will express itself. “You know, it’s like you don’t know what’s ahead of you….” 

Once again, the unexpected yet unsurprising turn in Dawn’s adventurous life: She went to college at the Cleveland Institute of Music.  “Yeah, I went to a conservatory.” It was “ an orchestral school, and that’s what I was trained to do.” Her studies were classically oriented, but something new and important began to emerge—the kind of versatility we’ve seen in the music lives of Adaron and Phil, and the eagerness to grow that underlies it: Dawn was finding out how much she valued “just having your eyes opened to more that you didn’t know.  Just getting more knowledge and hearing different things that you just had no idea were out there.”

So “when I went to Cleveland, I helped put myself through college by waiting tables, but I realized I could do a lot more things with my trumpet…like I could play in a rock band, I could play in a salsa band.  I could do this and make money from playing my trumpet, so that’s when I started to play some other styles of music. I sounded like a classical player, but that’s how I started to play different styles and decided that I really liked it.  I liked not having to just do the classical music.  I liked the difference.  And so that’s what stirred up my really starting to play other styles of music--because I could make money at it, and I liked it.”

Dawn began playing gigs and, more important, “that’s when I decided to take jazz improv lessons at the conservatory, so I could learn how to improvise, and so that’s where that started.” True, “I was horrible at it!  I sounded like a classical player trying to play jazz.  It was so funny. It was very scary the first time the teacher said, ‘OK, here’s what you do, now go!’  But I learned a lot from him during that semester, so that was my start.” Clearly Dawn did not begin as a jazz musician, and “I did not expect or foresee that I was going to be going into the jazz field.  So it kind of happened unexpected.”

Once it began to happen, Dawn put her passion into it: “When I started learning some of the basic ideas behind jazz improv and theory, then that basically did start to be like, ‘Oh, so that’s how you do it…oh, that’s how you can think of it.  Okay, I can do that.’  So it started coming to me easy.  I had to start learning the style because I was such a classical player that my style for jazz was so square, it was so bad.  But I started picking up a lot on the style….”

She was well on her way to becoming a legacy musician--playing, teaching, growing, and brilliantly versatile—like Adaron and Phil, a musical hybrid, a chameleon for whom playing jazz and open-ended learning are essential parts of the mix.

After graduating from the conservatory in Cleveland, she “free-lanced there for maybe one or two more years.”  By the time she moved to St. Louis in 1998, “I had experience playing in rock bands and salsa bands, and I had taken jazz improv lessons and stuff, and so that’s how, when I started gigging here, besides doing the classical stuff then, I started playing in cover bands, and that’s when I met people from Vargas Swing and started playing with them.  So that all took me into the direction where I’m at today.  So I had no idea.”

Vargas Swing “was just getting started, and they didn’t have a trumpet player, and I had asked them, ‘I’d love to sit in with you guys if you ever need a trumpet player.’  So they let me sit in.  I ended up playing with them, and then I ended up writing for them.” 

By then Dawn had also added singing to her repertoire, yet another bit of the fortunate unexpected.   Yes, “I sang as a kid with my dad’s band, and my sister sang, but I had no idea that I was ever going to actually do it for a living.  So that was all kind of a surprise, too.”  Like her playing, Dawn’s writing and singing thrived with Vargas Swing—“huge, monster musicians,” she says, “I kept learning from.”

“We were a very successful and popular band for a while, and we went on tour.  We toured the United States for probably about a year.  And then when we came back, the scene changed, and so we all went our separate ways.  We still remain great friends, but then I continued to keep writing and going into different projects.”

One of those:   “I started writing for an electronic project called The Electro-Funk Assembly.  I also started playing with a funk band.  In Cleveland, I was playing with a salsa band, and so that’s how I learned how to play that salsa style, and so I now play with a salsa band here as well.”

Dawn’s classical roots have also thrived in St. Louis.  As she says, “I’m kind of spread out all over the place, where I am a classical player—still work professionally classical and sub with the St. Louis Symphony—I am in a funk/soul project which I am one of the writers for, I am still in the electronic band which I am one of the premiere writers for, and I am in a salsa band.  I also continue to be in a like a swing-type blues band which I also still write for.”

Versatility:  “I’m what I’d call a hybrid in that I play a lot of styles of different music and study a lot of styles of different music so I can be competent in them and know the styles so I can be called for anything.”

Yes, Dawn says, “I am kind of all over the place, and jazz is in the mix.  It’s definitely in the mix.” So much so that she enrolled at SIU-E on a full scholarship and in 2016 earned her master’s in jazz performance, the next step in  becoming what Adaron calls a student of the music. “So, I would say that I am now a serious student of jazz and that I will hopefully be able to consider myself a jazz musician—like a serious jazz musician, but right now it’s like…yes, I do play jazz, but at the level that I want to take it to, that’s what I’m working towards right now.”

The process is never-ending: “The journey of a musician is that you always continue to learn.  Most of us don’t get to a point and say, ‘Well, I’ve learned all I can learn, I feel like I’m good enough. I’m good with that.’  I mean, maybe there are some that are like that, but for a lot of us musicians, it never ends, and you keep wanting to get better and better.”

A legacy musician, Dawn gets better and better—and helps keep jazz alive--by studying, by playing (“When you get to play with different people, you’re learning and growing, too”), and now by teaching:  She has private trumpet students at several area high schools, and she runs her own trumpet studio that currently has 60 private students enrolled.  She also serves as guest clinician and director at many jazz festivals.

When she graduated from the conservatory, Dawn thought that teaching was “something I didn’t really want to do, but I love it, I love teaching students that want to learn and seeing their eyes light up when something goes well, when they figure something out that you helped them learn,” especially when it strengthens that vital connection Dawn herself lives, between “the student and the instrument.”

Playing, studying, teaching: “Who knows what that is going to transform my playing and my style into?  I don’t even know where it’s going to go.  So it’s kind of exciting because as I learn more, I have no idea what I’m potentially going to sound like and grow into.”

JazzCore1/part two

JazzCore1/part two

Welcome (back) to the music.  In the first part of JazzCore1, you met me and the blog, then Adaron Jackson, the first of five St. Louis jazz musicians who are the focus of JazzCore1. Now meet the second: Phil Dunlap.  Thank you for playing along.

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Although the influence of Lester Young…no doubt proved crucial in [Charlie] Parker’s development…the altoist clearly drew inspiration from a variety of other sources during the late 1930s and early 1940s.  Parker’s early recordings show the wide range of his musical tastes: a hotel room jam session…in February 1943 finds him quoting Ben Webster’s landmark improvisation on ‘Body and Soul’; an even more unusual addition to the Parker discography from this period captures the altoist practicing over a recording of the Benny Goodman Trio.  At other points, momentary echoes of Willie Smith and Johnny Hodges can be heard in his playing…. A few years later, the jazz press would depict Parker and the other beboppers as rebels who had rejected the swing tradition, but…[t]he stylistic leap made by Parker (and the other beboppers) would have been impossible without careful study of the earlier pioneers of jazz tradition.

    Ted Gioia, The History of Jazz (1997)

Phil Dunlap

What’s the point of doing it if you’re not going to take risks?  The things that have the greatest reward come with the most risk—performing and composing are some of those things.

If you want to learn to improvise, you immerse yourself in it—you listen—you sing along with recordings, you play along, you transcribe, and then you take what you learn from those recordings and you apply it to your own playing.  And through studying other people, you start to develop your own style.

Playing jazz with other musicians is a group conversation of sorts, so when you’re playing jazz, you have to very much be in the moment.  It’s a matter of negotiating and listening, and things don’t necessarily go the direction you planned them to go.  But the best times I’ve had are when I’ve just let go and gone with the flow of things rather than trying to control something that I can’t control. 

When jazz musicians play, you’re always trying to get to that place of pure joy. And you’re not really thinking about it, because if you’re thinking about you’re probably not actually there. It just kind of happens….

      --Phil Dunlap

Music flowed early into Phil Dunlap’s life, partly because he was born and raised in Mason City, Iowa, hometown of Meredith Willson.  He wrote The Music Man, which, Phil says,  “we grew up being inundated with and forced to watch.”

There were richer, more positive currents as well. Phil’s parents “always sang in church.  We had a small church, and music was very much a part of that, so we were always around music.”  And a belief in its power: “My parents have always been very supportive of the arts and music—I did choir all through school.  I remember in middle school, I wanted to quit choir one year.  That’s the only thing they wouldn’t really let me do.  So they’ve always supported my being in the arts, in music, and then, when I wanted to study music in college, they didn’t object either. They supported that.”

And there were also Phil’s three musical brothers, beneficiaries of the same support: His older sibling, Josiah, played classical and jazz trombone.  Spencer, the brother right under Phil, played classical trumpet, eventually earning a master’s degree in trumpet performance.  He now works for a non-profit called American Voices and takes American bands on State Department tours. The youngest, Christopher, with a bachelor’s degree in jazz saxophone,  “is now doing a lot with electronic music in Minneapolis.”

Definitely, as Phil says, “a family of musicians.”

When Phil’s gateway moment came, he was ready. His cousins were taking piano lessons as he grew up. “We went to one of their recitals, and my mom just brought it up and said, ‘Is this something you might want to do?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’”  Hearing, improvising already.

Like Adaron (and me), Phil found his instrument before he found his music.  He and the piano connected.   “I started taking lessons.  It turned out I was good at it.” Like Adaron, he began classically, started piano lessons “somewhere between my 2^nd grade and 3^rd grade” on a piano at home.   (“I played trumpet for a very short time—probably in 5^th grade—but when faced with the thought of having to practice both instruments, I picked the one I was better at, which was piano.”)  The environment comped, and Phil was receptive, ready to play along.

He played classical piano all through grade school and beyond—and played it well. “I mean, you name it, I played it:  Beethoven, ‘Moonlight Sonata’; first and third movements in Mozart sonatas; and Chopin etudes, Bach partitas and inventions.”

When did jazz show up? One of his first and biggest influences: Three-years-older brother Josiah “played trombone in the jazz band and the symphonic band in high school, and we used to go to his concerts.  The jazz band concert was always my favorite.”  Phil was receptive, nothing forced about it:  Jazz “was there,” he recalls, and—like the piano—“it was something that for one reason or another just attracted me.” 

Wanting more, he found “a local music group called Raiders of the Lost Art, which was like a trad jazz ensemble, and I always loved going and hearing that group.  And then we had a couple of jazz CDs lying around the house.  One was Harry Connick, Jr.—it was solo piano—and the other was a Cole Porter compilation, and there were many different musicians on that.”

The legacy of jazz was there, and Phil was ready. Hearing—attracted to--the music of your environment, you go with the flow and begin soloing.  That music was jazz: Yes, he began by  “taking classical piano lessons,” but he remembers “not connecting with it and wanting to explore jazz.”

For Phil, this meant entering a process that engages him still: growing into skill and knowledge by actively shaping his life around jazz. So, when he was a junior in high school, he “auditioned for the jazz band and got a chance to play.  I didn’t really know what I was doing at all. I took some jazz lessons, so I had a good base of knowledge, starting to really get into it.”

Phil’s high school jazz-band director helped pass on the legacy, too, becoming another fortunate connection between Phil and the jazz world. He “turned me on to a lot of early stuff, and then he was always supporting that pursuit and encouraging people to check out concerts.”

When a jazz concert would come through town, Phil and a few friends showed up. “If there was something in the Twin Cities, two hours away, we would drive up, or at the University of Northern Iowa at Cedar Falls, we would drive down there.  So he very much supported that.”

Phil jazzed on, embracing the never-ending process of mastery: “In high school we had this listening room, and it had a piano, and there were all these great, old records, and one of my favorites was the Count Basie recording of ‘Have a Nice Day.’  It’s probably from the ‘70s, maybe, but with Sammy Nestico charts and arrangements, and if you put that CD on, I could probably sing along with the whole thing—backgrounds, solos, everything, I just listened to it so much.”

Encouraged listening was key: “My band director said if you’re going to play this music, you have to listen to it. He always had this saying, ‘You are what you eat, and you can play what you listen to.’ It made sense to me, and so every opportunity I had, I listened, and I would try to transcribe things and just be around the music.”

That desire to “just be around the music” and to grow in knowledge of it remains as strong as ever in Phil’s life.  So does the vital momentum that Phil was discovering in himself: “I have a desire to learn, and I’m just curious about things—how things work, and I’ve always had that, and I don’t think you can be a jazz musician without having a desire to constantly learn and find out about new things.  Because it goes beyond just learning about new things—it’s about how you take those things that you learn and you use them…for your advancement.”

Phil was fortunate in the strength of his curiosity because the challenges to advancing in jazz were real in late-1990s Mason City—population 28,000 and, Phil recalls,  “not really very close to a major metropolitan area where I could go hear jazz.” 

Phil remembers that as “a junior in high school--maybe 17--I started really trying to find as many recordings as I could.”  But what made ”exploring the music and trying to find it especially challenging,” he says, was that “the technology then…differed so from today’s.” 

The Internet was “just coming along, so it wasn’t like you could just go on YouTube or Google and search.  Somebody had to tell you about something, and then you had to go find out and research it yourself.  That might mean going to the library, which we lived a half-block from--and I spent a lot of time checking out CDs and looking at books about musicians—or to the local CD stores, where you’d go and look through a huge, thousand-page book of titles and have them order CDs.” 

Phil’s passion and prowess came together in the summer of 1998, between his junior and senior years, when he spent eight weeks at Interlochen, the arts school in northwest Michigan.   He had “auditioned as a classical pianist and got accepted,” but now, he recalls,  “the thought of spending my summer playing classical music just didn’t interest me, so I switched all of my classes to jazz classes, and that’s where I really got into it.” Improvising again, moving into what classical-to-jazz Adaron might call “the switch.”

Playing and listening to jazz—the pianist and the student--were now inseparable, and Phil was an ingenious jazz scout: He “befriended the guy who was in charge of the boys camp at Interlochen. I would find jazz CDs online at Borders, and I would call the Borders in town and order those CDs, and then I would give him the money, and he would go pick them up for me when he went into town, because we couldn’t leave camp. So he was like my connection to the outside world.”

Thanks to Phil’s many fortunate connections, the legacy of jazz had been passed on, both the music and the passion for playing and growing with it, for “advancement.” Phil took the legacy in and began to make it his own—to improvise with it--by speaking the language of jazz himself and showing the initiative as a musician that he’s displayed ever since. 

In Mason City, “there weren’t a lot of playing opportunities, so I had to create my own opportunities.  I put a band together—some high school friends—and we started playing at this restaurant every Friday, when I was a junior and senior in high school. And where I had a lot of my experience playing was in those settings.”

Art Blakey meets Mason City:  “We called ourselves ‘The New Jazz Messengers,’ a presumptuous name for a high school group.  But we played Real Book tunes.  We would have practices, and we would open the Real Books up, and I called all the classics.” Did he consider himself a jazz musician by high school?  “I probably did, whether or not I deserved that title.” 

Phil had entered the process of growth that’s akin to improvising a chorus, taking what’s there and building on it, making it new, extending it, going deeper.  He says this depth is what distinguishes practicing jazz musicians:  “their level of connectivity to the music--their level of depth, of how deep they go into something, pursue it beyond”—what Adaron meant by being “a student of the music” and never arriving, always evolving, self-renewing.

So, with his parents’ support, Phil moved to St. Louis in 2000 and enrolled in SIU-Edwardsville’s jazz program, eventually earning bachelor’s degrees in jazz performance and in music theory and composition and then a master’s in jazz performance. 

“I’ve always been blessed to be surrounded by good teachers,” Phil recalls.  At SIUE, he met and learned from a legacy jazz player who “was probably the biggest and most influential teacher” he has had: Reggie Thomas, a pianist as well as a “brilliant teacher” who had a “ huge impact on my development as a musician” (as he did on Adaron’s). 

Phil began moving ever closer to becoming the kind of legacy musician Reggie exemplified, embodying jazz by listening to it and playing it, passing the music on by teaching it and advocating for it.  That rich process flourishes in Phil’s life today.

Phil had begun offering private lessons as far back as high school (“I gave lessons one summer to a kid in town.  And then in college I started teaching lessons at a couple of music stores in the area.”)  He continues that, but he also began teaching courses at UMSL, Webster, and SIUE that have ranged from jazz history to, more recently, the business aspects of the arts world. 

Like his younger brother, Phil has gone international.  He serves on the board of a nonprofit organization called Jazz Education Abroad that offers weeklong jazz camps in Thailand, Taiwan, China, Lebanon, Cyprus, and soon in Malaysia.  For three years, Phil has taught at the organization’s Thailand Jazz Workshop at Rangsit University outside Bangkok. Upwards of 350 students attend, both high schoolers and adults.  

Phil’s work at Jazz St. Louis has enabled him to create new ways of teaching as well.  When he became Director of Education for Jazz St. Louis in 2007, he had the opportunity to mentor high school jazz players through the JazzU program, just as he himself had been mentored in Mason City not so many years before. Rich continuity, past into present:  the flow of jazz proceeds.  

Seven years later, Phil’s roles and responsibilities at Jazz St. Louis expanded when he became Director of Education and Community Engagement. The size of his department increased, and so did his creative options as musician and educator. 

Phil’s life-long ”curiosity and hunger for knowledge,” coupled with his dedication to teaching, took a new direction in 2016 when he created the community-focused Whitaker Jazz Speaks Series. Each free-admission event in the series “combines humanities and performance,” exploring a cultural topic through the multiple perspectives of lecture, discussion, and live jazz.  Topics have included “Jazz, Race, and Politics, “Duke Ellington and Film,” and “Harlem’s Renaissance.” 

He has also reached out with jazz to the community as organizer of the Jazz St. Louis Book Club and as music director of the St. Louis production of Bud, not Buddy, with a score by Terence Blanchard.

And, of course, Phil continues to play piano, but here, too, his life as what he calls a “gigging musician” evolves.   He no longer needs or chooses (”a conscious decision on my part,” as he puts it) to play what he once described as  “the music that I play most often and the types of gigs I do most often: the wedding gigs, the wedding receptions, background music type of work.” 

His work has a clearer jazz focus now, ranging from playing with visiting musicians at the Bistro and with the Jazz St. Louis Big Band (including their yearly performance of Duke Ellington’s “Nutcracker Suite”) to a Friday-and- Saturday-night jazz gig with bassist Jim Widner at The Cheshire’s Fox and Hounds Tavern. 

Like other legacy musicians, Phil has found his own way to support himself while keeping jazz at the center of his life.  What do you call the jazz-centric, jazz-rich life Phil is creating for himself? 

Here’s the answer he improvised: “My major area of interest is jazz.  That’s what I studied in college, that’s what I’ve been playing since high school.  I work in an organization that promotes jazz music, promotes jazz education.  I don’t know what you would call it,” he says of himself and his immersion in the music: maybe “a ‘jazz lifer,’ because every aspect of my life surrounds jazz in some way.” 

Yes, a “jazz lifer,” but integrated around jazz though it is, Phil’s life is not (and never has been) static and complete.  It flows. Like the music he lives and loves, “I’m very much process-oriented,” which includes, of course, the kind of creating anew in the moment that is at the heart of jazz improvising. 

So, Phil says of his playing, “I’m still very much in development of my style.  I’ve kind of plateaued for a moment probably because the demands of my job don’t leave a ton of time for practicing, which is something I’d like to remedy.” After all,  “ideally as artists we never get to a point of mastery.  We’re always moving forward and always exploring, so then styles are always developing.”

That immersion in process also means, as Phil implies, continuing to work on the right blend of playing, teaching, working, and home life—honing his style as player and educator and his work as a legacy musician that leaves time for both practice and a personal life. “I’ve definitely decided playing full time is not what I’m built for, not what I want to do,” Phil says, but finding the time to grow musically remains important to him.   

Phil admires Wynton Marsalis for the “way that he’s able to balance performing at an extremely high level while helping to run and set policy and shape the world’s leading jazz non-profit organization.” Phil’s hope, as he grows as both performer and arts administrator/educator: That “I can have room for both, because I love both.” 

Remember The Music Man, that early wavelet in the flow of Phil’s dynamic musical life?  Phil does.  “I always thought it would be cool to do a quintet version of The Music Man—maybe nothing with lyrics but something that was a new take or a re-look--a re-visiting of the music from The Music Man.  That’s always been on my mind to do, so I’d like to do that.”  Take what’s there, make it new.