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.”