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.