JazzCore2/part two

JazzCore2/part two

Dave Venn played a chorus in JazzCore2/part one.  Now listen to him solo as the first St. Louis jazz musician profiled in JazzCore2.  Make yourself heard, too: Comments welcomed. 

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Before formal jazz education existed, jazz flourished as an aural tradition. While some things were written down…, the vast majority of what people learned and played was done by ear. You'd listen to a recording or live performance and you'd try to play what you heard on your instrument, with only your ears to guide you. This method of learning jazz ensured that all jazz musicians developed the ability to play by ear.

Today, if we want to learn jazz (or music in general), we learn mostly from written instruction. We have hundreds of books to teach us scales, chords, chord progressions, patterns, and jazz theory. Everything is structured and organized in straightforward pieces. And, of course, it's all written down.

While it's great that we now have so much information at our fingertips, the shift from aural to written instruction has unfortunately led many students to have poorly developed aural skills. These students sound good when reading music, but if you take the music away they're lost….

   

     --www.iwasdoingallright.com (2005)

Dave Venn

From high school, I would take the bus home to my house, and when the bus got to Kingshighway--just before it made a left onto Delor Avenue, headed toward my parents' home--there was a bar on Kingshighway.  I forget what the name of it was, but it had a sign on it--‘So-and-so playing piano here’--and I thought that was show biz at its peak!  How about that?  Playing piano in a bar! 

I love getting into a good, swinging tune.  Especially with the right bass player.  When it's popping and really at its best, there's no better feeling.  It's thrilling.  It's exhilarating.

Never underestimate your audience.  They're not dummies.

I just wanted to play tunes.

     --Dave Venn

At the heart of jazz improvisation are learning and self-renewal, therefore optimism: the ready opportunity to make your solo new now, to change and grow musically no matter what has come before.  

Given what came before in Dave Venn’s musical life, you might not have expected him to grow into the lyrically hip, widely popular pianist he has become.   Yet the forward-moving, profoundly aural spirit of jazz improvisation has in fact animated Dave’s musical life from the outset, helping him create the unique player he is today and make a musical life for himself.

Dave was a South City boy, born at the old St. Anthony’s Hospital at Grand and Chippewa and raised in what he describes as a “stable, blue-collar” home on Dewey Avenue between Bates and Delor.   His father was a lithographer, his mother a homemaker.

Dave began piano lessons at age 7. It was not a happy experience.  Yes, he wanted to take lessons, his parents wanted him to take lessons, and they had a piano all ready for him at home.  So, Dave says, “it was kind of predetermined that I was going to take lessons.”

That “was fine with me—until I met up with this damned nun!” She was his teacher at the convent where his Catholic parents sent him for lessons, and that, Dave says, “was a horrible experience.”   

First of all, the lessons focused on “scales and exercises, which I hated.”  Worse, his teacher was a “sadistic person” who would “rap me on my knuckles with a drumstick.”  At first, Dave says, “my parents didn't believe the nun was as cruel as she was.  They were Catholic, so how could a nun be cruel?”  Finally they were persuaded:  “I got to the point,” Dave recalls, still vividly, “where on Saturday morning before my lesson, I would throw up.”

The lessons ended, but so powerfully negative an experience had important consequences for Dave, both personal and musical. 

 

Dave observed his parent’s Catholicism during his childhood, “but shortly after that, I blew it off,” and he hasn’t been a practicing Catholic “for as long as I can remember.” 

He also came away from his lessons with an aversion to learning that relies on formal study, reading music, and the practicing of scales, arpeggios and the like.  “The truth is,” Dave says, “I never practiced.”   Today, if he spends time alone working on his music, it’s “only to learn a new tune or something like that. But scales -- arpeggios -- none of that.  I didn't have the discipline for it when I was a kid.  I just hated it.  I just wanted to play tunes.”

Much more remarkable and positive, as improvised jazz solos can be richly surprising, Dave did not blow off the piano and playing music as a result of his hated lessons. Piano—playing it, growing with it, creating his own solo—had not been knuckled out of him. 

What saved him for music and for us?

For one, he listened to the legacy--to the music that moved him—and he eventually discovered that if he didn’t have the scale-bound discipline, he had the ear to learn and play the music he heard and cared about, an urge that turned out to be far stronger than knuckle-rapping.

The listening began early.  “When I was a little kid, my parents had a phonograph player, and they had a rack they had their 78 records in.  I was not as tall as the rack, but I could reach up and pull the records out, and I knew which record was which.  I would put it on and listen to it.  I suppose that's when it all started.”

These were popular jazz sides—“perhaps some big band stuff--maybe Glenn Miller or Tommy Dorsey.  Something like that.  I guess that's really when it first caught my ear…. I think that's probably why I started lessons, after hearing that music.”  The connection had begun, the legacy passed on.

Those first lessons ended badly, but the connection survived, empowering Dave:  He stayed with the piano, with listening, and with his self-teaching—“just kind of fooled around,” as he puts it. Eventually Dave’s listening and doodling expressed themselves in his discovering what he wanted to play:  “Not scales and exercises in classical music.  Popular music.  Playing that was my ambition.”

So Dave took the risk and started again, this time the way he wanted, the way that helped launch him as an auditory musician who had what he calls “a very quick ear”: “I wanted to learn something about playing popular music.  In 7th or 8th grade, I took some piano lessons from a guy who liked to play popular music….  That's what I wanted to learn.”

Here was Dave’s new beginning: “I would go to lessons, and he'd have sheet music to popular tunes of the day, and he'd play them.  I could see what he was doing and hear what he was doing, and I'd be able to do it myself.  He showed me, and I listened to him, and I watched his fingers.  From then on, that was the end of the piano lessons.  I learned the rest myself.  So from there I was self-taught.” 

Then came high school, a critical time in Dave’s growth as player and in his connection to jazz.  First—again a surprise—Dave began playing saxophone and then clarinet when he entered high school.  Why? Favored by necessity: “I wanted to be in the band.”  In fact, “there was a concert band, a marching band, and a dance band,” Dave recalls, and “I played in all three.” 

Maybe because the knuckle-rapping wasn’t there, “When I was playing clarinet and saxophone, I was practicing the scales.  Reading out of the books.”  But, Dave says, “playing jazz saxophone came easily” mainly because of that “good harmonic ear” he’d already discovered as a pianist, the ability to pick up the “melody and harmonic structure” of tunes by listening with his “quick ear.”

Dave’s easy growth soon paid off, literally, and created a vital bridge to his later career as a performer.  “I started playing gigs around town.  There were a couple of teen towns that had bands, and I was playing saxophone in a couple of those bands.”  The music may have been “typical dance-band music,” but the playing-out itself was key for Dave—inspiring, exciting, a life commitment:  “That was it for me.  I knew that’s what I wanted to do.”

Dave’s experimenting and improvising were far from over.  Soon out of high school, he enrolled at the now-shuttered St. Louis Institute of Music, which was located at the corner of Bonhomme and Bemiston in the heart of Clayton.  “A lot of my friends went there, so I went there,” Dave recalls. This was a time of testing other career possibilities, and one possibility was teaching that included classical music, so Dave did “the thing that most of us did when we got to the Institute:  the teaching degree.” Four years later, in 1962, Dave graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music education. 

Dave played mainly clarinet there, and his focus was on classical music.  Jazz and performance were not part of the program, and, he says, none of his teachers helped him in his growth as a jazz player. “I know now, looking back on it, that I wanted to perform,” so for his jazz education, Dave turned again from formal study to playing with others, starting in the early 1960s, as he was finishing his Institute degree.

In 1961, he spent a year playing tenor with small jazz ensemble Jazz Central.  The school of playing came with a key bonus:  the musicians he worked with, teachers of the right kind at the right time.  Older Jazz Central players such as Lee Hyde, Fred Del Gaudio, Herb Drury, and Harry Stone  “were very, very helpful to me--encouraging to me…. They were all very supportive.  They knew I could play, “ Dave says, “and I did.  They enjoyed what they heard, and I enjoyed working with them.  It was good.”

Dave’s reed work and his performance education continued for some years after Jazz Central and after his graduation.  He “started working with other bands around town,” including Russ David and Jack Engler.  Then, from 1965 till 1974, he did “the only musical travelling I did of any consequence” when he joined “a society band out of Palm Beach, Florida,” and “played alto saxophone and clarinet on a whole bunch of gigs,” usually in southern locales such as Birmingham, Dallas, Fort Worth, Nashville, and Memphis.  These were mostly what Dave describes as “big society gigs,” often at country clubs—a world Dave would also get to know well (and vice versa) as a piano player.

Then in 1977, in another key moment of reflection and renewal,  “I decided to forget the saxophone.”  Playing piano had come to seem “even more satisfying” than playing saxophone and clarinet, mainly because of that fertile keyboard, a rich field of play, “an orchestra right in front of you.  You've got everything, the full range.”  Plus—no surprise here—the reed instruments were closer to formal study, the piano to Dave’s brilliant ear.

Dave’s musical life grew powerfully consistent: piano-focused all the way.  “As long as I can remember,” Dave says,  “I've always listened to the great jazz players,” but it was the pianists who especially attracted him, starting with his listening as a teenager and “an aspiring pianist.” 

He listened to Art Tatum, and “I was blown away by him.  Then, of course, Oscar Peterson was just great.”  A few years later, he found Bill Evans, whom he describes as “a big, huge, huge influence—forever.”  Indeed, Dave sees him as “the most influential jazz pianist of the ‘60s and ‘70s.”  Dave listened as well to such “favorite New York pianists” as Wynton Kelly and Hank Jones.  “But the two piano players who are really closest to my heart,” he says, “are Victor Feldman and Lou Levy.”

Dave considers Lou Levy “probably the best accompanist I've ever heard.  For 18 years, he worked with either Ella Fitzgerald or Peggy Lee.” Dave became an agile accompanist himself partly because of his listening—to players such as Lou Levy and then to the performers Dave worked with. “I enjoyed accompanying singers as I was playing, growing up.  There's a special knack to that.  You have to support yet not get in the way.  You listen to what they're doing, and then you do what you have to do to support it.  Enhance it.”

He also gleaned specific skills and techniques from his listening.  He remembers “a perfect example” from a record that featured Lou Levy playing piano behind Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan.  “They played ‘This Can't Be Love’ in A-flat.  At the top of the tune, I heard Lou Levy play an A-flat chord--but he voiced it in fourths.  When I heard that, it was like a spark went off in my head.  I had never heard it voiced that way. To this day, every time I play something either in that key or any other key, I just love the voicings in fourths.  Chord-forming:  I was able to pick up what I heard.”

More generally, these two players--like another of his models, Dave McKenna--took Dave to a deep sense of his instrument’s (and his own) potential, what he describes as “just the way they play—the extraordinarily good sound they get out of the piano.”  Whatever music you’re playing or for whom, create that “good sound,” a blend of “the melody and the harmonic structure” and “a nice sense of swing.”

Here was Dave learning by listening—“strictly by listening and playing what I heard, just teaching myself.” Yes, he says, “I've looked at sheet music, and I've bought fake books and music through the years to learn tunes.  But so much of it has been by ear.”

Dave had given up reeds partly because he was finding “there was a whole lot more work playing piano.”  That’s the work he now pursued, building a long, busy career striking both for its range--from listening music to party music, jazz clubs to country clubs—and for its stylistic consistency: playing mainly from the American songbook, always making it sound good and swing.

When Dave started gigging on piano in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, he says, “a lot of work was going on for piano players.  Throughout the '60s, there were lounges and hotels and clubs…. Everyone had a piano.  There would be at least a piano player in those places five or six nights a week.  Sometimes a trio or quartet.” 

During those years and well into the ‘70s, Dave says, “I was working six nights a week, year-in, year-out,” including choice gigs accompanying Gaslight Square vocalists Jeanne Trevor and Clea Bradford.  (For a brief time, “back in the ‘70s”, Dave did some singing himself when he accompanied vocalist Carol Hartman.)

The pace was arduous: “In the '70s,” Dave recalls, “most days I was playing two jobs a day.  The reason for that was because in those years, a lot of restaurants and bars and hotels had music at happy hour…. Then they had music later--like 9 to 12 or 9 to 1.  So I would do a double-shift.  At least five nights a week.  I'd go from one hotel to the other.”

Some of the highlights from Dave’s busiest years at “a whole lot of different places”: playing in a quartet that opened St. Louis’ Playboy Club in 1962, playing cocktail-hour solo piano at popular St. Louis night spots such as Al Baker’s on DeBaliviere and the Colony Hotel in Clayton, playing trio three nights a week at Stouffer’s now-closed Top of the Riverfront club, and soloing for 22 years at the Ritz-Carlton, where “I was doing either lunches or cocktail hour or brunch on Sundays.  That was a busy spot for me.”

How many gigs then were just jazz? “In those years, not much.” For Dave, versatile and flexible as he was, the playing was what mattered--making it sound good and swing wherever and for whomever he played.

More recent gigs have included a typical mix of audiences, occasions, and venues.  Dave played at the Racquet Club in Ladue “for many years,” where, he says, “I played jazz, but I also played all of their favorite tunes and requests.”  Here he was aided by another inborn talent that has been a great partner to his quick ear:  “I happen to have a very good memory--especially for people’s favorite tunes.”

“Over the years,” Dave says,  “when you see people at parties and then some--many--of those people hire you, you get to know what they like.  That sticks like glue in my memory, whenever I see them here and there and I'm playing.  When they walk into a room and they hear me playing their favorite tune, they love it!”

Dave also likes to expand his listeners’ musical horizons.  “Over the years…I've introduced them to tunes that they wouldn't ordinarily know about,” including compositions by Johnny Mandel, the NEA Jazz Master awardee.  Dave came to consider him one of our greatest composers, and he began adding Mandel tunes to his famously-huge repertoire and to the lives of his listeners, including those who more recently came to hear him play Sundays at Pomme Café and Wine Bar in Clayton or Thursdays at Friendship Village retirement community in Chesterfield.

Dave’s genius for adapting—the essence of improvisation—has made him a musician who can listen to his audience in yet another way: “When you're playing in a very, very quiet reception or gathering and people are talking, you don't want to interfere with their talking.  You don't want to drown them out.  Or if you're in a dinner situation and you see somebody lean over to the person next to him, trying to hear what they're saying, you know you're playing too loud…. You adapt to whatever situation.”

Today, Dave says, the frequency of work is “not anywhere near the '60s and '70s”: “Gigs just aren’t what they were.”  Among them, however, have been several popular gigs at Jazz at the Bistro, including a duo with the late St. Louis saxophonist Willie Akins and two quartet performances with Dave’s long-time vocalist, Jeanne Trevor.  Dave would happily play more than he does.  He describes his current work situation as “part-time in the music business”—as few as 1 or 2 jobs weekly, as many as 4 or 5.

You can sample Dave online, including selections from One, Two, Three, his 1997 MAXJAZZ release (one of two albums he has made).

“I'm not one for change,” Dave says modestly.  “Yet within what I do, I try to be fresh…. I want the people I'm playing for to know that I'm there to do something besides sit and press keys down.”  Powerfully aural learner that he is, that means Dave hears his music as his listeners do and plays tunes a little differently each time to keep them interesting--“perhaps doing them at a different tempo, perhaps doing them in a different style.  Something that we always do as a bossa nova, maybe doing it now as a swing tune…. To change it around a little bit, here and there.”  And, of course, the improvisation Dave does in his playing is essential to renewal:  “That's what really keeps it alive.”

“I am there,” Dave says of himself and his listeners, “to please whomever I'm playing for, so they come away saying, ‘We really liked what we heard.  Thank you.’  I don't have to try to hide anything.  I can just go in and be myself--play the way I want to play” and “play the tunes they want to hear.”