JazzCore2/part one

"Music should not have any mandates. Jazz is not supposed to be something that is required to sound like jazz." (Wayne Shorter)

"Players are coming from other backgrounds: rock, folk, ethnic music. It's changing jazz for the better." (Billy Taylor)

"There's so many ways you can hit one note." (Stanley Turrentine)

JazzCore2/part one

Break’s over, JazzCore returns!

Welcome to JazzCore2/part one—a jam session, a medley of choruses:  Eleven St. Louis musicians who play jazz answer the question, “Do you consider yourself a jazz musician?” 

A question for you: As you read, what do you notice?  The comment jar awaits.

“Do you consider yourself a jazz musician?”

I do.  I do.  Although I’ve had to play other kinds of music to survive because obviously the majority doesn’t listen to jazz these days.  Jazz has been my primary focus over a lot of years, and I think that to be a jazz musician you have to be focused on creating your own language—your own personal language—and always working on that, whether or not it’s applicable to the gig you’re doing at the time.  Expanding it, expanding the things you can hear…. It’s like you’re constantly listening to other players and trying to pick out things that you can use…. I also think you have to be involved in improvising to be a jazz musician—although improvising isn’t the exclusive territory of jazz….

   Eric Slaughter, guitar

Yes.  Although I don't consider myself to be exclusively a jazz musician…. Improvisation is a big part of what makes jazz a unique form of music…. I don't really know that you're playing jazz unless you're improvising to some extent.

You can certainly play a tune and play it well, and it can swing and you can have good phrasing…. I guess I consider myself a jazz player because I incorporate those elements into the music when I perform--specifically when I perform jazz repertoire. 

   Tom Byrne, guitar

Oh, yes, I do. 

When I first started getting interested in music, it was boogie-woogie that caught my fancy--I guess you can call it an early form of jazz—and I just took the whole thing and ran with it.  I loved it! 

I was a dropout as a little beginner student until that came along.  So I went that route, and I have followed it as I grew up--people like Nat Cole, George Shearing, and then later on, Errol Garner, Oscar Peterson, Bill Evans—you name it—and those are all extremely well-known and excellent jazz pianists.  So I would call myself a jazz pianist because I followed their art.

My playing makes me a jazz musician. 

   Herb Drury, piano

Yes.  My playing swings, for one thing.  I do not profess to know every jazz tune that was ever written.  Basically, most of my repertoire is the American songbook, along with a number of jazz tunes. Being able to improvise is also an essential part of it.  It’s what you play and how you play it?  That's exactly right. Playing jazz and swinging at home, without an audience, you can still be a jazz musician.

   Dave Venn, piano

Yes.  I’ve been trained as one, and I practice jazz when I can.  There’s not as much opportunity to do it here in St. Louis on a daily basis, and I perform a lot of different kinds of music, but jazz is one of them. 

When I say ‘practice,’ I mean I perform it.  I think that I could call myself a jazz musician maybe in the same way I call myself a blues musician or a pop musician.  I don’t necessarily feel that that is my only label…. It’s one of a number of different kinds of styles that I play…. The jazz musician part of it feels as much like a lifestyle as it does an art form, so there’s a certain spontaneity to it, and also for me there’s a part of my life that I bring to it.  So my experiences in life I bring to the art form.  I’m not sure that I could say that about a lot of other art forms…. It ties into the improvisational nature of the music…. Maybe over 30 years I’ve been practicing this art form.

   Tim Garcia, piano

I never say to people, ‘I'm a jazz musician.’  Other people call me that.  I say that I'm a musician or a bassist.

Yes, jazz is very prominent in my life.  I especially like any kind of improvised music.  But…I've always enjoyed just about any kind of music--listening and playing.  So not calling myself a jazz musician reflects that I enjoy playing many kinds of music.  I'm often disappointed when I find out that people in other areas of music who are looking for a bassist didn't think to call me because they think I only do jazz….

Being able to improvise is an essential element of jazz and being a jazz musician.  I don't think that playing out or not makes the difference.  But I do think that improvising does.

   Willem von Hombracht, bass

Absolutely.  Yes.  I have for over 20 years just because of how deeply I enjoy the music and the act of improvisation and the community of it as well—interacting with different people--and the opportunity to play music that’s not repetitive all day long—which I’ve also done, and I imagine most jazz musicians have also done.  You know, you play rock, and you’ve got to stick to that bass line, stick to that drum beat….

Is someone just playing Real Book tunes at home without improvising a jazz musician?  Simply playing the melody?  No, I would liken that to me being at home practicing Chopin on the piano.  I’m not a classical musician…. But it is about the community, getting out and interacting with other musicians.  That’s how it’s learned—not through the school…. So playing standards from a book—no, I wouldn’t consider that jazz.  That would be the idiom—like the standards are obviously the vehicle for jazz—but improvisation, yes, is key—absolutely. 

   Bob DeBoo, bass

I do.   I mean, I think both musically first and foremost because even as a kid in orchestra in grade school, high school, I wanted to improvise and make my own stuff up.  And then, as I studied through college, grad school and everything,…the focus is the improvisation. That’s who I consider jazz musicians—people that are trying to make music in the spirit of the moment. I also feel like the lifestyle—even though it varies from person to person…I feel like I fit into that as well….

I know classical musicians and other musicians throughout time improvised, so it might not just be that.  It might be that within a certain context—like a certain style, like the history of the music.  So there has to be some connection to what came [before]…. It has to be based on if you’ve listened to the music and understand some things about it. 

So I’m not sure if someone just messing around on their guitar infinitely at home is considered a jazz musician per se…. I mean, maybe if you’ve never played out or played with other people, you might be missing some aspect of it.  I do think some phenomenal players play at home, and…they’re probably playing some really amazing music, and I would consider them still to be a jazz musician. 

   Ben Wheeler, bass

Yes.  For my entire adult life, I have specifically worked to develop skills within the jazz tradition…, and that remains my primary focus—as an instrumentalist and as a composer.  And then for the last 30+ years as a teacher.  That’s not to say I don’t have experiences outside the realm of jazz as performer or as teacher.  But the vast majority of time I put into the task of preparing to be a performer…and a teacher is spent within the discipline of jazz or within the style of jazz and the disciplines attendant to that. 

Over the last 40 years, the playing [I’ve] done has been primarily playing jazz…. My early professional experience—and this is the late ‘60s—was playing in saxophone sections in big bands, and a lot of them were these so-called ghost bands in various places in the Midwest, bandleaders that had reputations that had been established in the swing era or slightly later, who had books but no standing personnel, and you’d end up just on a free-lance basis through a contractor…. Some of that was jazz, some of it was more peripherally related. I suppose for most of the time, it was dance music.

And then I’ve done an enormous amount of show music and pops concerts…with the symphony, where jazz phrasing is central to making the music work…. If you’re phrasing correctly, then you’re playing like a jazz player regardless of whether anyone else is or isn’t doing it. 

Then there’s the whole notion of improvisation.  And, of course, improvisation is not strictly the domain of jazz, but the improvisation I’ve done has by and large been with jazz musicians involving a context that involves swing and using more traditional jazz forms.  The whole definition of what is jazz is…we could go on forever about that…and about what a jazz musician is.

   Paul DeMarinis, saxophone

No.  I study the music, I love the music. I think maybe there are a few people who consider themselves purely jazz musicians.  I love everything about the music, and it embodies how I approach playing, but in terms of whether I make a living off of the music, no.  I find other outlets that aren’t considered necessarily jazz…. I have enough reading ability to play with various jazz bands…but I’m definitely not hustling and trying to stay true… and only do jazz gigs.

I don’t know if there’s a way to strictly define ‘being a jazz musician.’   I guess I could consider myself a jazz musician in the sense that that’s the kind of music I listen to—the majority of it—and it’s the music I study to improve my musicianship, but then I go out and apply all of that knowledge to a gig that’s totally unrelated to jazz.  So I think that would probably be one way of being a jazz musician, where actually the majority of your livelihood is created and generated from that music.

   Ben Reece, saxophone

That’s an interesting question.  Yes, I do, but there’s still so much to learn about the idiom itself, there’s just so much to it.  And I think people take it very lightly in terms of what jazz is—and it’s been categorized in various ways—but there are so many different facets of it that you continue to learn about what works with what and how you can turn other kinds of music into jazz.  So I say, ‘Yes.’

I’d say I’ve been a jazz musician over 25 years.  I also consider myself an artist.

   Don Cook, saxophone

JazzCore1/part five

JazzCore1/part five

And now, Jim Jeter, the fifth of the five St. Louis jazz musicians playing in JazzCore1. Your comments invited at the end of his solo.

*   *   *   *  *   *

At Benny Carter’s birth, his father was a janitor but soon became a night-watchman, longshoreman, and then a postal clerk.  He played some guitar and led the musical family in singing at home, mainly church songs.... He encouraged his son's musical interests, taking pride in his growing professional success.  

Their mother mainly developed the children’s musical inclinations, at first.… She played piano and saw to it that there was always one at home on which she could teach the children the rudiments of music.  She gave her son Bennett piano lessons when he was about ten years old, then sent him to a teacher in the neighborhood along with his sisters….

Though she encouraged her son’s musical interest, Mrs. Carter was apprehensive about it.  She did not want him to become a professional musician, fearing he might fall into jazz.  ‘After all,’ Carter recalls, ‘jazz was a dirty word to many black people, who saw it played in an unwholesome atmosphere. Yet she wanted me to learn music as well as I could since that’s what I wanted.  She would have been most pleased if I could have combined music with a respectable career, say, as a clergyman.’

Morroe Berger, Edward Berger, and James Patrick, Benny Carter:  A Life in 
    American Music/Volume I (2^nd ed., 2002).

Jim Jeter

You improvise within a framework, but it’s like a mosaic: You don’t really know what shape…the exact shape…of what every little piece is going to be in it.

After I play, I feel endorphins.  It’s almost like when, years ago, I used to run, you’d be tired, but then you had this sense of well-being.

I always had this bug in me about music.  There’s just something about it I like.  It’s like playing a sport in that, probably with people like you, we could sit around and talk about jazz musicians the way some people will sit around and talk about baseball players or football players.   I guess you get the music in you somehow, and the next thing you know, you’ve got 1500 albums.

     --Jim Jeter

Jazz as a bug for some of us, contracted as we grow up and hear our environment comping. The condition is chronic.

Jim’s story is an intriguing version of that process: the nuanced relationship that can evolve between the jazz legacy environment in which the player grows up and the player’s attraction to the music.

Jim was born in St. Louis, at the now-razed St. Mary’s Infirmary on Papin Street, and he grew up here.  For seven years, he attended grade school at Blessed Sacrament School on North Kingshighway near St. Louis Avenue, “just north of what was called--I still call it--Easton, now Martin Luther King Drive.”

“Probably the main reason I went there,” he says, “is because at that time, that was the only integrated school system available in St. Louis.  The public schools in St. Louis were still segregated in ’52 and ’53,” and he believes his parents “thought that it was important for me to go, that it would be of benefit to be in an integrated situation.”  (“I can remember when I first went there that most of the kids in the class were white.  And as the demographic in the neighborhood changed, by the time of eighth grade, it was predominantly black.”) He went on to attend and graduate from Soldan High School.

During these years, Jim says, “I was hearing jazz all the time.”  His mother  “was a music lover, and she always played records.” Among them, Jim recalls, were recordings she found of “obscure tenor players like Sam ‘The Man’ Taylor,” but she was also a “huge Frank Sinatra fan, so we had all the Sinatra albums, and I can remember listening to Rosemary Clooney and a lot of Ella Fitzgerald, and she liked Dinah Washington, too.”

Jazz was in the family air. Jim’s mother had cousins in Chicago.  “She used to go to Chicago to see them, and then they would go out to clubs in Chicago, and she actually knew Milt Jackson for a while because Milt Jackson dated one of her cousins at one time, and they used to play bridge.  She played bridge with Milt Jackson.”  And, Jim recalls, Sy Oliver’s first wife, Billie, was “one of my mother’s best friends.”

Then there was the powerful influence of Jim’s father, James Jeter.  During the early 1920s, he played saxophone with the popular Alphonso Trent territory band.  The band gigged both on the road and later as the house orchestra for eighteen months at Dallas’ Adolphus Hotel, where, Jim says, there was “a segregated club on the roof called The Jungle Room,” complete with very popular radio broadcasts of the music. Jim recalls a picture of the band:  “They were a very elegant band.  They wore tuxedos every night, and…their music was pretty hot, some of it was very hot-- the hot jazz of the twenties.”

James Jeter came to St. Louis as the co-founder and co-leader of the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra, one of St. Louis’ most popular jazz and dance bands during the thirties and early forties.   “They started playing at the segregated Club Plantation in ’34,” first at a location on Vandeventer, then in a building at Grand and Delmar that, as Jim says, “is still there—it’s catty-corner from Powell Hall.  The band came to St. Louis for a six-month engagement, and they ended up staying here for 10 years.”

The gig was arduous: The band played three sets a night, seven nights a week, and was broadcast regularly over St. Louis radio.  Then, after ending its long run at the Plantation in 1944, the band played off and on at St. Louis’ Club Riviera and toured cities such as Detroit, Washington D.C., and New York, playing twice at the Apollo.  In 1945 the band also went on a USO tour of the Far East that included stops in Japan, the Philippines, and Guam. In 1947, the year after Jim was born, the orchestra broke up, and the Club Plantation closed.

Jim’s father continued to play local gigs with band members—dances and such—following the USO tour. After he had dental surgery in 1955, he stopped playing altogether.  By then, he was seven years into a day job selling beer for Anheuser-Busch.

The family messages Jim heard were multiple: Love jazz, play jazz, but don’t try to live on it. “My father really wasn’t in favor of me spending a lot of time with music.  He kind of permitted it, but he didn’t encourage it.”

Jim says his father wanted to protect him from pursuing the life of the working musician. “He said he didn’t want me to do it because it was not a good life.  He had a very negative experience at the Club Plantation because, first of all, it was a very segregated club and they were very racist.”

Jim recalls finding “some artifacts online from the Club Plantation a few years ago.  They had blacks depicted in a very stereotypical, ‘stupid coon’ kind of thing, like a menu and a stand with a caricature of a black woman with chains on her knees to keep her legs together, ‘Come on, let’s party’.  It was just very demeaning.  I mean, that was not him at all.  He was a very dignified man.”

To make matters worse, Jim’s father had run-ins with the mobsters who ran the club.  Jim remembers a scary incident: His father’s band “played from the fall to the spring, but when it got real hot in St. Louis in the summer, they didn’t have air conditioning in the building, so they shut down for the summer, and then they would tour. 

“One year—and I’m not sure which year it was—they went to New York and played with the Jimmy Lunceford band, which was a pretty famous band.  You know, at the Savoy [in New York], they had two bandstands so they could have continuous music, and they were like the second band, and my father said they used to trade arrangements, but there was an opportunity for them to go on…I think Lunceford, whom my dad was friends with, had a tour set up which was the same kind of deal in the New York area on the East Coast that was going to run into the fall.”

When Jim’s father called the Plantation owner and told him, “‘We’re not going to come back, we’re going to go with the tour,’ the guy said, ‘If you do, you’ll be dead in a month’ and threatened him, so they finally came back.  I mean, apparently somebody visited them and threatened them.”

Beyond the racism and the threats, Jim remembers the instability of his father’s career as a musician.  “He never had a home until he was 52 or 53 years old.  I mean, all that time from when he was in his early twenties until then, he either lived out of hotels or a rooming house or something like that.   And when he married my mother in 1940, and they…I mean, they were renters when I was born, and I think it was ‘52 or ’53 that they finally bought a house.”

“When he got the house,“ Jim recalls, “he was into the Father Knows Best kind of thing.  I mean, he put on a suit and a tie, went to work everyday, and came home and went outside and raked leaves.” (“And then my mother worked for the City of St. Louis in the treasurer’s office downtown, so she went to work everyday.”)

So as Jim was taking in the jazz his mother loved listening to--and the idea of making a place in your life for jazz--the messages he heard about pursuing a life in music like his father’s were very different. They grew out of both “the racism and the uncertainty” of that life.  In a word, “he said he didn’t want me to do it because it was not a good life--that was his best advice out of love and what he knew—that making a living as a jazz musician is a very precarious undertaking.”

From 1947 on, as his band’s days were waning, Jim’s father held his day job at Anheuser-Busch, showing Jim a life that blended music with stability. “I probably aspired to be like my dad in a lot of ways.  And the thing that I saw him do on a daily basis growing up was be a salesman, and so I went into sales.”

Jim recalls that his father had “wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor. I didn’t spend long in school before he gave that dream up.  I think his main thing was he wanted me to go to college and get a degree, which I did, and then I went into sales right out of college—first with IBM and then a couple of other companies, and then I ended up with almost 18 years with Hewlett-Packard.  So…that’s where I retired from.”

In his own life, Jim has found a middle way with music that seemed to please his father:  Say no to the jazz life, yes to jazz in your life.  It seems clear that Jim’s father, like his mother, wanted Jim to connect to the music and receive the legacy.

One early example: Jim’s father also played clarinet, and “I remember one of my first toys:  He gave me a LeBlanc clarinet, and it had cracked because it had come from overseas.”

Then, in seventh grade, a teacher at Jim’s school wanted to start an orchestra.  “His focus was really on string music, and his daughter was a good violinist, so he started off assigning instruments to kids if they were interested in playing.” Jim was interested, and he wasn’t playing anything in 7th grade, so the teacher suggested, “Why don’t you play the bass violin?’”

When Jim came to his father with a sheet of paper on which to sign up to rent a bass and begin playing, his father said,  “Two things you don’t want to play:  You don’t want to play drums, you don’t want to play a bass because, one, they’re cumbersome to move around and then, two, you’ll break it. If you want to play an instrument, I’ve got this old baritone sax that you can play.’ So I started on the baritone sax”—on his father’s baritone, the one he’d owned since the early 1930s and had played in the Jeter-Pillars sax section years before. “It’s a connection,” as Jim says,  “the fact that I’m playing his horn”—and still playing it, still living that vital connection to a musical legacy. 

As if emblematic of the future passing of the instrument and the music it represented, Jim remembers hearing his father play his bari “when I was a small child. We moved into the house when I was seven years old, but I can remember.  They had a duplex on Fountain Place, right on the corner of Fountain and Euclid, and I can remember him sitting, working on the horn, and sitting on the side of the bed playing it.  He had a very rich tone.  I think he had a pretty wide vibrato. I just remember it was beautiful.  I just liked it.”

Jim remembers two later, very special legacy experiences with his father that amounted to passing on the horn in another form, after Jim had started playing his father’s bari—two moments when listening to jazz, loving jazz, playing jazz, and bonding in respect with his jazzy father really came together.

The Basie band was in St. Louis.  “Sometimes they would be here a couple of nights, and it was like my father would disappear for a couple of days.  He did drink a little bit, and so when I got to be a teenager, my mother would encourage me to ask him to take me.”

This particular time, “Anheuser-Busch sponsored some kind of jazz festival at Kiel Auditorium, and I went.”  With his father at his side, “I met Gerry Mulligan, and I said, ‘What kind of horn do you play?’  He says, ‘It’s a Conn.’ I said, ‘Well, I play a Conn, too.’”   Then his father “introduced me to Marshal Royal [Basie’s lead alto] and Mr. Basie.   And then they would have all these acts--I met Dizzy Gillespie—they’d have all these acts playing, and they’d have a buffet and bar set up backstage, and these great players spoke to my father as a peer.  I forget who it was--it could have been Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis or someone like that--and he says, ‘Your father was a really good sax man’ or something like that.  I appreciated that and was really proud.  So, despite his wishes, that’s kind of how the bug got set for me.”

Then Jim recalls the time he and his father “were at a wedding reception…. He belonged to this men’s club called the Royal Vagabonds, and they have a big mansion right on the corner of Boyle and Westminster.  They bought it years ago when they were almost giving those houses away, and they kept it.  We were at my cousin’s wedding reception there, and they had a little jazz ensemble with [saxophonist] O’Hare Spearman.  I knew who Mr. Spearman was because he was the band director at one of the black high schools in St. Louis.  And my father says, ‘If you get a chance’—we could hear him playing in the background—‘go over and listen to this guy.  This guy’s really good.’  And he would do little things like that, and I went and heard Mr. Spearman play, and he was very good.  He grew up across the street from ‘Cannonball’ Adderley.” 

So while Jim’s father “didn’t encourage me in terms of playing, I can’t say he wasn’t supportive, because he gave me the horn.  He didn’t prevent me from doing it, but he said he didn’t want me to do it because it was not a good life.”

Jim plays his father’s horn today, describing himself as “a jazz appreciator aspiring to learn to play jazz better.”  He keeps the legacy alive by listening to jazz, studying it, and playing it.

After he began saxophone in seventh grade, Jim “played through high school, and then in college in what they called the stage band, which was like a big band, and then I played in the concert band in college, and then I played in the marching band for a couple of years, too. Then after college, I pretty much stopped playing.” 

In the “30-plus years that I didn’t play saxophone,” Jim became (and remains) a serious jazz listener. “I amassed a moderately large record collection, and then starting I guess in 1980, I began collecting CDs, so I have like about 2,000 LPs and about 1,500 CDs.  And then it’s gone beyond that with being able to buy music online, because before, if you liked a song off of an LP, you’d buy the whole LP and maybe just listen to that one song.  And now you can go on Amazon or iTunes and pull out the one song that you…or the one recording that you were really interested in.  So I have about 10,000 MP-3 files on my computer.”

Jim’s listening is eclectic, and, he says, “it almost changes on a weekly basis.”   Recently he’s listened seriously to two bari players, one younger—Rik van den Bergh—and one older, Ronnie Cuber.  And he has a six-CD changer in his car, and, Jim says, “the first CD I never change.  It’s got Charles Lloyd, Gerry Mulligan, and then a couple of really good Miles recordings—“Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Stella by Starlight”—and I’ve listened to those thousands of times.  But then the other five slots, I move stuff in and out of those.”

Jim came back to playing his father’s horn about seven years ago as a result of a series of serendipities that actualized his long-time intention to return to playing. Truly one never knows, do one.

He’d stored his dad’s horn in its case under his and his wife’s bed, where it got in the way of cleaning the inevitable under-bed dust.  One day, Jim says, “I came home and the case was sitting in my office,” and his wife told him, “Well, I brought it out because I need to be able to dust under there.”

Dust led to dog as Jim’s Labrador retriever got involved with the bari’s old wooden and leather case: “She was attracted to the leather, and so we began to see strips of leather off the case and pieces of leather all over the house, so finally the case was coming apart, and I went on line and said, ‘Well, I’m going to buy a case for this horn.’”

That led Jim to Saxquest in South St. Louis, where owner Mark Overton told Jim his father’s bari was “a fairly rare horn,” and Jim decided to have it “put in playing condition again. ‘It’s a good horn,’ Mark declared after the work had been done, ‘and it really plays well.’”  Jim “brought it home, and I tried to play it, and I didn’t play so well, so I said, ‘I’m going to take lessons,’ and I started.” Those lessons, Jim says, were “almost like re-setting a bone, a process of breaking bad habits and then learning to do it properly.” Jim continues to take lessons today, working on his reading, his technique, and his improvising--a student of the music, as Adaron Jackson put it.

He plays his bari regularly in several local groups, including the OASIS Jazz Ensemble and a saxophone quartet.  He used to play in a big band that rehearsed on Wednesday nights, and Jim usually didn’t get home till 10:00 or 10:30. “And I’m walking in here with this horn, and I say, ‘Well, this is what my dad used to do,’ because I can remember him coming home with the horn or leaving with the horn, and those types of things, so it’s like, I mean, he’s my musical hero.  I think he’d be proud of me.”

Jim’s son, Mark, lives in L.A and plays guitar.  “He played saxophone for a while,” Jim recalls.  “I rented him a saxophone, and he took lessons for about a year, and then he went away to college, and he never kept up with it.” Still, Jim says, “he’s aware of the legacy--my father’s legacy that he was a musician.” Who knows what might happen next?

One auspicious answer:  Recently Mark became a father—and Jim a grandfather—for the first time.  “I reflected on the fact,” Jim says, “that I’m the same age now that my father was when my son was born.”  Jim looks forward to continuing and sweetening the musical lineage.    He sent his new grandson, Noah, a Mozart for Babies CD but says, “It will be a couple of years before I start playing Giant Steps for him.”

JazzCore1/part four

JazzCore1/part four

Greet Danny Campbell, the fourth of five St. Louis jazz musicians playing in JazzCore1. Your comments invited at the end of the set.

*   *   *   *  *   *

The scene was the [1965] Newport Jazz Festival.  The ’happening’ was a confluence of drummers: Elvin Jones, Louis Bellson, Art Blakey, and Buddy Rich….  Rich played the final solo in this gathering of eagles.  ‘That was the time,’ he told me. ‘That was THE time.  When those other cats were all done, I sat down behind my drums and began.  I’m telling you, I did things that day I didn’t even know I was capable of playing.  I actually astonished myself! When I was finished, I laid the sticks down on the large tom, stood up, and walked off.  I had said it all, man.  Like I had never said it before.’ Then he added, ’Or since.’

     Mel Torme, Traps/ The Drum Wonder: The Life of Buddy Rich (1991)

Danny Campbell

Being a jazz musician requires lots of study.  It’s a hard, hard music…. There’s no one method for someone to teach you how to play the music.  You have to search on your own, you have to feel your way through the music and find yourself, which is very hard. 

The best thing you can do is learn your instrument because jazz is going to require you to express yourself in many different ways.  If you want to play jazz, listen to the music and transcribe the music, because you have to be able to swing and have the pulse and feel of the music.

I see myself a kind of a keeper of the flame.  I’m not out there actually making a living, but not everybody has to….  Sometimes we need people who just know how to direct others to get to the music.  We know basic things--kind of just to keep the flame going.  We have small embers.  We don’t have a big torch or a big pyre, like some of the jazz musicians.  Some knowledge of jazz is important even though I don’t make a living at it.  It’s not about the money; it’s just about doing what you really love to do.

Being right in the zone and focused is what we want all the time.  I try to have that whenever I play.  It doesn’t always happen.  I get the critical voice that comes...but it’s not always there, and when it’s not there, it’s wonderful.  The band is playing together, your tone is together—at that point, you’re just saying to yourself, ‘Okay, what do I want to play?  I can play anything.  I’m going to take a chance.’

     ---Danny Campbell

Jazz improvisation thrives on the unpredictable--those unplanned moments in an improvised solo when you surprise yourself.  Say you’re doing “Whisper Not” for the fifth, or tenth, or hundredth time.  You know the tune and the changes, and yet, midway through improvising, you play a line or lick you’ve never played before, never planned or thought about, but there it is, new and satisfyingly just right.   

That’s the sweet side of jazz and unpredictability.  The darker side is more mundane but still important: When will I work?  What’s my next gig?

How does a jazz musician plan their life and remain creative in the face of such livelihood risk and uncertainty?  One answer: Control what you can. Be musically versatile and prepared, just as the soloing musician who is in shape seems more likely to come upon those surprising moments of creativity.  Do the learning so you’re ready for the earning when—if--it comes.  Take the chance, but do it with competence.

Trumpeter Danny Campbell has done that.  He has also known the challenges and the limits of doing that when work as a jazz musician seriously lags, and he has to navigate the tension between his art and everyday uncertainty. 

Three men who made music a key part of their lives have inspired Danny to learn.  His father was the first and most powerful of the three, a model of the musical but not music-dependent life:  “My dad played piano, so I always fiddled around with it,” the kind of fiddling that can lead somewhere, begin unlocking the legacy.

Dad was “a classical player” who earned his doctorate in education from Washington University and taught at both the secondary and college levels. Danny remembers: He  “didn’t go off playing professionally.  But he learned how to play the piano in like two or three years….  He learned very fast.  I still have the little brochure that he gave out at his concert.… He did all this literature—Beethoven, Debussy, and Tchaikovsky—within less than a three-year period.  They left the window open at East St. Louis Lincoln Senior High so he could get in and practice for hours and hours--learned how to play piano, gave a full recital when he came out of high school.  He was very focused.”

His father hoped to pass on both the music and the focus, and, in Danny’s case, he succeeded.  “He made all four of his kids play music, and I’m the only one who stayed with it.” 

One other key difference: “He didn’t make me play piano like he did my brothers and sisters.” Maybe Danny’s father saw the connection that Danny had already formed, young listener that he was:  “A buddy down the street, I heard him playing the trumpet when I was in third grade. Sat down and played his trumpet, and it sounded so good, it blew me away, and I said, ‘I want to play that, too, when I’m in fourth grade.’ So when fourth grade came, I auditioned and tried out to play the trumpet--and stuck with it ever since.” The attraction, the connection, the deep hearing.

Danny’s father noticed.  In fourth grade, when Danny was 9 or 10, his father “bought me a little trumpet—a little student trumpet—and he let me go a year with the school band, feeling my way through, and then, time to get lessons.  ‘It’s the only way you’re going to get better.  Got to have lessons.’  So he arranged private lessons for me…. I was learning how to play a trumpet, period—no particular style, just learning how to play a trumpet—basic lessons.”

(The piano came back much later, when Danny enrolled at University of Missouri-Kansas City to study jazz performance and had to choose a “secondary instrument.”  He took three semesters of basic piano and one of jazz piano.  “You can use a piano for understanding chord structures and seeing them all at once as you play them….  You can do interval training with a piano. So it’s very important to learn piano.”)

For two or three years beginning in eighth grade, Danny‘s father took him to the old Baton Music on Delmar to study trumpet with Charlie Rose, the second key figure in Danny’s music life and, says Dennis Owsley in City of Gabriels, one of the “highly trained music teachers in the black schools of the St. Louis region” (9).

Danny’s father shared the legacy and nurtured his son’s talent in another way:  Playing records for Danny by the likes of Miles Davis and Wynton Marsalis and engaging him in “a lot of listening” to jazz, especially trumpet.  “I’ve listened to it since I was maybe in the fourth grade,” when Danny’s father also bought him that first horn.  Then, in eighth grade, under Charlie Rose at Baton, “I got introduced to playing jazz by working with those little play-along recordings like Jamey Aebersold’s. So it’s been over 30 years attempting to play jazz.”

Building his versatility, Danny went classical, too. In high school at Roosevelt, he entered the honors music program.  “I guess no one particular school had a good music program, so it was kind of a program that the public schools put together for all the kids in the public schools to go to this one place….  A lot of my early education came out of that program.”

Danny’s third teacher: Jim Bovinette, with whom Danny studied in high school. He was “probably one of my biggest influences, because he was a philharmonic, classical guy.  He wasn’t with the St. Louis Symphony, but if they needed someone to fill in, then they’d call him.” He was “the union guy, did the show bands. Those guys are like samurai on the trumpet.  They can play anything, right now.  Any show that comes in town….”

The honors program focused on classical training—but not entirely. “They had the jazz band, so it gave us a little taste,” and Danny welcomed it—but you had to be good enough.  “Once we got somewhat proficient on our instrument, then we could try out for the jazz band….  You had to play your instrument somewhat decent to play in the jazz band at honors music because they didn’t let you just come in and play with the jazz band. How well can you play your instrument?  How well are you learning to play your instrument? So that was important in the honors music program.”

Yes, “jazz eventually,” Danny remembers, but what mattered more was playing well in the competition with the other trumpet players in the program—as many as 12 of them. “We had to compete with each other to play whatever music it was.  If it was classical, then how well can you play it and how accurately can you play it?  That was the competition.  Can you sound good?”

Dad was a source of focus in another vital way.  Danny’s parents divorced when he was two years old.  “Dad lived in the city, and I moved in with him at 14 because I was getting kinda bad.  I was running with the bad crowd, trying to be tough with the guys.  My dad said, ‘Now get down here and learn that instrument and get on your school work.’  So he helped me focus on school.”

It worked: “I was a National Honor Society guy when I graduated, 3.4-3.5 grade-point average.  The second semester of my freshman year, I took lessons from Bovinette, and a year later I had a four-year scholarship to Jackson State University.  We had an Omega Psi Phi classical audition contest--piano players, violin players--and I whipped everybody.  I didn’t go to the school, but I won that scholarship,” Danny recalls with a laugh.

He didn’t go because, he says, they wanted him to join the marching band. “I didn’t believe in marching.  I was adamant. I wasn’t going to march in any band.  At that time I figured I was a jazz musician, I was going to be a jazz musician, and if I was to march, I would bump into somebody, and that would ruin my chops for the rest of my life, so I was always against marching bands.”

Danny’s father passed away in 2004.  “That’s actually when I came back to St. Louis.  I was then at Northern Illinois University.  I was in my senior year—my last year—and he had cancer.  He told me not to come home.  He said, ‘Don’t come home without your degree.’  That’s what he said.  But…I came home, and I was kinda scared. After a week or two, I saw him.  He was sick.  He didn’t say anything like, ‘I told you not to come home.’  It didn’t really matter.  It was just being with him…. I came back in March, he passed away in May.“

One lasting but challenging gift his father gave Danny was encouraging him to seek a life in music and the playing prowess that it required.  In high school, Danny’s “first little gig was a 30-minute church gig—I think it was at Morningstar Baptist Church—paid twenty-five dollars.” He had told his father, “‘I want to work at McDonald’s’…’No, you’re not going to work at McDonald’s.’  He wouldn’t let me work a job—like at McDonald’s or at a clothing store.  He said, ‘You’re going to work on the trumpet.  You get a gig, get a gig playing trumpet.’”

“I think that got me a little spoiled, because when you did music gigs, you got paid for it.  It was euphoric.  ‘Oh, paid for services rendered.  I’m going to go practice some more and get better.’  He’d say, ‘Now you have to be better the next time you play!’  So he would encourage that.  ‘Work on your horn’ as opposed to ‘Go out there and just work at McDonald’s.’ Because he felt like if I got used to that, what, hundred and twenty bucks that they give, then I would say, ‘Ah, forget the trumpet, I can go make a hundred and twenty bucks working at McDonald’s.’  Yeah, he was actually against that.”  That issue—music gig vs. day gig—would continue to challenge Danny as it has other musicians.

From his father and from teachers such as Charlie Rose and Jim Bovinette, Danny learned a key lesson: playing well, jazz or classical, was what counted, and he played both through high school.  “So it didn’t matter…music was music.  It didn’t matter what style.  That’s what I loved about Bovinette.”

But “jazz eventually.”  Danny went on to play with “the big band in high school” and then the Jazz Edge big band, which Robert Edwards formed and Danny joined when he was coming out of high school.  “That furthered our education.  Playing in the big bands, learning to play in the big bands, reading.”

 His listening furthered it, too, as he began to create his style as a player, hearing and building on the legacy history that spoke to him.  “I listened to a lot of Clifford Brown, Freddie Hubbard, Kenny Dorham, Blue Mitchell--yeah, most of the bop guys.  The swing era, right after Louis Armstrong…I didn’t listen to much of those guys. I didn’t listen to a lot of Louis until later. Something about the bop guys that really sticks with a lot of us—being able to rip fast notes, you know.  But just to play those lines like Charlie Parker…those were my main heroes.”

“I think one of my biggest influences would be Lee Morgan…because of his very bold, sassy, brassy sound.  Clifford had a smoother sound--I like Clifford a lot—Miles had a softer, subdued sound.  He was very, very dynamic—more dynamic than some of the players.  I think I’m more like Lee Morgan.”

But Danny has matured into the kind of stylistic flexibility and awareness that a professional player needs and his father would have appreciated:  “Lee Morgan can’t exist everywhere. No, it’s depending on the music.  I try to fit the style of the music including with my improvisation….  If we’re playing some Duke Ellington, like ‘Cottontail’—that’s more a swing era tune, not too be-bop, so I try to think more of those guys right after Dizzy but before Clifford…Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison, swing guys like that….  So I try to fit the style.  I won’t try to play like Woody Shaw over a Duke Ellington piece.”

What matters is  “trying to maintain the integrity of the style of that era.  I definitely try to go for that.  There was a time when I didn’t.  We didn’t care, we just played as many notes as we could cover…even if the song was a ballad, it didn’t matter.”

What changed Danny’s connection to history and style? “Taking music classes, history classes—jazz-music history—and, of course, listening to the music…. Plus having good teachers to direct you, so…if you were playing something wrong or out of style, they would be there to correct that, get you in the style of the music.  ‘Listen to this guy.’  So, that helps…direction from teachers.” Legacy learning.

After his father’s death, Danny lived the musician’s life, playing for a living, discovering and trying to master the challenging unpredictability of that life:  “You never know what’s going to happen.  Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but just the whole adventure of it, it’s exciting.  Sometimes it pays well, things are really good, sometimes it’s not, but it’s maybe the hope for…finding some balance, some consistency of living the life as a musician—not being rich, not being famous, it’s not even about that.  It’s maintain this living, paying your bills, just by playing music.  It’s hard to let go of music, it really is.  I’ve tried, I still try sometimes….”

In 2009, Danny tried.  He was back from Northern Illinois University, not yet with a degree, and music wasn’t paying the bills. “I just needed any job at that point,” Danny recalls, so he took a part-time job driving a van. After a year of that, he realized that “since I’m driving, I might as well get a job that’s paying more for driving.” He got his commercial driver’s license and took a job driving a bus for Metro in St. Louis.   He drove part-time for about eight months, which still allowed him to do music gigs, and then, after a layoff, switched to full-time for four years—his “first, real full-time job.”

The work was demanding, partly because it was “totally the opposite of music, nothing to do with music,” and, Danny recalls,  “that was a struggle for me. Eight to 12 hours a day—so, yes, totally the opposite of music.  Of course you can’t listen to music.  It’s very important that you get people safely where they want to go….  Customer service, safety, so there’s no room for music there.  Eight hours to 12 hours a day—no music, no headphones, nothing.”

So Danny would drive the bus, and “it would get to a point where I was singing songs in my head.  I had to make up my own music, which is not good when you have to concentrate on the road and monitor 30, 40 people on your bus and traffic and things like that.  It was a stressful job.”

After a day of driving, Danny would get home, watch some TV, and go to bed.  “Not listening to music had become part of my life as opposed to constantly listening to music.” Another challenge: Driving the bus by day and playing gigs at night or on weekends. “I might have a job that started at 10 o’clock at night and might be done at one o’clock in the morning, but I have to get up and be at the bus station at 3 in the morning. I used to do that a lot, but it got to a point where the job is…important enough that it deserves the respect that you have to get those people where they need to be safely, so you can’t come on the job sleepy.”

Danny’s practicing—that critical state of preparation--waned, too.  Before Metro, he played his horn at least three hours a day.  “When I was driving the bus, it was haphazard.  It might be five minutes today, and then three days later I might play for 15 minutes.  So there was no consistent schedule of practice.  My technique and my chops just got worse and worse.”

 When he got called for gigs, Danny recalls, “I became less able to perform. You work an eight-hour, 12-hour job, and you come home and you don’t want to really deal with your horn.  Maybe it’s after 10, and you stay in an apartment.  You can’t play your horn.  It’s too late.  There’s a loudness ordinance, you can’t play loud after a certain time, so that plays a part in my inability to practice.”  Yes, “every Friday I had a big fat check in my account, so it was like, I can’t really play this music job, I haven’t been practicing that much, but I’m okay because I have a check in the bank. So I started to slack off.”

In 2014, after 4 years of driving, Danny left Metro, taking the risk just to see what would follow, embracing the unplanned:  “I wanted to leave there and explore my music more and see if I could make something happen.”

Danny gave up the certainty of that regular pay, and he has since made a number of good musical things happen in his life, but are they enough?  “I took a loss, money-wise, pay-wise.  I don’t get a check every weekend, but time-wise I’m more free since then.” 

If not “regularly,” music work does come, and the fact that, as he says, “I play different types of music” helps him get closer to “making a living off the music.”  Danny’s playing now ranges from wedding and salsa gigs to choice Bistro engagements such as his recent “Art of Blakey” quintet performance and two splashy Jazz St. Louis Big Band jobs:  “Ellington’s Nutcracker” and the Whitaker Jazz Speaks Series event, “Duke Ellington & Film.”  Danny’s daily practice time has returned to its pre-Metro level of three hours minimum.

He also teaches trumpet students both through Jazz St. Louis and at Grand Center Arts Academy. And he gets hired from time to time to help set up audio equipment and instruments for visiting groups performing in St. Louis. “Say if the Temptations come to town, I might get picked to help organize the music equipment--put up the drum set or the microphones.”

So, for the moment, Danny continues to take the chance, solo into uncertainty.  He lives a music-centered life that is satisfying but still unpredictable.  Yes, he’s been “making it,” but  “it’s been hit and miss,” and “there’s always the risk of those dry spells when a gig is not coming through. Because the bills keep coming.”  While “some months might be good,” work “can still…drop off, work can drop off in two weeks.” Danny sees clearly:  “I’m older now, and if something happens…if I break an arm or a leg or if I get really sick, at my age, then what? I’m already close…on edge, so anything like that would just totally wipe me out.”

He still holds out hope for what he calls  “the balance:  Got to find the balance between steady money—and maybe a pension, medical insurance, stuff like that—and still be able to do music.” He knows well, as his father often told him, that finishing his NIU degree is key, and that remains a possibility.  So does finding an agent to help him with the business side of getting gigs.

And, yes, so does returning to non-music work. Negotiating between the real and the ideal is hard: “If I didn’t do music, I wouldn’t have a problem like driving a bus, because that’s all I can do.  And it’s the only way I can make my money.  Music gives you this other option.  You can make money, but then again there’s the other side where it can be rough.”

Danny recently completed two more choice music gigs through Jazz St. Louis: playing in the orchestra for the three-week St. Louis run of Bud, Not Buddy, with a jazz score by Terence Blanchard, and joining the band for another Whitaker Jazz Speaks Series event at the Bistro, “Harlem’s Renaissance.”

 Now, though, he will have to decide: “I could potentially go back to Metro, but I thought that, instead of staying at Metro, I can really go anywhere.  I can drive somewhere where I like to drive, somewhere maybe warm, like Las Vegas.  So the option for doing that and making a living, keeping food in my mouth, is still there.  But music is my love, so…. I don’t have kids, so I can afford to take chances.  I can afford it because it’s just me—I don’t have dogs or cats or anyone who depends on me.  It’s just me.”

He still hears his father’s voice: “’You’re going have to work.’  That’s what my dad used to always tell me.  ‘I can’t live your life for you.  You’re going to have to make your own decisions, and you’re going to have to work for the rest of your life.  Now where you want to work and in what capacity you’re going to work is dependent upon you.’”