If you’re late on Wayne tickets, check out the angelic voice of Cassie Peterson at F. Scott’s on Friday night starting at 7pm.

Saturday April 13th the Contemporary Jazz Series of NJW features my friend and colleague Chris West.

That same Saturday night I’m also leading a quartet at F. Scott’s with Pat Coil, Jonathan Wires, and Chris Brown from 7:30 to 11:30.

Finally on Sunday there are two shows by the super-talented NYC pianist and vocalist Champian Fulton at Nine48jazz.  It’s Champian’s debut in Nashville – click these links to buy tickets, although the early show is just about sold out. Shows are Sunday April 14th at 3:30 and 5:30

Nine48jazz, by the way, has begun a campaign raising money to convert from a house-concert series to a commercial venue.  Check it out and help grow jazz in Nashville.

Last week Andy and I sat down at one of the tiniest spots on Nolensville Road for an authentic Mexican lunch (mole poblano in Nashville!) and a discussion about the Andy’s work in Nashville, jazz, and Western Swing.  Andy is the featured guest at this coming Sunday’s NJW Jam Session.

EC: What were your first gigs in town?

AR: Well I was really lucky.  Through a friend of a friend I hooked up with a record producer and steel guitar player named Pete Drake.  Pete was a very, very influential player in the 60s and 70s.  He played with a couple nobodies like Paul McCartney, George Harrison…he literally taught Peter Frampton how to use the talk box.  So he was a heavy hitter and a really great guy.  The best thing was that he was a really active producer at that point, and his “school” was come down and watch recording sessions.  That gave me a great opportunity to see how it was really done by all the really great players.  It was amazing.

EC:  So having moved to Nashville in 1980, did you find that the word ‘jazz’ was something you wanted to avoid?  Was it a bad word?

AR:   Nashville was really fragmented back then.  You were a club guy, or you were a studio guy, or you were a road guy.  You were not any combination of that.  Studio guys were studio guys, period, and they were the elite.

EC:  Was the fragmentation because Nashville was a handshake kind of a city, and back then there wasn’t as much exposure of all the facets going on?

AR:  Partly, and partly because there was a lot of work for studio musicians then.  They were a larger group.  I mean now there is probably a larger group than there was then, but there are very few people who can really make a good living only doing studio work.  There are some guys who do it and make a really good living, but it’s tough.  Stylistically there was fragmentation too.  If you were a rock guy, you were a rock guy – you were not a studio guy – you were not a country guy.  And jazz guys were jazz guys, period.  I may have hurt myself because Mel Deal and I used to sit in Pete’s front office and play guitar duets all day long.

EC:  Do you think you missed opportunities because people thought ‘Andy Reiss is a jazz guy’?

AR:  There’s no way to really tell.  There’s an attitude “this guy just strums a G chord…what the hell anybody can strum a G chord!”  Then I realized it’s a very subtle art, the rhythm guitar.  I’m ashamed that I had to learn that.

EC:  Were you playing full-time in San Francisco when you moved to Nashville?

AR:  When I was seventeen I graduated from high school and pretty much hit the road.  I started with a rock band for six months and then got a gig, so I’ve always been a professional musician.  I guess I’m proud of that even though it’s not always been great.

EC:  Was it the connection to Pete Drake that made you decide to move here?

AR:  I had already moved here at that point.  I married a southern girl, and in San Francisco the only professional music really was rock’n roll.  You could make a living playing in clubs: play country music, do a few jazz gigs and casuals… but that started kind of drying up in the late 70s and early 80s.  And that was always a cliquish thing – there were maybe ten full-time country music club gigs in the area.  They payed good for the time – 300 to 350 bucks per week, which in the late 70s was pretty nice.

EC:  I think there are guys busting their butts down on Broadway for that kind of money now!

AR:  Yeah I saw a thing online about some guy who wants a commitment, you’ve got to stick with the gig, for a gig that pays 400 to 600 per week.  How the f$@k can you do that?

EC:  Yeah I’ve seen some scary stuff posted in that new Facebook group for finding Nashville gigs.

AR:  Yep.  I mean how can you do that?

EC:  Do you mean from the vantage point of paying somebody that and asking them to commit, or from the vantage point of actually taking that gig?

AR:  Well that’s one thing, the arrogance and stupidity of the offer, but I mean from the side that there were guys trying to hit him up for the gig!

EC:  It’s a pretty startling and frightening scene on that page.

AR:  Yeah.  But that’s a lot of people’s reality too.  I was really lucky because I got to see what you want to do right from the beginning.  See how the guys acted, how they learned songs.  I got to meet the guys and hang out with them and that was certainly valuable.

EC:  Do you see people today who move into town and get to have that experience?

AR:  There’s no place like that now.  I don’t know, maybe there is.  There’s a kid who moved to town who’s sort of a protégé of Brent Mason – Brent still works all the time, he’s a fabulous musician – so he got to go around with Brent on his stuff and learn that way.

EC:  So when you were meeting the main studio guys, would you tell them you were a jazz player?

AR:  I kind of turned my back on jazz for quite a while there because I really wanted to be a part of the scene and be successful.

EC:  Is that something you felt the need to do, or did happen naturally because you were working in different areas?

AR:  It happened naturally.  I had done a pretty good amount of jazz in the Bay Area.  I had a really good teacher there, a guy named Dave Smith who was a Joe Pass disciple – student, I should say.  And I got together with guys regularly and just played, which has always been the best thing you can do in my opinion.  I still do it.  There was probably ten years where I didn’t do any jazz here.  But then I started getting together with a couple friends just about every week and realized how much I loved it.  We had what I always think is so important  – what you’re doing with the Jazz Workshop jam session – a place where you can f#@k up and nobody will be mad at you!  A place where you can learn how to approach tunes.

EC:  Sometimes it does seem that in Music City, because so many people work in studios, they don’t take chances when they play jazz like you might be used to in other cities.  Many of our players’ approach to jazz seems really down the middle.

AR:  It does.  If you have an eight-bar solo – if you’re lucky – it’s got to be perfect the first time.

EC:  In 1980, was anybody in Nashville able to work full-time as a jazz player?

AR:  Well J.C.’s was happening.  Guys like Denis [Solee] and George [Tidwell], Bob Mater was doing it.  There was a scene, although it was nothing like it is now.  For a long time there really weren’t any upright bass players.  The country had mostly made a transition to electric bass at that point, so you had Rob Moore and Jim Ferguson, but that was about it.  At that point Jim was playing jazz, but he was working as a background vocalist a lot.

EC:  Were there any seminal moments between then and now that you can point to as changing the dynamics of the jazz scene in Nashville?

AR:  When Lori [Mechem] and Roger [Spencer] started doing what they’re doing that was huge.  I think just having more musicians move to town.  When Chris Brown moved to town, all of a sudden Bob wasn’t the only game in town.  We started getting more jazz bass players.  Gradually more and more people started saying “there is a jazz scene in Nashville – I can do this here.”  And now guys like you come to town and it’s great.

EC:  So the other week a musician friend of mine whom I’ve worked with asked me “do you want to play any gigs besides just jazz?”  Besides the antiquated notion that ‘jazz’ is “just” playing in quintets that sound like the late 1940s and 50s – I hear jazz in the majority of styles of today’s music –

AR:  Definitely!

EC:  and in 2013 there are maybe five people in Nashville who can afford to play “only” ‘jazz’ gigs and not play other genres.  I thought it was a crazy question – of course I want “other” gigs – I want to work and make money!  I enjoy playing in different genres too.  I find it so interesting that the word ‘jazz’ has these negative connotations that don’t serve the music that we love, either in its proliferation or our ability to grow a career.

AR:  It’s kind of like you’re part of this arcane knowledge.  Like “ooh you speak conversational Latin.”  What do you do with that exactly?

EC:  So what’s the secret to making people understand that a pursuit in jazz doesn’t equate to a disinterest in other genres?

AR:  Quite simply you do gigs in those other genres and you go out there and kill as an R&B saxophone player so people hear it and go “yeah!”.  Denis always played plenty of R&B and rock ‘n’ roll.  If I had to point out one musician that I’ve learned the most from, it would be Denis.

EC:  Anything specifically you can share?

AR:  Musicality.  I used to do these society gigs with him and Roger [Spencer], just the worst gigs you could imagine.  We’d be standing in front of the Belle Meade Country Club playing Dixieland tunes with some guy beating us up about how we’re not doing it right.  So Denis would find one song a night and make it intensely musical.  That really inspired me.  He wasn’t doing it for the gig, certainly – the gig was easier and better if we slept-walked through it.  He wasn’t doing it for me or for Roger, he was doing it for Denis.  I thought that was amazing.

EC:  When you first came to town, would you say yes to any gig that came your way?

AR:  I still kind of do, although I made a decision about fifteen years ago to not play music that I hated and only play music that really meant something to me.  And that meant not making certain amounts of money, definitely.  But it’s been good.  That’s what got me into the Time Jumpers, and that’s a really good fit for me musically.

EC:  Can you tell me about how you initially connected with the Time Jumpers?

AR:  Hoot Hester, who’s the staff fiddle player at the Grand Ole Opry, got together to play with a couple of friends at his house.  Around the next week or so I did a road trip that he was on and the steel player was on.  I knew they had got together and played Western Swing just for fun, so I was like “how could you even think about doing that without calling me!”  So I kind of buffaloed my way onto it, and now I’m the longest running member of the band.  It was just something for fun.  I always liked the music, because it’s as simple or complicated as you want it to be.  It’s the perfect vehicle for superimposing chord changes over simple structures, which I love to do.

EC:  Between you and Paul Franklin, I never know what to expect when I go hear the Time Jumpers.  It’s a simple blues but then suddenly it has the depth of a Bird Blues.

AR:  My musical relationship with Paul is probably the best that I’ve had in my life.  He’s a genius on his instrument.  He totally transcends the instrument.  And we communicate stupid good.

EC:  How would you describe the difference between jazz and the country western swing that the Time Jumpers play?

AR:  Well it’s 1948 jazz, for one thing.  Paul will get a lot more modern than I will, harmonically speaking or phrasing-wise.  But western swing is swing music.  It harkens back to the tradition of Texas fiddle music, which generally was one fiddle & one guitar or two fiddles & one guitar.  The guitar players developed this really unique style of superimposing other chord progressions on top of them.  So it started out being simple songs, two chord or three chord songs, but these guys would do things like on a I chord start on the minor iii, go flat-iii diminished, minor ii and V chords, things like that.

EC:  What’s the time frame that this is happening?  Is it concurrent with bebop?

AR:  Earlier – the early 40s.  A lot of those guys were really sophisticated jazz musicians, and there were a lot of jazz musicians who would walk the line and play western swing, regular jazz gigs, and just kind of go back and forth.   The most famous band in the genre was Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.  At one point he had something like a six-piece horn section.  People always wanted that gig because he paid more than The Dorsey Brothers or Artie Shaw.  They were really popular.

So good musicians are always curious about everything – you can imagine you’re in Texas trying to play saxophone and all of a sudden you hear Coleman Hawkins, you’re going to want to go there.  Same with guitar players – the impact of Charlie Christian on guitar players was unbelievable.  He was the young genius who played with the Benny Goodman Sextet in 1939 and really defined electric guitar as a solo instrument, changing the guitar from just a rhythm instrument.  The vocabulary he developed all by himself is still heard in guitar players today, everywhere.

EC:  Looking at the history of Texas swing music, did they steer away from the word ‘jazz’ even though there’s not so much of a discernable difference?  Perhaps Western Swing isn’t borne out of New Orleans?

AR:  But it is.  Texas is very close to New Orleans.  There’s a story of Bob Wills riding a mule a hundred and fifty miles just to hear Bessie Smith sing in Memphis.  So there’s definitely a major cross-fertilization of musical styles.  And I don’t think people were as rigid then either.  Now everything has to be “is it metal, or is it speed metal, or is it death speed metal?” There’s all these really intense subdivisions in a lot of forms of music.

EC:  Does that come from the recording academy?

AR:  Not from the recording academy, I think it comes from radio.  And people like to categorize so that you don’t have to really think about something.  “What’s it sound like?  Oh it sounds like this.”  It makes it safer and people like safe.

EC:  So amongst the Time Jumpers, do any of you call your music jazz?

AR:  Nah, we don’t call it anything, we’re not into labeling.

A clip of ‘You Make Me Feel Brand New’ from his CD “Brand New” on Origin Records Download audio file (01-You-Make-Me-Feel-Brand-New-edit.mp3)

Dr. Graham will be the featured guest at this Sunday’s Nashville Jazz Workshop Jam Session.  Last week Alex and I grabbed lunch at Tequila’s and spoke a lot about the jazz scene in Nashville: how it’s viewed, how it’s going, and where it’s headed.  Here are some excerpts from that conversation.

EC:  What were your first impressions of the jazz scene in Nashville?

AG:  After moving here?

EC:  Upon getting the job offer from Belmont, when you were weighing if there were going to be musical outlets outside of the university.

AG:  From outside of Nashville, my impression was that there probably wasn’t much of a scene.  Although, when I started telling people that I was moving to Nashville, a lot of them would say “oh yeah so-and-so lives there” and would name people that either I knew of or should have known of that lived here.  So I started realizing what I later realized after being here for a little while: that even if there’s not a huge scene per se in terms of what you outwardly see, there are a ton of great jazz musicians that live in Nashville.  More so than most places you would go.

EC:  What do you wish was different about the jazz scene in Nashville?

AG:  There are so many world-class musicians in Nashville, and I wouldn’t want to change a thing as far as that is concerned.  That being said, I guess there are a couple of things I’d like to see evolve over time with jazz in Nashville.  First of all, we need more people out there like Roger Spencer and Lori Mechem from the Nashville Jazz Workshop who are willing to stick their necks out and provide a place for musicians to perform, teach and learn about jazz.  I think the more that we can educate the public about this music, the more people you’re going to see going out to hear music at the clubs, and that will lead to a bigger and healthier scene.  The musicians are already here to make Nashville a top-notch jazz city, so now we just need some more infrastructure and public support to make that a reality.  Another thing I’ve noticed is that, since Nashville is such a studio oriented city, there is a tendency sometimes to ‘play it safe’ when playing jazz.  I like taking chances when I play, and with that comes the chance that some of your improvised moments might not end up in the tidiest package.  But it also means that you’re going to discover some new things and have more interaction with the people you’re playing with and the audience, and to me that’s what this music is all about.

EC:  In regards to music education, by my calculations Belmont University works out conservatively to a cost of 33 thousand dollars per year for undergraduate studies.  What would you tell a talented high school player who needs to bear the burden of even half those costs – student loans of $66k to pursue an undergraduate music performance degree?

AG:  That’s kind of the million dollar question.  I think a lot of educators are going to have to contemplate that nowadays.  It’s not just Belmont.  As you know, the cost of college education, with exceptions, for private school (which Belmont is), is very high.  I just recently saw a list of then ten least economically viable degrees.  My wife, who is a graphic designer, and I were looking at it and I think graphic design was the sixth worst degree to get and music was seventh or something like that!

EC:  Really?  I’m surprised there are five worse.

AG: [laughing] I know that was a surprise.  It’s on Forbes.com – I can’t remember exactly what it was.

*the list Alex was speaking about is Forbes 10 Worst College Majors

AG: [continued] Well we laughed at it – I feel like we’ve both been able to do pretty well at what we do.  I guess if a high school student was asking me that direct question, I would say that if his/her heart was in it, and they really believed in it and were willing to try to see it through all the way their life; that music meant that much to the student, then yeah it is worth it.  As crazy as that sounds to somebody who got some other kind of degree that leads to a clearer career path, like a doctor or lawyer.

It wasn’t easy for me, but I remember at one point many years ago I was kind of at a crossroads.  I had been in New York for a long time which was great for me.  I met a lot of great people and played a lot of great music – I learned a lot and really grew as a musician.  But financially it was incredibly difficult, and I reached the end of my rope a little bit in terms of being able to live – and I dropped off the scene for a little while.  What I realized after going through some soul-searching, was that I’d rather make a living playing crappy music – as a worst-case scenario – than leave music behind and try to do something else.  And that’s just who I am – it took me going through that those difficulties to realize that.  And I’m glad I did that.  Once I made that realization, I was able to start from scratch a little bit and build a career.  A different anecdote about this: a friend who is an amazing musician – one of the best musicians I’ve ever met in my life – he had a potential opportunity to get a pretty good teaching job that would probably have paid him twice as much money as he currently makes.  Plus insurance and all the other benefits.  When I pushed him on it – he’s very humble – and would say “no, no, I don’t want to do that.”  I figured he was just being humble, but then I realized after he never broke and said “okay I’m going to go for that job,” that he liked his life the way it was.  He doesn’t want to use up his time teaching.  He has a life where he can do nothing but play, study, and live music, and that’s what he wants out of life.

EC:  That’s worth something, even if financially it’s worth less.

AG:  Right, that’s what I’m saying.  For him, that’s what it came down to – he would have given his life for the music.  It wasn’t about the money and it never will be.  That comes with potential problems and hardships in life, but when it comes down to it you have to know who are.  If that’s who you are, then go for it.  File bankruptcy! [laughing]  I guess you can’t do that with student loans though, can you?  They’re still going to get you.

EC:  So in light of all this, and considering that college tuition has inflated at a rate greater than even the medical industry, I’m curious about something.  If a student came up to you and said “Dr. Graham I want to study the saxophone with you, but I don’t want the formal pedagogy and costs of a university.  Can I give you xx amount of dollars per month for intensive studies and apprenticeship?”  Would you be open to that, some kind of alternative degree, if you will?

AG:  I think my quick answer to that is ‘no’, but my extended answer to that is ‘maybe?’ I would probably be willing to see students like that on a casual basis, maybe come to a gig or rehearsal.  With my students at Belmont I have office hours.  I have students come and see me to ask questions about a lot of different things: music theory, career advice, arranging, whatever.  If there was a young student in town that came to me a similar proposal to what you’re saying and I thought that they were really serious and had a lot of potential, then I might be willing to work with somebody like that without financial compensation.  But I consider my role at Belmont to be one of exclusivity in terms of money exchanging hands, which I think is fair.

EC:  Where do you see the Nashville jazz scene ten years from now?

AG:  I think one of the unique aspects of jazz in Nashville is the eclecticism of it and its connection with current popular music styles, and I see that continuing to develop.  Since I am relatively new to town, it’s hard for me to have very much perspective on what came before me.  That being said, I hope that the jazz community in Nashville can continue to grow closer together and continue striving to make jazz that’s culturally relevant without losing too much connection with the jazz tradition and the broader jazz community.

picture courtesy of The Examiner

SH: So I started really getting into the R&B scene – you know we would play a lot of festivals and I started hearing about the Muscle Shoals thing and Stax and listening to all that music I hadn’t been all that familiar with before.

EC: Is that when you first got in touch with Jim Horn? [the horn section leader for the Kenny Chesney band]

SH: Yes actually Delbert brought him out when we played The Tonight Show in 1991 so that we’d have three horns.  He [Delbert] had an album that was out then – I think Never Been Rocked Enough – that was getting some play and so we got on the Leno show.  We just missed Johnny [Carson] by about six months I think.  That was too bad.

EC: So once you’re up and running here in Nashville, I’m curious how you identified yourself when you were meeting other musicians?  Did you use the word ‘jazz’?  Would mentioning you played trumpet in Delbert’s band put your playing into a certain area of expectations?

SH: I’d have to say, and it’s sad, I wouldn’t say “hey I’m a jazz musician.”  I think to really say you’re a jazz musician you need to be making a large chunk of your money playing jazz.  And we both know how hard that is.  So as much as I love jazz, as much as I practice it and work on it, it would be hard for me to really identify myself as a jazz musician.  Most of my professional work is not jazz.  But the cool thing is that the world has become a smaller place and there’s a lot of hip stuff going on in all kinds of music pulling from that area.

If somebody asked “what do you do?”, I’d say “I’m a trumpet player… I’m a session player”, or “I’m a freelance trumpet player.”  If they asked what kind of stuff I played, then I’d say a lot of jazz, a lot of blues, and I work in the studios a lot – which can be anything.

EC: Did you ever feel that ‘jazz’ was a dirty word in this city?

SH: I never felt that.  Jazz scares a lot of people, especially if it’s really aggressive or modal with guys playing twenty-minute solos.  Man, you want to clear a room in this town [laughing]… you know what I’m saying.  And I’ve changed myself.  I used to listen to a lot of that kind of stuff when I was younger but I don’t anymore.  I’m more of a ‘change player’ – I like to hear a tune and a melody with somebody making changes.  The modal stuff – I can appreciate it when people do it well – but it’s not my bag; it’s not what I hear in my head.

EC: Do you feel like the musical goals you had when you were coming out of school changed in any way after you worked different gigs?

SH: I think yeah – when you’re in that bubble at North Texas, I envisioned myself one way.  A lot of guys went out there and jumped into the Buddy Rich Band, the Woody Herman Band – but by the time I got out of school you realized those bands were no gravy train. I saw some of the guys jump onto Maynard’s thing when he was still out there – and I would have hoped to turn that into a soloist’s career.  That was my plan going into North Texas.  But the reality of the situation was I started getting gigs with those Latin bands, and coming home with a paycheck from playing my horn was something I felt pretty good about.

EC:  It’s hard to argue with.

SH: You just had to adapt.  Life is never what you think it’s going to be! [laughing] At least not for me, it’s been a surprise every time I turned around.

EC: It’s easy to be an idealist if you have nothing to lose.

SH: Right, exactly.  A good friend of mine, Jim Rotondi, he played in the One O’clock Band with me, he went to New York and made it. But now Jim is over in Europe full-time.  He took a job in…Graz? I remember asking him, I said “is this a business decision” – I forget how I worded it.  But I don’t think his wife, who’s from Paris, was happy with the United States.  And the jazz scene is certainly a lot better over in Europe.

EC: When you’re looking for musical inspiration, do you still mostly listen to jazz?  Or has your taste broadened because of the work you’ve done?

SH: If I’m actually putting music on, it’s usually jazz.  I’ve gotten into the music channels that come through the TV on AT&T.  So we’ll be sitting at the table and I’m constantly playing “who is that?” They’ve got about 30 channels and I listen to maybe three or four.  One of them is more of a singer’s channel which is cool because you get to hear the words to some of the songs you know the melodies to and have played for years.  And just hearing all those great big band arrangements behind the crooners from back in the day.  And then on the straight ahead jazz channel I’m always trying to guess who the horn players are.

I actually just bought a turntable [laughing].  I’ve got all these records that haven’t seen the light of day in over ten years.  I wanted at some point to move them over to disc, and I did with several, but not the whole collection.  So a lot of these records are stuff I really loved when I was younger and I’m looking forward to hearing again.

EC: That’s one thing that sucks about my generation.  My first music was on tape – and there’s no great fidelity in them that’s going to make coming back to that medium the joyful experience it is for record owners.

SH: It’s sad because as horn players, and maybe it’s this way with every instrument but I hear it more with horns, there’s something missing on digital.  They just cannot capture all that.  I saw an article in the paper the other day talking about how each one of these evolutions of music has actually reduced the information a listener receives.  On a record the information is all there – but when they scaled down to CD they pulled all this information out.  It’s a shame.  Obviously the convenience of it is what prompted it all.

EC: Agreed – it’s a double-edged sword.  Something like Spotify or one of those services – suddenly you have all this information at your fingertips, but it’s all diluted.  So is a kid who starts listening to Miles Davis at the age of thirteen going to have that same visceral reaction that’s happened for the previous generations?  When you listen to an MP3 through crappy $10 headphones, the material might be amazing but will it still be the same hair-raising experience?

SH: No it’s not.  I’ve noticed that in my own work.  When somebody asks you to record some Harmon mute, they’re thinking Miles, but it’s really hard to digitally capture a good Harmon mute sound.  I know guys have done it, but I’ve done other sessions where I left scratching my head thinking it just sounds like a pitch buzzing.  [laughing] It doesn’t have that sound.  And I don’t know enough to tell the engineers “okay you need to do this” – you know you need to experiment with things like distance to the mic.

EC: Have you continued to write music from your school years up through now?

SH: I’m not real good at just sitting down and writing – I need something to write for.  It’s been real great to be in Kelli’s group, because that’s given me something: okay I’ve got a three-horn arrangement to write for this performance in two months.  I can bring in a tune and get it played by great players.  But if I don’t have something like that going on I’m not real good at sitting around writing stuff – I wish I was! [laughing]

EC: Has it been important to have a musical outlet when you’re on the road for 200 dates in a year?  Are you practicing or does the music work become so all-encompassing that the outlets have to be books and family and whatnot?

SH: Yeah the outlet was definitely books for me on that gig. I must have read hundreds and hundreds.  I wish I could say it was all good literature, but a lot of it was just to pass time – there were so many hours on the bus.  With that gig we spent a lot of nights over in hotels after the gigs unless we had a real long haul, so we were doing a lot of day travel.  There was a lot of downtime – I read a ton.  I wish I could read that much nowadays.  Wearing glasses kind of ruined reading for me – I get tired so much faster.  It probably didn’t help trying to read like this! [Steve held up an imaginary book that was shaking all over from a bumpy ride].

EC: Something I’ve always heard about finding a big gig like the Kenny Chesney band is that you never know when that kind of opportunity might hit you, and so it’s best to keep your hands working in a lot of areas and be ready should opportunity strike.  What’s been the most major factor in your life in finding the career success that you’ve had?

SH: We both know guys that are ‘go-getters’ that are on the phone calling people – I’ve even heard of guys finding out where producers go to church and try to meet them at their church.  But to me, I’m what you just said.  I just want to be ready for the next opportunity.  I think work tends to come to people who deserve it, but you’ve got to take advantage of that opportunity when it happens.  I think for the most part I’ve been able to rise to the occasion or maybe even play better than I really play in crucial situations [laughing] and landed a lot of work that way.  You’ve got to be responsible and be somebody that people can count on.  You know and I know that there’s plenty of people who can do most gigs.  Even in the jazz world, maybe even more so in the jazz world, there are so many great players and so few jobs.  Say you went out there on a jazz road gig and you go out there and you’re an asshole or you’re showing up five minutes before the gig and freaking out the bandleader because you’re not there, you’re gonna be gone.  There’s just not room for that.  You’ve got to be someone people can count on, and fun to be around.  I hate to say that that’s an important thing as far as being a musician, but at the same time it is.  So much of our time is spent sitting around, unfortunately.  We’re not putting in twelve hour days – playing is the easiest part.  Especially as far as road gigs go, they’re not paying you for playing – you always want to play – they’re paying you for waiting at an airport for five hours at 4 in the morning for your next flight, or waiting three hours in the hotel lobby for your room to open up.

EC: Any closing thoughts on how Nashville has changed in terms of music scene and lifestyle since you first moved here?

SH:  I think it’s progressing every year. There’s a lot of opportunities here to do a wide variety of things.   I think you or I could land a gig that might be monetarily satisfying and musically satisfying here.  It might not be straight-ahead jazz like I think you like and I do, but maybe even that?  I think you’ve got to be flexible – you’ve got to be versatile.  There’s very little music that I’ve played that I didn’t get at least some satisfaction from being a part of.  If the musicians are competent and they believe in what they’re doing, and you’ve got a crowd that’s enthusiastic about what you’re playing, then I’m having a good time.

EC: There’s innate challenges in all of it.

SH: Yeah!  Kenny Chesney’s gig was simple parts for the most part – some of it was physically challenging endurance wise.  But sometimes whole notes are harder to play than Donna Lee.  If you’re trying to play in tune with a lot of really loud guitars, it can be really challenging.  And temperature can be a factor, we’d do outdoor shed shows where it’s been 105 degrees during the day and you’ve got all those stage lights – that’s a whole other realm of challenge.

This weekend was a blast.  The quartet had a great show at F Scotts – we played a large mix of new charts, original tunes, and a few standards.  Sometimes there’s a tendency to overlook the “band” aspect in jazz and focus on soloists ability, but that’s nearly impossible when playing with Bruce, Jonathan, and Josh.

Prior to the show I had given a lesson to a student alto player.  We had had such a good time that I brought my alto to the gig (as pictured above) and ended up playing it on about 40% of the tunes, a first for me.  I think this might become a trend.  My student was gracious enough to come check out the gig too.

On Saturday night I ventured back out to F Scott’s to hear the Pat Coil Quartet with Don Aliquo, Jim Ferguson, and Derrek Phillips.  They sounded ridiculously good – so ridiculous that I noticed saxophonist Rahsaan Barber and I kept shaking our heads in astonishment at the unbelievable playing.

Looking ahead, there’s exciting music coming through town.  This Friday the Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour plays the Schermerhorn.  Next weekend Rodney Whitaker plays at the Steinway Gallery with the Jazz Music City All-Stars.  See ya out there!

-evan

“Singers and Musicians are some of the most driven, courageous people on the face of the earth. They deal with more day-to-day rejection in one year than most people do in a lifetime. Every day, they face the financial challenge of living a freelance lifestyle, the disrespect of people who think they should get real jobs, and their own fear that they’ll never work again.”

The quote goes on to provide some inspirational epithets – so inspirational in fact that the same quote can be found from a few weeks prior, but speaking about “Actors” instead of singers and musicians.

Bad internet researching aside, the quote does hit a few touchstones for artists.  As you know, it is undoubtedly a challenging lifestyle for the vast majority of artists.  There are rejections, constant financial battles, and doubts cast both internally and externally.  Learning how to handle these pitfalls and challenges with joy and grace is a big part of what being ‘a professional’ is all about.

One of the things that my students find fascinating the first time they hear it is this – playing music is the easiest part of my job.  Sometimes great music becomes the reward for the struggles.

Tomorrow night I get to play F Scott’s with the band from Falling Up (minus Matt): Bruce Dudley, Jonathan Wires, and Josh Hunt.  We’ll be playing some of the CD’s tunes along with some standards and a few brand new ones.  This an example of a gig so rewarding musically that getting paid practically feels like a bonus. I hope that you’ll come out and join us from 7 to 11 (no cover)!

Earlier this week Steve and I sat down to lunch where we spoke about that very term, as well as the idea that ‘jazz’ is a dirty word (and not just in the BAM sense), and how his music career has unfolded.  He’s also the featured guest at today’s NJW Jam Session.  I’ve transcribed the first part of our interview below, and also included an audio clip of Steve’s original tune Winter Solace that he recently recorded with the Kelli Cox Collaborative.  I’ll post the rest of the interview in a few days – when I have time to finish writing it out.

Winter Solace

Download audio file (08-Winter-Solace.mp3)

EC: Were you a jazz performance major at University North Texas?

SH: Yeah it was jazz studies at first, then I switched to jazz performance.

EC: Did you stay in Denton after school?  For how many years?

SH: Thirteen years.

EC: Did you get the Delbert [McClinton] gig down there?

SH: Yeah. He was based out of Fort Worth back then.

EC: How did first working with that band come about?

SH: A good friend of mine who I had known there, his name was Mark Breithaupt, he got some kind of theater job in Japan that was coming fairly quickly and was going to be very lucrative.  I’m sure I’m not the first guy that he called [laughing], but I was the first one that could do it!  I just went out for a week and a half run or something like that, and stayed for seven years.  And I was only 28, which is not young, but for that kind of gig I was by far the youngest guy on the band.  The other guys were in their 40s and 50s, I’m sure.

EC: How long had the band been playing at that point?

SH: Well the guys came and went out of there pretty frequently.  After I left he kind of settled into some guys he had for a long time, like Kevin McKendree, Rob McNelley.  That rhythm section was together for maybe 15 years working for him.  But when I was there it was a lot more volatile – guys coming and going a lot.

EC: What else had you been doing in Denton for those 6 or so years between graduating and Delbert’s gig?

SH: Played a lot of Latin gigs down in Dallas.  Worked in bands from ‘82 till probably ‘86 or ‘87.  I worked in a straight ahead Cumbia band: all Cumbias and Rancheros – that was a traditional Mexican music band.  I did that 5 nights a week for over a year.  Then I got to play in a tropical band, did that for around 3 years, and I was doing that at the same time I was playing in the 1 o’clock.  So I was paying my own way – finished up my school.  My folks payed for the first 4 years but I have to say I kind of dicked around and didn’t get the degree.  So I stayed out of school, took enough hours that I could become a Texas resident and then get the in-state tuition, which back then was ridiculously affordable.

EC: Would you call the playing that you were doing with the Latin bands ‘jazz’?

SH: I got to solo a lot in the Cumbia band – but that’s all like two chord vamping groove kind of stuff.  But it was a blast.  In the other band we did a couple of “Girl From Ipanema” type things, stuff like that we could solo on.  We also played some Salsa stuff –obviously we were doing it with a small rhythm section, a guy at a drumset – a Salsa purist might have looked down his nose at it. But it was a pretty good band for guys who were mostly part-time players, they had day gigs.

Then we had a three-night a week house band gig, so I’d do school then go down Friday night and play Friday, Saturday, Sunday nights at this club and make a couple hundred bucks a week.  My rent up in Denton was ridiculously cheap, so it was working.  I was happy to be playing.

EC: Was the training you got at North Texas helpful for the work you were doing?

SH: For that particular gig, probably not, it didn’t really have anything to do with it.  I got good instruction just as far as learning to play the horn, but then all of a sudden you’re trying to turn around and play a 4 or 5 hour gig.  There’s no substitute for that other than just doing it.  But yeah, I got a lot of great instruction up there.  I was also studying with Don Jacoby who’s a legendary trumpet player from back in the ‘40s and ‘50s.  He had settled in that area, and almost all the guys were going and studying with Jac also.  But I had good teachers at school too.

EC: At what point in your seven-year tenure with Delbert’s band did you decide to relocate to Nashville?

SH: I moved here in ’91 – that’s when I met Susie.

EC: Can you tell me a bit about the decision process to move?

SH: It happened so fast, it’s ridiculous.  I had an aunt who lived here, and H.B. Johnson who was a sax player and instrument repairman lived next door to my aunt.   He had a rental house nearby in Antioch that opened up, and I had an old friend that I grew up with in Hamilton, OH whose roommate was leaving so he needed a roommate.  And I knew Susie was moving here too, and we had grown close – so I swear to God it was less than two weeks that I made the decision to pack up all my stuff and move to Nashville.  I just thought if everything is pushing you in one direction, why fight it? I have to say at one point in my life I hated Nashville – everything I had seen of it I despised.

EC: How far after 1991 is that?

SH: Oh that was before ’91. I wouldn’t have moved here if I had still felt that way.  But when I used to get warehoused on Demonbreun – this is before all the restaurants and stuff  that are there now – it used to be this tourist trap area, and I’d be stuck in the Shoney’s for two or three days [laughing].  You know, the town has changed a lot.  Once you get to know it, there’s a lot more going on here than appears.

EC: I imagine Nashville didn’t come into your realm of thought while you grew up in Ohio.  I imagine that when you were working in Texas you started hearing about it and coming into town for the occasional gig?

SH: Yeah we [the Delbert band] would play here – not a lot – but you know Delbert was always held in high regard among the singers and songwriters, and still is, and that’s why he moved here. And also as far as touring, when we left to go play the Carolinas from Dallas/Fort-Worth that was close to a thousand-mile hike.  And that was a huge hunk of his workload back when I first started with the band.  We were in the Carolinas all the time – all the Shag music, beach music kind of thing – they really loved Delbert.  We were certainly touring nationally, but I bet we were in that area – we were playing 200 gigs a year when I started , and I bet half of them were in the Carolinas, Virginia, maybe northern Florida.  From Nashville, those bus rides are a lot better.  Look at the eastern half of the United States – we’re smack in the middle of it – you can jump on a bus leaving midnight from here and be in half the population of the United States.

- the rest to come soon – evan

“A whole note is – a great big circle.  A half note adds – a great big stem…”

As all students do, I had many opinions about my teachers.  It was through private music lessons that I started understanding how effective a teacher could be, and also how ineffective.  It’s a two-way street of course – the student must be prepared to learn and ask questions.  But sometimes extremely talented musicians were very ineffective teachers.  One element I try to keep in mind with my students is the term ‘education.’  Looking at the Latin root educo is very revealing: “to draw out.”  The greatest teachers are not renowned for the information they bestow, but the inspiration they provide.

Of course it’s easy to love Mr. Holland’s Opus when we see years of repetitive work pay off with a moment of clarity for a pupil.  Teaching exceptional students is easy – but what about the groundwork that must be laid in order to reach a point of inspiration?  And what if a student has the potential, but can’t afford music lessons?  Is that moment of inspiration more or less likely to occur if the fundamentals are never drilled in over time?

Truthfully I don’t know the answers to those questions.  But I am excited to say that at the time being, I no longer need those answers.  The Nashville Jazz Workshop is launching a Scholarship Lessons Program this semester for area students of all ability levels who are serious about music but can’t afford music lessons.  All the details are available at the Nashville Jazz Workshop website (or click the link above) – there’s an application and a brief audition.  But essentially students can qualify for entire semesters (and beyond) of free music lessons (and more). Feel free to hit me questions, and please spread the word!

You’ve no doubt heard trumpeter Matt White – he’s featured prominently on Falling Up – but you likely haven’t had the pleasure of listening to his original material.  Just prior to moving to the coast of South Carolina to begin a trumpet teaching gig at Coastal Carolina University, Matt put together a great band to record eight original compositions (and one arrangement).  Matt’s writing is capable of producing flying sensations for me as much as any musician I’ve ever worked with, and the great ensemble he recorded took up that task with great aplomb: Joe Davidian, Jonathan Wires, Jim White (not actually Matt’s brother), and Don Aliquo on the sextet tracks.  The record was just recently mixed and mastered, so now I’m waiting with great curiosity (as you should be too!) to hear the finished product.

Click the link to hear a sample track, “The Yankee Poured Out the Bacon Grease.”  Wheeeeeeeee