[Dixielandjazz] A leg up for young jazz musicians

[Stephen G Barbone]

Help for Those Just Starting Out in the Jazz World

NY Times - Sept 5, 2010 -  Phillip Lutz

JAZZ musicians have long lamented the loss of the apprenticeship  
system, which vanished along with the nightspots that lined former  
music hubs like Dixwell Avenue in New Haven and West 52nd Street in  
Manhattan, where players of different generations shared bandstands,  
beer and trade secrets after the marquees went dark.

Billy Taylor, 89, is now artistic director for jazz at the Kennedy  
Center, but at one time was the protégé of the piano titan Art Tatum  
and worked as the house pianist at the original Birdland, where he  
absorbed the tenets of bebop alongside Bird himself, Charlie Parker.  
These days, he said, “you don’t have the after-hours clubs, you don’t  
have the kinds of places that lend themselves to that kind of getting  
together.”

But cultural and educational institutions are starting to pick up part  
of the slack. While they rarely provide the kind of trial-by-fire that  
aspiring musicians routinely experienced while jamming in the wee  
hours with their elders, they do offer students, including some  
promising musicians in Westchester and Connecticut, opportunities they  
otherwise might not have had.

“We’ve been able to bring people together the same way that I was  
brought into the context of people who could help me and wanted to  
help me,” Mr. Taylor said.

The pianist Christian Sands is a case in point. Mr. Sands, 21, was  
already attracting local attention as a high school student in  
Woodbridge, Conn., when he entered a summer music program that Mr.  
Taylor ran at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Mr. Sands performed so impressively that he soon found himself drawn  
by Mr. Taylor into the Kennedy Center orbit, taking part in master  
classes, appearing on the center’s stages and, in the spring of 2007,  
participating in Betty Carter’s Jazz Ahead, a selective two-week  
residency for young musicians from around the world.

A ubiquitous presence in New Haven, Mr. Sands has returned twice to  
perform at the Kennedy Center; worked established rooms, like the Jazz  
Standard in Manhattan, where he will be a sideman with the bassist  
Christian McBride in November; and earned a Grammy nomination for Best  
Latin Jazz Solo, on “Tin Tin Deo,” from “Kenya Revisited Live,”  
featuring the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra of the Manhattan School of  
Music, where Mr. Sands is entering his senior year.

Making records is just one way school ensembles in the region are  
entering the commercial arena and, in the process, aiding students’  
careers. They are also vying for live engagements at area clubs,  
sometimes at off hours, in a competition that has heated up as jazz  
studies programs proliferate, said Todd Coolman, the bassist and  
director ofjazz studies at Purchase College, State University of New  
York.

Concerned about the breakdown of the apprenticeship system, Mr.  
Coolman has introduced elements of it at Purchase. The college’s big  
band has played at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola at Lincoln Center, and its  
Latin big band has performed at Birdland, eight blocks south of the  
original Birdland where Mr. Taylor was house pianist. Purchase also  
has its share of standouts.

Nir Naaman, a 29-year-old saxophonist from Israel and 2010 Carter  
fellow who led a septet at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage on  
his own tune “Dilemma,” just began his final year in the master’s  
program at Purchase.

During his Carter residency, Mr. Naaman showed he both “had the  
ability to be a strong leader when it came to his own music” and  
“understood the importance of sitting back and becoming a sideman when  
he needed to,” said Kevin Struthers, the director of jazz programming  
at the Kennedy Center.

Like Mr. Sands, he said, Mr. Naaman would be a fine fit for the  
emerging artists series at the center’s KC Jazz Club. Mr. Naaman,  
whose quartet periodically performs in Brooklyn, will play at Miles’  
Cafe in Manhattan next month. He has also gained a foothold in  
California, joining the San Francisco drummer Eddie Marshall in  
repertory.

At Purchase, Mr. Coolman said, Mr. Naaman pursues every opportunity,  
regularly applying for awards (on top of the Carter fellowship, he  
recently won a scholarship from the Eubie Blake National Jazz  
Institute and Cultural Center) and generally pushing the limits of his  
musical knowledge.

One of nine students from outside the United States among the 28  
Carter residents this year, Mr. Naaman said he maintains ties with  
musicians from that residency and from his undergraduate years at the  
Berklee College of Music in Boston. In some cases the connections  
stretch back to the high school he attended near Tel Aviv, where he  
and many other Israeli jazz musicians were able to take courses that  
qualified for credit toward a Berklee degree.

The emergence of an Israeli pipeline to the American jazz scene  
reflects a trend toward networks of young musicians connecting through  
institutions in far-flung locales, said the saxophonist and educator  
David Liebman, who founded the International Association of Schools of  
Jazz, which counts more than 40 member schools.

If apprenticeships are part of jazz’s past, global networks are its  
future.

Mr. Liebman, who as artist-in-residence at the Manhattan School of  
Music revived the Miles Davis classic “Sketches of Spain” last year at  
the school with Mr. Sands on piano, said that the association’s 20th  
meeting at the Hague in June brought out an array of international  
players who showed great dedication to their jazz studies, despite the  
career obstacles that lay ahead.

“What are they thinking?” he asked. “They’re not thinking. They just  
love it.”