[Dixielandjazz] two comments

Tue Jun 20 17:58:08 EDT 2017

As usual, my good friend Fuzzy beat me to the musical punch, but here are a few additional thoughts. I have attended the NOLA trad jazz camp now in one capacity or another for 8 years.  I agree that a week is not enough to develop players, but it is certainly enough time to inspire and interest them in the music and that has been one of the goals of the camp since the beginning.   The young man featured on trumpet in the video was a student in the early camps and has gone on to become a fine player and a leader of a band that performs regularly in NOLA.  There are at least two other campers who have done the same thing----established bands in the area.  

To your point though, Charles, each of them also came from New Orleans originally and so, as you suggest, had some of the musical DNA in place already.  

This year's campers had a range of skills but most of them had the capacity to improvise.  I suspect they were using the charts as more of a back-up to make sure they sounded good in the somewhat unfamiliar setting of the playing live on-air.  

Sadly, with so many public schools cutting back on their music programs, even introducing kids to music, let alone to a specific genre, is challenging.  The camp provides a way to do that even if on a limited basis.  And the instructor staff has included some truly great players----Connie Jones, Ed Polcer, Don Vappie, Dan Levinson, David Sager, Gerald French David Boeddinghaus, Katie Cavera---just to name a few.  Plus some of the other camp mentors that Fuzzy mentioned.

Many of the younger players who come to camp, particularly those from NOLA, have had much more exposure to the world of brass bands through the groups that play on Jackson Square and in 2nd lines.  But over the course of just a few days in the camp I have seen many of them begin to refine their playing, turning the volume down and looking for the right notes, not just more notes. 

Unfortunately, since many of these campers come from other parts of the country I doubt if they'll have the opportunity to continue to play or learn this music (broadly defined as trad jazz and swing) given the paucity of bands and venues in places outside of NOLA, New York and perhaps a few other markets.  

But if a clarinet player from the wilds of Montana can find his way there, hopefully a lot of other players from the younger generation will too.  The jazz camps in NOLA, San Diego, New York, Sacramento, etc. are part of that process.

Best regards...

Larry Garrett
Writer.  Clarinet Player.

-----Original Message-----
From: Charles Suhor <csuhor at zebra.net>
To: Larry Garrett <lrg4003 at aol.com>
Cc: Dixieland Jazz Mailing List <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Tue, Jun 20, 2017 7:21 am
Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] two comments

Well said, Marek. The point I take from this is that there are many roads to competent jazz playing, and a short camp can plant the seeds that will grow elsewhere, in time. High school jazz bands do this, over a longer period of time, though as has often been pointed out, most don’t don’t make room for improvisation, and fewer still offer combo settings that encourage traditional jazz. The larger culture bends kids towards guitar-based rock bands, and most kids are channeled into that.The conception of traditonal jazz doesn’t come in through the pores as it did in my youth, and settings for sustained mentorship in the music are rare. Still, as Syncopated Times, this list show, the music persists. Gratitude for that.

Charles

On Jun 20, 2017, at 11:22 AM, Marek Boym <marekboym at gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Charles,

The professional musician is young, so he started long after the revival.

True, the kids read their music, although it is difficult to know whether they have the whole thing written down, or just lead sheets.  

This reminds me of a story I heard from my late trombonist friend, Roy Crimmins: At some stage Roy (a founder member of the Alex Welsh band), joined a well known traditional band, and got a book with all his solos written down.  After a while he became fed up with playing set solos and asked the leader whether he could play his own solos.  The answer was "by all means."  It turned out that his predecessor could not improvise!  And yet, the band was quite popular (I heard the band live, with Roy on trombone, at the Prince of Orange many a moon ago).

Sure, I've heard more swinging bands, but the band does not sound stodgy.  More than I could say of a band I heard in London last November!

A short camp is certainly not enough, but at least some of the kids are likely to carry on and learn - they don't get much exposure to jazz otherwise.

Cheers

On 19 June 2017 at 22:01, Charles Suhor <csuhor at zebra.net> wrote:

I listened to this, and it’s hard to react. The trumpeter-teacher, obviously an adult pro, is carrying the jazz feeling, The kids are mostly reading the music that's on the floor without a lot of natural swing. The culture has changed beyond recognition, but when in New Orleans as teen (and I suspect in many cities in pre-rock & roll times), the musical environment and kid-adult everyday camaraderie were such that apprenticeship and enthusiasm evolved pretty naturally. The generational peers who I played with, surrounded by Dixieland and swing as we grew up, included Connie Jones, Bill Huntington, Buddy Prima, Reed Vaughan, Charlie (Chicken) May, Nick LaRocca, Jr., Al Hermann, Cecile Laurie, Theresa Kelly, Larry Muhoberac, Murphy Campo, Pee Wee Spitelera….Only 3 to 7 years older were the Assunto brothers, Pete Fountain, Don Suhor,  Al Belletto, Jack Delaney, Herbie Tassin, Stan Mendellson, Johnny McGhee, Al McCrossen, Lou Timken, Oliver (Stick) Felix, Don Lasday. (Pardon any omissions and misspellings). The ones in the list you haven’t heard of were equally or more talented than the ones you know.

The local environment explains much of that, I suppose, but I suspect there was talent DNA afloat as well. The point, if there is one, is that an ear and a bent for improvisation with a jazz feeling seem most often to come from within, discovered in some cases, teachable in others, but not convincingly evoked for most youth in a short jazz camp setting. To quote Thornton Wilder, it don’t do no, harm, I guess. But is it the basis for a new generation of players of what we call OKOM? Okay, I wrote this in haste and am ready for views that will lighten me up. Maybe your own experiences as learners of the music will bring other perspectives.

On Jun 19, 2017, at 10:31 AM, Les Elkins <leslie.r.elkins at gmail.com> wrote:

>1)  Young Kids have NO jazz feelings!

I'm just back to the real world from the New Orleans Adult Traditional Jazz Camp, held last week. This time around it included a number of Young Kids. They were in the ensembles like the rest of us, and while like the rest of us many have a ways to go, I'll strongly disagree with "NO" feeling. But the camp brought their scholarship students into WWOZ for a bit, so judge for yourself....

https://www.wwoz.org/events/247086

For me- it took me many years to find this music. I just can't imagine being exposed to this stuff at their age, and I am confident to say that if I had been, it would have been a stretch for me to have been anywhere close to as competent, musical, or as overall nice as these folks are.

-Les Elkins

-- 

"NEVER use a maj7 chord in any bar that is named after a deceased NASCAR 
  driver, a large-calibre firearm, or an intoxicated farm animal." 
-Rev. Billy C. Wirtz's Universal Chord Law

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