Playing Changes

by Nate Chinen

  Meanwhile, the effects of the Internet, and the increasing fluidity of cultural transmission in general, have produced new generations of players with a world of information at their instant command. The more easily distracted young musicians in their midst might disappear down a rabbit hole and never reemerge. The more sophisticated might enact a new version of the process that Metheny identified—developing competencies, proficiencies, and perspectives that a prior generation would never have dreamed of grasping at that age.

  An extreme case in point is Joey Alexander, the pianist who became a media sensation when he released his debut album, My Favorite Things, at eleven years of age. He was an undeniable child prodigy, reason enough for the hoopla. What wasn’t noted often enough was the remarkable fact of his development in isolation. Joey grew up in Bali, Indonesia, many miles from anything resembling a thriving jazz scene. His father, a jazz fan and amateur musician who had studied in New York, introduced him to some recordings, and encouraged his talent. But the sheer availability of information on the Internet—recordings, instructional videos, performance footage—served as a hothouse incubator.

  The web was also useful in spreading the word: Joey was a cherubic ten-year-old when one of his YouTube videos caught the notice of Wynton Marsalis, who arranged for him to be flown to New York to perform in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s annual gala. From that moment on, opportunities spilled forth in abundance: Motéma Music made Joey the youngest-ever signing to its roster, and his family moved to New York, supported by a coterie of wealthy patrons. My Favorite Things hit number one on Billboard’s jazz albums chart and garnered two Grammy nominations, for Best Jazz Instrumental Album and Best Improvised Jazz Solo.

  Joey Alexander’s talent was exceptional on its face, but within the jazz community it was also the source of some watchful ambivalence. His youthful limitations were easy enough to discern, for a seasoned listener. But the scope of his success gave him no obvious incentive to pursue a formal jazz education, or even a conventional apprenticeship. “I love to play with elders and people before me,” he said diplomatically in 2016, a month before turning thirteen. “But you know, I have a different path than other musicians.”5 The open question, for those with a rooting interest, was how much higher Joey could elevate his gift by taking advantage of resources in an institutional setting. Jazz instruction had developed along one track for Aebersold’s legions of hobbyists, and along another for the gifted young musicians rocketing toward major careers.

  * * *

  —

  The first music I ever heard by Andy Clausen was a wafting, harmonically layered composition for a group he called the Split Stream Big Band. Clausen, a clean-cut trombonist with an earnest demeanor, was leading his ten-piece ensemble at a colorfully dingy spot called Café Racer, in his hometown of Seattle, Washington. The ranks of the band formed a peer group, including another trombonist, Willem de Koch, and a trumpeter named Riley Mulherkar.

  Clausen’s writing showed an unforced grasp of advanced large-ensemble compositional techniques, like those of Gil Evans and Maria Schneider. It struck me as startlingly impressive, as did the high level of musicianship in the group. The impression stayed with me, and not only because every member of Clausen’s Split Stream Big Band was a teenager, still in high school.

  I was poking around Seattle, in the spring of 2010, to report a story about the city’s conspicuously healthy jazz scene. Going in, I already knew that educational institutions were an anchor of that scene, as well as an engine pumping out promising young talent year after year. Most of the players in Clausen’s band were classmates at Roosevelt High School, near the University District. A few others, including Mulherkar, hailed from Garfield High School, closer to downtown. Both schools were perennial favorites at the Essentially Ellington High School Jazz Band Competition, a popular nationwide program run by Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York; over the previous decade, Roosevelt and Garfield had won first place a combined seven times.

  Dropping in on band practice at both schools provided a study in contrasts and a reminder of best practices. Each program took its jazz division seriously—“The big band programs here are kind of like high-school football in Texas,” said one local musician, a Garfield alum—and the students were focused even as they jostled and joked their way through rehearsals. At Roosevelt, Scott Brown led the band with a careful attunement to the details, often pausing to tinker with the mechanics of a tricky passage. Clarence Acox, the veteran bandleader at Garfield, exuded a more booming authority, like a wrestling coach.

  For young musicians in Seattle, this was all part of a visible, accessible pathway to the music. “My babysitters were in the Garfield High School jazz ensemble,” Mulherkar told me. “I would watch them play and I knew I wanted to do that, from when I was really, really little.” Before reaching Garfield High, he passed through nearby Washington Middle School, encountering a legendary jazz educator named Robert Knatt. “He was like a drill sergeant,” Mulherkar said admiringly. “He was on everyone’s case about learning their scales. He would yell at you, scare you to death, but he motivated people more than anyone I’ve ever seen.”6

  The Essentially Ellington Competition was held a month after my Seattle visit, at Frederick P. Rose Hall in Manhattan. Garfield and Roosevelt were two of thirteen bands in the running, each of which played several Duke Ellington charts for a panel of judges that included Marsalis. At one point, in between Garfield’s performance and the announcement of the three schools moving on to the finals, Mulherkar slipped away to audition up the street at the Juilliard School.

  Later that evening the three finalists performed, Garfield among them. During a piece called “The Shepherd,” Marsalis joined as a featured soloist, and Mulherkar stood beside him, trading smartly coiled barbs and plunger-muted whinnies. The young man’s composure earned him a stagy glare from Marsalis, some encouraging hollers from the hall, and finally a standing ovation. He received the Ella Fitzgerald Outstanding Soloist Award, the highest individual honor in the competition, and Garfield took first prize. (Clausen won a nod for outstanding trombone.)

  Mulherkar and Clausen both attended Juilliard, receiving some of the most intensive classroom tutelage available to a young jazz musician. They also fell into life in New York, connecting with a range of musicians on the scene. But when I next heard from them, they were playing music with two more old high-school pals: Zubin Hensler, a trumpeter, and Willem de Koch, the trombonist I’d seen at Café Racer.

  These four musicians had formed an improvising brass quartet called the Westerlies. Their debut album—Wish the Children Would Come on Home, released on Songlines in 2014—featured a dozen deftly reframed compositions by a former mentor back home, the keyboardist and composer Wayne Horvitz. (He’d moved to Seattle in 1988, after leaving his initial mark at the Knitting Factory.) A track called “The Band with Muddy,” from the Otis Spann Suite, was a tour de force of dynamics and breath control, with Mulherkar nailing a perilous series of pirouettes originally scored for flute or violins. Another piece, “Waltz from Woman of Tokyo,” had the trombones creating a hypnotic phase effect, in an echo of postminimalist pianism.

  The Westerlies didn’t sound like a jazz ensemble per se, but neither did they resemble a conventional brass quartet. Their arrangements, all by group members, were technically demanding and daringly inventive—and their original compositions, captured on a self-titled double album in 2016, showed a highly sophisticated group mind. They played the Newport Jazz Festival that year, on the smallest stage but to a packed house, and the roughly hourlong performance was burbling and kinetic, with a youthful spirit of possibility. During an episodic invention called “So So Shy,” by Hensler, a riveting, smeary solo by Mulherkar was backed by an odd textural effect: the others had wrapped aluminum foil around the bells of their horns. (This was novel, but done with such expressive musical effect that it didn’t scan as novelty.)

 
By 2017, the Westerlies had expanded their profile through savvy collaboration. The prominent Malian guitarist and vocalist Vieux Farka Touré had already featured the group on a track of his album Touristes. Now Dave Douglas tapped the ensemble for an album called Little Giant Still Life, inspired by the American artist Stuart Davis and also featuring the drummer Anwar Marshall. The Westerlies also went on tour with the prominent indie-folk band Fleet Foxes, playing backing arrangements as well as an opening set. The entrance music for Fleet Foxes during the tour was “A Nearer Sun,” a Mulherkar composition with the bucolic solemnity of an Aaron Copland prelude.

  To some extent the trajectories of Clausen and Mulherkar, from the moment I first heard them in a Seattle coffee shop, feel exceptional: there isn’t another group in improvised music that sounds precisely like the Westerlies, for one thing. And yet their experience cycling through the jazz educational system—and their shrewdly selective actions around that system—illuminate a contemporary reality. Jazz education was integral to their foundation, in a way that might have seemed more unusual a generation or two ago. They’re shining products of a formalized training arc that has taken years to lock into place, and years more to allow for such permissive liberties.

  * * *

  —

  When Clausen and Mulherkar both enrolled at Juilliard in 2010, its Jazz Studies department wasn’t yet a decade old. It had been designed as an elite preprofessional program, with a student body of just eighteen musicians, and a hands-on faculty of notable jazz musicians, such as the pianist Frank Kimbrough. By contrast, Miles Davis went to Juilliard in the 1940s—partly as a concession to his parents and partly to be close to the action in New York at the time. He later characterized the classical program at Juilliard as valuable in certain technical and compositional respects, but otherwise stifling: “The shit they was talking about was too white for me.”7

  The school wasn’t really all that different when Marsalis dropped out of Juilliard in the late seventies, though he was more receptive to the premise of European classical instruction. Marsalis later became the director of Jazz Studies at Juilliard—in the summer of 2014, just after Clausen and Mulherkar graduated with their bachelor’s degrees.

  During the first major boom in conservatory jazz programs, in the 1970s and ’80s, a common complaint among older musicians was that the schools merely turned out imitators: eager young players with basic proficiency and some solid book learning but nothing resembling an original voice. The implicit (or, at times, explicit) comparison was to a more heroic jazz generation that willed itself into being, learning the music as an indomitably creative folk art. (To wit, the indelible first line of Clark Terry’s autobiography: “I made my first trumpet with scraps from a junkyard.”)8

  There was some truth in this critique, which had a lot to do with methods of instruction. It also reflected the ways in which a school can be an echo chamber, the sort of place where a consensus is unwittingly formed. At one point in the seventies, it was common to hear skeptics complaining about “Coltrane clones,” in the same way that the fifties produced a proliferation of wannabe Charlie Parkers. By the eighties, the frame of reference had largely shifted—to Michael Brecker, the ingenious, astonishingly proficient tenor and soprano saxophonist who sheathed Coltrane’s style in a layer of Teflon. Sticking with the tenor saxophone as a case study, you could have ducked into almost any jazz school in the nineties and heard an emulation of either Chris Potter, who embodies the next step after Brecker, or Mark Turner, whose innovation set different parameters: a sleeker line, a lighter sound, a more labyrinthine path, a more introspective tone.

  Turner’s influence in the academy turned out to be nearly overwhelming, as some students of his style have observed—none more insightfully than the saxophonist Kevin Sun, in an article titled “Every Single Tree in the Forest: Mark Turner as Seen by His Peers, Part One.” Sun includes several amusing vignettes, including one from Boston circa the fall of 1998, involving a young man who bought an album from the Tower Records at the corner of Newbury Street and Massachusetts Avenue.

  The next day, the same young man, a Berklee freshman saxophonist from Houston named Walter Smith III, starts picking out melodies by ear from his new acquisition: In This World, Mark Turner’s second release for Warner Brothers. A few hours later, Smith steps out into the hall to clear his ears. He pauses for a moment when he realizes he is still hearing fragments of songs from the album in his head, and then realizes the sounds aren’t in his head; they’re seeping out from practice rooms throughout the entire floor.9

  Kurt Rosenwinkel, one of Turner’s closest peers at Berklee and beyond, offered a similar testimonial in the same publication: “A lot of people used to gather outside his practice room at various times and just listen to him. He would be in there ten hours a day, usually.”10

  There’s no question that Turner’s style has reverberated farther, as a result of obsessive emulation in the conservatory, than it would have simply out in the world. (This is no slight to his originality, his industriousness, or his genius, all of which are secure.) Melissa Aldana, a tenor saxophonist born in 1988, not long after Turner himself arrived at Berklee, asserted that “Mark is as important to my generation as Michael Brecker or Coltrane or Sonny Rollins or Coleman Hawkins were to generations before me.”11

  What’s different about Aldana’s generation, to state the obvious, is that the entire spectrum of those influences, from Hawkins to Turner, is available as a resource. Today’s aspiring player has a choice of school programs, method and theory books, videos, and transcriptions. This profusion of information—compounded by the endless epiphanies and distractions of the Internet—produces quite a different formative landscape than the one that faced jazz musicians in an earlier age.

  Bill Pierce, chair of the woodwinds department at Berklee, is one of many musicians I’ve heard describe this situation with a resigned ambivalence. “You can learn every Coltrane solo there is without ever listening to a record,” he told me in his office in Boston. “I’m not saying that’s a good thing. But it’s there. The musicianship, on a purely technical level, is accessible to anyone who wants to pursue it.”12

  Pierce had his most formative professional experience with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, in the same world-beating edition that showcased a young Wynton Marsalis. The Jazz Messengers famously set a gold standard for apprenticeship in the music, earning a reputation as the ultimate finishing school. The guildlike process by which young musicians absorb lessons from their elders, upheld by Blakey and the singer Betty Carter, among others, was seen as a key path to success.

  Then came the 1990s, and the deaths of Blakey, Carter, and Miles Davis, among other mentor-bandleaders. Due to market forces, fewer jazz musicians were finding it possible to keep a working band on payroll. But the jazz ecology abhors a vacuum, and there are still bright young musicians in need of counsel. “The apprenticeship model doesn’t exist in the way that it once did,” Pierce told me at Berklee. “So it’s being incubated in institutions.”13

  Conservatories like the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music now take pains to encourage a mentorship dynamic among their faculty, an effort that hasn’t gone unnoticed by those deciding where to apply or which scholarship to accept. Most serious high-school musicians study the faculty at the prospective college music programs: “That’s my highest priority, who’s the faculty there,” a senior at Houston’s High School for the Performing and Visual Arts told me in the school library one afternoon.

  In Seattle, musicians as gifted as the Westerlies could be trusted to find their way to the independent sage Wayne Horvitz—but had they stayed put rather than heading east, they might have also discovered mentors at the Cornish College of the Arts, which has a deep connection to the avant-garde, or the University of Washington, whose Jazz Studies department is headed by Cuong Vu, a trumpeter, electronic musician, and composer who grew up in Seat
tle and returned after carving out a career in and beyond New York’s downtown scene.

  A fascinating wrinkle in this system was the eventual inclusion of some mentors from outside the usual framework for jazz education. Ethan Iverson, a true jazz autodidact, joined the faculty at the New England Conservatory in 2016, formalizing a process of instruction that he’d been carrying out, much more informally, in salonlike master classes. And Vijay Iyer, whose entire mentorship experience occurred outside the conservatory, brought a specific perspective to the table when he became the director of the Banff International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music in Canada, and then a tenured professor at Harvard, in partnership with the NEC.

  “There’s a lot about music, especially improvisational music, that you learn in the course of performance and nowhere else,” Iyer said. “Before this hardened into a tradition—which is pretty recent, when you think about it—there was a sense of people creating their own reality. And if you access the right people, that’s still the case.”14

  * * *

  —

  “The reason for this book is quite simple,” wrote Marshall Stearns in The Story of Jazz. “More people in the United States listen to and enjoy jazz or near-jazz than any other music. Jazz is of tremendous importance for its quantity alone.” Stearns, a professor of English at Hunter College, penned this passage in June of 1956, a few weeks before chairing a panel called “Jazz as Communication” at the Newport Jazz Festival. The panel preceded by a day Duke Ellington’s Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue, an amen chorus for the professor’s claim. More than half a century later, his words testify to a vanished culture, as impossible to recapture as the fresh jolt of Paul Gonsalves’s twenty-seven-chorus tenor solo. But The Story of Jazz remains relevant, part of the founding literature of an interdisciplinary field of academic jazz studies, which has had many implications for a music no longer served by popular appeal.