Excerpts
Author’s Note
Author’s Note
I assumed, as an avid reader and writer, that the best histories were told after a life had already been lived. If you read most jazz books, you would assume the same. Shortly after I began writing this book, I realized that I either had to change my perspective or my chosen genre. I now believe that some observations of the human experience are best made by taking ones own life and setting it to the soundtrack of others. Age is but a number to mark the time; experience is the true reality.
I guess you would say that I was one of the chosen ones. My experience in this life began when my parents chose to raise me on jazz…modern jazz to be exact. To go into even more detail, Pat Metheny was pretty much the “religious” icon in my house. I knew no different. Later on, I chose trumpet as my personal instrument of study and made it my life. By the time I left home to begin college, jazz had already infused every fiber of my being. Yet four weeks into my freshman year at the University of North Florida, I crashed and burned. I felt as if jazz had gone stale. Of course, this was before the iPod generation, genius bars and MP3 sharing. I had to actually go to a record store to buy and discover new recordings.
Jazz, it seemed, had failed me. It was mentally exhausting. Even the albums I found the most solace in, such as Kind of Blue, were suffocating my trained ears. At that point in time, my experiences alone were not enough to carry me through this depression. While awaiting my college band rehearsal one afternoon, another band was finishing up their time in the room. Their director called one last song. A pianist by the name of Oscar Perez, who is now in this book, began to paint a picture through the opening lines of this piece. It showed me a place I knew I had to find but had never seen. I found myself captured amidst a wordless poem. Suddenly I felt I could move on. This isn’t to say I was completely changed, or my depression was permanently lifted, but it offered a glimpse into a side of the one art form I thought I knew that I hadn’t seen before.
The tune: Last Season by, Maria Schneider. In many ways, Maria opened my ears to music again. Subtle colors and textures that are present in her music were abundant and they fed my need for change. She offered a new dialect of the language and forced me to give up my preconceived notions of the art ceasing to exist in modern times. I had to tell everyone and anyone who would listen about what I had heard.
Since that day, I’ve looked at jazz in a different light. I’ve had to seek out music that suits my ears and there’s plenty of it. Yet if someone had not shown me that that side of music existed how would I have known to find it? Too many in our technologically advanced culture, I believe, see and hear jazz as I once did. This, I believe, is where we are going wrong as a culture. Somewhere along the way, people mistook their notions of jazz for background noise. We dismissed jazz as what we heard one day in one place or what others told us it was. We’ve heralded the past as if it’s the only way to go when it comes to this music. But this isn’t what jazz is. Jazz is essentially the equivalent to musical story telling. Jazz tells the story about the life we’re living right this very second. The music changes with the moment and if you hold onto its past, it has already passed you by.
This book is about that moment; in time played out by the very best accessible, prolific artists that are enriching our lives. If we don’t, as a culture take the time to listen to this moment in this art, we’re going to miss out on it too.
Throughout the past year, I learned a lot by taking time to hear their stories. Although my professional career as a musician didn’t last much past seven or eight years after college, I know what musicians do day in and day out, the hours spent in practice rooms, the odd hours of the night when the actual work gets done, the lobby calls and the times when you wish that silence would take over and calm you down.
I am also, by far, not the first one to have taken down an oral history of jazz. Although I am certainly continuing the tradition, I believe my time as a musician has allowed me camaraderie with the players and access to the place in their minds that only musicians know to go. Other writers have chased down only the most notable voices among the crowd, I chose to give a broader perspective on the scene. Many of the artists included in these pages are those who live in your community. Some have won major awards such as Grammy awards or NEA Grants. Some musicians were simply chosen on their merit and sheer talent-filled ambition. But each of them brought a voice to the table that needed to be heard.
Of course, many were excluded and I’m sure there are those of you who are questioning their exclusion. I can only answer that there will never, ever be enough pages or time to include every important player out there. It’s a big community and admittedly, this book barely scratches the surface. I hope the positive effects of spotlighting the artists who are in these pages outweigh the negative effects of the unfortunate but inevitable omission. Those that were interviewed but unfortunately omitted from the manuscript will be included on our website for the book (www.newfaceofjazz.com) in addition to the revolving door of reviews and jazz industry news.
As for those that were included, they offered a side of themselves that is rarely seen in method books, trade magazines or pared down critiques. They spoke of their fears, hopes, challenges and reasons for living. Some interviews took ten minutes, others I spent up to six or seven hours with either in a cafe, their homes or on the phone, praying my battery didn’t die while we spoke. More than a few of them said they rarely were asked who they were. Some of them ended in tears but all of them had laughter peppered throughout as if they’d been granted the title of a seasoned professional in the emotion of joy. Yet the recurring theme that surfaced in over four hundred of the interviews over nine months, across racial, financial, generational and geographical, boundaries was that their needs, were the exact same.
The EXACT same.
They’ve placed a dire call for help, a plea for a very basic human connection. They want for others to listen and reach out to them and hear what they are doing. It’s much easier, in this culture, to stay complacent in our ways. But jazz is a contradiction to that lifestyle. It never stays the same. It reflects the here and now. It’s part of us. Although we’ve all seen and heard the past, I can guarantee that jazz is vastly different now. It’s a new face. Its tradition has sewn its lines in the wrinkle of time while moving ahead and forging a path of its own. And although its face may have changed, the accompanying melody has been sung since the beginning of time. Give jazz a second glance, another listen, another chance and you too will see that it’s the soundtrack we’re all missing in our lives.
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