ITG 2001 Conference

Moderator and contributor to the discussion, Harbison has been associated with Jamey Abersold’s Summer Jazz Workshops and is associate professor of jazz studies at Indian University. He has authored Technical Studies for the Modern Trumpet and Twenty Authentic Bebop Solos and currently performs with his own quartet and a number of other groups. Much of the teaching and learning of the jazz idiom centers on transcribing solos of great artists and committing them to memory, yet Harbison freely admits that he “was not a fan of transcribing.”

For Harbison, jazz is internalized by listening to the music of others. When a person learns a particular solo, there occurs an ownership of that music which helps the individual to assemble the vocabulary of the art. Jazz, like any language, is first acquired from others. Besides learning from the masters of this type of language, those who wish to participate in the conversation will have to use an additional aid, the piano. This instrument proves invaluable in learning chords, the structures of music similar to the grammar of language as it follows a number of complex rules. Harbison advises jazz enthusiasts to work at the piano the same as they work at the horn. In this way the individual can take a melody and play it each time in a more personalized way.

Ingrid Jensen at twenty-five became the jazz trumpet professor at Austria’s Bruckner Conservatory. Originally influenced by Louis Armstrong and Woody Shaw, Jensen has followed her own path of development leading her to New York City. To Jensen, the importance of playing is to ultimately find one’s own voice in the musical expression. As a child she learned many standards since her mother was a pianist who enjoyed playing them. Like other panelists, she agrees that jazz should be approached as a feeling in interpreting a melody. She recommends that everyone play along when she teaches and notes that the player should not care what he or she sounds like. The important point is to be engaged in the process and not to worry about what may come along as a mistake. Equally important is to play along and get the feeling of the music and the very sound of it. Anyone wishing to play jazz will have to focus on the sound and should learn to sing the part as well as play it on the horn. Jensen emphasizes the music of jazz and not the playing of exercises, scales, and long tones. After all, she indicates, the reason to pick up the horn is to make music. Why not start the practice, she asks, by making music from the beginning of any session.

Toru, “Tiger,” Okoshi took up the trumpet after hearing Louis Armstrong and has since devoted himself to jazz. Okoshi’s emphasis lies in the notion that simply copying another artist is not playing jazz. To his way of thinking, transcribing solos should not be done as a matter of sheer convenience. He emphasizes the importance of singing and the playing of the song with only the fingers on the valves.

Eddie Severn, lead trumpet with the Scottish National Orchestra, became enamored with jazz upon hearing Maynard Ferguson and Woody Shaw. He notes that in England teaching jazz means teaching students to overcome their musical inhibitions. He encourages students to get into composing because trumpet players are so frequently struggling with the physical demands of the instrument that the actual music becomes a casualty of practicing technical exercises.

Chase Sanborn, a jazz artist from Great Britain, also indicated that jazz is an oral art and not something that can be confined to book learning. That is what makes jazz difficult. But what further makes this American music difficult is that an individual can be practicing all the right exercises and yet still not have a sense that he or she is making progress in the idiomatic musical expression called jazz. Listening to a tune and then playing it by ear is crucial to learning to play jazz. No amount of book learning can replace this important aspect of jazz language. In this sense, to listen attentively and repeat the language is to speak the language and ultimately create new language. Sanborn starts his students with the melody. In an ironic change of the cliché that less is more, Sanborn maintains that more is less, that students should not try to do too much, and so in attempting to do more they create less in the way of musical improvisation.

Mike Vax is well known for his many recordings with such jazz legends as Stan Kenton, Clark Terry, Buddy DeFranco, and a host of others too numerous to mention. Like his colleagues, Vax notes the importance of listening. He mentioned that when he was a child, people would literally watch the radio as they listened to the music. He also recalled for the audience that as a child of seven or eight he used to go to his grandfather’s house and listen to entire operas. He initially wanted to be a classical trumpeter, but one day heard Stan Kenton’s band and decided that jazz was the music he wanted to play. He suggests that playing along with recordings of singers is one way to learn the rudiments of how to play jazz. It is also important to memorize as many tunes as possible, and in doing so the student of jazz will learn that many bear a startling similarity.

ITG members present at this panel session benefited from the variety and quality of the panel’s comments. What was particularly interesting was how common threads wove their way through each individual’s observations.