The Magnificent Terry Waldo: This is Ragtime

November annually brings home to Columbus, Ohio the greatest living interpreter of ragtime and early jazz piano, Terry Waldo. Waldo grew up here and graduated from Ohio State. Waldo's many friends celebrate his birthday on Thanksgiving eve at Becky Ogden's Bungalow Jazz concert series. It's a tradition held as dear as the feast day itself, especially since the guests get the gifts at the honoree's expense of effort. The consummate entertainer, Waldo plays, sings, tells bawdy jokes, and even takes requests (within limits: Not Take the A Train: "It would be wasted on my talents," he suggests.) A one-man guardian of the vaudeville flame, Waldo declares himself willing to let the superficial reign, to make people happy, to have fun. 

Terry Waldo at his birthday concert, November
2013, Bungalow Jazz, Columbus, Ohio.
Photo by James Loeffler.

A Waldo performance is the delight that a sunburn must be to a Laplander in December. But tap your toes and laugh your head off, if you're paying attention to the music, you'll be astounded to find that he plays ragtime with a power one rarely ascribes to what we think of a merely a cheerful music. Waldo interprets and improvises from a depth of understanding few access. Protege of Eubie Blake for the last fifteen years of the great composer's life, Waldo began even in his teens to pursue this music and to sit in with the generation that invented it. He's become the world's premier performer and scholar of the music on the basis of experience-based understanding.

Here's Waldo's opening from November's birthday concert, "The Pearl," by Jelly Roll Morton:                  

Acute timing, articulation, and improvisation all leap out from this and all Waldo's performances, the latter being central to his understanding of the music. Over the years, he reports, he's been dragged into "pissing contests" with musicians for whom playing ragtime is a matter of copying old records. "It's not jazz," says Waldo. "You're always doomed to failure. If you're copying records note-for-note, musicians on the stand aren't listening to each other: It's not alive. I get into a lot of shit about that," he confesses. "My recordings are originals. Jelly Roll Morton wouldn't have done a tune the same way twice." How many ways has Waldo played Eubie Blake's "Troublesome Ivories?"

Waldo's education in ragtime and traditional jazz is the result of curiosity and the opportunities of a great scene in Columbus and Dayton. When he was in high school and college in the early '60s, he benefited from the legacy of the '40s traditional revival. He knew the great Johnny Ulrich, who played piano with one hand and trumpet with the other, who had played with Bobby Hackett and did Jackie Gleason's arrangements. He heard and learned from Gene Mayle and the Dixieland Rhythm Kings, the Gin Bottle Seven, and trombonist Pee Wee Hunt, who taught him banjo. He founded his own band, the Fungus Five, in 1963, as a high school student, and a star was born. Or, at least, an indomitable artist was.

Selection of Waldo's releases, including 26-hour Public
Radio series, "This is Ragtime." Photo by James Loeffler.

During his student summers, Waldo played in a banjo band at the Red Garter in the French Quarter of New Orleans and got to know musicians still living from the original days of ragtime and New Orleans jazz. He worked in San Francisco during the '70s Dixieland revival, this time as a tuba player at Turk Murphy's club as a member of Earthquake McGoon's band.

In short, Waldo learned his art from the ground up as a young man, playing with and learning from the first generation men (and women—Alberta Hunter) who made his music. 

Although Waldo was both a band member and leader (his bands included the Ralph Emerson Waldo Jazz Band, Waldo's Ragtime Orchestra, and his Gutbucket Syncopators, which recorded several great CDs), he reminds us that ragtime is principally piano music. It was offered as sheet music; it's longer form than jazz; and compared to jazz band music of the Dixieland era, it's very complex harmonically. 

Illustration from This is Ragtime by Terry Waldo, Jazz at Lincoln
Center Library Editions, 2009. Wlado's High Society Stompers
with Sandra Day O'Connor on washboard.

Many casual listeners enjoy ragtime thinking it essentially uniform and predictable. But hearing Waldo play James P. Johnson's "Carolina Shout," you can hear how the music veers among keys in both hands, changing colors crazily, rushing tempos, and making the listener stagger to keep up. We can tap our feet to it, but ultimately we have to just surrender to the exciting succession of tremblers that mark its irregular course. This goes back to interpretation and improvisation. While lots of sheet music exists for Ragtime tunes, as Wynton Marsalis points out in the introduction to Waldo's book, This is Ragtime, "Many times what you write is so much less than you can play."

During our evening with Waldo, it was interesting to hear him distinguish between band and piano music when a request was made for him to play the Lil Hardin delight, "Struttin' with Some Barbecue," a Dixieland band favorite. The music is from his period, but he's a ragtime pianist, something quite different: Hear Waldo's reaction to this request. His brief performance could convince someone unacquainted with the tune that it had been a piano rag all along. 

Waldo greets fans at Bungalow Jazz. Photo by James Loeffler.

Waldo's first real encounter with Eubie Blake  was at the 1970 St. Louis Ragtime Festival. he played Blake's formidable "Charleston Rag." Afterwards, when Blake took the stage, he declared to the crowd, "This man Terry Waldo played my 'Charleston Rag;' if he'd have been a woman, I'd have married him." 

A friendship was formed that resulted first in Waldo's arranging a tour for Blake of colleges in central Ohio (Ohio State declined the pleasure). Eventually, Waldo transcribed most of Blake's music and resided with Eubie and Marion for several years as student and assistant. Waldo takes amused—but very sincere—pleasure in Blake's having referred to him as his "ofay son."

In this video of Eubie Blake himself playing "Charleston Rag," one is reminded of two aspects of ragtime that are always shine from Waldo's performances. First is that, for all the fun, it is cerebral music. The rhythmic and harmonic intricacies—What work it must be to transcribe a performance!—are great. Glad as it makes us feel, there is nothing simple about it, certainly in conception. The other thing is that despite its musical demands, ragtime is always presented lightly, as an amusement for the performer and audience alike. Eubie Blake puts himself through his paces, but not without intermittent jokes about his ability to recollect the tune.

Waldo's material is accessible and engaging: "I see it as show biz." He sees himself as actively in the vaudeville tradition because even Dixieland jazz bands played vaudeville. When they did, they played no more than fifteen-minute sets with maybe five tunes per set, including drumstick showmanship and visual gags. It would be part of a larger entertainment with "singers, jugglers, comedians, an unnatural sex act—whatever made it work." 

Terry Waldo's history of ragtime and early jazz piano.

So while he is the consummate interpreter and teacher about ragtime and early jazz piano, Waldo also does television and, radio, produces musicals and is, of course, a composer in the ragtime and vaudeville veins. No show is without his own songs, always bawdy or satirical with a stinging political or social edge. After performing on request Tom Lehrer's "Vatican Rag" last month, he followed up with his own, "Let's Pray Against Someone." It's fun, but fun is also essential to the tradition.

"I do know vaudeville, and I act in my shows. Eubie was a great actor and performer," Waldo told me. "As a Black actor, he was like a boxer: You go out and give 'em everything you've got—Bam bam, no apologies, you don't be messing around! You have to have a sense of humor: Give them comedy; give them novelty songs: 'I like bananas because the have no bones.'"

For these reasons, Waldo the entertainer, the vaudevillian, takes exception to many existing presentations of ragtime, especially to people who record hour-long "archival" CDs with no breaks, simply one tune after another without suffusing any essential levity to keep it various and interesting.

Terry Waldo's knowledge about ragtime is the result of unbridled, lifelong curiosity, pursued since his 'teens. He's plunged into any opportunity he could find or create for his whole life. His book about ragtime is only one form in which he has transmitted his knowledge about early jazz. His National Public Radio series is available through his website. He has also recorded lectures for Jazz at Lincoln Center, which are available on YouTube. In these videos we can appreciate the entertainer, but we primarily see the excellent pedagogue who knows his material so deeply that he needs no recourse to academic or obfuscatory language to impart either facts or enthusiasm to his audience. He assumes we are interested and listening: He makes it fun: Terry Waldo Discusses Ragtime.  Here you can hear his own performance of the "Charleston Rag" as well as Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag." 

Terry Waldo's an artist I admire because the depth of his knowledge is based on his experience of his art—he understands it from the ground up, through his ears and muscle memory, through observation and conversation, trial and error. I also respect Waldo's lover-like commitment to what he knows and does. "I'm a dinosaur," he once told me. The revival of the '70s is long gone and the people who are interested in playing traditional jazz come through academic historical interest to a music of guts and laughter. I'll show up to his party, though, as long as it lasts, just to "come and hear." 

DeWitt, DiCenzo, and Scott: This is Improvisation

Derek DiCenzo, Dave DeWitt, Aaron Scott

Dave DeWitt, piano. Derek DiCenzo, bass. Aaron Scott, drums. This jazz trio has been improvising around Columbus since the late '80s. Jazz; improvisation. Inseparable, right?

Yes and no. There's improvisation...and then there's improvisation.When a jazz ensemble begins a tune, they establish the melody first. Usually it's a widely recognized standard song from a great composer of the early-to-mid twentieth century, like George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, or Jule Styne; songs you know, like "There Will Never Be Another You," "[Take the] A-Train," or "Skylark." Or, it may be a jazz tune derived directly from one of those great, standard songs. 

After the tune's first chorus is set down, the musicians trade improvised solos based on the progression of chords used in the melody. By "improvised," we mean, generally, that they wing it. Their muscle memory and their ear knowledge allow them spontaneously to invent variations on the tune while adhering to the structures that tie those variations, however bold or soaring, to the melody.

The ideas of improvisation, spontaneity, and uniqueness in jazz intertwine. But if a group has two or three gigs a week, how can those improvised solos continue to be genuinely spontaneous night after night? Isn't it inevitable that the musicians will develop "licks" or patterns they like, feel comfortable with, or wish to continue exploring? Does spontaneity have to imply uniqueness, the result of continual reinvention? Is non-repetition even a possibility for musical creativity? Wouldn't that be to invoke a god-like standard of conceptual fertility?

We who follow DeWitt, DiCenzo, and Scott—variously appearing as the ADD Trio, TRio, Aaron Scott Trio, Derek DiCenzo, or Dave DeWitt Trio—can make it our week's work to attend the two or three gigs that hard-working Scott books for them. We can hear them play "Moon River" many times over. So one might assume that sooner or later, we'd start to pay more attention to our drinks than to repertory we'd presumably heard before.

Dave DeWitt. Author photo.

This emphatically doesn't happen. Every performance by this trio starts in a galaxy far, far away, from which we witness the emergence of a new star. We in the audience arrive as musical newborns. We struggle even to grasp the tune, for even the musicians aren't sure, as they set out, where they are headed, let alone in what key. These are jazz improvisers in the radical sense. 

The trio is the house band for Becky Ogden's Jazz Bungalow. On November 4th they opened the first set for a Jazz Brunch with the following set up by Dave DeWitt on the piano. Put yourself in the shoes of the bassist and drummer, preparing yourself for the tune emerging HERE. What is it? I still don't know. Clearly, the first premises of the music are trust and anticipation.

Making music that coalesces into standard tunes, the trio depends on pianist DeWitt to let his hands and imagination wend their ways through rhythmic thickets and chordal tides for as long as it takes DiCenzo and Scott—and DeWitt himself—to figure out what they are playing. When everything falls together (it can take the audience even longer to figure out what the tune is), the band surges, often beyond the information of the moment. The ambiguous, novel puzzle of DeWitt's question—the antithesis of the normal "statement"—makes each performance of the same tune a unique event for musicians and listeners alike. Given this device the trio has chosen for setting up each tune, there simply is no possibility of repetition. As you watch as well as listen, you can see these guys literally sweating to pull it off; you can see and hear the hits and misses, the facial telegraphing of the hits and misses, the pleasure, panic, and pains of improvisation. And it is good.

I love this antic, all-out, seven-and-a-half-minute performance of a tune I didn't identify until several minutes along, the name of which you'll find with the following YouTube of its simple version. This tune gives ADD at its best: The statement-as-question, the headlong playing, the unity on-the-fly. I've decided not to excerpt this or the following tunes. I simply don't know how to interrupt such driving music, and my will to try is weak. So HERE it is. You can compare it to a simple rendition, the perfect material for a "tune with variations," copied from YouTube HERE.

Derek DiCenzo. Author photo.

The music this ensemble makes is molten, always hot and taking shape, but never solidified into a state of rest, even up to the last second. Only in retrospect can the listener, like the musicians, begin to analyze what happened; only when there's time to exhale and laugh off the tension can anyone begin sorting through all the musical quotations, key changes, and collective exhibition of forms, styles, and rhythms of Western music.

The gigs that this trio play are divided into sets. Unlike others', though, the sets are not exactly divided into tunes separated by time during which the crowd applauds and the musicians reset. Usually, there is barely a break between one number and the next. DeWitt is loath to let the energy lapse and keeps his hands on the keyboard, roiling the notes until the next tune unravels itself. In some groups, this would be the means of making a medley of tunes, but that's never what DeWitt is setting up. For these guys, the performance unit is the set, not the tune, so their energy is wave-like, increasing in pressure throughout the hour. The lack of space between the tunes gives the listener the heady sense of riding a wave that is gaining height and force until it exhausts itself in a crash—as these musicians literally come close  to doing by set's end.

To illustrate the persistence and push of a performance, on this 8-1/2 minute sample is the closing of "On Green Dolphin Street" and the full performance of the Latin classic, "Fungi Mama." Listen HERE.

How do DeWitt, DiCenzo, and Scott generate music of such size, energy, and originality? For one thing, by being nonpareil musicians. For another, by being playmates. One has a sense of them as being in an eternal clubhouse: At one minute they're the chess nerds, and the next they are covered in grease, taking apart car engines.

Aaron Scott. Author photo.

Scott is unstoppable both as drummer and impresario: He will get work for his phenomenal group, and he does, even in  tight times. He's been booking since his twenties, when he returned to town from North Texas State where he went on scholarship. Even then he began booking for himself and for the city's top jazz musicians with whom he was playing, including his father, pianist Bob Allen. Booking, and playing, Scott was also teaching at Columbus Percussion Center and enrolled at Capital University to complete his degree. He's a man whose excellence on his instrument is paralleled by his knowledge of talent and determination that it will not go empty-handed. He will also not let talent go without attracting it to his own.

DeWitt and DiCenzo are madmen; naturals, whose music wells up from inner springs. Both are self-taught musical polymaths. 

I first knew the mercurial DeWitt as a premier bassist when I came to Columbus ten years ago, and was surprised when I first heard him on the keyboards, making astonishing music. Yet, as it seems, many know him primarily as a drummer. DeWitt explains that he began playing piano at age 3, even before his musician father knew that he could; his parents thought he had been simply pecking at the instrument in the garage. He confesses to a lifelong "love/hate relationship" with piano, the hate side of which led him to give it up in his teens and to take up drums, again on his own.

DeWitt returned to piano for a decade but in his mid-thirties (during the '80s), he turned to the string bass. "I was seldom happy with the bassists I played with, so I decided I'd do it myself," he grins. "I really liked it. I like being in the middle of the rhythm section."

Dave DeWitt. Author photo.

Indeed, the relationship between piano and bass in this trio is arresting, for the two instruments occupy virtually equal positions—DeWitt cites the relationship between pianist Bill Evans and bassist Scott LaFaro as an admirable example. Although the piano "leads" in the sense of insuring that each tune becomes the strand picked from the knot, this is not at all a "piano trio." Actually, it's not a trio led by any voice: It's a three-part conversation. Even the pianist plays all three instruments.

As does the bassist. Derek DiCenzo, too, like his colleagues, has supported himself by his music in Columbus since the '80s. He, too, is largely self-taught. He reads music, as DeWitt does not, but he makes it clear that he is in another world from the great "technicians" of conservatory and college with whom he often plays in the Columbus Jazz Orchestra and on tours. 

I originally identified DiCenzo with guitar and electric bass. Then I heard him on upright bass, as in this group. But these are just the start: He also gigs on piano, Hammond B3 organ, drums, steel drums, and accordion. On special occasions, he can be convinced to bring and play his theremin.

Derek DiCenzo. Author photo.

On the occasion of this recording, the second of two sets ended with the musicians literally close to physical collapse, yet in a nervous state of exhausted euphoria. Scott threw down his sticks, laughing to DiCenzo, of the last tune, "All the Things You Are," "Man! We were swinging by the seat of our pants!" DiCenzo responded incredulously, "Where are the beats? What am I doing up here? This is crazy stuff!" Laughing, "You'd think we'd rehearse or something!"

Yet when I talked with DiCenzo a few minutes later, he assured me that of all the work he does, playing almost daily, this is "what makes me feel like a great musician." As he explains this, I know exactly what he means, because I've heard everything. He says that, "It's not just filling up the space with notes. It's crazily fresh," because the three of them have "a perfect hook-up" that allows "great accidents to happen." And, best of all, it is the most basic form of improvisation, the complete opposite of playing from scored music. "You don't practice at home to go play the same notes that you practiced. The music happens. I love it. It's unlike anything else." He nails his words with the hammer of his voice.

DiCenzo, Scott, and DeWitt play with love and abandon. They joke about calling themselves the ADD Trio (for Aaron, Derek and Dave) with the implications ("attention deficit disorder") of frantic, turn-on-a-dime energy. Maybe, given that each member is absolutely crucial to the existence of the music they make, they should try something like The Codependents, or Dave DeWitt and the Enablers. 

The intensity of their abandoned playing—the all out, sweaty, no-breaks and no-brakes leap—does indeed make me marvel at the energy they generate for work that leaves them at the end both exhausted and possessed. Coming down from a session like this would seem to be as difficult as playing it; the consequences of returning to earth after such a euphoria of ideas, adrenaline, and fiery creativity could require as much attention, balance, and management as making the music itself.

Those of us on the audience side of jazz enjoy the privilege of sitting at the table, knowing how richly we enjoy the feast. But we are as gourmets to cooks, savoring the dishes without having had to slit any throats. It seems so little to applaud musicians like these, who can take us to heights of joy as we simply listen, while they get there by sweating blood.

Listen HERE to DeWitt, DiCenzo and Scott play "My Funny Valentine."

Two Days with Bill Dobbins: Things Are Looking Up

Those of us who dragged through this searing July in Columbus rebounded at month's end, refreshed by the heart-lifting, musical two-day visit of jazz pianist and arranger, Bill Dobbins.

Bill Dobbins at the Bungalow Jazz keyboard.

Dobbins is by title Professor of Jazz Studies and Contemporary Media at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York where he has worked twice: from 1973-'94, and again from 2002 upon returning from eight years in Cologne, Germany where he directed the WDR Big Band. As a performer, as an arranger, and as a band leader, Dobbins has probably worked with more contemporary jazz artists than not, as his Eastman bio suggests.

When he comes to Columbus—it's getting to be an annual affair—Dobbins gives an intimate, theme-based piano trio performance at the Bungalow Jazz series, and is guest artist with Vaughn Wiester's Famous Jazz Orchestra. Here he's Bill, with a friendly twinkle in his eye and a gracious willingness to sit down with any of his many fans who wants to talk—especially if there's an anecdote to share about high school days in Akron, or someone extends one of his early vinyl records for an autograph.

Dobbins is connected to Columbus through Vaughn Wiester and his Famous Jazz Orchestra, a twenty-one piece big band. (Disclosure: Wiester—"weester"—is this writer's brother.) Wiester is a trombonist and arranger well-known in Ohio and adjoining states; he is deeply studied in big band literature and is a passionate collector of orchestral scores. He is acquainted with many other eminent arrangers, such as Bill Holman, Slide Hampton, and Med Flory—people who arranged music for the likes of Count Basie, Woody Herman, Maynard Ferguson, and Frank Sinatra. When possible, Wiester commissions new arrangements from these writers. 

Dobbins, Wiester, and fan, Bill Miller

Famous Jazz plays once a week with no rehearsals. The band's composed of amateur musicians; music students and educators from public schools, colleges, and universities; and several professionals. The common denominator is that each member is a sight-reading ace who's happy to receive ten dollars for the evening's fun. Part of the fun is playing music that Bill Dobbins wrote exclusively for them. It's an experience few musicians working outside a professional environment in New York or Los Angeles will ever have. 

Wiester has commissioned Dobbins to arrange for FJO two classics of the Bill Evan piano trios, 1961's Waltz for Debby and 1966's Turn Out the Stars, both works of lyrical emotion expressed through long, light lines. I wondered how such gem-like works could bear the weighty presence of a big band. Gerry Mulligan's Rocker, another commission, is well-known from the Miles Davis Birth of the Cool recordings (1950), basics of the jazz canon. Dobbins has also arranged Antonio Carlos Jobim's delicate bossa nova, Passarim, for Wiester.

Vaughn Wiester's Famous Jazz Orchestra, early July, 2012

Dobbins' arrangements reflect his view that the rise of ego has done the world no good, for he keeps a low profile in his writing. He does not repossess the tunes he touches; he does not render them novel, "new," or "updated." He explained that he adheres to basic harmonies, embellishing them and coloring them in a personal manner, but trying to keep such interpretation within the spirits of the originals. 

It's not only the original harmonies that Dobbins tries to remain true to when he arranges, but the weights and the spirits of the works as well. He follows closely the musical movement of Turn Out the Stars, and he follows the emotional movement just as accurately. Much of the success is in his choice of voicings as he expands a piano trio into music for twenty-one pieces, twelve of them brass. The addition of musical lines neither adds excess bulk nor blurs any sound. What Dobbins adds is both obvious and transparent at the same time. His arrangement is so thoroughly informed by knowledge of the original and by concern for the composer's purposes that his expansions and elaborations fit seamlessly. As a result, it  hardly seems that he has arranged, but more like he collaborated with the composer. Is this what Evans would have written, had it occurred to him to write Turn Out the Stars for an expanded big band? An impossibility of course; but in the way that fiction has of revealing truth through possibilities, I'd say, Yes.

You can hear full performances of Dobbins' arrangements of Turn Out the Stars and Rocker played by the Famous Jazz Orchestra by clicking on these title links.

*****

As a tot, Dobbins often stayed with an aunt who owned a piano. His Pentecostal preacher father and his mother would go on the road for long periods, leaving him not merely to his fascination with the music he heard, but successfully to apply his own hands to the keys when he could barely balance on the stool. When he was eleven, Dobbins was thunderstruck upon hearing George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on the radio. He walked downtown the next day to buy the sheet music, and memorized the whole piece over a weekend. His family supported his passion and talent for music, but he and his father "locked horns," as he calls it, when it came to his first love, jazz.

It's not as if the world made it easy to study jazz in the late 1960s anyway. At Kent State University—as in nearly every music department nationwide—there was contempt rather than curriculum for jazz. Dobbins considers this to have been his good fortune. He studied composition with Fred Coulter, whose pedagogy was deep study of classical Western composers by means of writing compositions "in the style of" the greats he would specify, from Bach through Berg.

The traditions and basic musical language Dobbins learned so thoroughly in this manner he considers fundamental to jazz, and regrets greatly that so few young musicians trouble to learn it. He is firm in asserting that, "There's nothing in jazz that didn't exist before it. Look at Bach's use of syncopation." Thus, Dobbins sees jazz as evolutionary rather than innovative in nature, having emerged organically as something unique—a fusion of local music and African—wherever the slave trade went: to Brazil, Cuba, or Louisiana.

Dobbins and pianist Abhik Mazumder before a lesson

"It's a new Dark Age for music," Dobbins believes. Both jazz and classical music are being forced underground, since young people learn too little to perpetuate the accumulated culture of the past. Innovation is valued too highly over preservation, which he connects to discovery, exploration, and community—that is, to qualities not based in ego. Such an idea connects directly to Dobbins' brilliance as an arranger whose discernible presence in the music of a predecessor is suffused with exquisite understanding of the methods and the emotional scope of the composer's work.

Dobbins' prizing of community over ego and careerism is exemplified by the story he loves about a big break during college days. He had a jazz band that played weekly off-campus at Eddie's Stag Bar. Bill Dobbins named the band after himself, not so much as an act of ego as one of responsibility. He was careful to avoid any possible link between the good name of Kent State University with a bar band.

For an independent band of collegians to be invited to the 1970 Montreux (Switzerland) Jazz Festival was amazing; for them to be invited not only to play, but then to backup legendary trumpeter Art Farmer was even more amazing. Of course they would go.

But it takes a lot of money to fly a band of around fifteen people from Ohio to Switzerland. Kent State refused to have anything to do with it and wouldn't find a penny for them. When the patrons of Eddie's Stag Bar learned of this outrage, they began their own collection and ultimately raised the cash for the students to make the trip. Lesson for Dobbins: The people who love the music will do the job; don't look to institutions. "It was the power of community."

Dobbins recollects, too, his first period at Eastman, 1973-'94, when he was under the pressure of building a dossier of performances and writing on a tenure-timetable. New, elite academic artists face the task of getting famous when opportunities for their work to be heard are few, and even then audiences are sparse. Artistic life under these circumstances is struggle.

But in 1995 Dobbins accepted an invitation to become the principal director of the WDR Big Band in Cologne, Germany, where he and his wife remained for eight years. "Within four months, I was on national television!" he still marvels. With no particular effort from him, the band leader, their concert hall was filled to its twenty-five-hundred capacity for every program. 

Jim Rupp

His applause for the strong cultural connection Germans have to music carries with it grief for the lack of same in the U.S. In other countries, audiences sometimes sing along with music they know at choral concerts. Where Americans would be very uncomfortable with this, finding it rowdy or inappropriate, we really have very little widely shared musical literature. The hymns on which Bach based some of his cantatas are still sung in German churches today. "When we hear Bach, we can't know any of that," he says. "For most of us, it's simply old, academic stuff."

*****

The night before his guest appearance with Famous Jazz, Dobbins performed a Gershwin program at Becky Ogden's Bungalow Jazz House Concerts (where we recently reviewed Ron Busch and Jack Schantz). Developed as a solo concert at Eastman last spring, here Dobbins performed it with bassist Andy Woodson and drummer Jim Rupp.

The lesser-known verses of Gershwin's songs are as interesting to Dobbins as the famous choruses, and he introduced several tunes with recitations of verses. Gershwin's lyrics, he assured me, are always in his head when he plays the music. I was happy to hear this, since I know this music as song, inseparable from words. Being so, the performances were redolent of the sense of the song played. In "How Long Has This Been Going On," I found Dobbins' solo introduction—the first two-and-a-half minutes of verse, chorus and bridge—especially poignant. The lyrics are these:

VERSE

As a tot, when I trotted in my little velvet panties,

I was kissed by my sisters, my cousins and my aunties.

Sad to tell, it was hell, an inferno worse than Dante's.

So my dear I swore,

"Never, never more!"

On my list, I insisted that kissing must be crossed out.

Now, I find I was blind, and oh my! how I lost out!

CHORUS

I could cry salty tears; 

Where have I been all these years?

Little Wow, tell me now:

How long has this been going on?

There were chills up my spine,

And some thrills I can't define.

Listen sweet, I repeat:

How long has this been going on?

BRIDGE

Oh, I feel that I could melt:

Into Heaven I'm hurled!

I know how Columbus felt,

Finding another world,

CHORUS

Kiss me once, then once, more.

What a dunce I was before. 

What a break! For Heaven's sake!

How long has this been going on?

Bill Dobbins

Ira Gershwin's verse presents a silly image of the smitten man as a baby discovering his sexuality in confusion and denial. What follows, in compact lines chopped by internal rhyme, are expressions of the undeniable sensual daze when he finally falls from the fog into the flames. And Dobbins captures every detail of emotion, latent and expressed, in that brief statement, before the tune takes shape in the trio performance. The verse is played skippingly, yet not without ironic adult awareness: The minor chords on "Dear" and "more" hit like the sensation of chewing on cracked teeth, coming as painful surprises. During the bridge, when the lover knows how Columbus felt in discovery, we understand by the dissonance that it's with mixed emotions, not entirely comfortable. Dobbins beautifully controls tempo, slightly rushing and then dragging for emotional effect, slowing considerably once he gets to the chorus, where the jokes of the verse are dropped and the ecstatic pain of discovery begins.

Listen to Dobbins' opening of "How Long Has This Been Going On?" HERE

Similarly, in the piano statement of "Soon," opened here by Dobbins' remarks, he sets a tune with ebullient, hopeful lyrics in among some unexpectedly dark harmonies. He doesn't do so with any irony, but with a rich, suave tenderness. He suffuses his interpretation with a felt understanding of the inevitable hurt in hope, of the difficult patience of yearning, of the inherent fragility of romantic beginnings. I sing the lyrics in my head whenever I hear this tune, but Dobbins' voiceless arrangement fills it with meaning I'm not sure that a vocalist could attain—with the rich, exotic colors that give an allure more majestic than domestic. The "little ship" is a luxury liner with a pensive and passionate captain, afloat on a sea of deep, complex undercurrents. Ira's words were never meant to stand alone, but the tune, in Dobbins' hands, is far from wordless.

Soon, my dear, you'll never be lonely,

Soon, you'll find I live for you only.

When I'm with you who cares what time it is

Or what the place or what the climate is?

Oh soon, our little ship will come sailing

Home through every storm, never failing,

The day you're mine this world will be in tune,

Let's make that day come soon.

You can listen to this opening of "Soon" HERE.

Andy Woodson

Dobbins goes to town with Woodson and Rupp on "The Man I Love." He sets it to a Latin rhythm; but even more interesting is that he prefaces it with "Blue Lullaby," also known as "Prelude No. 2."  Recognizing harmonic kinship, he melds the two. 

The entire performance will play when you press the link, featuring fantastic playing and a lot of fun once "The Man I Love" gets established. Solos by Woodson and Rupp are fast-paced and thrill-packed. Again, though, Dobbins responds to the mood of the "Blue Lullaby" when he opens, sweet and simple in the right hand, with thunder rolling in from the left. The melody sounds like a plain, bluesy folk tune, but this baby's sleeping through tough times. The bridge features some moderate-tempo ragtime, but not too buoyant; its return to the chorus produces the piquant blend of moods that seems to be a Dobbins specialty.
There's a thirty-second adjustment of keys and motif; and by the time he's turned us around, Woodson and Rupp are in—all three are in, playing "The Man I Love." Dobbins doesn't rush it into the heady romp it becomes, though. He retains in the harmonies the dark underpinning of doubt: "Some day he'll come along,/The man I love.../And when he comes my way/ I'll do my best to make him stay." Nothing's given.

Enjoy the trio performance of "The Man I Love" HERE.

At the end of the first set, Woodson and Rupp sat out while Dobbins played his solo arrangement of "Rhapsody in Blue." Of course we were all thrilled: It's bound to be the highlight of any Gershwin piano program. Any music is hair-raising when I'm seated a yard from the open piano, feeling in my chest cavity the resonance of every hammer on string. But to have that privileged position for this performance was the more extraordinary since I felt that I'd never really heard this "familiar" music before then. For instance, the stride elements that I commented on to Dobbins, had always been there, but in the orchestra, he explained. Placed in the piano, though, I heard them laid bare so their contextual significance leapt out. The structural clarity of the "Rhapsody in Blue" piano arrangement makes its jazz elements particularly vivid, pared away from orchestral grandeur. Dobbins had written the arrangement originally for a Hindemith symposium, in acknowledgement of the composer's awareness of jazz. It's an excellent way to make the point.

HERE is Bill Dobbins playing his arrangement for solo piano of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue."  

Dobbins told me that we can expect him back in Columbus next summer, probably again on the last Sunday and Monday of July for gigs at the Bungalow House and with Famous Jazz Orchestra. With each return there is greater excitement for his visits, across a broader spectrum of listeners. Last year he did an Ellington/Strayhorn concert, and Gershwin this year. He's in the process of researching and writing a book on Bill Holman, whom he is interviewing over time. Whatever he brings us will be beautiful and will make us think again about inherited and shared music. Be sure to keep and eye on the websites linked above for dates.

If you come, you'll see his glow and his smile of satisfaction at the end of every tune he plays. Even—or, especially—after one as demanding as "Rhapsody in Blue," he can barely be said to rise from the bench because he springs from it, raising his left hand to his right shoulder. I asked if his shoulder hurt and he was surprised by the question, having been unaware of the habit. Perhaps it's an anchoring gesture, a way to be sure he doesn't float off. For, by the end of a performance, he is the opposite of exhausted: He looks and sounds as if he has been administered the finest, most bracing tonic. His connection with keyboard and music is not the sort that pulls any power from him, but returns even more than he puts into the energy loop. He shares accumulated surplus energy with his audience the way a happy child offers slices of birthday cake.

Here's a bonus track, the Bill Dobbins Trio at Bungalow House Jazz Concerts on July 29, 2012, playing George Gershwin's "S' Wonderful," bossa style.

____________________________________________________________________
With many thanks to Tom Johnson for his recordings from Vaughn Wiester's Famous Jazz Orchestra on Monday, July 30, 2012: FJO performing Dobbins arrangements of "Turn Out the Stars" and "Rocker;" the Bill Dobbins Trio performing "Blue Lullaby/The Man I Love." Other recordings, and photographs are my own, with thanks to Becky Ogden and Bungalow Jazz House Concerts for making them possible.

Tenor soloist on "Turn Out the Stars" is Bryan Olsheski, for whom Dobbins wrote the part.
Soloists on "Rocker" are Jim Powell, trumpet; Michael Cox, alto sax; Bob LeBeau, baritone sax. Drummer on "Rocker" is Steve Schaar. Dobbins is pianist on both "Turn Out the Stars" and "Rocker."

Personnel for FJO on July 30, 2012: Saxes: Kent Englehardt, Michael Cox (altos); Matt Wagner, Alex Burgoyne (tenors); Bob LeBeau (bari). Trumpets: Erik Gimbel (lead); Larry Everhart, Jim Powell, Bob Larson, Phil Winnard. Trombones: Ryan Hamilton (lead); Matt Ellis, John Hall, Bill England (bass), Tony Zilincik (tuba). French horns: Scott Strohm, John Busic. Guitar: Aaron Quinn. Bass: Terry Douds. Piano: Jim Luellen. Drums: Jim Leslie. Guest (piano) Bill Dobbins. Guests with Dobbins Trio: Andy Woodson (bass), Jim Rupp (drums). Leader, solo trombone, cowbell: Vaughn Wiester.

The Ron Busch/Jack Schantz Quintet at Bungalow Jazz House Concerts

"The Bungalow"

The Bungalow Jazz House Concerts are where Columbus, Ohio jazz insiders go for a good evening of friendly jazz. House concerts at the hospitable and eccentric Victorian home of Becky Ogden, empress of music and imagination in our city, are intimate and comfortable for audiences and musicians alike. Nothing beats the musical rapport possible between instrumentalists and listeners when they are two yards apart in Ogden's big living room with the acoustical-tiled ceiling and her beloved Mason & Hamlin piano that delights Mark Flugge and Bill Dobbins. 

On concert evenings, folks stroll in, drop their financial contributions in the basket, and are likely to be greeted by a squawk from the extraordinary roaring parrot even before one of Becky's friends, enlisted for the job, point newcomers the way to the table laden with food that friends contribute, pot-luck style: Friends always hope that Rosemary Litzinger will have come and brought something she baked. There's beer, soda and coffee in the kitchen; bring your own bottle if you like. And please bring your own kids. 

Early arrivals can stroll around Becky's lovingly maintained gardens, tour her rooms full of her ingenious, antique collector's fanciful tableaux, or chat with friends and musicians until the music starts.

Because of the small size of Ogden's room and the comparative ease with which she can reach her network of jazz fans, she has been able to book musicians Columbus might not otherwise hear as they visit local friends or pass between New York and Chicago. She has booked trumpeters Brad Goode and Dominick Farinacci, pianists Terry Waldo and Tamir Hendelman, guitarist Gene Bertoncini, and flautist Ali Ryerson. She regularly books the most imaginative and energetic players in Columbus, like the Aaron Scott Trio (with Dave Dewitt and Derek DiCenzo), or pianist Bobby Floyd, and saxophonists Bryan Olsheski and Michael Cox. She provides the ideal intimate stage for the torchy queen of local vocalists, Mary McClendon; and she gives the stage to new blood, the up-and-coming college ensembles and soloists. Recently, she added vibes to her collection of instruments that includes not only the admirable piano but a Hammond B-3 organ.

Jack Schantz, Bob Fraser

On May 5th, the Cleveland-area Ron Busch/Jack Schantz Quintet played Bungalow Jazz. Ron Busch, on vibes, has long been a force in Cleveland jazz not only for musicianship on his queenly instrument, but for his being co-owner of the legendary club, the Bop Stop. The club's doors open now only for private engagements, but its importance as a locus for Cleveland jazz was inestimable. 

Jack Schantz, professor at the University of Akron, was the artistic director for the Cleveland Jazz Orchestra until he retired from the position in 2009, handing it over to his former student, Sean Jones, late of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. The liner notes to his first record, Speechless (Azica AJD-72201, with Chip Stevens, piano; Jeff Halsey, bass; Val Kent, drums; and Howie Smith, alto sax) describe the person and player very well: "When you first meet Jack Schantz...his manner is so quiet and unassuming that you would never imagine that here is a man who has been trumpet soloist with the Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw and Woody Herman Orchestras. Then he steps onto the stage and a complete metamorphosis occurs! The musician before you is now a commanding presence, able to meld power and sensitivity..."

The guitarist Bob Fraser has long been central to Cleveland jazz (he and Busch were high school classmates and have held down the scene for years). In April he received a call-out in Jazz Times for his collaboration with vocalist Ki Allen at the Tri-C Jazz Festival. Their partnership is of long-standing.

Doug Richeson, bass, and Jim Rupp, drums, are pillars of the Columbus jazz community who perfected their skills during long careers in big bands and touring with major vocalists, Richeson having spent years with Tony Bennett. You can listen to a fascinating interview about Rupp's early career here.

Ron Busch

My delight in an evening of jazz like the one the Busch/Schantz Quintet delivered is the pleasure of an eager listener who's receptive to whatever the ingenuity of the ensemble produces. As in any art form, poor technique will elicit lackluster response, but heartless display of fine technique will too. For me, the ideal is when performers demonstrate the kind of reflection that I come to art to find. It's great when formal beauties are enhanced by the musicians' own human responses to the content of the music.

Busch/Schantz fulfilled my listener's dream with a beguiling performance of  "I Fall in Love Too Easily." The well-known lyrics by Sammy Cahn often reinforce the mood of reflection in Jule Styne's tune: "I fall in love too easily/ I fall in love too fast./ I fall in love too terribly hard/ For love to ever last./ My heart should be well-schooled/ 'Cause I've been fooled in the past./ And still I fall in love too easily" etc. 

Their performance demonstrated beautiful ensemble work. Schantz's solo set a moody atmosphere that he'd try to rise out of musically, but the effort to achieve something more swinging failed, as if a heavy hand kept pulling him back. And so it went with each subsequent solo. The entire performance was unified by a sense of experience—the difficulty of overcoming regret, the  tenuous capacity to "bounce back." It was an extraordinary performance not only for the tightness of the musical ensemble, but also for the musicians' deeply shared awareness of what happens in life. 

Something that would pull this ensemble together in any event, it seems to me, is the wonderful instrumentation. To my ear, the vibraphone is one of the most beguiling of sounds and here it's at its best. The sound of the vibes is like a peppermint. It's "cool." "Cool" affects many senses: blue and silver colors, low temperatures, but also physical hardness. The sound of vibes, however, while generated by mallets on metal ("hard" when it is initiated) resonates so far and decays so slowly that it becomes extremely "soft" as it lingers in the air and collects subsequent tones around it. Like mints, vibes' sound is cool without retaining the other important sensory associations we make with coldness. 

What's more, though vibes are percussive, they also resonant like an electric guitar. They can provide a wide, resonant foil for the narrow focus a trumpet. A vibes/trumpet quintet is on the face of it a brilliant collection of sounds. Here's a Busch solo from Kurt Weill's "Speak Low." Not only is Busch's dance across rhythms a delight, but so is the sound of his instrument in its relationship to bass, guitar, and drums. 

Bob Fraser

Bob Fraser's elegant guitar solo from another outstanding ensemble performance, of Steve Swallow's "Ladies in Mercedes," shows off not only his own artless, warm playing, but the beauty of that guitar-vibes pairing. Their voices pass back and forth between similar and distinct, adding another kind of sonic interest. Rupp's propulsive shakers and brisk percussion pop in contrast to the guitar and vibes, making this, for me, a magical two minutes. 

Amidst all this shimmery chordal dynamic, the flatter, focused trumpet sound has a special place, which Schantz uses to great effect. Within his two-minute solo he creates a virtual narrative, moving up the scale with long notes into a more suspenseful passage of eighth notes and triplets that bursts into a pair of held high notes constituting a musical and emotional break. As if we have been watching the cool lady in her in convertible gliding along the ocean parkway, those notes break the climbing line into irregular patterns that fall all over the beat—it's dizzy with excitement. The whole perspective changes: Perhaps we're no longer observers but now we are in the Mercedes, we are that woman, feeling the tumbling exhilaration and freedom.

Doug Richeson

Richeson showed his gift for emotion and storytelling too in his many solos during this gig. Every bassist is dramatic in his or her physical relationship with the (full-scale, upright) instrument. Richeson sits on a tall stool and surrounds the bass with his large upper body, holding his broad shoulders parallel with the instrument's, his head resting low over the neck. In this solo from "All or Nothing at All" (followed by Schantz), Richeson achieves both a simplicity and privacy that I find as touching as musical. The slow decay time of its notes creates a hushed cloud around a bass solo in any event, and here Richeson uses it to create something that seems particularly personal. He plays like someone who speaks love and truth at the same time.

In the past year I've several times heard people predict the demise of jazz. This forecast has been made on the basis of small turnouts for performances or audiences disproportionately representative of the "blue-hair" generation. Recently, the host of a jazz series  announced a promotion that rewarded concert-goers who would bring to the next show guest who were under forty. The host himself, and all the performers save one on that occasion were at least fifty, and most well over that.

Jack Schantz

On the one hand I can appreciate the nervousness of artists who see the ravages of time in the core audience for their art, with no big influx of youth knocking at the doors. On the other hand, I sometimes wonder if jazz has not grown so broad that it doesn't now include several generations with several audiences. They may share jazz history, but their histories in the world are very different indeed. 

Columbus has two universities with flourishing jazz programs whose students are a vital part of the local scene and keep local clubs at no loss for good music. There is of course great collegiality and exchange between the elders and the youth in town, but I think it is true that there are distinctions  in the music. The generation that grew up while bebop and post-bop flourished knows jazz in a different way than the generations who grew up with bebop as a legacy, and sophisticated rap dominating the airwaves. The life perspectives of musicians in their 60s and 70s have to affect the way they interpret jazz standards; new generations will bring their cultural and personal experiences to them as well. 

I doubt that the audience for an ensemble like the Busch/Schantz Quintet is about to disappear. I think that a mature, jazz-loving audience prizes the refinement of their musicianship, and understands the clarity of the group's observation and reflection—the valuable content of their music. This theme statement to Tadd Dameron's "If You Could See Me Now" epitomizes this point, I think. Of course the music is available to anyone with ears to hear and a mind to consider it with. But performance is a self-portrait too. In Schantz's solo 
and in the patient, certain placement of every chord, note, and beat behind him, we hear a performance with aggregated personal histories as the musical momentum. It's a thematic statement with an awful lot to say.

Jim Rupp

A good experience of jazz gives the audience not only the great music, but the awareness that the music is coming from the fact that those musicians are glad to be there, working—playing—with other musicians whose instincts and ideas they appreciate. You can see these successful relationships; you certainly hear them. (Even those these Cleveland and Columbus units don't work together quite so regularly as they might in one town, Ohio is one town for these purposes.)

As the evening closed at the Bungalow, the band asked for suggestions from the audience. It was the night of the "super-moon," when the moon was the closest to the Earth that it will be for another thirteen years, so they ripped into "Old Devil Moon" at Ogden's suggestion.

They closed, though, on a final suggestion, that proved the perfect thing, Clifford Brown's "Joy Spring." I'm so glad to have been there with a recorder, to be able to enjoy again the tempo, the voicing, and the tempered ebullience of their beautifully balanced performance: Fade to delight.

Becky Ogden serves pasta to Jack Schantz. "Make yourself at home."

I am grateful to Thomas A. Johnson who edited my recording of the May 5, 2012 Busch/Schantz session, and to Sarah Hippensteele of Ash Secure for helping me post the recordings.