Highschool Story #1

I was goofing around with hokey blues patterns today when I suddenly remembered a school dance I attended sophomore year. Dances were a sort of mandatory social acceptance ritual. I would have spent my Saturday doing something different, but while I had no problem being a bit different, I didn't want to be rejected by all of me peers.

I was asked to assemble a band to play in the entrance way, as a sort of warm up band for the swing band that would play the whole dance. I said yes, and ended up playing for about 5 kids. I suppose having an instrument in your mouth is productive whatever you are doing.

We played "Autumn Leaves" in a trio setting: sax, piano and drums. The drum set had heads that were taped together, and I think the cymbals were pieces of sheet metal discarded in a scrap yard. The piano was the only piano the school would let us use: the only piano they didn't care if it was destroyed. But it worked for the trio, so who cared what anyone else thought about how our set up looked.

We played, were told to shut up and went downstairs and danced. The swing band was captivating. I didn't dance much that evening, but rather stood in aw, watching every move the musicians made. I was interested in how they could still fool around with advanced harmony and keep people dancing. I thought the 7b9 made you sound like late Coltrane, and the most you could get away with for people to dance was a bebop scale. I learned I was wrong. This probably further diluted my mind into thinking avant guard jazz sounded better to the general public than it does: story #2 to come soon.

While I wasn't watching the band I was talking to the other two musicians in the trio. Still having a drum set and piano set up practically demanded that we play for a bit. So as the rest of the school is dancing, us 3 nerds (and I use that term with great admiration) are thinking "what should we play?" We decided on a blues (none of us had yet to learn enough songs to all know a standard from memory). The drummer (who actually is a bass player) suggested a lick to base the blues around; one that the students might be able to relate to, maybe. "Oh yeah" I said, and my elementary ears said "that's just a minor 7 chord with the major 6 stuck in isn't it?". "No no, it is a major 7 chord" I was told. And the better half of the dance I spent thinking "is that major or minor? Summertime is a descending major third... so acceding major third sounds like this....."

I soon yielded to the bass player, who has much better ears than I ever will. A teacher brought down his trombone from his class room, and soon we were jamming. The professional band was packing up and leaving, and noted our playing. The school exited, oblivious to what was happening so loudly right in front of them. They probably had bigger things on their mind, like how hot so and so was in her dress, or why so and so didn't dance with them. Par for the course in high school.

But us three musicians rejected that mold, then, and many times in high school. For me the motto "music, not maidens", which was so expertly coined by my dad (all be it I think there was a bit of a mocking, disappointed tone to the phrase) rang in my head. For others a complete rejection of popular culture yielded religious gains (devout catholicism was not foreign to our school, unlike so many other schools). Either way the trio rejected popular culture that night.

If ever there was any doubt that jazz musicians are a bit different from the rest of their peers, Michael Lewis, an underrated saxophonist, once said "when you devote your life to one thing, you are bound to be a bit weird."