Jazz Moves

The fourth annual Buddy DeFranco Jazz Festival will be a special event—a jazz birthday party for DeFranco, who is turning 80 in 2003. The festival will be April 25-26, 2003, with events held in the University Theatre. Artists who will join DeFranco include James Moody, Butch Miles, Bill Watrous, Fabrice Zammarchi, and Joe Cohn.

Buddy DeFranco (left) and Eddie Daniels Photos by Garrett Cheen

Tiger Woods’ father systematically exposed the young Tiger to jazz, a fact included in a list of Tiger data compiled by a reporter for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “I wanted him to be attuned to the sound,” says Earl Woods, “because I think jazz is one of the last creative arts we have.”

Golf was the outcome, as nearly everyone knows. Tiger now likes rap and hip-hop. But I don’t think this story is necessarily one of incongruous musical tastes, any more than I would conclude that parents who want their children to be jazz musicians should sign them up for golf. Music is not entirely predictable in terms of cause and effect. Its effects are more sweeping than that.

“It fortifies their existence,” clarinetist Buddy DeFranco has said about jazz education for young people. “[It] encourages them to see what they may one day become.”

There might, after all, be some jazz in Tiger’s swing.

I didn’t grow up listening to Miles Davis or Charlie Parker. Not many children do. My own early musical exposure in Cut Bank, Montana, was eclectic, as demonstrated by this creatively spelled diary entry:

Feb. 9, 1965, Tues.

Byron Stripling

Dear Diary, We went to a concert tonight and it was great! I forget the lady’s name, but she is a artist, tapdancer, comedien, ballarina, singer, and possibly others. She is really talented! Well, gotta go! Adios! Astala Vista!

While a one-woman chautauqua apparently was possible on the Hi-Line, jazz was notably missing in rural areas of Montana in those days. This is no longer true, judging from the roster of high school jazz bands that attend the Buddy DeFranco Jazz Festival at UM each spring. There are bands from Montana’s bigger high schools, of course, but there also are groups from St. Ignatius, Deer Lodge, Libby, Belgrade, Malta—small towns where jazz, despite its rural roots, isn’t common fare. It occurred to me that these jazz bands might exist, in part, because of the festival, which is going into its third decade.

It became the Buddy DeFranco Jazz Festival a few years ago, when DeFranco, winner of twenty Downbeat magazine awards, nine Metronome magazine awards, and sixteen Playboy All-Star awards naming him the number one jazz clarinetist in the world (who happens to live part time in Whitefish, Montana), lent his name and brought his talent to the event, attracting top-notch jazz performers to share the bill.

DeFranco grew up in South Philadelphia, where his father, a blind piano tuner, taught him to play the mandolin. The mandolin career was short-lived. DeFranco told Downbeat magazine that he was playing clarinet by age eight and listening to Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti play in a neighborhood music store. His father and uncle were big-band fans, so he heard that music, both live and on records. By age thirteen, he had organized his own swing band. He spent his teenage years sneaking into jazz clubs, hearing Art Tatum, Benny Goodman, and Artie Shaw. Despite a materially poor childhood, he had all the preparation that might predict a brilliant future in jazz, and in this case it happened. He went on to “set the example for all jazz musicians for technical brilliance, improvisational virtuosity and creative warmth,” according to Downbeat, where he is cited as “one of the most imaginative clarinetists playing today.” Nearly eighty, he remains at the top of the field.

Eddie Daniels leads UM's Jazz Band I.

Clarinetist Eddie Daniels and trumpeter Byron Stripling joined DeFranco at the 2002 festival for two evening performances with three UM jazz bands, along with a roster of professionals that included native Montanan David Morgenroth, UM music Professor Robert LedBetter, and former UM student Clipper Anderson. These evening concerts capped day-long clinics in which high school groups had the opportunity to work with prominent adjudicators Charlie Argersinger and Denny Christianson.

“Clinic” describes the feel of those sessions better than “adjudication.” Despite their impressive credentials as composers, educators, and performers, Argersinger and Christianson functioned more as fix-it guys (facilitators, if you may) than as judges. Each band had a quick fifteen-minute shot at playing, enough time for two songs. Another fifteen minutes went to the adjudicator’s response, which sometimes involved coaxing a new sound out of the group. Musical elements were isolated and examined, just as a part might be extracted from a body or a car. Bits of phrases, musical and verbal, floated down from the stage to the scattered audience.

“Intuitive dynamic motions,” I heard Christianson say in a session with the Russtones, from Charles M. Russell High School in Great Falls. “Solid from top to bottom.”

“Fat and separated” was another phrase that stuck in my mind. Music, the players were reminded, has real substance. “That melody,” Christianson told the Russtones, “is literally going somewhere in space.”

He used the language of jazz, which is not especially codified; it’s learned as you go. As I watched Christianson (director of music at Humber College in Montreal) work with the Russtones, I wondered about the players: Who were they? What would they become? Typical for our time, several eras were represented in the Russtones’ hairstyles and the way they wore their suits. The drummer was from the ’70s, one saxophonist was definitely l962, another was early ’80’s punk. Missoula’s Hellgate High School Jazz Band, waiting in the wings, evoked various levels of swank in their black tuxedos; they looked like young proprietors of a well-heeled casino. There were only a few girls in any of the groups, high school or college. The study of jazz hasn’t yet become as equal-gendered, as say, law school. Oh well. The music simply transcended it all.

I know jazz has its epochs, trends, and fads. (DeFranco himself is credited with leading the way from swing to bop.) But I wonder if jazz doesn’t provide a door out at times—out of the incessant, insistent world of pop culture. (Witness middle-schoolers in Missoula who are lucky enough to experience the annual Starlighter’s Ball at Rattlesnake Middle School. Each year, preteens and just-teens—all those kids so into the world of the Walkman—play Duke Ellington under the glitter ball with astonishing skill and grace.) Jazz is a bit detached from the dictates of mediated taste; it has its own grooves of meaning. And it has a “ticket to ride” feeling, as if it were linked by a taut, invisible line to somewhere else.

When I was in high school, the music at the spring music festivals wasn’t generally jazz, but it wasn’t what we heard on KSEN’s “Night Flight,” either. Whatever else it was to us, our spring foray into other-worldly music (Chopin, Debussy, Khachaturian) most of all meant mobility—we went to Shelby or Havre for the district festival, then—if we were lucky—to Missoula for “State.” We received adjudication sheets with numbers at the district festival and, I have to confess, we sometimes bypassed the comments to get to the rating.

Ranking is inescapable, in music as in sports. The Hi-Line music teachers of my memory, lovely, courteous individuals most of the year, became warlords bent on slaughter in the spring. In my opinion, this was probably okay. Sports dominated most of the time; why shouldn’t music receive its fair share of aggression? But winning wasn’t the only point. A “Superior” rating—a “One”—was a passport for travel, and we were eager to go. Musical success, in that context, did not represent talent so much as possibility.

At the UM jazz festival the model for musical performance seems to be something closer to groups lining up to play at a jazz club. The number system is downplayed, according to Lance Boyd, UM’s director of jazz studies. Participants can request a rating, but competition isn’t the focus of the event.

The trombone section in UM's Jazz Band I backs Buddy DeFranco in an evening performance.

A forum is provided; you’re invited to play. The stakes are still there—will you be successful or not? But winning is something other than beating an opponent. It’s finding your voice and making it heard, in many ways a more intricate endeavor. It’s about “having passion for what you are doing,” DeFranco says,“and the desire to do something different, however minimal, so that you become an original, so that people will say . . . ‘That’s who it is.’ ‘That’s Bird.’ ‘That’s Art Tatum.’ ‘That’s Oscar Peterson.’ ‘That’s Buddy.’”

Many of the aspiring jazz musicians at the UM jazz festival will turn a corner and become something else. What will they be? A golf star? A writer? A comedian/ballerina? It’s good to think that these students are, meanwhile, discovering something about themselves through playing jazz. Maybe they will find what DeFranco calls that “inner voice.” Jazz, then, will be something they take away with them, wherever they go, whatever they do, and it will show up again as real substance—a beautiful sentence, a perfect swing.

Megan McNamer received a bachelor’s degree in music from UM in 1976 and a master’s degree in ethnomusicology from the University of Washington in 1986. She has no idea what her musician children will grow up to be.