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Bill Dobbins - Interview Pt. III |
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by Evan Dobbins
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E.D.: From 1994-2002 you lived in Cologne, Germany, where you directed the WDR Big-Band. Most American musicians are aware of the level of support the arts receive overseas. Could you discuss some of the major differences between the jazz scene here and in Europe? What, if any, were the drawbacks to having this level of support for jazz and the arts?
BD:There is much more support of music and the arts in general, including jazz. Of course, the force of unbridled capitalism throughout the world is resulting in a gradual decline of support for quality of life issues everywhere. In most of Europe the erosion of this support is probably at least a generation behind the US, but we saw small changes during our eight years in Cologne.
Still, in addition to the three full-time radio big bands that remain (Cologne, Hamburg, Frankfurt), there is a thriving club scene throughout Germany, with other small venues such as theatres, museums, etc. Many of these venues, even some clubs, have been presenting jazz since shortly after the end of World War II. Quite a few of these actually receive subsidy from the government as cultural venues. The government realizes that in a venue that only accommodates 100-150 people, the price of admission would be prohibitive if the musicians and other employees were paid reasonably well for their services. The subsidy also helps with upkeep and the maintenance of a good piano, an absolute essential for any legitimate jazz venue. I did quite a bit of playing in these places with members of the WDR Big Band in trio, quartet and quintet situations, and always earned the equivalent of $250 - $450 for a normal two-set performance, more than double what you can expect here for local gigs that are considered well-paid.
The job with the big band was fabulous. Nearly every member was a competent soloist, with several really outstanding soloists in each section. All the saxophonists played several woodwind doubles, and the radio had excellent instruments for everyone, from flugelhorns to euphoniums and piccolos to contrabass clarinets. We had internationally known guest soloists for every project, nearly two weeks of rehearsal time for each, and several of the projects I did were taped for TV broadcast while some were also commercially released in co production with various CD labels. These included projects with drummer Peter Erskine (Prism, Advance Music), Paquito D’Rivera (Big Band Time, Timba Records) and Kevin Mahogany (Pussycat Dues, ENJA). A recent project I arranged and conducted, Erik Satie, has just been released by CMO Music as a double CD, featuring my arrangements of Satie’s music, the WDR Big Band and it’s soloists, especially pianist Frank Chastenier, and readings of Satie’s writings by Christian Brückner, a radio dramatist, actor, reader of spoken word recordings and the voice of Robert DeNiro and other well known actors in German dubbed versions of American films. In December of 2008 I’m going to be doing a CD project with the incredible vocal group, Kingsingers and the WDR Big Band of my arrangements of music from J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio.
Each of the major dozen or so radio and TV complexes in Germany still has two full orchestras (symphonic and multi-purpose) and a symphonic choir. All this plus TV drama, theatre and documentaries are financed by a tax on media devices (radios, television sets, cassette or CD players, etc.). There are family rates for all devices combined which, if I remember, run in the neighborhood of $150 a year. In a densely populated region such as Berlin or the region in which Cologne is located, there may be in the neighborhood of 10 million people. That provides revenue for a great deal of regular quality programming. Each of the dozen or so regions in Germany has its own TV and radio complex, along with its own radio and TV channels, all high quality programming with no commercial interruptions. You can afford a lot of worthwhile things if you’re not trying to run the world.
It is true that some people in a country with virtually free college education and a high quality of life subsidized by the state tend to take things for granted and are not accustomed to the workaholic mentality more characteristic of the US, Japan and China. In the radio band, for instance, where everyone has a lifetime contract with good medical insurance and retirement, you could certainly argue that not everyone stays on their toes to the degree they might if they had to constantly worry about having a job next month. But to me that’s a miniscule waste of potential compared to the trillions of dollars worth of weapons that are rusting away in mothballs, let alone the trillions of dollars that simply “go missing” in our huge military industrial complex, in a society which has the highest rate of child poverty in the industrialized world and where one third of the people have little or no medical insurance. Having lived abroad for an extended period, it was also sad to see that the biggest American influences around the world are mostly negative ones, from junk food and junk pop culture to all the worst human and ecological down sides of the “corporate state”, which is, unhappily, one of the simple definitions of fascism.
In case people may be wondering why we returned to the U.S.A., it was because of the opportunity to return to the Eastman School after you had moved back to Rochester, married and started a family. No matter how many pluses other societies may have to offer, they can’t compare with the quality of a life with an extended family, where we can play gigs together and Daralene and I can watch the grandchildren grow up (and spoil them rotten).
E.D.: Your performance and recording career has spanned a wide range of repertoire and ensembles. What performers or groups come to mind as ones you would most like to work with again?
BD: They are really too numerous to include here, but I’ll give a partial list, hoping that the ones I inadvertently leave out will forgive the sometimes failing memory of a man who’s now just this side of sixty. Although I had many memorable performances in the classical world up to around 1973, I’m happy that I chose jazz as my major focus. There’s some classical music that I will always love, Bach and Shostakovich for example, but I find the professional classical world to be much too stressed and I don’t think music was meant to be like that. I really enjoyed the opportunity to work with Clark Terry, Joe Williams, Art Farmer, Ernie Krivda, Eddie Daniels, Dave Liebman, Keith Jarrett, Red Mitchell, Al Cohn, Bill Goodwin, Chuck Israels, Steve Gilmore, Phil Woods, Pat Martino, John Abercrombie, John Scofield, Louis Smith, Ron McClure, Rufus Reid, Billy Hart, Richie Beirach, Joe Lovano, Wynton and Branford Marsalis, Bill Holman, Jon Hendriks, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Al Grey, Slide Hampton, Eddie Henderson, Gary Bartz, Peter Erskine, John Riley, Dennis Mackrel, Jeff Hamilton, Ferdinand Povel, John Goldsby, John Marshall, Rolf Römer, Steve Kuhn, Barry Harris, Anthony Braxton, George Russell, Kevin Mahogany, Madeline Bell, Georgie Fame, Dee Daniels, Lee Konitz, Albert Mangelsdorf, Nguyen Le, Adam Nussbaum, Mark Feldman, Dusko Goykovich, Randy Brecker, Bryan Lynch, Mike Mainieri, Jerry Bergonzi, Hal Crook, Bob Brookmeyer, Thad Jones , Mel Lewis, Jimmy Knepper, Charles McPherson, Benny Golson, Don Menza, Kenny Wheeler, Paquito D’Rivera, Steve Lacy, Eddie Gomez, Jeremy Steig, Eliot Zigmund, Rolf Kühn, Katia and Marielle Labeque, Gary Foster, Clare Fischer, Hendrik Meurkens, Kingsingers, and the wonderful musicians in the WDR Big Band, the NDR Big Band (Hamburg) the Metropole Orchestra (Hilversum, the Netherlands) and the greater Rochester area, which I think is among the best talent pools for its size anywhere in the world. That’s a partial list, but it gives an indication of the charmed life I’ve managed to live so far. I would love to be able to work with all of these people again, and it’s truly unfortunate that some of them are no longer with us.
During the stint in Cologne, I got to write a Monk program for Steve Lacy, a Mingus program for Jimmy Knepper and Charles McPherson, and a Bill Evans program for Eddie Gomez, Eliot Zigmund and Jeremy Steig. These are like dream projects. If I have to pick a few favorites from the living artists, I would have to include Clark Terry, Barry Harris, Benny Golson, Bill Holman, Clare Fischer, Jimmy Knepper, Bob Brookmeyer, Slide Hampton, Phil Woods and Charles McPherson. These are some of the real giants of the music, and I hope they will all be with us for many years to come. Because they are closer chronologically to the birth of the music, they have more of the magic than any of the younger generations. Although it’s always nice to get hired by one of the recent influential players, it’s really something special to get to make music with one of the great masters.
Clark and Phil have been especially supportive, and Benny made a very special memory for me in addition to the times during which I had the pleasure of working with him. The closing scenes in the recent film, The Terminal, are so poignant to me that, whenever I remember them, it’s hard to hold back the tears. Tom Hanks portrays a Russian immigrant whose persistence to get into America has made him a temporary exile in one of New York’s international airports. Through the entire film he never reveals why he is so determined to get to New York City. It turns out that it is because his deceased father always heard the sound of freedom, spiritual strength and human persistence in the face of adversity in the sound of jazz, and he had made a collection of photos of important jazz musicians whom he dreamt of meeting someday in America. His son (Hanks) is fulfilling his father’s dream and beginning his own odyssey by visiting the world where jazz music was born, and when he finally gets to a hotel in the city, it just happens to be one where Benny, one of his father’s many heroes, is beginning an engagement.
It is so fantastic that jazz has brought so much joy, inspiration and hope to so many people around the world, and yet it is so unbearably sad that it is largely unknown and unappreciated in the nation of its birth. Living in Europe made me all the more aware of this, because every European country is aware and appreciative of its history and cultural heritage. Even though the influence of the worst of our pop culture is gradually vulgarizing Europe along with the rest of the world, their substantial subsidization of the legacies of their own greatest cultural achievements ensures that they will continue to have a prominent place in their societies. If only we were mature enough to learn from these countries, we could benefit so much.
E.D.: You have devoted significant time in your life to the study of Duke Ellington’s music. Do you feel like the average jazz musician has a decent understanding of Ellington’s contributions to the music and has listened to a representative sampling of his recordings? Are there some specific innovations and techniques (either improvisational or compositional) Ellington used that you find most musicians are unaware of?
BD: The average jazz musician has little understanding of Ellington’s contributions because most jazz musicians haven’t listened seriously to much of Ellington’s music. There’s a lot of lip service, but far too little real attention. One of the best things Wynton Marsalis has done is the annual competition for public school big bands known as Essentially Ellington. The bands all receive free published editions of eight or nine Ellington and/or Strayhorn compositions. The repertoire changes every year, so this is also resulting in the publication of a growing Ellington and Strayhorn repertoire that student and professional bands can dive into.
Ellington is definitely the greatest American composer, period, independent of category, and there are well over a thousand original pieces to demonstrate that fact. They run the gamut from three-minute masterpieces to mini-concertos to the magnificent fourteen-minute tone poem, Harlem, to the numerous suites with their highly varied sources of inspiration. They also range from pieces that have a bare minimum of notated material, such as Subtle Lament or La Plus Belle Africaine, to virtuoso showcases that are completely notated, with little or no improvisation in the sense of ad lib solos, such as Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue or Madness in Great Ones (from Such Sweet Thunder). They also include many blues-tinged pieces, mood pieces and songs with lyrics, sometimes also written by Ellington or Strayhorn. Ellington sought out musicians who had personal sounds and he wrote for those individuals more than any jazz composer before or since has managed to do.
David Berger is the main jazz writer that I’m aware of who has managed to continue this approach in a manner that is technically skillful, aesthetically convincing and faithful to the musical elements that immediately distinguish the music as coming from jazz. He has maintained his own big band in New York, David Berger and the Sultans of Swing, for about thirty years now. Several of his musicians have been there for the duration, and there has been very little turnover, which is a remarkable achievement. I highly recommend the bands most recent CDs, Marlowe and Hindustan (available from Such Sweet Thunder). Of course, there several of the master jazz writers who are still with us today, but I think that David is the closest to the Ellington esthetic. The music that I wrote for the WDR Big Band that is the most memorable to me today is the music that most perfectly fits the personality of the soloists and the overall strengths of the ensemble. Duke definitely knew what he was doing!
Another one of my pet peeves, especially in light of the considerable lip service to Ellington in recent years, is the regularity with which jazz musicians play the wrong chords in some of the most familiar Ellington tunes. Two of the most painful examples are the third bar of Mood Indigo and the fifth bar of Satin Doll. Although it should be obvious that most so-called “fake books” faithfully live up to their name, it seems to me that if we want people to respect THE MUSIC, we have to begin by respecting it ourselves. Anyone who bothers to listen to an Ellington recording of those two pieces, ANY Ellington recording, should be surprised by the unique and colorful chords in those examples, which are seldom heard in renditions by today’s more “advanced” performers. The same thing happens with Monk and many other great composers or songwriters. Even if the perpetrator happens to be Miles Davis or Bill Evans, their versions of Monk’s tunes would have been even better if they had been based on Monk’s melodies and changes. I don’t object to the use of substitute chords, but the substitutes should at least be as convincing as the original chords. Too often they are actually less effective, sometimes simply because the original chords were never learned.
As to melodies, I think the correct melody of any piece should be played at least once somewhere in a performance, since most listeners today don’t know the original melodies. In an art form that is primarily theme and variations, which is mostly what jazz improvising is, it’s impossible to fully appreciate the variations if you haven’t heard the theme. The pernicious effect of the low pop culture of the last fifty years can most easily be understood by considering the fact that in the 1950s a high percentage of the American public was familiar enough with a large repertoire of great songs that they could appreciate their embellishment or abstraction by jazz artists. There’s little room for personal creativity in pop music today where, with few exceptions, everyone wants to hear everything just like it was on the original recording. And most of the material is so poor; it’s like “no theme and no variation.”
Returning to Ellington, his orchestra from 1938 to 1941, 1950 to 1958 and 1962 to 1966 or so represents some of the greatest big band music of all time. There are at least three qualities that many of his soloists had that are remarkable, quite apart from the normal expectation of being able to improvise a cohesive solo statement.
First, all of Ellington’s musicians could interpret a written melody in a personal and compelling way, whereby the listener could always recognize its identity even though it was never played in exactly the same way. The tendency in many younger players is to find one set way that they feel comfortable with or to change things just to change them, too often in ways that sound arbitrary and without much conviction or musical logic. In one of the two parts of the PBS documentary, A Duke Named Ellington, Russell Procope talks about what an engaging creative challenge it was for him to play the melody of Mood Indigo every night for twenty-six years. Far from being boring, he realized that a musician who really had something to say could always find a way of dragging some notes out, clipping off others, playing some straight, others with more vibrato or inflections, leaving some phrases more plain while embellishing others, in a manner that expressed exactly the way he felt about that melody on that particular occasion.
Second, Ellington’s soloists always improvised in relation to whatever written material coexisted with their solo in a particular piece. Too many soloists in big bands, especially after 1950, just get up and play their licks, more or less oblivious to the written material. In terms of later bands, Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, are great examples of improvising in relation to the written material that occurs around the solo, and Bob Brookmeyer’s New Art Orchestra is an excellent modern example. If soloists aren’t responding to something in the piece, there’s a good chance they’re ruining it, even though they may not realize it. Ellington was smart enough to realize that, so he wrote many pieces where the soloists simply presented written melodies in a personal way, others where there were occasional brief improvised solos, often no more than eight or sixteen bars, and only a small percentage in which a soloist improvised an extended solo. And in that last category he often used melodic material that was similar to the material the particular soloist usually put into their improvisations, so that it would likely make an agreeable combination.
Exceptional soloists, of course, have the ability to keep finding fresh responses in their solos to fixed events in a piece. I remember working with Lee Konitz with the WDR Big Band during the late 1990s in a program that included a beautiful Bill Holman chart on Lover Man. In every run through during rehearsals and in both concert performances, every phrase Lee played related to the previous one and, whenever applicable, to background or interruptive written material. And he had fresh responses each time to each event. I’ll never forget that. It certainly represents a worthwhile ideal to strive for as an improviser.
Thirdly, Ellington intentionally utilized two or more soloists in conversation with each other. This goes back at least to The Mooch in 1928 (especially the October 17 version) and continues throughout his career. Of course, Ellington’s soloists often responded to the written material around their solos in a conversational manner as well. This aspect of improvisation has been almost entirely neglected in recent decades, and yet it is an extremely effective technic for involving the audience in the creative process without diluting or vulgarizing the content.
After Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington is undoubtedly the most important creative figure in the entire history of jazz. The multifaceted legacy of his orchestra, his composing and arranging, and his piano playing comprise the richest repository of musical wealth in relation to jazz history from New Orleans jazz to the avant garde, jazz instrumental practices and technics, jazz harmony in all its aspects, jazz composing and arranging from song forms to extended forms, and improvisation from the tasteful decoration and personalization of written melodies to extended solo statements. Unlike other bandleaders, Ellington kept his earliest pieces in the repertoire, some essentially in their original arrangements, right alongside his latest and most complex works. But when he made new versions of older pieces, these adjustments often brought to light how contemporary some of them could sound. The 1966 version of The Mooch, on the album The Popular Duke Ellington, is a great example. And yet, for his most conservative fans, Ellington always had a medley of his biggest hits, from Prelude to a Kiss to Strayhorn’s signature piece, Take the ‘A’ Train. Ellington was always looking for ways to expand the music’s vocabulary and creative potential without losing a segment of his audience. This worked for many decades, until the crudest and most brutally materialistic elements of the pop culture took over in the 1970s. They have yet to loosen their grip.
E.D.: Recently you have been revisiting some of your earlier compositions in your public performances. What brought you to the decision to bring some of these pieces out of “retirement”?
BD:First of all, my big band music has always been a part of the Eastman programs, and I keep playing tunes of mine on gigs that go back to the early 1970s. At a certain point around 1980 I decided to destroy quite a few of my earlier efforts, simply because they were too painful to listen to and I couldn’t bear the thought that some stray copy would continue to encourage performances, let alone recordings. Since then, I’m happy to say that nothing has been permanently retired.
But I think you were referring to some of my piano writing, especially the preludes and the stylistic variations based on an original theme. Toward the end of the 1970s I decided to write a series of pedagogical books on jazz piano playing, which I collectively titled, The Contemporary Jazz Pianist. The primary reason for these books was to provide my jazz piano students with plenty of information about the specifics of jazz piano harmony and voice leading, and specific concepts and technics for developing their proficiency at improvisation. After writing two volumes that dealt with essential vocabulary and skills needed for playing in a rhythm section and ensembles of various sizes, I decided to write two more volumes in order to deal with the more specialized tradition of solo jazz piano playing.
The first of these books (Volume 3 in the series) dealt with general solo styles from stride and boogie-woogie up to so-called “free jazz”. Since I had transcribed solo piano pieces by a dozen or more different jazz pianists, I thought it would be most useful to compose an original theme based on the chord progression of a well known standard tune, and then write a set of variations in the styles of particular pianists. I had a recording of Dick Hyman, called Variations on A Child Is Born (by Thad Jones), which both greatly impressed me and made me realize the pedagogical value of such an approach. I decided on the chord progression of All of Me, primarily because it has phrases in minor as well as major keys and because it is extremely well known. My theme starts like an upside down version of All of Me.
Although I started with the idea of twelve variations (one in each of the twelve keys), it soon became apparent that it would be difficult to do justice to the rich tradition of jazz piano even with twenty-four. I finally decided to limit my selection to pianists who had made a significant contribution to solo piano playing, specifically. The selection was still difficult, and I regret not having room for a few of my favorites, especially Hank Jones and Dave McKenna. Still, I think the pieces turned out very well, and I certainly deepened my own understanding of this great tradition by writing them.
Although I had listened to recordings of all of the pianists, I had not transcribed solos or done extensive analysis of all their styles. The insight I gained into the specific contribution of Willie “The Lion” Smith, Teddy Wilson, Jimmy Rowles, Cecil Taylor and others, was well worth the extra time and effort necessary to really get inside a few of their recordings that characterize their unique contributions. The final list included twelve traditional pianists, from Scott Joplin and Jelly Roll Morton though the boogie-woogie pianists such as Meade Lux Lewis, and twelve modern pianists, from Thelonious Monk to Richie Beirach. The music is included in The Contemporary Jazz Pianist, Volume 4, and can be purchased with an audiocassette of my recording of the variations from Charles Colin Music Publishers. There are also two videocassettes, The Evolution of Solo Jazz Piano, Volume 1 (Traditional Styles) and 2 (Modern Styles), in which I discuss each pianist and then play the particular variation. Although the videos are now out of print, they may be available from some university or public libraries. We expect a DVD version to be released sometime within the next year or two.
A secondary aim for writing these variations was to begin the creation of a body of work that would help me to maintain a certain degree of technical fluency at the piano without practicing just scales and arpeggios, on the one hand, or someone else’s music, on the other. After returning to Rochester in 2002, I gradually began to have more opportunities to perform as a pianist in the area. Since most of my time in Cologne had been devoted to writing, directing and teaching, I felt like my playing needed some concentrated work. Getting the “All of You” variations back under my fingers (the “you” refers to the twenty-four pianists) proved to be just what I was looking for. Although it’s a view of the contributions of my predecessors and peers, it’s my own personal view. Once I began playing the pieces again they made me realize and appreciate, even more than I originally had, the valuable contributions of these pianists and the inestimable value of being involved in a tradition, especially one that’s as culturally rich and spiritually uplifting as that of jazz music.
Because of my great love for a particular part of the classical piano repertoire, around 1990 I began writing pieces that combined elements of classical vocabulary with that of jazz and several folk or classical music traditions from other cultures that have fascinated me since my college days. After composing the first two or three of these pieces, I decided to work toward a set of twenty-four, covering all major and minor keys in the manner of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. Since I wanted to have leeway in terms of formal designs, I entitled the pieces “preludes”, and I found a way of writing them so that they could be played either with or without improvisation. I wanted them to be accessible to classically trained pianists who were interested in jazz as well as by pianists with a real jazz background.
Fortunately, Hans Gruber, my publisher at Advance Music, was interested in publishing both the music and my own recordings of the pieces. For the recordings, I decided on four volumes with six preludes in each, along with five to eight pieces from the jazz and American popular song repertoire that continues to intrigue me. The resulting CDs were released under the collective title, Preludes & Predilections between 1992 and 2001. I have been both a little surprised and deeply gratified to discover how much I still enjoy playing these preludes as well as the stylistic variations. Although I sometimes hear things in earlier pieces that I could have done more convincingly, I think I succeeded pretty well with these.
E.D.: What one recording or specific song would you choose to play for another musician who had never heard you play before?
BD: Happily, I would recommend my most recent work. That might not have always been true but, fortunately, I feel I’m doing my best work right now. I seem to be able to play within myself most of the time and, in group situations, listen to what’s going on around me and interact with it in an unselfconscious way. Of course, sometimes I wish my time could be more consistent and that my attention could be more steady, but these are unavoidable imperfections that I just keep working on. I try to learn from my mistakes, and I’m thankful for every day and for the wonderful people and situations I‘m privileged to enjoy in my life. I think that kind of attitude can make it easier to simply enjoy the moment.
For people who have never heard me play, I would play Comrade Conrad or Preludes XXIII and XXIV from Preludes & Predilections, Volume 4 (Advance Music). In a group setting, I would pick While We’re Young, Danny Boy, Free Ballad and Twelve, from the Cologne CD with John Goldsby and Peter Erskine (Fuzzy Music). As a writer, I think the Prism CD (Advance Music) is the most representative of my work. There are five original pieces and arrangements of three of Peter Erskine’s tunes with the WDR Big Band. The more recent Paquito D’Rivera and Erik Satie recordings are more specialized in terms of repertoire, and they have almost no original pieces on them, but I was quite pleased with the musical results. I feel like the translation of the Satie music we selected worked extremely well with both the big band and the individual soloists.
E.D.: Over your career, you have always had to balance performing, composing/arranging, classroom teaching and conducting. How do you see these pursuits in relation to one another? Have you ever felt drawn to devote a larger percent of your time to one of these areas?
BD:Performing is the thing I enjoy most, because it’s right inside the process of musical creativity, especially when improvisation is involved. I actually enjoy playing in small groups more than solo, probably because I enjoy accompanying and the interactive aspect so much. I had the unusual opportunity of playing jazz nearly every night for a little more than two years running in Cleveland from 1971-73, so since then there’s never been a time when I wouldn’t have liked to do at least a little more performing.
The other things I enjoy equally. I didn’t have a lot of opportunities to write professionally before moving to Cologne. Outside of New York or Los Angeles, it’s difficult to find many possibilities to get paid for writing music that’s not involved with the pop culture. The job in Cologne was extremely fulfilling for at least three reasons. First, in addition to the salary as principal director, I was paid very well to write as much music as I could find time to write for one of the world’s premier big bands. Second, I had opportunities to write for singers, which I hadn’t been able to do much before. The consideration of the singer’s personality and range, as well as things like text painting add a different dimension that I find both challenging and enjoyable. Finally, it was possible to enlarge the band with extra woodwinds, percussion, horns and even strings from time to time, and to put together unusual programs with unique guest artists. The projects with Dave Liebman, the Bach 2000 project with Gary Foster and Kingsingers and the recent Erik Satie project are examples that come to mind.
I must say, I was really enthusiastic about returning to Eastman, because I think it’s very important to pass on as much of this great tradition as possible to young creative musicians. Recognizing what happened to classical music after the decline and virtual disappearance of improvisation is, indeed, sobering. And with the recent passing of so many of the greatest masters of this art form, there is a real need for more young players with a high standard and uncompromising ideals.
When I was a student at Kent State, the thing that helped us to develop so quickly in an environment where there was no formal jazz program was that we did not consider our peers, whether local or national, to be our competition. What we were striving for was to play and write at the level of our heroes, such as Charlie Parker, Clifford Brown, Sonny Rollins, J.J. Johnson, Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery, Paul Chambers, Art Blakey, Duke Ellington, Thad Jones, Bob Brookmeyer and Clare Fischer, and we were always painfully aware that our best was never good enough. The challenge for the younger generation is to maintain high standards during a time of incredibly low standards in our society, where an increasing number of people think that all that is required is to show up, and after that it’s up to the teachers, or the doctors, or the social workers or the politicians to guarantee a successful outcome. All you have to do to see the results of such an ethically bankrupt point of view is to look around at what is happening in our country today and the meager prospects that things will improve significantly in the immediate future. I remain an eternal optimist, but I have to say that we certainly have our work cut out for us.
E.D.: What short and long-term projects are you currently working on or considering?
BD:My two most important long-term projects are the care and support of my immediate family and the transmission of the best that THE MUSIC has to offer to as many young musicians as possible. It has seemed to me for quite some time that our society is already in the beginning of a new Dark Age, where money and power are considered more important than people, and religious faith or political propaganda are considered more important than education and the ability to think critically. Someday there may be a renaissance of the most valuable cultural treasures of the American empire, and if there’s any chance of that, we need to continue to pass things on from masters to students in a direct line. You can’t get it into a book, or even onto recordings. There have to be some people around who can still speak the language and who really understand something about the rich cultural and social environment that gave it birth.
As to family, I could never have found as wonderful a woman as Daralene, your mother, if I had searched the world over. She has been such a source of support and encouragement that I could never possibly repay her. When we first moved to Cologne, her health just gave out for a while due to a combination of too much overtime at her job in human resources at a local bank for too many years and the physical stress of getting the house ready for our move. Because she had neither family nor close friends in Cologne when we first moved there, it was necessary for me to take care of her for a change, until she finally got her health and mobility back. That was a difficult time for her, but a great opportunity for me. What I learned and gained as a result of really giving to another person and putting someone I really cared about ahead of myself literally changed my life. Since then my priorities have permanently changed to family, close friends, and then my work. I realize that I have to put myself first in some ways in order to be at my best for others, but I think I have a much better understanding now of where and how to draw the line.
That was the most liberating transformation of my life up to this point, although helping with the care of our two grandsons, Danny and David, is definitely a close second. I wish I could have known what I know now when you were growing up, but I’m happy to have been able to grow and develop as a result of my experience. Now I can really leave work at the office and give my full attention to the people that matter the most to me, with no sacrifice whatsoever in the quality of my work. If anything, it helps to better prioritize the things I’m working on. Of course, I’m happy when some of my students also become close friends. I love people who love to work hard and who are not afraid to tell it like it is. If my life up to this point has taught me anything, it’s that allowing myself to live under the illusion of the way things might seem to be, instead of the way they really are, is the main obstacle to making them what they could be.
In terms of short-term goals, I’m finishing a guitar/piano reduction of a concerto for guitar and orchestra that was premiered in November of last year with Eastman guitar professor Nicholas Goluses and the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra and their principal conductor, Christopher Seaman. At the same time, I’m making a final version of the orchestral score and parts based on minor alterations made in preparation of the world premier.
I’m also in the middle of a text on big band arranging and composing, which I hope to complete by the end of next summer. It’s a long overdue follow up to my earlier Jazz Arranging and Composing: A Linear Approach, which focused on writing for small groups of two to five horns plus rhythm section. The new book is based on the music from the previously mentioned CD, Prism, featuring the WDR Big Band and Peter Erskine.
The Eastman Jazz Ensemble will be doing a short residency for the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and a few neighboring schools in October. It’s always great to get the band out of school for a short time for such rewarding activities. Just before that I will be putting on an antiwar concert with some Eastman students and faculty for the Metro Justice organization at a local church, an activity that I consider equally rewarding and no less essential. I also hope to get some stimulating guests for upcoming Eastman jazz concerts, including Jim McNeely and Finnish saxophonist Jukka Perko, who I got to know in a project we did last September together with the Metropole Orchestra.
It’s also been a special treat to get to perform with you on occasion, and I particularly enjoyed a concert we did in the spring with the ten piece band that you co lead with Rick Holland, featuring German born jazz harmonica soloist Hendrik Meurkens. I got to arrange four of Hendrik’s tunes for that project, and I understand that we may be recording them commercially as well as playing some future engagements with him. I’m certainly looking forward to that.
I just finished an arrangement of Duke Ellington’s theme song from the film, Anatomy of a Murder, for trumpeter Terence Blanchard and the Metropole Orchestra. In addition to the project based on the Bach Christmas Oratorio with the WDR Big Band and Kingsingers, we are also trying to schedule a program with the WDR Big Band based on the piano music of the Spanish impressionist composer, Federico Mompou. He was a contemporary of Debussy who lived in the area around Barcelona until the mid 1980s. He wrote mainly suites of short but exquisitely expressed piano pieces that were somewhat influenced by Catalonian folk music, the flamenco tradition, the sound of cathedral bells and the tradition of Christian mysticism, especially the writings of St. John of the Cross. I have loved this music since I first got to know it during my college years, and it would be a beautiful experience to translate some of it into the medium of the big band.
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Evan Dobbins |
| About the author: |
| Mr. Dobbins serves on the faculty of Monroe Community College where he teaches music theory and jazz history. |
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Bill Dobbins has performed with classical orchestras and chamber ensembles under the direction of Pierre Boulez, Lukas Foss, and Louis Lane, and has performed and recorded with such jazz artists as Clark Terry, Al Cohn, Red Mitchell, Phil Woods, Bill Goodwin, Dave Liebman, Kevin Mahogany, Paquito D'Rivera, Peter Erskine, and John Goldsby.