Jeff: For the Optimist [Manitoba regional] Festival, we would always be doing something different. Sometimes it was dismissed by the adjudicators. “This isn't band music,” or whatever else, but a lot of the band teachers would talk about it afterwards so we were having some influence on the conversation. We still played some traditional music and the things that brought us to the forefront.

 

Dave: And you probably mentioned this to your students, that by doing this kind of music we actually might be jeopardizing our chance of getting a trophy… but, “we don't actually care about that.”

 

Jeff: Right. I remember one year at the festival we played some sort of aleatoric thing and a prominent music industry person said, “You know, Jeff this could be detrimental to your career.” 

 

Dave: Ha. To say that a high school teacher at a top high school who's doing a lot of great things is jeopardizing their career by programming new music is a little hyperbolic.

 

Jeff: And the trophies weren't really a concern. For the last several years at any festival we've really just gone comments only. I didn't care what the marks were and because of that I haven’t played any list pieces for a long time. I just played new commissions or something different.

 

Dave: And you knew the reaction to that was always going to be a mixed bag. I didn’t do it for long enough to get away from the list pieces. And some of that traditional band literature is good music and I hadn’t conducted very much of it so it wasn’t a main concern. I think, early on, there was also good mileage out of getting a good grade at the festivals if we could. If getting the trophy was a residual effect of having a decent band, then it was fine. 

 

But if we did a standard piece, the second piece was always one of mine. I would work the name of a student into the main title or movement title. Or take a student melody that one of the kids composed in our “composition” unit, create a cantus firmus out of that, and hide it in one of the concert band pieces. Just to do anything to get the students into it. But we got ripped at Musicfest Canada one year because we had this one piece called “War Games,” a weird thing inspired by John Zorn’s “ “Cobra” with aleatoric sections. 

 

And everybody who was in the jazz band was in the concert band or wind ensemble and we had some pretty great soloists. But we just got hammered for that. And we played the list pieces almost as well as anybody. Doing new music isn’t exactly pushing the envelope but wind ensemble can be a pretty traditional setting with matching attitudes. It’s not all like that but you also don’t get to select your own judges at festivals. And my motivation was as much pragmatic as it was artistic. I was trying to motivate the students but also writing music to feature the absolute best students. So in years where I had some National Youth Band kids I would write long angular solos for them and the players who couldn't play as well were more in the background. It made everything sound twice as good as it really was.

 

Jeff: I can't believe you'd get ripped for that at national music festival because that's the essence of great teaching. You're making a piece work for everybody. The kids who need a challenge get a challenge and there's still a way for everyone else to participate to make great music, to bring something fresh and new to the table. Back then, seeing and hearing your compositions I was thinking, “This is great because this is what music education should be.” Through the compositional projects you can tailor make music for your students. But, yes, the whole concert band thing is pretty conservative. 

 

Dave: There's very little true 20th or 21st century concert band repertoire on most of the lists, regardless of when it’s written. It's often very safe, very romantic, 19th century harmony. And you understand, from an educational perspective, why it’s justified that way. Jazz ensemble attitudes aren’t all that different. One year I decided to voluntarily start a jazz band at my main feeder school, Arthur Day Junior High. This was right before Paul Graham took over the program. We’d been rehearsing for two or three months and I wrote all the charts because these were absolute beginners in jazz and there was no way I was going to be able to work up anything respectable if I used stock charts. We did “St. Thomas” and an easy version of this Mingus chart, “Hog Callin’ Blues.” I can’t remember the third chart. And there's this one part on the Mingus Big Band version where the two tenor players make loud pig noises. For a group of little kids, it’s was pretty good. They were especially good at the pig sounds. Two of the adjudicators gave us a gold rating and some pretty enthusiastic comments. But the third, Bobby Harriot the trumpet player, gave us a bronze rating and hated it all. And I remember Ken Epp [executive of the Manitoba Band Association] having a conversation with him in the hallway at Glenlawn Collegiate asking if he would consider changing his grade because they didn’t like grades that were “split” like that. And he was pretty pissed off and refused to change his grade.

 

Jeff: I couldn't figure that stuff out because I had some of the same experiences. We always went “comments only” at the Optimus Festival. We did all kinds of John Cage stuff at the festival and whatever else, and I remember one year a well-known adjudicator said, “You'll understand why I won't adjudicate this well.” I’m thinking, “You've taken 20th century music classes. If my high school kids can get this, then how come someone who has a PhD can't figure out how to grade this?” And then some of the other adjudicators would be all over this saying, “this is the greatest,” and “the exposure kids are getting to different music is fantastic.” But you get the traditionalists saying, “this isn't concert band music.” But what is that? Music is music.

 

Dave: The instrumentation makes it a concert band. What they do with that. Similar with the orchestra. I think it’s somewhat different with Jazz ensemble. Those seventeen instruments don’t automatically make it a jazz band, regardless of what you play. And you decided not to do the list pieces, but not because you were incapable of doing them. And that's a big thing. They have the list pieces so that people working up to a particular standard have something to shoot for. There are a specific number of elements that they have to be putting into the music. It makes sense. But once you're at the point where you don't have to actually prove that you can play this music properly, which you clearly had done, then you get a pass and can say, “I don't want your trophy. I don't need it anymore.” You've got to have a particularly supportive set of parents and administration to not need the acknowledgement. We understand that it's not about awards but, clearly there are people doing this job better than other people. The idea that there's no room for dividing levels or even identifying levels… and the one thing we haven't mentioned yet is the Jazz at Lincoln Center thing which is clearly competitive.

 

What was it about the Jazz at Lincoln Center, Essentially Ellington Festival where you possibly said, “I think we can get some mileage out of that” or “It's a good idea and we're going to try to do it.” What was your thought process at the beginning?

 

Jeff: The festival had been going for a few years before Canadian bands were invited to participate. When Canada was first included, this email came out and with that announcement. And it sounded interesting it, certainly something no one else in Canada was doing, obviously. And the music is phenomenal and I like the idea of getting free charts. 

 

So the music came out for that year and I happened to have had some players in there who were pretty heavy hitters like Keith Price was playing guitar, Julian Bradford on bass, and the Metcalf boys. I figured, “Let's find some charts they could do. So we hit this thing and it was a fluke. We had no idea what the hell we were doing. We just spent time rehearsing, spent an hour recording the tunes and sent it in with no expectations. That year we were seventeenth, just out of the group of fifteen finalists that got invited to New York.

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In those days, if your band placed in spots sixteen to twenty, the band director got a trip to the band director academy. That year, I went to Aspen Snowmass. They flew me down there, all expenses paid, and it was great. I got to meet Ron Carter and all these different cats. Wycliffe Gordon was there and all these different players. I didn't really know much about the competition. 

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They were saying, “This is the World Series of jazz” and they're asking me about the recording we made to enter. I said we just recorded one afternoon for an hour and they couldn't believe it. I started to get to know a little bit more about that scene and after that experience I thought we could probably do a better job the next year. We started getting a little more detailed. And it helps that the music is phenomenal, whereas a lot of the stock charts that you play had to be “fixed” in certain ways, like we're going to change some details. These Ellington charts are perfect. Duke Ellington was such a genius composer and these are all works of art

 

Dave: They're the real charts. And if you didn't know who David Berger was, or King Brand, you didn’t have them. Almost no high schools really had any access to Duke Ellington charts. A tiny handful of high school bands had them but they were these pretty chicken scratchy David Berger transcriptions. And you had to have some pretty specialized background to even know about them. So for the longest time, jazz education was so skewed against Duke Ellington because nobody could get the charts. There were some Basie-esque charts of Duke Ellington tunes that bands played. 

 

But the cool thing about Essentially Ellington is these charts are playable by young people, the way that the Ellington band played them. But the kids need to get that, musically, it's a totally different world and we're going to have to immerse ourselves in this sound in order to be able to play them properly. We can start to play them almost immediately. But now how do we play them in a way that does any level of musical justice to what Duke Ellington did?

 

Jeff: For most high school kids, a lot of the Basie charts are out of their realm. That's what a lot of bands are playing but they're not actually all that playable because there's so much in there that most high school kids can't get. The ranges are insane. But the Ellington charts, yeah they're in the zone. And the same thing you said before about how they're real. So many charts available are “written in the style of that” or “this is the written in the style of Basie, but why not play the original stuff? And there are reference recordings of the original Ellington charts that you can get to that are exactly the same charts. Wynton Marsalis gets a lot of shit for a different reasons but he’s also getting free Duke Ellington charts into thousands of band rooms.

 

Dave: There's not much else you can do with high school kids that's a real repertoire chart, unless you have a really solid band. I've heard recordings of some of the absolute best high school bands trying to play Maria Schneider charts and they're pretty terrible or Bob Brookmeyer charts, Jim McNeely charts, Thad Jones. Some Count Basie charts are moderately accessible but other ones are just ridiculous, like you said. 

 

This is unlike concert band where if you've got a really good high school band, you can play a lot of the repertoire and do it justice. One of several problems with most real jazz band literature is you're asking a sixteen or eighteen-year-old trumpet player to do what almost no trumpet player player can do, even when they're twenty two. And even then it's like 1% of all trumpet players who are ever going to be able to do that. So the chance of you having a real lead trumpet player in your high school band is almost zero. 

 

Guys that I went to college with had gone to the Iowa Jazz Championships as a high school trip. They heard Ryan Kisor and had a bootleg recording of him playing Cherokee when he was seventeen and still in high school. It's just miraculous. But he's one in a million players.

Ryan is only a year older than me. He went to Sioux City North High School in Iowa and his dad was the band director. He was our jazz festival guest artist in the first year of our my master’s degree and because I was a teaching assistant, it was my job to drive him to and from the hotel, drive him around to buy a suit and take him out for dinner and all that. And there was something weird about the fact that we (sort of) play the same instrument and are almost the same age but he’s the guest artist. And at that point, he'd already been playing in the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra and the Mingus Big Band and had already done two or more records for Columbia by that point. And a lot of kids have their parent as their band director so that doesn’t explain everything about Ryan Kisor’s ability.

 

Dave: Anyway, what was the first year that you did that?

 

Jeff: Actually, I forget the year now. It was probably 2000? Around there.

 

Dave: It was while I was in Winnipeg so it was around 2000, sure.

 

Jeff: There was a huge learning curve for me but I learned so much by doing it. I learned to love Duke Ellington’s music so much more. To play his stuff right, you have to get deep into it and I just became more immersed in the listening. Ron Carter [the educator] was really my biggest influence for this and I think he's the guy who knows that stuff more than anybody. Even since then I've had Ron out to River East to workshop my kids. He just knows how to get those kids swinging. He is just so knowledgeable in that area and so very inspirational to kids. I have also become one of his clinicians at his Carter’s Clinics and got a lot out of that too. I got to spend more time with him and meet Dave Berger and others. These guys got the bug in me so, when I came back, I had a different level of knowledge.

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It became infectious. When we worked deeper with the kids, they started to get deeper into the music. The detail on the level that you had to start dealing with was serious. We came so close in that first crack and were very fortunate to be able to get to the finals five times, which was a phenomenal experience. The band rehearsed more times a week than they had before and it was really the kids that requested that change. 

 

Was that another example of a strong catalyst for motivation where, “if we have a real focus in our band program centered around Duke Ellington, I don't need to apologize for that?” And maybe this leads into another question I haven't thought of much, but you don't seem to have taken the approach that you hear so often that, “If playing some pop tune or rap music is going to get kids to love band, then I don't care, I’m going to do it. If a pop tune is going to get kids to like playing in the concert band, I'm fine with that. I don't care what level of integrity the music has as long as it's music. I'll put it in there just because the kids will love it.” 

 

Jeff: With Essentially Ellington, the character of the festival was definitely important. You could present the goal and the kids were like, “Let's go for it!” “Here's what you're going to have to do,” and they were into it. Because there's so much depth and so much history. Any music that I program with any band, there has to be some sort of connection to something, a piece of history or a relationship that makes this music important or important to us. 

 

I have programmed rock and pop tunes but there's always a connection to something that served a purpose in the history or was influential somehow. For Duke Ellington, it was easy because the influence was massive. And it was so interesting. There was a lot of listening and a lot of depth that came with that. One of the things we learned about Wynton’s philosophy was his interest in preserving American history. “America has given the world three things: the hot dog, baseball, and jazz. The hot dog is doing great, baseball is thriving, and jazz is not.” And the musicians were lamenting about the fact that, especially the African American kids, are not listening to much jazz anymore. “How can we get them to do this again?” Basically, the mission is to preserve culture by bringing the music to the forefront because it's part of American history. Unfortunately, the festival is not as open as it used to be. The fifteen finalist bands are basically by region. Back in the day, there were always ten spots for bands who hadn't been finalists in the last five years and five spots for people who might have been finalists. 

 

And then they put all of these conglomerate bands in the mix. Now any performing arts school is the same category as Joe Public High School. The level of the playing has gone through the roof. We were there the last time in 201. We've tried a couple of times since and we’ve come close but it’s a bit more exclusive. And it's a lot of the same bands every year. Even Ron Carter was saying to Wynton he wasn’t sure this is the way to go because they’re not going to catch as many kids as before. But at the time the level of performance was so great for my kids and it was so inspiring.

 

The very first year we went, Karl Kohut was my bass player. He eventually did his masters at Juilliard and got to play with Jazz at Lincoln Center one year when they did a piece with two bass players. Now Carl’s a jazz professor here at U of M. So it did sort of come full circle where one of our guys went through that process, went to Juilliard, and is teaching the next generation.

 

The last trip I did right before COVID, we went to New York to audit the Essentially Ellington festival. We hadn't applied that year but we just sat through the competition and all of my kids were knocked out by the level.

 And they're doing a lot of streaming of that festival now which is great for everyone to be able to see.

 

Dave: You realize the level that some of those high schools are at but, like you said, some of them are magnet high schools and some of those kids are a year away from being admitted to Juilliard or some of the best schools in the world. It's going to be difficult to compete.

 

Jeff: At Essentially Ellington, there was often a dinner the first night where the directors sat together. The kids sat with their instrument sections and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra members sat with the kids. So all the high school trumpet kids would be eating with the four great JLCO trumpet players. 

 

I was hanging with the band directors and there was a group from Texas, three directors there from one school. I told them all of the different ensembles I teach and the lady who was directing their jazz band said that her sole job was directing that jazz orchestra. And they were talking about their roster of in-house clinicians. They had their own saxophone teacher and trumpet teacher. And every instrument had their own teacher in addition to the jazz band director. This is a whole different world from what we deal with. And they asked me about my job and I'm teaching three concert bands, two jazz bands, and other ensembles, and they couldn't believe it. In some of those schools it was essentially that one person’s job to prepare their bands for that festival.

 

Dave: We deal with that here on some level. Some of our best students are about as good as anyone. Pretty recently, I’d been working with a trumpet kid for about six years and even though he wasn’t participating in his high school music program, he got a good scholarship to Manhattan School of Music and is finishing up there at the end of next year. I think i can give a student the right information and guide them in their choices of what to practice. But they have to do the practice themselves because I can't sit with them all day. But to be able to produce a consistent line of students like that or multiple students at the same time is difficult in most places.

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You said that, for more than a decade, you taught the percussion methods class at the University of Manitoba?

 

Jeff: Yeah I did that for about a dozen years at U of M.

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Dave: There’s another thing I think offers additional satisfaction for someone teaching in a public school: by the time a student auditions for a magnet school or a top university, they’ve probably already met their most influential teacher. If the school they’re applying to is really good, the students already have to have accomplished a lot and your impact, as their primary teacher who took them from zero to whatever, is probably more profound than what some magnet school teacher is going to accomplish. They’ll learn more and go a lot further but the most rewarding and impactful work might have been done already. It's similar to students at elite universities.  The most profound person to them is not going to be that university teacher. It's going to be somebody before that. Whoever their high school teacher or private lesson teacher. If you want to teach college and you think, “I'd really like to teach at the best place,” that's probably not actually the best gig from a job satisfaction standpoint. I was mentioning that Facebook post about your retirement. You've got a number of people saying, “This guy is my best teacher. He's the one that had the biggest impact on me. He made me not quit school.” That's a profound impact and that's going to make you feel good about having done this job for 3 1/2 decades.