George Gaber would prove to be a lifelong friend — a man whose wisdom, advice, and love for music has accompanied me every day and in most every circumstance, musical or otherwise. He’s always with me in word, thought, musical choice, or touch. Gaber taught his students to always strive for the best tone. Professionalism was his calling, musicality his ethos, compassion and laughter his response to life’s challenges. His advice was as sharp as his wit. Gaber would say of fame: “That, plus 50 cents, will get you a ride on any subway in New York.” The train costs more now, but his advice is still true. He also offered, “There’ll always be that kid with the purple drumsticks.” In other words, something flashy might come and go, but musical values sustain a musician forever; i.e., it’s important to find lasting musical values for oneself. He also showed me perspective, and this during our first lesson at that band camp in Kentucky, my parents in attendance.
Gaber, intuiting and clearly sensing my post-jazz camp trauma and inherent insecurity, instructed me to play a snare drum etude on the practice pad — and to not play any of it correctly. To do so would result in his walking over to the pad and hitting me with a drumstick. “Excuse me?” I asked. “You heard me,” he answered. “I want you to play that piece of music, but if you play any of it correctly or as written, you’re going to get hit with a drumstick. Hard. Now play it.” I glanced over at my mother, and she had a puzzled if not horrified look on her face, as if to say, “Who is this madman?” But I did as instructed and played the snare drum etude on the practice pad, playing the notes upside down and completely out of rhythm, etc., rendering the piece of music unrecognizable.
When I felt that I had done this long enough, I stopped. Gaber then took a satisfied puff on his cigar, said “Good,” and continued: “Now, I want you to go over to that window, look outside, and tell me what you see.” I followed these instructions, and he prompted me while I was at the window: “Is the sun still shining? Are there clouds up in the sky? The trees are still there, it seems like the earth is still spinning, right?” My mother was smiling now, getting the point of where Professor Gaber was going. “Now, come back to the practice pad.” I did as he instructed. “You just played that snare drum piece as badly as it will ever be played. In fact, it could not be played any worse than how you played it. And yet, what happened? Absolutely nothing. NOW, let’s begin…”
If THAT’S not a life lesson, I don’t know what is.
Gaber saw to it at that camp that I played snare drum in the camp band, made up of an incredible faculty of first-desk wind and brass players from professional symphonies as well as top university students, all under the direction of Czech-born composer Václav Nelhybel. This was my first chance to work under the baton of a screaming, intense, it’s-all-about-the-music-and-nothing-else type of conductor, and it made a lasting impression on me. Combined with Gaber’s efforts to allow me to experience that it’s okay to make mistakes, I was thrust into a crucible of music that matters above all else at that moment, an intensity and appreciation so fierce that the results can be as searing as the hottest fire — at least, that’s the idea. I was tremendously taken by Nelhybel, his temper and his quick-turnaround kindness, his immersion into his music’s detail and potential power. His music fell out of fashion for a period of time, but his compositions were quite the rage with college wind ensembles for many years. As for me, instead of just playing the triangle, bass drum, or snare drum for a few measures at a time, separated by great distances of rests with the perils of miscounting those bars of rest always present, Nelhybel’s snare drum part was the next-best-thing to a jazz drummer’s part, providing the rhythmic motor to the band and always present, always audible, and in my hands at that camp, always calling attention to itself.
I’ll never forget the shocked look on Nelhybel’s face at the end of the concert when he cut off the final chord of his composition “Trittico” and I finished the held snare drum roll with a loud vaudevillian rimshot to close the piece. “Whack!”
I was a jazzer to the core, and as Gaber promised, the world didn’t stop spinning.
10. School
My good luck extended to school. Elementary schoolteachers accommodated my musical interests by allowing me to substitute reports such as “Charles Mingus” for “Arizona,” or “Jazz” instead of “New Jersey.” Every Christmas-break time, my mother would send me off to school with a gift-wrapped package that she cautioned me not to drop; turns out I was giving my teacher a bottle of whiskey each year. My mother was smart; she was also privy to knowing that several of my teachers were also patients of my father’s. Linwood, New Jersey was a small town. By the time I reached the junior-high level, I was ambitious enough to be the class president, plus valedictorian, scenery artist, and musical director for our 8th-grade graduation. As I recall, I played piano, snare drum, and xylophone as part of the ceremony (talk about vaudeville). My parents helped me scribe the graduation address; it was somewhat politically conservative, I’m afraid — the fear of the hippie unknown entering their bloodstreams along with most everyone else’s. The year was 1968, and the times they were a changin’.
The local high school offered draconian rigidity, more teachers who were patients of my father, and a marching band as the sole musical component for my next level of studies and life lessons. At some point during my 8th-grade studies, we searched for an alternative and found it in the pages of a Life magazine article that chronicled a magical place called Interlochen.
In fact, Professor Gaber had alerted us to the existence of the Interlochen Arts Academy, a boarding school that had grown out of the famed National Music Camp founded in that idyllic northern Michigan setting by Joseph Maddy in 1927. The Academy opened its doors in 1962. Like the best of schools, it offered an outstanding curriculum, the facilities to bring our music dreams to life (practice rooms, rehearsal studios, and so on), an excellent faculty — a relatively young faculty now that I look back upon them, but very much adults to us at the time — and, most important, the school was a magnet to some of the best and brightest teenaged talent in the world.
Side note: My parents and I knew that we had to find someplace for me to go to school other than what was available in New Jersey at the time. A large part of this had to do with my not being able to communicate or relate too deeply about what it was that made me tick or what it was that made me want to tick-tock — i.e., music. I once experienced goosebumps while listening to part of the Oliver Nelson album Afro-American Sketches and asked my friend, “Did you feel that?” He said, “Huh? Feel what?” and I said, “The music…here,” and I picked up the tone arm of the record player and placed it just prior to the same spot, whereupon the musical passage played again. I experienced those same goosebumps all over again and said, “There! That! Did you feel it?” He looked at me like I was nuts. Later I asked my father about this, and he explained to me that not everyone responds to music the same way as I did or, indeed, the same way at all. This was a puzzling and disturbing notion at the time. But we came to trust in the knowledge that, at Interlochen, there’d be a lot of shared goosebumps and feelings.
I looked longingly at the Life magazine article pages about Interlochen over and over again, and literally dreamt of the place. Of course, any place this special would require an audition tape of the highest possible quality. I began to prepare this opus, mapping out a track-bouncing scheme on our stereo tape recorder so I could perform a percussion quartet, plus a xylophone solo (I had been studying xylophone with former NBC/Toscanini percussionist Billy Dorn), a snare drum piece, and a drumset play-along to a Dizzy Gillespie album that Lalo Schifrin had composed and conducted titled The New Continent with Mel Lewis on drums. In retrospect, the audition tape was a bit of an over-achievement, but as they say, “Who knew?” In any event, years later I heard that outgoing percussion instructor Rick Kvistad was running down the concourse hallway holding the tape high in his hand, shouting to the school’s jazz band director, Dave Sporny, “Here’s your next drummer! Here�
�s your next drummer!”
11. Interlochen
photo courtesy Interlochen Center for the Arts
A special kind of wind blows in the northern woods of Michigan. This strong breeze passes through the thickets of pine needles that form a spindly canopy over the campus of the Interlochen Center for the Arts. I spent three very formative years going to school there, beginning in 1968 when I was 14. Again, my parents drove me one-third or more of the way across the country so that I could study music. This time I would be taking all of the regular high school classes as well. And I would be away from home, much like the summer camps, only this would not be a one- or two-week camp experience, but an entire school year. That did not seem at all daunting, but it did prove to be an excruciatingly lonely experience for the first few weeks.
Jazz band director Dave Sporny is on some sort of leave or sabbatical for a couple of months. I feel really young and out of place and overwhelmed, to the point where my mother makes a second trip out just to visit and reassure me, but of course between the time her trip is planned and the time she arrives I’m beginning to settle in. The only moment I remember of this visit is her laughing uncontrollably while watching our freshman physical education class, peopled by violinists afraid to hurt their fingers and brass players scared to damage their chops while playing an intramural game of basketball, which resembles nothing more than a ball being tossed around the gym floor with all intended recipients curling up into a gangly shape of agitated fear, hands up for cover while our exasperated gym teacher throws up his hands and rolls his eyes to the heavens. This gig is certainly his karma for something bad.
As the Arts Academy was a boarding school, my immediate parental figures were found in my teachers, and my classmates were like brothers and sisters. Competition and the pursuit of excellence were the credos of the place. Discovery was the magical result. Interlochen was where I discovered Mahler, Moten Swing, and Mongo Santamaria, as well as Debussy, Shostakovitch, and Blood, Sweat & Tears, not to mention getting a high school education. Come to think of it, many of my classmates turned out to be my teachers there as well. With a total population of approximately 400, all of whom were snowbound a good percent of the year there, we taught each other about music and life.
My first moment of knowing I’m “home” is when the symphony orchestra is rehearsing “Petite Suite” by Claude Debussy. I’m playing the triangle and having the time of my life. It’s not just what I’m playing that’s important to me: It’s the larger picture, the glorious sound of all of these musicians playing this music composed so long ago and far away, and yet here we all are, rekindling the music’s spirit and creating magic. I would leave rehearsals in those early autumn afternoons and inhale the scent of the pine trees and the breeze from the lake — the school campus sits between two beautiful lakes — while still glowing from the sounds of the orchestra playing that Debussy, and I felt all grown up and truly happy. And the Debussy would be only the beginning of what that orchestra would tackle that year and the following years: Ernest Bloch’s “Schelomo,” Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and Ravel’s “Bolero” (I played the snare drum parts in all three of those), Mahler’s First and Second Symphonies, Nielsen’s Second Symphony and Clarinet Concerto (snare drum), the Barber Piano Concerto, Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis,” Elgar’s “Enigma Variations,” and Bartók’s “Concerto for Orchestra” (timpani on those last three pieces). Guest artists would include Isaac Stern, Lukas Foss, and Dave Brubeck.
Meanwhile, there was jazz band. Dave Sporny, who also taught lower brass at the school, had come back and was holding auditions for the band. My competition would be two drummers, one of them the grandson of a major trustee at the school, the other the son of Dave Brubeck! Luckily, I played really well during the audition; all of my past big band experience and my getting un-squared-away a couple of summers earlier paid off and I won the chair. Also lucky for me was the fact that Danny Brubeck turned out to be such a cool guy. He turned me on to all of the music that was coming around the corner like Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and (later) Buddy Miles, while his older brother Chris turned us all onto Blood, Sweat & Tears.
The jazz band at Interlochen was known as the Studio Orchestra, in part because Sporny wanted the musicians in the band to be able to play all styles of contemporary music convincingly and with conviction. The group’s repertoire included the music of the Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, Stan Kenton, and Thad Jones/Mel Lewis big bands, plus music of the time as arranged by Dave, such as tunes from the Beatles’ Abbey Road or Simon and Garfunkle’s Bridge Over Troubled Water albums. The Studio Orchestra, or “Stud Ork” for short, used euphemism because “jazz” was still a dirty word in most educational institutions, Interlochen very much among them, and so the band ran under the radar of the place for quite a few years. That is, until the band appeared at the 1969 Notre Dame Jazz Festival on the final afternoon set where we literally stopped the show with a galvanizing performance that still ranks as one of the all-time great high school big band gigs I know of. The band was peaking and it was on fire. What started out as a guerilla-type operation that rehearsed unofficially during the school’s designated “ice cream social” once a week turned into a powerhouse big band.
After that 1969 festival gig, the Studio Orchestra became one of the most popular ensembles at the school, and its alumni list is impressive by any measure, including Chris Brubeck, Bob Mintzer (Yellowjackets, Jaco Pastorius), Anne Hills, Chris Brown (St. Paul Chamber Orchestra), Becky Root (Rochester Symphony Orchestra), Jim Olin (Baltimore Symphony), Eddie Carroll (CalArts), Woodrow English (Master Sergeant and the U.S. Army’s top “Taps” player), Walter White and Byron Stripling (both incredible trumpet players), Kiku Collins, James Cathcart, Clarence Penn, et al. (We all held positions in the Academy’s symphonic orchestra or concert band, too; the perils of playing piatti in Mahler’s First Symphony prepared this percussionist well for the likes of Neal Hefti and Sammy Nestico.) The symphony orchestra’s list of alums from the three years I attended is even longer and more impressive; suffice to say that just about every major orchestra in the USA and abroad can count Interlochen musicians in its midst. And I haven’t even mentioned the alums from the theatre, dance, and visual arts departments. Not all of the kids who go to Interlochen remain performers; some become doctors, others enter the corporate world, etc. Two drumming colleagues of mine ended up doing something completely different: timpanist Kenneth Broadway is now a world-class piano soloist, while my orchestra section-mate Stan Ragsdale is a federal prosecutor for the government.
Interlochen was where I began to learn about life, within a cocoon of music that was so intense that we naturally expanded so rapidly as to explode outside the artificial behavioral and protective barriers the school elders attempted to hold. We were “gifted youth” as the school’s motto boasted, and we saw the world from afar. At the same time we were dealing with geometry, Gershwin, and the growing discontent of our generation to the unraveling events in Vietnam. We were busy trying to figure out our future identities: Would we be symphonic players or jazzers, hippies or squares, part of a silent majority or vocal minority? And did that cute girl like me or not?
Meanwhile, I’ve got a history paper due tomorrow, but I still need to practice that Bartók “Concerto for Orchestra” timpani part. The late 1960s and early ’70s were, for us, the best of times even during the worst of the Vietnam War era, because everything pointed to a hopeful beyond. The music we heard, one album after another, all indicated or promised change. It seemed like a postcard from the future that said, “Hey, this is what music can sound like. Wish you were here!”
Weather Report’s first album is released during my final year at Interlochen.
Man, it was a great time to be young. It was also a great time to make friends, many of whom are still my friends for life: singer Anne Hills, director Jack Fletcher, hornist-turned-pro golfer Tom Moss, violist Pam Peeters Havenith, harpist Katie Kir
kpatrick, violinist and ECM recording artist Michelle Makarski, and saxophonist, composer, and big band leader (plus USC colleague) Bob Mintzer. I loved and love these people and the place, so I’m not sure why I was in such a hurry to leave, but a hurry I was in, and so I took summer academic courses by mail while playing gigs in Atlantic City between school years, applied for and was granted a year-early graduation. I was accepted by Indiana University, where I could continue my studies with George Gaber, and it looked like I might be able to satisfy my father’s dream that I become a doctor — if not in medicine then at least in music. One year and a few weeks after my three-year-term high school graduation, I would be back at Interlochen, this time as a college dropout on his first day’s gig with the Stan Kenton Orchestra.
No Beethoven: An Autobiography & Chronicle of Weather Report Page 4