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.And one of the thingsthat she had established is the Jazz Links program, which is it has kids, different The Lifetime Teacher 181ages, up through high school, and they get together and have jam sessions withprofessionals.So it s sort of like on-the-job training for them.NH: Do they record any of these? So the kids can hear them?JF: I m not sure.NH: I m just curious.Might be part of the instruction.JF: Probably not yet, but I think they re hoping to document this whole process.And I ve hosted a couple of pizza parties for these Jazz Links kids and had themcome over to the room, and we sit there and have pizza Chicago-style, but youknow I prefer the New York myself but we have the pizza, and then have a jamsession and I talk to them about some of the things that they can do and some ofthe things they re practicing sometimes, like when they don t understand theory,I ll send them a theory book that they can read and try to understand it a littlebit better.One of the great things we just did in Chicago is we started a programfor middle school and high schools students called the Louis Armstrong LegacyProgram and Performance, and we had about eight schools come and performtranscriptions that I did of  West End Blues,  Wild Man Blues and  Struttinwith Some Barbeque. And for those that were younger, from middle school,and the music was a little bit too difficult for them, we did  When the Saints GoMarching In and  What a Wonderful World. And it was supported by the LouisArmstrong Educational Foundation with Phoebe Jacobs.NH: I know Phoebe, yes.JF: And also, yeah, I think the Polk Foundation? And there was a young kid,maybe in the eighth grade, his name was Methuselah.NH: Methuselah?JF: That s his first, that s his name, and he came over, I think, a couple ofyears ago from Africa he came out, and he started to sing  What a WonderfulWorld, and there were tears flowing in the audience, it was so beautiful.Andwhen I started going to Chicago and performing, a lot of the schools that wewould visit and perform [at], and the clinics, were in the suburbs.But throughLauren Deutsch [and] Dick Dunscum at Columbia College we had a meetingwith Chicago public school teachers, and they were telling us some of their needs.And we helped to set up this program.Because, unfortunately, with budget cutsNH: And with No Child Left Behind, so you have to test for the test all the timeJF: Yeah, jazz programs are getting dropped, music programs are gettingdropped, art programs are getting dropped left and right.NH: Now, have any of these teaching [and] playing sessions that you re talkingabout ever been filmed? Because if they have been or could be, it would be great182 The Master Teachersto send around to the schools and maybe stimulate some of the principals ordivision chairmen to have there s nobody like you, but other people doing thatsort of thing.JF: Well I believe one of the parents brought a film camera the last time we hadit, and there s a blind pianist that I think was twelve years old who is incredible,and his mother wanted to film him, so I said,  OK.NH: This should be on PBS, or something like it, because the more people whosee this, especially the more young people who see this, seems to me, it ll inspirethem, and that s where your jazz audience and players are gonna come from.JF: Of course the future of the jazz audience is from getting to these kids whenthey re young.NH: Yeah.Now, we started this conversation with Louis Armstrong.When didhis playing begin to mean something to you?JF: Well, I think from a young age, when I started playing the trumpet, I wasalways aware of Louis Armstrong s music; he used to appear quite often on tele-vision, on the Ed Sullivan Show or something like that, but also in films.And,you know, if it was a trumpet player on television, I wanted to watch it.WhenI was ten years old, my trumpet teacher, Bill Catalano, introduced me to DizzyGillespie s music, and part of my study, and my lessons, was to practice excerptsfrom Dizzy s solos until I could eventually, after several weeks, put together achorus of a Dizzy Gillespie solo.When I was, I don t know, probably thirteen orfourteen, my parents would have parties in the house, and [when] I would comeout,  John, do  Hello, Dolly.  And I would do my imitation of Louis Armstrongsinging  Hello, Dolly. At that time I wasn t really aware of the Hot Fives and theHot Sevens or the recordings he did with his all stars or the things he did withDuke Ellington or the big band things that he did.I did a recording session forBob Thiele, after I d gotten to New York, I was probably in my early twenties.Andwritten down was the introduction to  West End Blues. And I said,  What isthis, [and] he says,  Are you kidding, this is Louis Armstrong s  West End Blues,from 1928.This is one of the greatest trumpet solos ever recorded. So, after Ifinished the recording session, I went toNH: Tower Music.JF: Not Tower, maybe King Carole, they had a place in Times Square, on Forty-second and Sixth or somewhere like that, and I went in,  Do you have  WestEnd Blues, by and I knew the buyer do you have  West End Blues by LouisArmstrong?  Oh, of course, here you go. And I went back, and then I learnedit, and a few years later, after that, I recorded it on one of the albums I didwith Ray Brown and Mel Lewis, Kenny Barron.Then I started to get into Louis The Lifetime Teacher 183Armstrong s music.And what was happening by this time was [that] I started todo master classes and clinics, and I read something that Dizzy said, because atthis time in New York, whenever Dizzy would appear somewhere, I would alwayscome and sit in with him.And I read an excerpt I read something that Dizzysaid to Fats Navarro and Benny Harris, who would always challenge him and tryto get him [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]