She Did It All

The number of surviving veterans of jazz, those musicians who were young in the late thirties, is constantly shrinking. Last Monday, January 25, we lost another one when pianist Jane Jarvis passed away at the age of 94.

Jane is far from a household name in the jazz world, although she played with many of the greats and was a highly respected pianist, composer, arranger, and music executive. Jane got her start in the music business in an odd and abrupt way. At the age of 11, she found herself a gig as a staff pianist for a radio station in Gary, Indiana. Jane related how this came about in our interview for the Jazz Archive, on September 3, 1995:

MR: Tell us about how the staff piano player at this radio show came about.

JJ: My life has just been serendipity you know. My father saw, there in the Gary Post Tribune, that they were going to put on a children’s radio show. So he thought well that would be nice, my daughter can play all these little pop tunes you know. So we were sitting in the waiting room, waiting for all these children to come in and perform, and there was a — I don’t know what people were thinking — but there was one lady who had her child there who was a baton twirler. This is for radio now, mind you. And they had tap dancers, and the brought their piece of board that they could tap. And so...

MR: And they were all dressed up too of course, right?

JJ: To a tee, including the mothers and fathers. And so we were sitting in this waiting room and it was really getting very noisy because we’d all been sitting there an hour. And I was very well off, because across from the radio station, you know the next door, a band was rehearsing. And it was a jazz band. So my father says, well let’s just go in there and see what’s going on. And I sat and listened to it as long as I could, and to my father’s astonishment I went up to the leader and asked him if I could sit in. I don’t recall what I said. But these men just thought it was so hilarious you know, to have a little girl, I was 11 at this point. And so they let me sit in and I played, ‘cause I knew all the tunes they were playing. And they just thought it was cute you know. But that did it for me. That’s what I was going to be — a piano player in a big band. All right, now we go back to the waiting room where all the noisy kids are. And a woman came out and she said “can anybody out here play the piano?” Because she was saddled with this room full of kids, chattering kids, kids that could recite poetry you know. So I held my hand up and came in and so I was pressed into service as the accompanist for tap dancers, baton twirlers and singers and so forth. But at this point I could transpose. That was no problem, and I already knew most of the tunes because everybody listened to the radio. And so I went through the whole thing, auditioned the whole, and so I kept waiting for her to say “won’t you play some?” I wanted to be on the show you know. And she never got around to that. I was crushed. I thought if I’m good enough to play for all these kids, why doesn’t she ask me to appear on the program? And I was just getting ready to go out the door and she said “and by the way” she said “could you please be back here next Saturday, we have auditions every Saturday.” And so I thought that was better than nothing. And my father popped up and said “well Jane is accustomed to being paid a small stipend.” My father was an attorney by the way.

MR: Good. I was going to say, what kind of bread are we talking about?

JJ: Well at that point in time 50 cents would have been a large nest you know. So I can’t remember what actually happened, but at any rate, I not only then began playing for all these Saturday auditions, and finally, somebody said “well if she can play for the auditions, she should play for the children on the show.” So then I became the official accompanist see, by default. Then after about six or eight months of this, nobody had any idea how old I was. Because I never did look young. I never had a young face, and it just never crossed their minds that anybody that could do what I was doing could be literally a child. At any rate after a few months of this, their regular staff house pianist summarily walked out one day, and they asked me if I’d like to be the staff pianist for the radio station. Well I couldn’t believe my good fortune but I was sure my parents wouldn’t let me do it. But to my astonishment, my parents had a powwow and Mother was very big into the public school system, she made a special trip and spoke to my principal and she said “my daughter has an unparalleled opportunity, could she possibly be excused from study halls and let her stay home the first two hours in the morning?” I worked until twelve o’clock at night, would you believe this? And I mean when I think about, now isn’t this...

MR: You were 12 — 11 or 12?

JJ: Yeah, by this time I was about 12.

I have to think that this live, on-air experience, served Jane well throughout her career. As she stated, she had perfect pitch, she had no trouble transposing, and I can picture her dealing with the typical guest singer who comes in with sheet music and says “can we do this a little bit lower?” Being able to transpose on the fly at the age of 12 is quite astonishing.

In our interview, Jane's description of her career sounded similar to mine. In addition to my work in the Jazz Archive, my week-to-week musical activities include a wide variety of gigs, teaching, facilitating gigs for others, you name it. And Jane, throughout her career, did what it took to support her family, and found a way to make a living in music, from playing jazz gigs, to being an executive at the Muzak Corporation, to accompanying baseball games. No doubt Jane didn’t envision herself solely as a sports organist, but it’s telling that an article about her passing appeared on the front page of the Utica, New York Observer Dispatch sports section this week, highlighting Jane's tenure with the New York Mets. She got her start in Milwaukee, for the Braves, and in our interview she related the story of how this came to pass:

MR: When did the whole thing with the ball clubs come about?

JJ: Well, what happened, when I tell this it doesn’t seem possible. When the Milwaukee Braves, who had been the Boston Braves, moved to Milwaukee, the owners called me out of the blue and asked me if I’d like to be an organist for the ball club. And I thought somebody was kidding me you know. Because I took music so seriously and that seemed so frivolous. And they said, (it was the most left handed compliment I’ve ever had in my life), the president of the new Milwaukee Braves, said “well we need an organist and we don’t know whether you’re anything good or not, but every time we ask somebody who a good organist is, your name always comes up. And we want to know if you’d like to come in and talk to us about the job.” Well to me that was just some more extra money you know, and I’d never been to a baseball game. I couldn’t even get a passing grade in gym. And my eyes cross if throw a ball at me you know. So I think I was the most unlikely person on earth to be a sports organist. At any rate, I’ll never forget that interview that they explained baseball to me. “Now the men get up with the bat, and they throw the ball, three strikes and you’re out. Don’t play unless the club is leaving the field.” So then they got nervous about me interrupting the game, and decided that they’d only have me play at the beginning, at the ending, and play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in the middle. So after they became certain that I wouldn’t wreck the national league, they let me begin to play.

After her move to New York she became the organist for the New York Mets, as well as an all-around musician who could step into many musical situations. She also started in a clerical job with the Muzak Corporation, and eventually rose through the ranks to become Vice President of Recording. Most musicians cringe when they hear the word “Muzak,” which is often perceived as bland, easily-ignored arrangements of pop tunes. What I didn’t know about this music until I read Jane’s bio, is that the musicians who regularly recorded it were some of the most highly respected in the business. Jazz giants such as Dick Hyman, Bucky Pizzarelli, Joe Wilder and Bob Haggart all worked in the studios recording arrangements written by Jane and other staff arrangers.

I can picture Jane’s typical day during those years, getting her kids off to school, going to the Muzak recording studios and overseeing a session of arrangements she had written of some current pop tunes, running to the ballpark to play the opening songs for the game, and in her downtime sitting with staff paper writing arrangements for the next Muzak recording session. Because she had perfect pitch she didn’t need to be at a keyboard when she wrote. After the ballgame she probably went out and played piano in a club, accompanied by people such as Milt Hinton and Jay Leonhart.

Jane said that some of the gigs she got came about by default, when accomplished male pianists couldn’t make it she eventually got the call. Jane soon became a first-call pianist when vocalists discovered she easily played in the keys of B, E and A.

In her later years Jane recorded for Arbors Records, and was a founding member of The Statesman of Jazz, a loose-knit ensemble of veteran musicians, all over the age of 65, who toured the country playing concerts and staging educational events. Up until the last few years of her life she was active, and of all the people I met, early on in the gathering of our interviews, I related to her the most for her day-to-day musical activities, and for finding a way to make a living in the sometimes brutal world of jazz. That inspiration led to my composition called “Standard Time” dedicated to Jane, which appears on my CD “Jazz Life.” Click here to hear a portion of this musical tribute.

Click on my blog title “She Did It All” and you will be transported to a video poem about Jane’s latter years and her relationship with trombonist Benny Powell.

New Year's Advice

While I didn’t go into the jazz archive interviews with a pre-prepared list of questions, I occasionally asked interviewees if they had advice for aspiring musicians. They often did, and here are eight gems:

From saxophonist Phil Woods:

Advice for young jazzmen? No. I figure that if they’re going to do it, no matter what I say they’re going to do it. It’s for those ones in between, those ones that aren’t really sure, those are the ones I worry about. I mean I think jazz is only for those that have no choice. I think if you’re a young man and you’re entertaining thoughts of becoming a brain surgeon or a jazz tenor man, I’d go with the brain surgery, you know what I mean? If you have a choice. If you’ve got two burning desires, don’t pick jazz. I mean keep playing it. Sometimes I envy the amateur, like all those dentists and doctors who play for kicks. They don’t have to worry about making bread at it. They really enjoy making music. And that’s really what it’s about. Never forget that joy, that first time you made a note and it made you feel good. Musicians kind of forget that stuff, you know, they’re sitting in the pit and reading “The Wall Street Journal” and grumpy, grumpy, grumpy. They forgot that feeling, that burn of the belly the first time they sounded decent. And it’s easy to get kind of trapped into just making some bread and trying to exist when the bloom is off the rose. But a young man should consider — you only have one life. When you make a choice, a career decision, it should be well thought out. Not too carefully structured mind you, but I wouldn’t rush into anything. I wouldn’t rush to go to a jazz school or any university. I always recommend take a year off man. Hitchhike around the world. Take your horn and see if you can play for your supper around the world. See what life is about while you can, before you have a family, before you need bread. Get a couple of thou and just do it. Just do it, man. Take a chance. Because you might never have a chance to do it, and that’s when you can really kind of get inside your head. It’s hard to do it when you’re surrounded by your peers or family or the pressures of society that you know — go somewhere where it’s all fresh and pursue your — find out who you are. And then when you decide, you’re going to be a much better player for this experience.

From guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli:

Utilize the education you got, which we never got. We learned hard knocks you know. Somebody’d say you’re playing the wrong chord or do this or do that. Sometimes it’s costly. You’re on a job and you don’t get the job back. But you have to learn the repertoire. The repertoire is Jerome Kern, Johnny Mercer, Duke Ellington, Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, Walter Donaldson, people like that, Harry Warren. And it takes about this much space on your shelf. And for about five bucks a piece, or seven dollars maybe now, you can buy everybody’s book. That’s where it’s all at, right in there. All the changes. Learn the song the way the guy wrote it first. And then apply all that slick stuff you learned in school and sometime you’re going to end up playing exactly the way it’s written.

From vocalist Dianne Reeves:

A lot of everything came through experience. I remember when I had a band with Billy Childs and our music was just way out there. We would try to go as far out harmonically, we would perform on stage in a place where they didn’t care about the music that we performed. It was a place for artists. So we were very, very fortunate to have that. And we would experiment every night. And I remember things got more and more complicated, more chance taking, and then I ended up with Harry Belafonte. And when I got with him I thought to myself, wow, I can’t sing this music. It has like three chords and the melodies are real simple and you know I thought what is this? And at the time I was working with the great vocal coach Phil Moore. And he said “I think that you should definitely do this, have this experience with him.” And he was going to feature me. And what I found in performing with Harry Belafonte was that I had all of these songs that came from all over the world that had all of these dual meetings, you know some social, political meanings. And I found that there was a way that you had to sing them to communicate the message in the song. And that the harmonies were very rich and beautiful but simple. The rhythms were interesting and it was just different. And I found from that point on less is more. And so where in my early years when I would sing it was really about my instrument. I really didn’t care that much about lyrics. I wanted to use my instrument. But later on, I think after my experience with Harry, it changed, and I wanted to be able to tell stories and use the colors that I gathered from the very beginning of my career to really color the words and to really make my point very clear with the lyrics and the stories that I was trying to tell.

From trumpeter Lew Soloff:

First of all you have to decide what you want to do, whether you want to be an instrumentalist, a trumpet player per se or whether or not you have a love of jazz to the point where you want to be a stylist. You have to decide what you want to do. If you want to be an in-demand cat, and I include women in that, to play any kind of job for anybody, the key is versatility and very fast sight reading ability. There are people that learn to read lines ahead of where they’re playing. Very few people have this ability but some people do, culminating in maybe a whole page ahead, almost like photographing the page with your mind. But most people that can do that learn it when they were very small. But it’s a good thing to learn to read, if possible, a bar or two ahead, or even more if possible, than where you’re playing. It’s a skill that’s hard to develop, I don’t have it, I read maybe a couple of beats ahead of where I’m playing or something. But if you can do that, if you can become a superb sight reader, if you want to become a horn for hire or a musician for hire, that’s one of the prime things you need to do. And there’s another kind of musician who could be a for-hire musician as a side man, and I think this combines with being a stylist, where you may not have to read as well but you still have to be a good reader if you’re going to play in somebody else’s band. Because somebody else wants to do new material, and if the whole band can learn the material in two hours and you need to spend four days learning it because you can’t read, if there’s another person plays as well as you they’re going to get the job you know? And then, if you’re hooked on music and you want to really express yourself playing your music you should start getting bands together, ensembles together, whatever it is you like to play and you should start assuming the role of leadership at a young age and learn how to play your own music, in your own group, and how to get a whole concept of what you like. Don’t have any doubts about it. And the final piece of advice is that it’s a very competitive field, everybody would like to have a good time rather than go to work and do a job they don’t like from nine to five, so if you love it enough and you really want to do it, work really, really hard at it. And if you don’t have the ability to do that, if you don’t have the ability to work hard at it, it’s going to be a very dangerous field for you to make a living. There’s no guarantee of making a good living anyway in it, because it fluctuates. But in other words the passion has to overcome all the possible problems. It’s very possible to make a great living at it also. But the passion has to overcome all these problems. It has to become more important than a comfortable, meaning rich, lifestyle. It has to be more important to you than that, and then you might get the rich lifestyle from it.

From trumpeter Randy Sandke:

I think the most creative part of the whole thing is getting your career going. And it’s going to be different for everyone. And the people that do it are the ones that are — it’s like they don’t have any choice, this is what they have to do and they do it and they find a way and they meet the other guys that feel the same way and then somehow they start forming groups and you go through that period in your twenties where you’re willing to sleep on floors and crash at people’s places and do whatever it takes, and trust that hopefully you’ll come out on the other side. I mean I think on the positive side it is — maybe some opportunities are opening up. It’s kind of a double edged sword, this bit about the little bit more media. Jazz is kind of getting into the mainstream of American culture more then it has been, and with it comes all the other parts of mainstream culture, like just the kind of media focus on personalities, focus on looks, focus on this and that. But at the same time it’s creating some kind of economic base, some money is coming in, it means opportunities, it means more people are talking about it and curious. So it’s tough, but it can be done, to turn it into a career, to do it. And I see young guys breaking in every year. I feel sorry for people moving to New York and having to deal with the expense and you’ve got to be prepared for having this double life of doing something else to make money or having some money saved up, until you get things rolling. And that can take some years. But people still do it. They still do it.

From saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom:

Play as much as you can. Whatever opportunity you have to perform, take it. The whole idea is you can’t learn how to improvise without doing it, and hopefully every day. That’s how you learn how to do it and do it well. So take every opportunity you can to play and play with musicians who might be better than you are, to learn from them, and take any opportunity you can, even when it’s scary.

From trumpeter Warren Vache:

From the point of view of practicing as a trumpet player, we’re all concerned with endurance. Because it hurts to play the instrument. What I did was when it started to hurt I put the horn down. So instead of practicing an hour and a half at a clip, I may do thirty minutes three times a day, or fifteen minutes six times a day. But if it starts to hurt, stop, because you’re practicing at feeling bad. You might as well practice while it feels good. If your lip isn’t working, don’t struggle. Put it back down. The other one is an amazing amount of practice for me happens all day long. I’m always thinking about music. At this point in my life, every time I hear a tone I’ve got fingers going down, because that’s what I’ve done naturally, you know? So there’s a larger sort of practicing if you’re really committed to music, every time you hear a piece of music there’s a certain amount of analysis that gets done. If something moves you on something you’ve heard on the radio, can you analyze what the voicing was that moved you? Can you analyze, do you know what the chord was? If you don’t have perfect pitch, do you sit there and try to figure out well that’s an A minor seven and the seventh is in the bass and that’s why it’s that movement that I like. And you remember that and use it somewhere else. And that’s, I mean this is the great vast wonderful thing about music is the more you know the more you know you don’t know and the more there is to find and hear. So in that sense the practicing never stops. Because just learning to play and make a sound on an instrument is not enough. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about making music, and that involves thought, a lot of which is compulsive in me. I’ve always said that anybody that goes into music or into jazz for a living does it because they’re diseased. It’s a compulsion, you know. It’s a disease. There’s a voice in my head that keeps playing melodies. I can’t stop it, much as I’d like to sometimes.

From drummer Roy McCurdy:

What the guys used to tell me is just to listen to everything that you can get your hands on. Listen to all different types of music. And play as much as you can. And for me, I’m a gym guy so I like to be in the gym a lot. So I think that’s really helped me over the years, for being strong and for playing and for being on the road and keeping healthy. You know I don’t drink or smoke or anything like that, so that’s, the physical thing in the gym has really been a big part of helping me survive.

And here’s, my two cents for young musicians: for every mode and pattern you learn, memorize an actual song. And finally, the bandstand is not the place to tell stories to fellow bandmates, check text messages or practice licks between songs. Don’t play everything you know in one pass, there will be more chances.

Christmas Time is Here

It’s that time of year — of course I’m talking about the holidays. I used to be just as jolly as the next guy when it came to the holiday season, but I do admit to feeling a bit like Scrooge every time Thanksgiving and the following month roll around. I can attribute some of that to the gross commercialism that is now part of the Christmas season, which starts in early October, and the fact that working the holidays in a WalMart can now be fatal does not help the overall spirit of the season. I suspect my ambivalence to the holiday season is mostly attributable to Christmas gigs. Probably 15 years ago I started working an increasing number of holiday parties, private events, parties sponsored by banks or insurance companies, you name it. Everybody has their office parties, usually in the evening, often in a private club. Mostly I work these as a solo pianist. I have to acknowledge my teeth-gritting during that first holiday song, which I always try to delay at least until the calendar hits December.

This year my first holiday party came a couple of days after Thanksgiving and I was determined not to play a Christmas song just yet. But as the night progressed I realized this was definitely a holiday party, and I should be professional, so I asked myself what would be the first holiday tune of the year. I chose “Winter Wonderland.” This song has interesting chord changes, an intriguing modulation going to the bridge (up a minor third), and you have to pay attention when playing it.

In the ensuing party I pulled out my standard list: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Jingle Bells,” the usual suspects. I suppose the problem is repetition and a basic set of mostly uninteresting chord changes and insipid lyrics. “Have a holly jolly Christmas/It’s the best time of the year” is not actually all that inspiring. In spite of this, I do admit a certain envy for songwriter Johnny Marks who wrote this stuff in spades. He wrote “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas,” and many other Christmas songs, and I’m sure if he played his cards right and had his copyrights and publishing in order, he had many merry Christmases.

One of the oddest things that happens to me along the way during these numerous Christmas parties is an unintentional inserting of the wrong bridge in a Christmas song. It’s as if the parts are interchangeable. Many Christmas songs follow the standard A-A-B-A song form, much like many songs of the golden age, what we have come to know as standards. It’s intriguing how you can play “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” and when you get to the bridge you can play the bridge from “Holly Jolly Christmas”; or you could play “Jingle Bell Rock” and insert the bridge from “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and when you get to the last A you can play “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.” It always happens to me unintentionally the first time. I’ll be playing one of these songs and I’ll get to the bridge and somehow realize I made a transition to a different song and I didn’t even realize it. I do it absentmindedly the first few times, then it’s sort of fun to switch from one song to another and look around the room to see if anybody noticed. I have yet to see anyone indicate they heard it. And by the way, “Jingle Bell Rock” and “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” are not rock tunes at all, they are both swing tunes. What’s up with that?

Christmas tunes do wear me down, but a gig is a gig, and so I stick it out and try to insert the short list of hip Christmas tunes, which fortunately do exist. Mel Torme’s “Christmas Song” has a beautiful set of chord changes and could actually be re-written with a non-Christmas lyric and be a great tune. Oddly enough, it was written poolside in California in July. “Christmastime is Here” is a another beautiful song, by Vince Guaraldi. I’m also fond of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” mostly because it can be played in a nice, slow 6/8 groove.

This year, Christmas gigs are down — just like the economy — across the board. A lot of those banks and insurance companies that used to have Christmas parties did not call this year and I’m feeling a little out of touch with the Christmas songs. So if you want to send me a Christmas gig I’ll be glad to play “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” in all twelve keys.

Here’s a scenario that has happened to me and I will get some perverse pleasure knowing it may happen to someone else. If you’re in a restaurant with a pianist, and the pianist is doing his best to cover the holiday repertoire, wait until four or five Christmas songs have been played, then go up to the piano and put one dollar in the tip jar and say “how about some Christmas songs?” Then duck.