A Decades-Long Jazz Odyssey Leads to Jazz Workshop

Age 76 may seem a little late for playing with a jazz combo for the first time. But what am I to do when I pound out a few bars on the piano and my sight singing teacher shouts, “You must join a jazz band!”

Well, I don’t have a paid gig, but I spent a few sessions with a group organized by pianist Ron Worthy at a house in D.C. And now I am playing once a week at a jazz combo class in Tysons Corner called the Jazz Workshop.

The experience has been an eye-opener in the world of jazz, seen with a perspective of many years of listening and playing jazz piano alone, almost exclusively in my house.

For one thing, the music is really what I grew up with. At the Jazz Workshop, where I play with four or five instrumentalists once a week, most of the songs are based in the 1945-65 era. Our repertoire has such tunes as “The Shadow of Your Smile,” “Emily,” “Invitation” and Miles Davis’ “Nardis” and “So What.” Paul Pieper, the host and instructor, says that most of today’s jazz uses this classic era as a model before expanding into other forms after that.

I had taken piano for a few years and like most teenagers dropped it during high school. But I listened religiously to Pat Henry’s jazz show on KROW in Oakland, and parlayed some of my interest in my journalistic career, including Las Vegas correspondent for the Associated Press from 1968-1970. During that “rat pack” era , I interviewed such jazz-influenced luminaries as Hoagy Carmichael, Ramsey Lewis and Dionne Warwick. And I saw in person such jazz acts as Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald.

In Washington, also with AP, I took up piano again and studied for three years with Jean Butler (a.k.a. Maria Rodriguez), who introduced me to the Real Book, which contains the great pieces with all of their chords. I played for a few parties but got only one paid gig. That time, I refused to play the host’s favorite song. I was not invited back!

Retired at age 67, I took up singing, following much too late in the steps of my father, who sang in the San Francisco Opera chorus. I was stunned to find that I had inherited his tenor voice and I joined all kinds of choirs, soloed many times at my church. My beautiful grand piano sat idle for years, except when I played notes to get the right singing pitch.

But it was the sight-singing teacher’s declaration that got me to play with others. I found Worthy’s D.C. group the perfect form for jazz, but I felt in over my head with these experts who played weekly in this seven-piece band. So I signed up for Jazz Workshop, where you pay $65 per session with people at your level and get guidance from Pieper. “I know that F-sharp diminished minor seventh is not a common chord, but you should know that it doesn’t have a C-sharp in it,” he says gently. Wow! What an ear!

Some of what I have learned:Jazz is a lot more structured than I thought. Even many of the avan tgarde groups still follow this form: Head (opening melody) followed by 32-bar solos. Often it will end with “fours,” when the soloists play four bars and the drummer plays four. Frequently the ending consists of four bars repeated three times. Most music is in an AABA format.

Pianists can’t fill out the whole keyboard while “comping” or accompanying the others. You are restricted to about two octaves of chords. That can be frustrating, when your instinct is to play like Liberace.

Jazz has its own lingo. “They are tunes or songs, not pieces,” Pieper tells me crisply, as I try to separate out the classical music I have been singing in the past 10 years. “They’re bars, not measures.’ And he hates first and second endings. It’s the bridge or the last eight bars.
Pianists can’t play the root of the chord while comping because that is the bass player’s job. I had to learn entirely new voicings for the chords and at first played them with just my right hand. Now I am adding my left hand with thirds and sevenths, and the entirely new voicings are a new challenge.

Listen to the bass player and maybe the drummer too to get the rhythm, Worthy told me. It is tempting in a solo just to blast off on your own, leaving your bandmates in the dust. And don’t co-opt these instruments in creating the rhythm. “You’re playing the same thing we are,” complained the bass player once.

You are collaborating, not just taking turns with solos. Look at the other players to see if they are done with their solos or ready to start theirs. Pick up their solo lines and expand on them with your own. Have a sense of how the piece will end and agree on that. The one-word mantra: “Listen.”

Counting is everything. If you lose track as a solo performer, you can catch up. But in a group, it’s easy to get lost in someone’s solo. It’s better to drop out than guess and plunk down the wrong chords.

A workshop like this is a great place to talk about an increasingly fragmented form of art. Hardly any of my other friends are jazz fans, but here we can muse about Dizzy Gillespie’s upturned horn, Miles Davis’ second quintet with Wayne Shorter, Thelonious Monk’s seconds intervals or the late more experimental years of John Coltrane. The people in our mid-afternoon session are all over 60.

You can play jam sessions, performing with people you have never met and songs you don’t know. The Jazz Workshop holds such sessions on the last Sunday evening of the month the Epicure in Fairfax, with two selected groups performing from 7 to 9 p.m. and all others can sign up for 9 to 11 p.m.

Where do I go from here? Well, I may go back and visit Worthy’s group and show off my new stuff. I may play with a sax player I have jammed with in front of guests at our summer bed & breakfast in South Boston, Va. And some day (in the distant future I hope) I may be the center of the most badass group of all at an assisted living facility.

You can reach Jazz Workshop director Paul Pieper either at his email (paul@thejazzworkshop.net) or at 703-405-1476. Website: www.thejazzworkshop.net