Musician-in-Residence, St. John's College (Part 2 of 4)
| 2/17/2005 - The next day I was invited to dinner at the residence of Principal Tim Brook and his delightful wife Fay and their son; he had also invited some other interested St. John residence music students for the occasion and it was an enjoyable way to take the pulse of the community there. The atmosphere was relaxed and informal and I met a host of quirky and fascinating personalities, including majors in cello, piano, choral singing and composition, as well as a broadcaster involved in a local multi-cultural t.v. channel…
Afterwards, St. John’s had arranged for me to do a master class with UBC music students. UBC doesn’t have a jazz degree program per se, but their jazz head, Fred Stride, is enthusiastic and obviously doing a terrific job with the resources available to him. Some of the students who attended actually were not music majors at all, but the level of competency was quite high. I spent the first part of the class talking about my own history and my own conceptual ideas, and then I brought up two separate groups of students to play and coach, focusing on some of the tricks of the trade from the NY scene, particularly with its emphasis on rhythmic precision between the piano/bass/drums section, interaction and supporting of soloists. We also experimented with some Don Pullen-esque freeing techniques. It was thankfully very well received and a promising start to the upcoming week.
On Tues. was my big solo piano concert at the Music Building’s Recital Hall, and I was pleased that there was a large Bosendorfer piano for me to play for the occasion. The concert gave me the chance to practice what I preached, in a sense, and served perhaps as a useful introduction to where I really was coming from musically. Although the attendance was relatively spotty, the audience was again quite enthusiastic; it certainly seemed like much of St. John’s artistic community was in attendance and it fueled many further mealtime discussions in the ensuing days…
On Wed. I was invited by the Principal of the seemingly “rival” college nearby, Green College, to do a brief lecture/demonstration. Green had a kind of formal, “old English” air, with beautiful building architecture and a smaller student body. They, too, remarkably had a Bosendorfer piano at hand, though in this case it was unfortunately an older instrument, and I managed after piece #3 to actually break off it’s sustain pedal, thus putting a prompt end to the performing portion of my presentation. (I later found out that the pedal mechanism had actually been put together literally with fishing wire and chewing gum, so I suppose I can’t add this instrument to my list of past “abuses” at least officially :-)…) I told them that it was interesting that the latest column I recently submitted for Down Beat is called “When Things Go Wrong”, and covers just these sorts of predicaments that have arisen in my career over the years…Despite the sudden cut-off, I took many interesting questions and had a very pleasant discussion with some keen graduate students, most notably a classical piano major whose curiosity I suspect I particularly peeked… | | |
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