Teen musicians feel the vibe in legendary jazz, blues and funk
Prospects didn’t look good. As the musicians quietly took their places onstage and the auditorium lights dimmed, a small man in a sports coat approached the center-stage microphone. Parents and other veterans of school concerts, bracing themselves for a long-winded introduction and a longer night of abrasive brass and cruelly out-of-tune strings, were about to be sweetly disappointed. “Good evening,” Nick Mariconda, a music teacher and the jazz band leader at Staples High School, said into the mic. “Here’s ‘Satin Doll.’ ” With that, the student jazz ensemble kicked off the annual Staples Jazz Concert by launching into the Duke Ellington–Billy Strayhorn classic.
With the rhythm section locked into a syncopated groove and the horn section swelling, the soloists stepped out and did what seasoned musicians do: They made the jazz standard their own, their instruments descending and rising on the melody, altering the very composition of the air and transporting their audience beyond the high school auditorium to an exalted, satiny state. Then, with barely a pause, the kids launched themselves into Charlie Parker’s “Yardbird Suite.”
Ellington and Bird, two geniuses who transformed American music more than a half century ago, may sound like offbeat sources of material for a suburban high school concert, not to mention unlikely musical models for teenagers today. But to a growing number of young musicians in the area, traditional jazz and jazz masters are where it’s at.
In Westport and Weston, in Norwalk and Wilton and Fairfield, high school kids are listening to Miles, Monk, Mingus and other giants of the genre — and copying their riffs and styles — with the same fervor other teens feel for Green Day maybe, or canonized rock bands like Led Zeppelin. Disdaining classic rock radio, one Fairfield Ludlowe High School senior who plays guitar says, “After you’ve heard ‘Stairway to Heaven’ a thousand times, what’s the point? If a radio station isn’t playing John Scofield or Wes Montgomery, I’m not interested in it.”
Jazz kids like him are taking private lessons, spending summers at jazz camps or schools, enrolling in advanced programs at nearby colleges, and playing outside school in trios and fusion groups.
Thelonious Monk’s Greatest Hits
One reason for the current interest in jazz among teenagers may simply be the availability of so much music. “Kids listen more now,” says Sal LaRusso, the band and jazz ensemble director at Weston High School. “They can download five different versions of a song and hear it played five different ways. Instead of listening to five minutes of jazz, they can listen to five hours. Music’s more accessible to them.”
In addition, some kids are exposed to jazz in the home, especially in our area, because a number of professional musicians have settled here. Growing up, Jarryd Torff, a senior at Fairfield Warde High School and son of the renowned bassist Brian Torff, couldn’t avoid hearing the music. “It was always playing in the house,” he says, “and I tagged along with my dad to gigs. I remember him playing at Carnegie Hall when I must have been ten or eleven. I couldn’t believe it — he was on stage with Yo-Yo Ma and Bobby McFerrin!”
Jarryd played in the popular Fairfield band Prophets of Funk and is currently in Tribe Suburbia, a fusion band. Last fall, he also put together with some classmates a combo called the Jarryd Torff Trio. Their debut was on stage at Black Rock’s Acoustic Cafe. The eight-year-old club, located on Fairfield Avenue in Bridgeport, serves as a venue for a wide range of music, including jazz (a jazz jam, on Sunday nights, features another local jazz group, the Steve Clarke Trio).
For Steven Lowenthal, a senior at Weston High School who plays piano in the school jazz band, it was a present from his parents that got his attention. “They bought me Thelonious Monk’s Greatest Hits when I was really young and it interested me,” he recalls. “I just wanted to play what I heard.”
When Steven and his friends talk passionately about Monk’s music, which, let’s face it, is complicated, you can clearly hear most kids’ natural desire to find something new they can make their own.
“I think they sense something real in jazz and funk, and a certain kind of connection that jazz, blues and funk make, that’s the opposite of what they hear on the radio,” says Brian Torff, who, when not performing or recording, heads the music program at Fairfield University. “Jazz opens doors to express yourself in a wide palette. Without me saying this is what you should be listening to, I find it interesting that Jarryd and his friends seem to gravitate to jazz. I think they hear intelligence. I think they sense jazz opens a door to discovery.”
In Fairfield County, at least, the first door to discovering jazz is the kind of introductory programs offered in the middle schools. “Kids are getting an education earlier, and not just the jazz programs in high school,” says Sally White of Sally’s Place, the Westport music store and institution, who has seen an increase in youngsters in her store in recent years. “Kids are buying classic jazz. They’re buying Cannonball Adderley, they’re buying Mingus, they’re buying Chet Baker and Bill Evans. Those musicians are having a tremendous impact on them. The interest is there, not because their parents are saying they have to do something for the summer — you have to play baseball, you have to play soccer. They’re doing it because they want to.”
Without the early programs, in fact, there most likely wouldn’t be jazz ensembles in the high schools. And as funding for the arts are being cut across the state, teachers like John Fumasoli, the band director at Roger Ludlowe Middle School in Fairfield, are making a strong case for introducing kids to jazz as early as possible. “Jazz is America’s classical music,” he says. “As a jazz teacher, you present yourself as a guide and say, ‘Go on your own path and come back and I’ll guide you some more.’ Because if you say, ‘I’m going to teach you a Charlie Parker style of playing,’ you’re going to get a clone, and that’s the furthest thing from what we want. We want kids who are individualistic and who develop their own voice.”
Ten years ago, Fumasoli and Mike Varga, the jazz band teacher at Fairfield Woods Middle School, started Sharing Diversity Through the Arts, a program designed to unite Fairfield student musicians with peers from urban schools. They brought in Mark Fisher at Tomlinson, the other middle school in Fairfield, and Jeff Bellagamba at West Rocks Middle School in Norwalk, and hooked up with a middle school in Bridgeport.
When state funding for the program was cut five years ago, Bridgeport lost its place, but the three Fairfield schools helped raise the money needed to continue. When West Rocks School in Norwalk hosts the annual joint jazz concerts, the stage is filled with more than one hundred kids from the four middle schools. When they achieve sonic unison, it’s like a constellation exploding on stage.
Cool, Man
Teachers probably have as much an influence on kids digging jazz as jazz greats do, and not just because they run programs and emcee concerts. Jazz band teachers seem looser and cooler than most parents — and cooler than regular teachers. They also tend to be working musicians who have been doing what they do for a long time. John Fumasoli, a trombonist and leader of John Fumasoli and the Jones Factor, for example, is currently in his twenty-ninth year as band director at Ludlowe Middle School. Weston High’s Sal LaRusso, a clarinetist, has directed the school’s jazz band and ensemble for twenty-six years; he also conducts the Westport Community Band.
Nick Mariconda plays trumpet in two bands, the oldies group Atwood Express and the high-energy jazz band the Al Ferrante Band, and teaches music in Westport schools, where he’s been for the past thirty years, twenty of them as jazz band director. Mariconda is easy-going, with a kind of bebop shuffle and a habit of sprinkling his conversation with “cool” and “man.” It’s a natural, disarming style, and one that kids find easy to relate to.
“Music is such an intimate subject because you use so much emotion,” says Chris Zappi, a trumpet player formerly in the Staples jazz band who is now in his freshman year at Cornell. “You really get to know one another through how you play. He and I talked about music but we also talked about life.”
By the time Westport kids reach high school, they have a multitude of musical choices: freshman or sophomore band or orchestra (meaning strings as well as brass and woodwinds); combined junior-senior symphonic band and symphonic orchestra (playing symphony-level scores as opposed to band sheet music), and four choral groups. To join the jazz band, however, Staples students must both play in one of the larger groups and audition.
Last year, twenty-seven kids auditioned for a place in the jazz lineup. This year, there are more. “In the last four or five years the numbers have increased,” notes Mariconda, “because the middle schools, programs are expanding and more kids are coming up who are interested and have the skills.”
After school on Thursdays, from 2:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m., those who have passed the audition gather in the largest of the three new orchestra rooms at the renovated high school — an enormous room crowded with a semicircle of black chairs and music stands focused on Nick Mariconda’s larger stand placed at front and center of the room. That grouping is ringed, in turn, by a phalanx of instruments: piano, xylophone, snare drums, kettle drums, bongos. The long list of songs was chosen by students and teachers together.
“We start looking at charts and see what works,” he says. “The kids might love one particular tune immediately and have it ready in a month. Other, more challenging pieces, take longer.”
One song that quickly caught the kids’ ears was “Yardbird Suite” by Charlie Parker, the bebop saxophone player nicknamed “Bird” (the New York City nightclub, Birdland, was named after him), who died in 1955 at age thirty-five.
“That tune’s been around,” Mariconda says, “but a year ago I heard a new arrangement by Mark Taylor — I met Mark and he’s a cool cat — and I liked it. It’s a tough chart when you do something that fast, you have to lock into it and keep it there. But it’s a strong jazz band arrangement, and a strong number for concerts, and I knew my saxes were strong.”
In addition to the Parker tune and Ellington’s “Satin Doll,” the band eventually worked up six other performance pieces, including “Since I Fell for You” and the Yip Harburg–Vernon Duke classic, “April in Paris.” Last year, from September to June, the kids rehearsed eight numbers. The season’s finale in Staples auditorium was Nick Mariconda’s twentieth end-of-year concert.
Each section of the jazz band has a leader, and the leader of the saxophone section was senior Brian Haswell. When he was a freshman, he had been tentative, even shy, on stage. Throughout his Staples years, however, he grew steadily more confident. He began to venture out on solos. He found his voice. And when it came time to do “Yardbird Suite,” Brian was able to boldly lead the sax attack.
Solo Flights
Originating in New Orleans around a hundred years ago, jazz relies on strong rhythm and the use of syncopation, improvisation, and musicians’ individual sounds and styles. Its appeal to teenagers, according to teachers and students, is the freedom for personal expression. And the path there lies in improvisation, composing on the spot, according to a musician’s feelings at the moment and an audience’s response.
Nick DiBernardino, a senior at Staples who plays baritone sax, joined the Coleytown Middle School jazz band in sixth grade. “At first, it was scary. I think a lot of us were afraid of improvising back in middle school,” he remembers. “But as you grow comfortable, it gradually becomes fun, especially in front of an audience, because it’s all you.”
The benefits of learning to improvise extends well beyond being able to solo on stage, teachers and parents say.
“Improvisation is kind of the complete package,” observes John Fumasoli. “Musically, it helps kids create something from their hearts and minds. But it also helps kids socially, to stand up and do things on their own, to lay out their bodies and souls in public instead of hiding in a crowd. Standing up and delivering can apply to many walks of life. It has to do with self and ego.”
Susan Davis, whose son, Steven Lowenthal, plays in the Weston High School jazz band, views the socialization aspect of the music in a larger context. “People don’t like to hear this,” she says, “but in Weston it’s said that there are two types of people: those with two-car garages and those with three-car garages. Kids who play jazz are exposed to a lot of different kinds of kids and a lot of different ideas, and I think that may be part of how jazz broadens them. To me, that’s what really wonderful about it. It’s music that asks a little bit more of you.”
In turn, it may just give kids something more than other after-school activities. “Jazz kids do something off the paper,” as Nick Mariconda puts it. “It lets them take something and make it their own.”
Notes Brian Torff: “Jazz is so based on the intuitive interplay of the musicians that I think it makes kids better ensemble players, and better listeners. It’s like you’re on a split screen. It’s a deeper
consciousness.”
Last spring the jazz kids from Staples competed against ten other bands in the big annual competition at Norwalk High School and came in first. When the band swung into “Yardbird Suite,” Brian Haswell, who had been sitting in the sax section, stood and stepped into the spotlight. “I felt a lot of energy for this song and I wanted to give it all I had,” he says, “and whenever I do that, I’m relaxed.”
Younger, less mature players tend to stall out on a solo, but Haswell had a lot to say. As his bandmates stuck to the charts, supporting the structure and forward movement of the number, he left the page, his fingers moving up and down the instrument, exploring the edges of the solo space and filling it with power but also ease and grace. Later in the concert, he soloed on “Since I Fell for You,” playing the melodic line usually sung by a vocalist.
“Improvising has been a kind of journey for me,” says Haswell, who graduated from Staples two weeks after the concert and is currently a freshman at Bates College. “A lot of times you have something in your head, but it’s hard to express. As more time has gone on, I’ve been able to express what I want, what I feel, more accurately. Sometimes, when I’ve let the music flow and my feelings have controlled the show, I’ve played something and thought, Wow! I just played that? Jazz has just kept expanding my horizons.”
Young musicians are beginning to feel freer, expressive, more open to new music, ideas and their own journeys. And their teachers are waiting to see when each of them will take flight. “It’s something you hear,” muses Sal LaRusso at Weston High, where alumni of the school’s jazz program include the world-class vibraphonist Arthur Lipner. “You hear a few of them understanding the music at another level and, all of a sudden, they start playing at another level. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a kid come up to me and say, ‘Hey, I found this great trumpet player. Have you ever heard of Chet Baker?’ That’s the thrill for me. It says they got it, they figured it out.”