Journey into Jazz with Bennett Friedman
With its rich history, vivid personalities and exponential expansion of schools and styles, jazz can be an intimidating art form for curious but uninitiated music fans. Veteran saxophonist and esteemed educator Bennett Friedman teaches a free four-part course that demystifies jazz, offering an historical overview and musical insight into compositional forms, improvisation and the nature of jazz’s essential pulse, swing.
It’s the perfect introduction for casual listeners looking to understand how jazz works and how the music evolved throughout the 20th century.
The goal of this class is to make jazz music accessible so that anyone can relate to it. The classes will outline the history and introduce ways of listening to the music and the great artists that shaped the art form. By using recordings and live demonstrations this class will be an enjoyable journey into the world of jazz.
There will be four 2-hour classes, on consecutive Wednesdays from 6 – 8 pm. They will be held at the Healdsburg High School Band Room, on the HHS campus (1024 Prince St. at Powell Ave). Admission is FREE. If you plan on attending please RSVP to info@healdsburgjazzfestival.org
Class schedule is as follows:
June 22: Foundations
This class starts at the beginning, exploring jazz’s origins in the blues, funeral marches, and popular songs of the early 20th century. Friedman explores early jazz styles that develop in New Orleans and Chicago, and the emergence of the music’s most influential star, Louis Armstrong, who radically shifted jazz’s focus from group improvisation to a soloist’s art form. By close listening to classic recordings, Friedman illustrates what sets jazz apart, and how to follow an improvised solo.
June 29: Swing to Bop
By the end of the 1920s, jazz had already undergone a startlingly rapid evolution, from the group improvisation of traditional New Orleans ensembles to the rise of swing orchestras. Friedman focuses on the most influential jazz orchestras of the era, from Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington in the late 1920s to the rise of Count Basie and bluesy swagger of the Kansas City sound in the mid 1930s. By the end of the decade, the most advanced improvisers were paving the way for the rise of bebop, a style forged in small groups, mostly quartets, quintets and sextets, which replaced the jazz orchestra as the music’s fundamental setting.
July 6: The 1950s
In the years after World War II, the jazz scene became increasingly diverse, as various musical factions pursued their own concepts and developed new forms and instrumental settings. The regional divide between the East and West Coast is easy to overstate, but there was a loose association between cool jazz and California and hard bop and New York City. Friedman shows how Miles Davis complicates and exemplifies these stylistic developments.
July 13: Coltrane and Beyond
Jazz’s diversification gathered speed in the 1960s, as John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor introduced new approaches to improvisation (free jazz) in which swing, compositional structures and harmonic centers opened up. While free jazz’s foundational figures all came of age in the 1950s, the style became strongly associated with the raucous politics of the 1960s. Jazz’s most controversial movement, free jazz never attained mainstream status, though elements continue to influence today’s jazz scene.
About Bennett Friedman: A Berkeley native, Friedman has been performing, writing and teaching music in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1960’s. He attended Berklee College of Music in Boston and San Francisco State University, where he received a master’s degree in music (performance) in 1971, Friedman has performed with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, The Temptations and Michael Jackson among many others. He directed the jazz ensembles at San Francisco State University for 8 years, and since 1977 has been a full-time instructor at SRJC teaching jazz courses and conducting the Santa Rosa Wind Symphony.
After spending 20 years in Kansas City and getting indoctrinated in the mythology of the jazz era there, just wanted to put up some comments regarding Bennet Friedman’s exposition on swing, et al:
1. Kansas City was arguably the major center for jazz from the mid-1920s through the late 30s because of the corrupt Pendergast municipal machine that kept the city going through the depression and prohibition, maintaining a night life and entertainment industry that supported over 100 night clubs in the “Vine” jazz district. Night clubs supported both big bands and small combos and kept literally thousands of musicians working during that era. The Tom Pendergast political machine hand in hand with the mob ran the town for decades, even employing Harry Truman at one time in a minor municipal role. Reputedly Kansas City mob money was foundational to the creation of Las Vegas and the skim from those gambling operations was first channeled through the KC families before being distributed elsewhere in the national gangster network. Pendergast was finally indicted on income tax evasion in 1939, the blue noses gainined municipal power, the state of Missouri took over administration of the corrupt municipal police force, and things went down hill from there.
2. Kansas City was the incubator for important jazz innovations, including a change in the instrumentation of the jazz rhythm section. Originally jazz orchestras used the tuba, banjo, even the glockenspiel as the rhythmic underpinning for the music. It was out of the great Blue Devils territorial jazz orchestra based in Kansas City that the modern rhythm section of piano, bass and drums developed, featuring Walter Page at first on tuba and then later on bass. The band also included Hot Lips Page and Lester Young. It disbanded in 1933 when they got stuck in Virginia broke and no gigs. They variously hitch hiked or hopped frieghts back to KC.
3. Benny Moten’s Orchestra was the pre-eminent jazz band among the many famous outfits during this era. He hired Bill “Count” Basie from the Blue Devils to be second pianist, and eventually hired the rest of the band when the Blue Devils fell apart. Benny Moten was king of Kansas City jazz at the time and his theme song, Moten’s Swing, was like the city’s anthem. Unfortunately he died on the operating table in 1935 during a tonsillectomy. His band’s leadership was contested between his brother, Bus Moten, and Count Basie, with the Count ending up with the band that became famous under his name. But the essential character of the Basie Orchestra was formed under Bennie Moten, including the loose riff based format, the rhythm section and the free blowing improvisational style.
3. As important as anything else in the Kansas City scene were the late night jam sessions that would go on for hours, sometimes days, after the clubs main attractions finished. The story is told that Mary Lou Williams was woken up one night to go down to the club to play because the original pianist was worn out. These jam sessions included vicious, head to head cutting sessions pitting musicians against each other. The story is told about Coleman Hawkins going against the locals, palying so long and getting his head handed to him in a platter, then burning up his car trying to get to his next gig after been run out of KC. Charley Parker also played in these sessions but was so bad he too was often run off the band stand, sometimes by the drummer flinging one of his cymbals at Parker’s feet.
4. Eventually Parker went down to the lake district and wood shedded for a season, improved enough to land a gig in Jay McShane’s small orchestra, continued to develop his technique and style until he was ready to make history.
5. Big Joe Turner was also a major figure in the Vine during this era. His career spanned the roots of KC jazz all the way to the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll with his hit “Shake, Rattel and Roll”. He was actually a bar tender in a club that featured Pete Johnson on piano, at the Sunset Club. Pete would play the piano on the band stand and Joe would sing from behind the bar with a voice so powerful you could hear it on the street, especially impressive as the bar was below ground to begin with. Singing in the blues tradition, Joe would improvise lyrics for chorus after chorus, sometimes taking the song out over 100 stanzas! The scene was so vibrant and energetic that was par for the course for all musicians.
6. It is arguable that much of modern music would not have developed without the Kansas City jazz scene, whether it is jazz or rock or blues. Since its heyday, the music scene has waned and never again had such an influence as during the ’20s and ’30s. Jay McShane’s band was the last great outfit to attain national recognition although for years many small outfits were locally famous, such as Julia and George Lee’s orchestra. Mary Lou Williams, a pioneer pianist, also was instrumental in the Kansas City scene.
7. A fine history of the Kansas City era is “Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop–A History”, by Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix. Another interesting history, though at times inaccurate, is “Goin’ to Kansas City” by Nathan W. Pearson. Also interesting is a video titled “Last of the Blue Devils” documentary by Bruce Ricker that includes Count Basie, Joe Turner, and musicians from that era.
RSVP for July 6th