Discover the heartbeat of America with Sarah Roberts, interim director for UT Tyler’s School of Performing Arts, as she unravels the legacy of jazz during Jazz Appreciation Month. Gain insights into how this American art form has left an indelible mark on today’s culture. From the historic rhythms of African American communities to the transformative sounds of Delta and Chicago blues, pay homage to the genre and its pioneers like Duke Ellington, while also spotlighting the fresh vibrancy brought by contemporary greats such as Maria Schneider. Learn how music education and performance at UT Tyler are key to preserving the rich musical tradition of jazz.
TRANSCRIPT
LANDESS:
Twenty-three years ago this month, the National Museum of American History in Washington created “JAM” as an acronym that stands for Jazz Appreciation Month. UT Tyler Connects with School of Performing Arts Interim Director Dr. Sarah Roberts, to find out why she celebrates it every month of every year. How come?
ROBERTS:
Because jazz is America’s music. We have to celebrate it all the time because it’s truly ours. It’s our American art form.
LANDESS:
That it is. Now, when UT Tyler Radio revamped its programming this spring, we added 19 hours of jazz, and someone asked me, “Why jazz?” So I gave them your cell phone number, is that OK?
ROBERTS:
That’s why it’s been ringing off the hook.
LANDESS:
But when people ask that or say, why this big focus on jazz? Because…?
ROBERTS:
Because if we don’t talk about it and support it, we’re not continuing the tradition. And we have to keep it alive. And regardless of whether you’re a jazz performer or you’re listening, or maybe you don’t even know what jazz is, it’s our responsibility to keep this American art form alive. And the only way that we can do that is continue to train students to play it, continue to make it popular and available in any means necessary on the radio, for example, and continue to program concerts that feature jazz and all of the facets of jazz.
LANDESS:
Now I want to talk about the various programs that you have going on this month here at UT Tyler. But let’s step back a little bit and talk about jazz. It is arguably one of the most influential and meaningful contributions to American life by African Americans to our culture. It has an extraordinary heritage and history.
ROBERTS:
It definitely does. It, you know, really came from this place of merging cultures and merging just different ways of life. You know, there’s no pinpoint of we can say on this day jazz started. But if you think back to the late 1800s, early 1900s, you know, especially in the South, especially New Orleans, it’s this melting pot of cultures. In New Orleans, there were six opera houses in the early 1900s. Six! That’s incredible.
And you know, jazz came out of this melding of all of these cultures, and it has its influences in African music, in Latin music and what was happening here in our country. And it kind of took all of these different elements and put them together. But even more so, it was this music that was heavily started and influenced by non-trained musicians who were taking the elements from their cultures that they knew and putting them together. So we can look at the blues as being one of those first genres.
LANDESS:
Starting with field hollers and gospel music, and all of that put together.
ROBERTS:
And then we see that transition into Dixieland and early jazz where the horn players are trying to play their instruments like old blues musicians, with how they would, you know, use their voices and play notes that are in between the pitches and slide into them and make guttural sounds and really change. The first jazz record, 1917, it was recorded by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and it — “Livery Stable Blues” is one side of the record. And then there’s another tune on the other side, 3 minutes on each side, right, and records. You know those round discs?
LANDESS:
Oh, yes, exactly. And the old ones, the 78s, were like a quarter of an inch thick. They were huge, yeah.
ROBERTS:
That sound of that record was unlike anything that had been being played on the radio waves of that time.
ROBERTS:
You know, you think of traditional American folk song, that’s pretty much what was on the sound waves, on the airwaves. And when they released “Livery Stable Blues,” it totally changed what our entire population then was listening to. That had a clarinet that was trying to kind of be like a crow and crowing and playing obligato lines; a trumpet that was playing the melody and a trombone that was doing all these like low slides, kind of like mooing like a cow, because they were trying to sound like a stable and the tempo was peppy, it was upbeat. So if you compare that to American folk music, this changed kind of what everybody was listening to and the fact that radio was unifying our country now. Jazz just started to take hold, but depending on where you’re at in the country, you also have, you know, all these different cultures influencing that as well. So you know, going back to blues, we could look at all different centers in our country, the Delta blues–
LANDESS:
Delta blues, Chicago blues.
ROBERTS:
Yeah, exactly. And jazz kind of did that same thing based on the players. So if we look at swing music, for example, it moved, Jazz moved up the Mississippi river, so we have like a Kansas City swing, Chicago swing. Then it moves over to New York. That’s different. It finally reaches the West Coast, and we get kind of the West Coast vibe. So I think it’s really interesting to then look at all these different areas in the country and how the music articulates those different areas and those cultures and the musics of the population.
LANDESS:
I hadn’t thought about it specifically in that way, but certainly with blues, I’m more familiar with that, probably, than I am jazz, but knowing that there is, I mean there is Delta Blues, Chicago Blues, B.B. King’s Blues Club in St. Louis. I mean the way the influence on rock and roll, country was a big part in all of that here. One of the great country albums, interestingly enough, was Ray Charles, who was arguably quite a jazz musician, jazz and blues musician. But I digress. Let’s go back. I mentioned earlier that the National Museum of American History created JAM, and this year they’re honoring Duke Ellington, a Washington D.C. native. His parents were both pianists, and this would have been his 125th birthday. His was one of the most influential big bands and his work inspired generations of jazz musicians. Do you love that big band sound, and do you try to recreate it in some of the performances we do here at UT Tyler?
ROBERTS:
Definitely. I’m so glad you brought up Duke Ellington. He is not just so influential in jazz but in composition as well. He’s one of our most influential composers, not just for jazz but orchestra and other American music, especially of his time. He was a very prolific composer.
ROBERTS:
But it’s funny you mentioned that because we’re actually playing an Ellington chart on our next concert with our jazz ensemble, and it’s featuring one of our trombonists who’s graduating this year. It’s a really great, really great work, and so we’ve been studying that band sound and how to achieve sounding like Duke Ellington. And it’s really funny when you, if you get a chance to look at his original manuscripts — and there’s some different places where you can see those in different libraries across the country — he didn’t write in the top of his parts “Trumpet 1” or “Alto Sax 2,” typical labelings of the parts. He wrote for the musicians that were in his band, and he thought about what each musician could do. So, case in point, Harry Carney was a barry (baritone sax) player in his band, and he had a particular sound and a particular way that he would play and how he would use his vibrato, and so he would write parts particularly for him.
Or Cootie Williams was –that’s his nickname– but he was a trumpet player, and he did a lot of different sounds with mutes and plungers and things like that.
LANDESS:
(sounds) It was wah-wah before wah-wah.
ROBERTS: It was wah-wah–exactly. And so he wrote on the part “for Cootie.” There’s actually a ballad for Cootie. But it’s really interesting from a compositional standpoint that he took the time to understand his players, understand what they could do on the instrument and then utilize that as a way of composing, rather than you know, sometimes maybe we compose something for ourselves, and we don’t think about who’s actually going to be playing it and how it might sound.
LANDESS:
I was thinking about, what was the, it was an Academy-Award winning documentary in the ’70s — “From Mao to Mozart” — Isaac Stern went and visited these Chinese kids. They’re now embracing Western music after it had been taken out, and the kids are playing it note for note, and he grabs the violin. No, it’s not da-da-da, it’s da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da. And these kids’ eyes are just huge because, yeah, it’s the same music on the same sheet. But he had this understanding and brought this incredible element to it.
ROBERTS:
Well, it’s funny you say that — I’ve had that experience before when I was in grad school. There was a group of us, a little jazz combo, and we traveled to China. And one of the things that we did was working with this school, teaching them how to put the jazz inflections into their repertoire and how to actually play the part. And none of us spoke Chinese. I take that back. There was one of us.
LANDESS: You spoke music, though.
ROBERTS:
We spoke music, and so we would play, and then they would try and imitate. And you know, it was a really, really meaningful and cool trip to see how they approached it differently than knowing. It’s like learning a language, you know, and so you can learn French from a textbook, but if you go to Paris, you’re going to be immersed in it, and it’s kind of that same idea.
LANDESS:
But if you’re American, they’ll still hate you.
ROBERTS: Yeah, true. Oui, oui.
LANDESS: It just goes with the territory. Tell us about some of the upcoming events related to Jazz Month here at UT Tyler.
ROBERTS:
Sure. So we have our Swoop Jazz Collective, which is our ambassador jazz combo. They’re performing all over for a lot of different events. I don’t think people are asking them because they know that it’s Jazz Appreciation Month, but they have a lot of performances coming up, some with the city, some just at private events, some on campus for different events — Patriot Premiere and things like that. So that’s really exciting. And then, of course, we have our concerts that are happening with our jazz combo and then also our jazz ensembles, and those are toward the end of the month.
ROBERTS:
Just, you know, trying to celebrate and program as much diverse music as we can and really show the range of jazz. I think sometimes people will classify one area as jazz, and it might be the area that they know, for example, big band swing, and so with our Jazz Ensemble I, right now, some of the tunes that we’ve programmed are very different, and a couple are pretty modern, to show. We have the Duke Ellington tune that I mentioned earlier, and then we have a piece by Maria Schneider, who is a jazz composer who lives in New York and writes very modern colors for the jazz ensemble, and a lot of the saxophones will double on flute and clarinet, and you know, she’s mixing with timbres, and so it’s kind of cool to program both of those composers on one concert to see how far we’ve come.
LANDESS:
Wow, that’s amazing. Now, last summer your department at UT Tyler sponsored Jazz camps, Brass camps, Drum camps. Are you going to do all of that again this summer?
ROBERTS:
Oh, definitely. We are gearing up for our camp season happening in June, and so we have Brass Camp and Jazz Camp happening. I believe it’s the third week of June and then, of course, Jazz Camp. It’s our seventh summer for Jazz Camp, June 24 through the 28, I believe, and I’m so excited. We are very close to announcing our guest artist, and I won’t give away the name, but I will tell you what instrument this person plays. They’re a trumpet player, so this year is a trumpet guest artist. They are from New York, and they currently are playing on the Saturday Night Live band.
LANDESS:
ROBERTS: And that’s all I’m going to say, but follow our socials because, we’re about ready to announce it.
LANDESS: Speaking of socials and ways in which to get information about what you’re doing — There are so many events coming up this month. We didn’t want to pinpoint it, to put too fine a point on it, so we could be able to hear more about this later on. Where can folks go to learn about what kinds of things you’ve got planned for the music department?
ROBERTS:
Sure, April is the busiest month, probably that we have all year. Some nights we even have two shows a night. So they can find out information at UTTyler.edu/Music. Go to our performance calendar. Everything is right there. There’s only one event that I know of that there are tickets, and those are $10 each, but everything else is free, open to the public, and we hope to see a lot of people there.
LANDESS:
Thanks for listening as UT Tyler Radio Connects with Dr. Sarah Roberts, interim director for the University School of Performing Arts. For UT Tyler Radio News, I’m Mike Landess.
(Transcripts are automatically generated and may contain phonetic spellings and other spelling and punctuation errors. Grammar errors contained in the original recording are not typically corrected.)
