Jazz age dawns at Virginia

It’s hardly Harlem, nor is it New Orleans, but never mind — Charlottesville is a jazz town.

“It’s almost like our own little secret here that this world exists,” said saxophonist Jeff Decker. “Nobody in the world says to himself, ‘I’m going to be a jazz musician and I’m going to move to Charlottesville, Virginia.’”

But somehow they do. The Charlottesville jazz scene mixes a diverse collection of musicians, enthusiastic audiences, award-winning scholarship and U.Va. students who arrive with talent and develop a passion for jazz.

Three of the local jazz mainstays, for example, moved to the area from New York “just for the summer” in the early ’80s. Now trumpeter John D’earth, his wife Dawn Thompson, a vocalist, and drummer Robert Jospé live here, teach at U.Va. and also have active careers as performers.

Decker arrived in the late ’80s for graduate school in history but, to his surprise, stayed on as a musician. And Pete Spaar, who pushed for the creation of a faculty jazz quintet, came back to his home town from North Texas State University, a renowned jazz school where he and Decker had played together.

“We are in the fortunate position of having this world-class talent in Charlottesville, and over the years we have been able to avail ourselves more and more of this talent,” said music department chair Judith Shatin. “Whenever we have jazz programs people flock to them.”

The talent isn’t limited to the performance faculty. Associate professor Scott DeVeaux, who teaches the enormously popular History of Jazz course, won the American Book Award in 1998 and distinctions from several music organizations for his most recent book, The Birth of Bebop.

“I didn’t really get interested in jazz until college, but as I was getting interested in music history of this century, I realized there was a sort of secret history of African-American music that wasn’t part of the curriculum. I started listening to a lot of jazz and decided this was the kind of music history I wanted to study.”

Enrollment in DeVeaux’s jazz history class has grown to about 500. His students go to two live jazz performances and write about them “both for their good and the good of the jazz community.” He credits live performances at Miller’s, a smoky restaurant on the Downtown Mall and concerts sponsored by University radio station WTJU as important pillars of the live jazz offerings.

And JazzFest ’99, sponsored by U.Va.’s Arts Board, brought pianist Herbie Hancock, jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, saxophonist and dramatist Oliver Lake, trombonist Steve Turee and the jazz string ensemble Quartette Indigo to Grounds for a weekend of performances and workshops.

“Part of the history of the music department in the time I’ve been here has been expanding into performance,” said DeVeaux. Once student-run, the Jazz Ensemble became a department offering, for example, when D’earth was hired to direct it. “Since then it’s become a very important part of our musical activity.”

An internationally recognized jazz trumpet player and composer, D’earth has performed with or written music for artists like Lionel Hampton, Tito Puente, Quincy Jones, Miles Davis, Buddy Rich, Bruce Hornsby and Dave Matthews. At U.Va. he also teaches composition and improvisation, and he loves the mix of music and non-music majorshe teaches. He sees what it takes to improvise successfully — long preparation and the ability to think on your feet and work with others on the spot — as a metaphor for other life skills they’ll need in non-musical pursuits.

“The students are a delight,” said D’earth. “You learn so much having to teach this stuff over and over again.”

Spaar, who regularly plays classical music as principal bass player in the Charlottesville University Symphony Orchestra, coaches two student jazz chamber groups. “The interest in the groups is far greater than the playing opportunities we can provide,” he said.

The student jazz musicians represent a broad cross-section of the University community. “They often bring a passion to it that you don’t find at other music schools,” said Spaar. “It’s their creative outlet, fun, a release.”

When Spaar pitched the idea of a chamber group to showcase the jazz faculty, at least one person thought he was joking.

But in January 1998 the Free Bridge Quintet played its first concert to a standing-room-only audience in Cabell Hall. The group — Spaar, D’earth, Jospé, Decker and pianist Bob Hallahan of Richmond — now packs the hall for one concert a semester, plays in smaller venues and performs for DeVeaux’s jazz history class.

Their CD, “Spanning Time,” got a $10,000 boost from the University of Virginia Council for the Arts, a group of arts-supporting alumni and friends. DeVeaux’s close analysis of the CD is on his class syllabus.

Shatin would like to establish the Free Bridge Quintet as artists in residence like the department’s classical Guild Trio. “We are trying to find the funding to support them on the firm footing we would like and they richly deserve.”

Last spring the department received approval to inaugurate a doctoral program offered both in composition and in comparative and critical studies, which breaks down the traditional wall between classical music and “other.”

“I hope that will make us tap our full potential to be a force in jazz scholarship,” DeVeaux said.

Decker will be one of the first Ph.D. students, and he will keep on playing gigs and teaching.

“U.Va. students are usually pretty focused and pretty bright,” he said. “One thing I do find, however, is that most of my students are real novices when it comes to jazz.”

Take baritone saxophonist Kathy Olson (College ’02), for example. Decker introduced her to jazz, she started listening to friends’ CDs, and the Free Bridge Quintet “just blew me away,” she said. “It’s hard to explain. I’d really never been exposed to anything like that before, and once I was, it really took over.”

Ann Marie Simpson (Music ’01) had played classical and folk violin before she came to U.Va. “I guess what I like about it is it’s a very nice combination between classical technique and folk music improvisation. You’re free to explore what’s going on in your head,” she said.

“It makes me feel something, whether it’s happy or sad,” Olson said. “It just intensifies what I’m feeling. It’s also a release from frustrations.

“It’s just something I can’t believe I wasn’t exposed to before. Now that I’m really into it, I can’t remember what it was like not to be thinking about it all the time.”

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Sidebar: A sampler of Jazz alumni

As director of the Louis Armstrong House and Archives at Queens College in New York, Mike Cogswell (Music ’83) oversees six rooms full of Armstrong material from tapes to trumpets and expects the house to open to the public in 2002. He dropped out of U.Va. after three semesters to play the saxophone professionally but came back and studied jazz history with George Starks, the first to teach it at U.Va. As he listened to Ernest Mead lecture on Brahms and Beethoven, Cogswell wondered why people weren’t teaching the same way about Duke Ellington and John Coltrane. “That’s when the light went on in my head that jazz history was a brand new field that really needed attention.”

Composer and guitarist Rob Levit (Music ’88) has wide-ranging musical interests: electronic, world, classical, straight jazz and avant-garde jazz. During the summer of 2000 his career got a boost from a $10,000 composition award from Chamber Music America. Now living in Annapolis, Levit has performed with his own group at the Montreal and the Ottawa jazz festivals but said he arrived at U.Va. as a jazz greenhorn. “I didn’t find out what jazz was until my second year of college.” Mike Cogswell, then the music librarian; DeVeaux; Shatin; and D’earth helped him develop his career in different ways.

Booking bands for PK German made the music business a natural choice for Peter Levinson (History ’56), of Malibu, California. Among the acts he brought to the Grounds were Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Les Brown. Later, as a publicist he represented a slew of the greats, including Chick Corea, Dave Brubeck, Woody Herman and Billy Taylor. His book, Trumpet Blues: The Life of Harry James, was published by Oxford University Press, and he’s now at work on a book about Nelson Riddle. “My career really got started in Charlottesville,” he said.

Martin Williams (English ’48), a jazz critic who was hailed as one of the greatest America has produced, directed the jazz program at the Smithsonian Institution from 1971 to 1981. He produced two Grammy-winning anthologies, published numerous books, wrote criticism for The New York Times, the Saturday Review and Downbeat, among other publications, and was co-founder and co-editor with Nat Hentoff of The Jazz Review. Williams died in 1992.