Category: Arts & Music

The Day the Music Paused

Posted on by Suki

I am part of a community that most people don’t even know exists.

Jazz, voted the least popular genre of music in a poll done in Santa Cruz (really, we came in after polka!), is alive and well in our little edge of the universe. I am on the board of our local Jazz Society, which has a weekly newsletter, puts on jams, and offers a well-attended monthly lecture series.

Until this month.

This coming weekend brings the regular jam date, but the brewery where our jam takes place will be silent. We have entered The Great Pause.

There are so many ways that this is going to hurt our fragile little enterprise. First, our large group brought in a good amount of money to support a locally owned business. Second, we paid professional musicians to come in and provide a solid backing band for musicians from beginner to professional. Third, we exchanged information and ideas in a thriving corner of a musical discipline that is threatened with extinction.

It occurs to me that this pause is harming community on all sorts of levels. It’s financial, it’s musical, it’s emotional.

But let me take a moment to describe our jam as it was rather than focusing on what might or might not be:

The band arrives early and sets up. Our drummer, bass player, and pianist are professionals who have had long careers. It’s such a thrill that our Jazz Society members can pay them for their hard work.

Next, our fearless jam coordinator arrives with the all-important clipboard. Already several avid players who want to get the first slots are there, poised to sign up. Other players and audience members arrive as the music starts. This is a tight community: The band members wave and sometimes pause their playing to give hugs.

The bar and nearby restaurant do an unusually good amount of business on these Sunday afternoons. Participants buy beer brewed on site, soft drinks, and barbecue from next door.

We have all the instruments you’d expect…and more. We regularly have singers, from beginners to pros, horn players of all varieties, woodwinds, guitarists, and an occasional violinist, harmonica player, and once we even got a recorder player from Sweden. We also get lots of pianists, drummers, and bass players who spell the band and take their turn.

Each musician gets to call two tunes and invite other soloists up with them. Sometimes we get full horn sections playing well-known standards. Sometimes we get songwriters sharing their own tunes. The mood ranges from maudlin to magic, and it’s all in good fun.

Perhaps what I’m describing doesn’t seem that amazing until you consider the fact that we are an isolated county of 250,000, hemmed in on side by the Monterey Bay and the other by mountains. We don’t seem like a likely place for a thriving jazz community.

Yet it thrives. In part it thrives because of the hard work for over 20 years of a group of dedicated board members. In part it thrives because Santa Cruz has a long tradition of art for art’s sake, with pros and amateurs finding a comfortable home here. But mostly it thrives because we all value the camaraderie and learning that happens on those Sunday afternoons.

For now, we have gone silent. Until we meet again, you can check out our rather new Youtube channel, which has some moments from our jams and a few of our lectures available. If you’re a player who wants to be part of our community, you can subscribe to our newsletter and join our Facebook Group.

Like everyone during this Great Pause, the Jazz Society board is in wait-and-see mode. There will be a lot of work that will have to be done to pick up the pieces when life gets back to normal.

But the music will go on!

The benefits of being small

Posted on by Suki

I moved to Santa Cruz from San Francisco. I had always wanted to live in San Francisco, and I loved it, but my future husband was a Santa Cruzan to the core. So I packed up my piano, guitars, and the wool sweaters I’d never use again and moved down to a foggy beach town which, as far as I was concerned, was in the middle of nowhere.

How Maker Faire can you get? An outsize pun-ridden interactive, um, art piece!

I knew that Santa Cruz had some things San Francisco didn’t, such as swimmable beaches, redwood forests, and chai*, but I didn’t appreciate that its very smallness would offer other advantages. (*At the time, you couldn’t get a decent cup o’ chai outsides of a few Indian restaurants anywhere but Santa Cruz. As far as I know, India Joze in Santa Cruz started the American “Chai Latte” revolution.)

We went to Santa Cruz’s Mini Maker Faire today and I was hit with something I’ve known for a while: The advantages of small town living are sometimes less obvious than a towering redwood tree. Although parking was nearly as difficult as the big one in San Mateo, this really was a “mini.” Walking into the Visual and Performing Arts complex at Cabrillo College, we were faced with a smattering of food trucks and a few fun exhibits like the “Unnecessarily High 5” pictured at the right.

Then we saw some vendors of various hand-made tschaschkes, the Ham radio guys, and a sign that said “Bronze Pour, 11am.”

Bronze Pour? We had to check that one out.

Unlike the big SF Maker Faire, which by necessity is comprised of mobile exhibits, the local one got full use of the VAPA complex. And use it they did. We got to see a bronze pour and hear an explanation of how it’s done. (See video below.) We got to do screen printing and computer programming. If we’d had little kids, we would have had ample opportunities for face-painting, craft-making, and dancing—all without the crowds and sometimes hours-long waits of the bigger fairs.

After 22 years, I have ceased thinking I’ll ever live in San Francisco again. And I’ve started enjoying my adopted hometown more than ever. So here’s a Necessarily High 5 for a little place that, I’ve learned, is Somewhere because it takes itself seriously. Our Maker Faire may not have had a mobile flame thrower, and we only spotted one guy wearing a utility kilt, but I’ll take a bronze pour and hanging out with our Ham radio guys as a pretty fine substitute.

 

Risk-taking and lifelong learning

Posted on by Suki

As adults, it’s sometimes hard to remember that feeling of vulnerability that kids have when they’re learning new things. That’s one reason why I continue to value the experience of trying new things out in the world—I think it helps me be a better teacher.

One thing I’ve been doing recently is solo jazz singing. Although I’ve sung in classical vocal ensembles for years, I got shy about performing as a soloist. Last spring I decided to defeat that shyness, one way or another!

I took a jazz singing workshop at my local community college, which was a blast.  [See “In praise of adult ed”] Another thing I’ve been doing is going to a jazz open mike to perform.

Suki singing
This is a picture of me singing with a jazz ensemble.

It’s great to get up there and be nervous about how well you’re going to perform, but then realize that the important thing is the joy of learning and expanding your boundaries. The people who come to this open mike range from rank amateurs who are just learning to pro’s who want a friendly audience to work through new material.

It’s hard to remember, when I’m there, that this is an unusual experience for most adults. For most of us—and I include myself in this category much of the time—life is about doing what we’re used to and what we feel comfortable with. Once we’re adults and we have a career (or not), we are less likely to take the sorts of risks that kids take for granted.

It’s possible, in normal adult life, to go months without going to a place we’ve never been before, have in-depth conversations with new people, and choose to do something in front of other people that we aren’t sure we can do.

Yet it’s this sort of striving that keeps us alive and learning. Certainly, we can go for months without having a conversation that pulls us out of our comfort zones, but those are the months that get lost in the mists of our memories. We’ll have these long stretches of time from which we can remember next to nothing, but then retain vivid memories of one conversation we had at a school gathering we didn’t really want to go to.

If we adults make an effort to keep striving for new and challenging experiences in our lives, it makes us better teachers and parents. My students, I try to keep in mind, do the equivalent of getting up in front of a jazz band nearly every day of their lives. They are always facing something new, and their bravery is inspiring!

In praise of adult ed

Posted on by Suki

Every Wednesday evening last spring, I presented myself with a challenge.

A friend encouraged me to take a jazz singing class with her at our local community college. I’d been looking for a new musical outlet, so I agreed.

I nearly walked out the first night.

The teacher was a venerable local swing band leader who immediately started calling on students to get up and perform. Accompanied by a piano, a series of cute young divas got up and sang polished songs. I started to feel uncomfortable, knowing that I hadn’t gotten up in front of an audience and sang without a book or a guitar to shield me in a very long time.

One of the benefits of community college is that the teachers are often actively working in the field they teach in. In this case, my teacher was a well-known local bandleader.
One of the benefits of community college is that the teachers are often actively working in the field they teach in. In this case, my teacher was a well-known local bandleader.

Then a woman much older than I volunteered. She got up and spoke into the microphone. “For my whole life I was afraid of talking in front of people,” she said by way of introduction. “I’m taking this class so I can get over that.”

I thought, “she’s afraid of talking in front of people and now she’s going to sing jazz into a microphone?”

That’s all I needed. When he asked for the next volunteer, I raised my hand. If a woman 20 years my senior with no vocal training was willing to put herself out there, who was I to pretend I couldn’t do it?

I did it, and then every week following I did it again and again.

There’s a lot of wrangling going on right now about the purpose of community college. The combination of limited funds and the push for “college for everyone” has incited discussion on whether community colleges are for the community as a whole or just for the specific purposes of helping young people on to four-year colleges and giving specific technical degrees.

Personally, I have always loved the “community” aspect of community college, and I think it would be sad to see it go. I have both taught at and been a student at a few different community colleges, and I think they only benefit from mixing the “young divas” with the more, ahem, seasoned members of our community.

My jazz class was a great example. Each student was there for a different purpose—there were a few music majors preparing to apply to four-year universities. There were some lost souls who drifted out of high school and were now drifting into college without a plan. There were adults who just love adult ed and have taken a variety of courses over the years. And there were adults who had specific agendas, such as being more comfortable in front of an audience.

Our teacher didn’t spend much time “teaching”—he didn’t have to. Each student inadvertently brought his or her own wisdom and questions into the mix, and just performing and working together engendered deep learning in everyone. Occasionally our teacher would see an opportunity for a bit of a lecture, but he kept it short and to the point.

People who want to separate the community college from the community are probably unaware of how much learning takes place in a classroom that seems so informal. They are also probably unaware of (or unconcerned with) how important intergenerational learning can be to many of the eighteen-year-olds who end up drifting into community college simply because nothing had gelled for them yet.

I wish those people would attend a class like the one I was in. They would see the teacher energized by working with older adults who shared a passion with him. They would see that same teacher trying to offer confused and unhappy teens a reason to put some structure into their newly unregimented lives. They would see a bunch of people modeling healthy learning behavior for each other: set a task, work on it a bit, fail to perform as well as they’d like, work more, succeed.

At the end of the semester, we all performed songs we’d prepared in a local bar that hosts jazz bands. Though our teacher wasn’t much for direct instruction, it was clear how much we’d all learned.

I don’t know if I’ll take another class soon, but I love knowing that community college is there for me, a member of our community, as well as everyone else who wants to continue their education.

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