How did you get started?

I got started in music when I was eight or nine. My parents had an upright in the house and encouraged everyone to take piano lessons. For awhile, I was doing some guitar and enjoying that and eventually I started playing some piano reading the guitar symbols on the sheet music and finding them on the piano. When I was thirteen I finally got a chance to play trombone which I enjoyed because my older brother played trombone in high school; that was the start for me. Most musicians seem to start from about five or six, but I didn’t start playing my primary instrument (trombone) until I was thirteen. At first, I was pretty lousy at it, but I grew as much as I could. When I was in high school, someone came to the school and asked me, “Garcia who’s your favorite trombonist?” I pointed to the kid next to me because I had no idea what was going on. Today, I say to my students that I’m the poster child for late development. Part of why I think I’m equipped to help them with their concerns is because I know how it feels to start behind the eight ball.

Most of my students have far more information about jazz and music in general than I did when I was growing up. I went to Loyola University in New Orleans, where I was a small fish in a small pond. By the time I graduated from college, top of my class, I still couldn’t dependably improvise. I could read music great, I could play shows, I could do a lot of gigs, I was working sometimes 28 to 38 times a month. Someone would call “Satin Doll” and I’d freak out; especially if there was a vocalist involved and the key was different. It wasn’t until I went to graduate school at the Eastman School of Music in my mid 20s that I finally began playing my first decent improvised solos on a consistent basis. That was largely because a) I needed more time to develop b) art has no clock, you can study all you want but you don’t know when it’s going to come back and develop for you, and c) I went to grad school as a jazz writer because my beloved and very accurate college teacher in New Orleans said I’d like to see you go to graduate school but I can’t recommend you as a player (you’re not consistent enough) but I might be able to recommend you as a writer.

In grad school I realized, as I began focusing on jazz writing – my playing started getting better; not only because I was being exposed to great musicians, but because improvising is basically like composing without an eraser. If you can learn how to deal with phrasing and playing themes and articulations and dynamics and organize a statement musically with a pencil and a paper, then you’re probably going to be closer to being able to pull it off as an improvising musician.

From a rhythm section standpoint, I play some guitar and piano and along the way I’ve adopted a great deal of percussion. I own a lot more percussion instruments than I do trombones because I think it’s very important for my students (or anyone pursuing a musical art) to understand something about the culture that the music came from; the rhythms of that culture. Basically all music comes from either sacred or secular. Either it came from worshiping some entity and/or creating dance. It’s important for people to understand the moves that are behind the different styles of music, so if someone is sitting behind a saxophone or a trumpet or a bass or drums, they understand something about the root of that groove and can interpret their parts to reflect that. If they don’t they’re just going to sound like pretenders.

After grad school, I moved to the Chicago area where I taught for six years at Northern Illinois University. I also taught for eight years at Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois and then in 2001 I made the move here to Richmond to VCU, a place I’m terrifically excited I teach.