What have you learned about the music business that was a surprise?

I think when you get started in the music business everything’s a surprise. I was really fortunate growing up in New Orleans. I mean I was extremely fortunate! I had no idea how fortunate I was until I moved to upstate New York, which had a good school but the town itself was not a jazz Mecca. When I was growing up in New Orleans, I took it for granted that you could turn on am radio and hear things that were not dictated by commercial music polls. You would hear jazz, country, pop and traditional New Orleans jazz. You would hear bebop on the radio on both am and fm stations. You could walk out into the streets in the French Quarter and hear jazz and country and blues and rock and different kinds of jazz at any given hour. That kind of exposure isn’t readily available.

I think the opportunity I had to work with so many terrific world class internationally renowned musicians taught me a lot at a very early age. By the time I was 19, I was lucky enough to be gigging with Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme’, and George Shearing, and people who were coming to New Orleans to perform so I didn’t even have to leave town. I didn’t have to leave college to play with them. They were coming to town and I was getting the opportunity to perform with them, sometimes on multiple occasions. I got to play more than 50 gigs with Ella Fitzgerald; you can’t learn any better lessons about the music and the music business than watching Ella at work. Not only the professionalism of her ensemble, that I had the opportunity to play with, but for instance, I remember one evening where there was a horrible storm and there were probably 10 or 12 people in the Fairmont Hotel in New Orleans to hear her on a particular night during one of our two week runs. We were concerned that she wasn’t even going to perform, after all, why perform for a dozen people? That room would normally hold around 300 people, and certainly it wasn’t going to be a money maker that night. Ella appeared right on schedule, in the wings, ready to go and she just tore the place up with her music that night. That kind of lesson taught me very clearly that you don’t change your music just because of the number of people in the hall. You give it your all because you’re there as a musician. The music is there to be honored no matter who’s listening to it. She certainly didn’t have to do that and she did.

Or I could listen to the music lessons of someone like a George Shearing who taught me the depth of musical background that any given person brings. It’s very easy for someone to be typecast what their abilities are. Let’s say you’re a trombonist. “Oh you play tenor trombone you can’t possibly play bass trombone. “ Or, “Oh you play bass you don’t play tenor.” “You play written music? You probably don’t improvise.” “You improvise you probably don’t read well.” Or, “If you read well you probably don’t write music.” “You write? You probably don’t play music all that much.” “You read or write music but you’re probably not into the history of it or you’re not into writing words about it or editing or whatever.” People get type casted, it’s normal. I played a two week run with George Shearing and I played 24 shows with him. On the 24th show, something happened that was different than the first 23. The lead trumpeter in the band missed, just slightly, this particular dramatic high note in the opening tune that was supposed to be kind of a band shock chord for the audience. And George reacted very differently, instead of playing the tune which was molten swing playing it very light and casually as he had the previous 23 shows, he played the rest of the tune like thelonious monk, very authentic sounding thelonious monk which is very different than the George Shearing sound, certainly different than the George Shearing I grew up listening to when I was in college. Well it turns out there’s probably no bigger fan of thelonious monk than George Shearing. He had done his homework, he knew that style, and it’s a part of him. And the fact that it didn’t always surface in his music was not any indication that he hadn’t done his homework in a breadth of styles before becoming George Shearing. And so it taught me very clearly that all musicians, much less people in general, they might show on the surface just the slightest tip of the iceberg what they’ve really invested in their learning and in their life and you can’t prejudge that. Similarly, I’ve learned not to prejudge musicians in terms of whether or not I really want to play with them. I’ll give you an example.

When I was 20 or so I had an invitation to play in another 24 shows with Debbie Boone and at that point her big hit was You Light Up My Life. I’d heard You Light up My Life enough times by that point to know that I was concerned about whether or not I even wanted to play 24 shows that would include that song but I thought, well I’ll do it. And I was glad I did because I learned what a terrific musician she was, what a great breadth of music she could perform and all kinds of different styles. I got to meet and play with the incredible musicians she had rounded up at the tops of their game and I wouldn’t have had that opportunity if I had prejudged that scenario. Playing with jazz musicians in small groups has always taught me to take risks and experiment. In the music business, you show up at a gig maybe my students would do what I would do at 20 which was maybe show up with a bag full of music books ready to read off a stand if you had to read standard tunes like George Gershwin or anything else like pop songs and you show up and there are no music stands because nobody’s going to use a book. They didn’t really care if you brought a book or not. It’s embarrassing to take out a book on those gigs.

I remember showing up playing with Frank Frederico. Frank is a guitarist/vocalist who performed with Louis Armstrong. By the time I performed with him he was 60 or 65 years old and I showed up as a sub playing New Orleans traditional jazz music as a 19 or 20 year old and showed up with my books and there were no music stands and then I learned that you have to use your ear and they called more tunes than I’ll ever remember in my life, tunes that I’ve never heard of. And you listen and you grow that way and you learn if you’re willing to take that risk and be serious about it and you learn which mentors are willing to take you under their wing and put up with your mistakes and show you the ropes of learning it because they remember learning it and that lesson is a tremendous one.

My students in music industry class learn very quickly that most of the people they contact for their final projects to interview, to ask advice of, are more than willing to spend time to answer their questions and this shocks them. They’re stupefied that someone, local, regional, or national, would take the time to answer a strangers questions from somebody that’s 20 years old and nobody supposedly but they realize that the vast majority of people that have succeeded in the music business are willing to help the next generation do the same and that’s a tremendous lesson of the music business. I never stopped learning from the people around me. All teachers are eternal students and the day we stop learning is the day we should hang it up.