By Julie Shapiro
Professional jazz saxophonist Patience Higgins put a difficult question to a group of middle school musicians at Claremont Prep recently: What is jazz?
The 11 members of Claremont’s fledgling jazz program looked down at their gleaming trumpets and saxophones, suddenly shy.
Then one boy volunteered, “It’s a mix of different instruments coming together and making one beat that makes people dance around — especially in New Orleans.”
“It’s music that has a feel to it,” added another boy, who balanced a blue Miles Davis trumpet on his lap, “to get you to dance without knowing it.”
Higgins — who has toured or recorded with the Duke Ellington Orchestra, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder and Yoko Ono, among others — smiled at the students’ definitions and then gave his own: Jazz is a marriage of Europe’s harmonies and Africa’s rhythms, with the musicians improvising over the roadmap of the song, he said.
Higgins was visiting Claremont last month as part of the Financial District school’s new jazz residency program, which is also bringing in pianist Henry Butler, guitarist Melvin Sparks, drummer Napoleon Revels-Bey and others to teach and jam with the students. “The Sopranos” actor Michael Imperioli is a Claremont parent and arranged the partnership through the Jazz Foundation of America, where he is a board member. After a semester of working together, the students and professional musicians will take the stage in Claremont’s ballroom May 20.
But on a Thursday afternoon in February, Higgins and the students focused not so much on performance-perfect and more on having fun. Higgins started them off playing the B-flat scale, a jazz basic, and then called out the numbers of different notes in the scale, having the students play each one in turn. Soon, a familiar melody emerged: the opening notes of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
“Hm, I wonder where that might be from,” Higgins said with a smile, feigning surprise as several students jumped up in excitement.
Higgins then told the students, who are part of Claremont’s after-school jazz group, to try to play the song through from beginning to end. A few reached for their books of sheet music, uncertain of the right notes, but Higgins stopped them and told them to try to find the notes on their own.
“This is what I used to do with my friends,” he said. “It’s called using your ear, trying to play a melody you’ve heard all your life.”
Some of the young saxophonists and trumpet players plunged right in, hitting some true notes and honking out some clashing ones as they made it to the end of the song. But others gave up after one wrong note and set down their instruments, unwilling to try again.
Higgins got serious: “I see some of you stopping,” he said. “If you hit a note you don’t think is correct, you’ve got to keep going. Time and music don’t stop. It’s like the universe.”
Once the group more or less had the melody down, Higgins taught them to use the notes of the scale to start improvising.
“It was inspiring,” Ian Rodriguez, a sixth-grade trumpeter, said afterward. He added that he planned to put in some extra practicing time.
Leo Gitelman, a seventh-grader, also said he was excited to play with Higgins and the other visiting musicians.
“They’re really good,” Gitelman said. “It shows you how good you have to be.”
Pete Robbins, the Claremont music teacher by day and a jazz saxophonist by night, said the students are working harder now that they see what it takes to become a professional.
“They’re starting to see all these artists come in,” Robbins said, “and there’s a similarity in what [they say] about practicing, using scales, what jazz is, improvising, learning melodies by ear. “It’s all variations on the same thing, but it’s important for them to hear it from different voices.”
Julie@DowntownExpress.com
