Jazz Conversations II

An interview with conductor Jeffrey Leonard

Jeffrey Leonard (photo via the artist)

I’ve spoken in this series on jazz about Jeffrey Leonard in the context of jazz and the place that I’m from. He made an amazing space of music making at a high school, even though he was long involved with professional and university groups (and still is).

Jeff helped many professional - even Grammy nominated - musicians get their start and gain their love for music. But he also inspired many other (former) amateur musicians like myself to have a deeper appreciation for so many kinds of music. He also taught us to work as a team, not unlike a sports team, to persevere and create something beautiful. His standards were always high, but he was also very patient and understood there were a variety of levels of talent and dedication (in this setting, he didn’t expect all of us to practice as much as the most ambitious and motivated musicians at our school).

As a teacher, it was really wonderful to hear especially about the way Jeff approaches pedagogy and music education, now from the perspective of training and mentoring future music teachers or student conductors as well as influencing university curricula, which we talked about before getting started on the topic of jazz. When I came back to teach for three years at Lexington High School (Massachusetts), Jeff was also my colleague. I learned how much the staff also revered him.

During that time, we had a few great chats in the hallways, but I remarked during our interview that we never had time to properly catch up outside of school. It was my first three years teaching…if you’re a teacher, you know what that’s like! And also, I was coaching track, which in America means six days a week. But more to the point, Jeff — even after twenty years — was making music with students often until 9:00 pm. There were the many ensembles as well as musicals and marching band…I was involved in three groups as a student but only witnessed a tiny slice of what he did.

I don’t think it burned him out ever; instead it energized him. In speaking with him now during his non-retirement, I can really see the way not only music but teaching and working with young people are truly his passions. At least now, we will have time for a drink or a gig when I next come home.

This conversation was a wonderful chance to find out more about Jeff’s relationship with jazz and gain some inspiration to listen to some albums or attend the nearby Montreux Jazz Festival next summer, which he shared great memories of back in the days when he took the high school jazz band on a trip abroad. Many of us out there have him to thank for the way music is in our lives.

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Jeffrey Leonard

Jeffrey Leonard is a Summa Cum Laude graduate of the Berklee College of Music, having majored in Music Education and Jazz Composition and Arranging. He holds a Master’s Degree in Music Education from Boston University. Jeff was the director of bands and the jazz program at Lexington High School starting in 1983, and the Performing Arts Coordinator for the Lexington Public Schools from 2008 until his retirement at the end of the 2017 school year. He is the recipient of the Mass. Music Educators’ Distinguished Service Award, the Mass. Jazz Educators; Lifetime Achievement Award and Lowell Mason Award, the Mass. Instrumental and Choral Conductors Association’s Hall of Fame Award, the Lexington Public Schools’ “Teacher of the Year Award” and the Dr. Michael Fiveash Teaching Award.

Jeff is currently an Associate Professor the Berklee College of Music, and Adjunct Professor at Boston University, and is the co-director of the Youth Jazz Orchestra in the New England Conservatory Preparatory Division. Jeff is a multi-reed player who is found in theatre pit orchestras all around the Boston metropolitan area. He is an in-demand clinician, adjudicator and conductor for regional, state and national music festivals, having conducted All-State Concert and Jazz Bands throughout New England.

Here’s a recording of one of Jeff’s original compositions; he’s also performing on tenor saxophone:

Kate: Why did you first become a musician and what drew you to jazz specifically?

Jeff: In fourth grade, my parents saw that I liked music, so I started to play the guitar. It turned out he just did folk music with small classes, so I played a little guitar. The program in Virginia had the big push at the beginning of junior high (seventh grade), [so this is when I joined the band].

And if you started then, you had five days a week as a class. By mid-term, we had advanced the way a Massachusetts band might in three or four years. So I really got into it!

I remember there was a tipping point; I was talking with somebody about this recently.We did in school concerts and assemblies. So there was a junior high stage band, and my conductor was running it. It was mostly the older kids, eighth and ninth graders. They played pop hits: “You’re just too good to be true” and the Four Seasons. But I thought this was really cool! There were saxophones and trumpets and trombones. I got really fired up; I thought, hey, maybe I could do that!

I knew one of the kids who was a drummer, who’s still a really good friend of mine. I went and talked to the director and did some summer stuff instead of the standard progression. We played for a couple of hours a day for about five weeks in the summer. There was a beginning stage band or jazz band there, and I got involved in those during the summer, so I was able to move up to the advanced band by the next year.

Now, my start was really inauspicious. So my instrument was the clarinet, but the instruments were all done on the lottery. They wanted a balanced instrumentation. So my name didn’t get pulled. It was a full section. So when I didn’t get drawn, they came to me and said, ‘Would you mind playing saxophone?’ This was before saxophone hit its really popular peak, but I wanted to play, so I said, ‘Ok, sure.’ So they said, ‘Would you like to play alto or tenor?’ And I didn’t know anything about the instruments, and I thought tenor sounded like the little one. [laughter] And I was a little kid in seventh grade. They provided you with the instrument, so I just walked home that day with a huge case. [laughter] So there I was in seventh grade playing tenor sax.

That got me fired up about the jazz thing. Then I really pursued it. I played with that band all the way through junior high and then kept going in high school.

That became sort of my persona. This friend of mine Dean McCall, who wound up being literally a rocket scientist [he’s worked at Boeing, Ball Aerospace, and is currently CEO of Cogestalt Group], he was playing in a band [as a high school sophomore] at the time before DJs. You know, at that point since there were no DJs, all events needed bands — school dances, church parties, all that stuff — and they would play a lot of cover stuff. Their saxophone player left, so he had me go and play for them. I started playing that. I had a bunch of odd jobs at that point, but by the time I was sixteen, my main source of income was playing music.

The bands switched and changed, I was in like four different bands from 16-21. My senior year, I was playing in music clubs all through DC. Dance clubs, that kind of thing. I remember sleeping through history class second period, it was when I always got tired.

It’s funny that that’s how you remember it, sleeping through that class…

Well, I remember it because I really liked the teacher! So I felt bad about it. But I was playing until two! I was so tired. [laughter]

So anyway, before college, I took three years off. I had three gap years basically. After high school we were basically local, around DC, and I took some courses part time.

I won’t really go through why I left the band and the whole demise of the band; it isn’t really important at this point. But then I went to Berklee [College of Music, Boston]. And that’s where I really got all hung up with the whole jazz thing. That’s when it all really came to me.

So that’s the path I took. So for me, I didn’t have a job in mind or a career path in mind. I just knew I wanted to do something in music. And I’ve been able to do that since.

[My parents were worried about what I was going to do with a music degree and suggested teaching. It was a bad time for teaching in terms of hiring music teachers in Massachusetts, but I was really lucky to get hired in Lexington, where I did my student teaching.] I liked the people I was working with [at Lexington]. I liked the students I was working with. I was a really nerdy student teacher. I showed up January 3 and didn’t leave until putting music in the folders with [another Lexington legend] Don Gillespie on June 20th or whenever the end of the year was, even though the college semester had ended weeks earlier. I just really liked the people and I liked what I was doing. So I never left.

So basically my first job came because I had really good references from really good people, and because I was cheap! [as a first year teacher]

Well, but you’re being humble…you’re pretty good, too…[laughter].

[He insists he was just inexpensive…]

As an observer, you seem to just really light up when you play jazz. You used to play quite a bit of music when you were teaching us in high school, but something happened when it was jazz. I don’t know if you would agree, but I have witnessed that. I found it even - not in a negative way - quite intimidating. The whole jazz group was a special institution to be a part of and I was always so impressed by it. So, do you have a special relationship with this form of music and how did that happen?

That evolved through college.

I didn’t really get an education in jazz in high school. It was only big band and contemporary stuff. So at Berklee, the people I met, the courses I started to take, the things that I learned and studied, the roommates I had who introduced me to new players…

Part of it is that (and I always wonder if there is some bias there, but anyway) what jazz asks you to do is more difficult than anything else. It’s more sophisticated. It’s the only music we associate and base upon improvisation. It requires you to be simultaneously a composer and performer. You need to create and perform at the same time. That’s really difficult to do. It’s a very sophisticated skill, to be able to get to that, and requires a long and difficult path.

It used to be, the great musicians of the past, and we’re talking mostly about Western music (I mean there is improvisation in Indian music, for example, but I’ll focus on the Western tradition right now), so Mozart, Bach, Hayden, Liszt…they were great improvisers. They would just sit down and play classical music, but they were improvising all the time. People don’t really know that. And that’s been sort of lost from classical music. The conservatories don’t even teach that anymore.

You know they used to write a cadenza for a soloist into a concerto that was meant to be improvised. Instead, it’s changed to: here’s the standard cadenza and that’s what you’ll play. You’re not creating anything right then.

You remember, we used to have the jazz artists come in [to school]. Were you there when a pianist friend of mine came called Makoto Ozone? He came twice. We played together in college and he is super genius. So he was a wonderful jazz musician, but when he got to about 40, he got really interested in classical music again. What he started to do now is improvise cadenzas. He’s really in demand by orchestras who want him to do this. He brings a creative element to it that the contemporary conductors really like.

That’s what drew me to jazz. Also something about the rhythmic feel really settled into me well.

And that’s something I try to explain to teachers now. How do you get there? There are steps to break it down to help students get to that level.

So that’s where it came from. And some of the professors I had my senior year really cemented it for me. People like Herb Pameroy, the dean, he came out to the high school every year. Because he was one of the best combinations of musician, teacher, and person I had ever encountered. He was so kind. He just knew the music so well and was such a great teacher. I took a lot of his writing courses at Berklee as well. He kept taking us up to the next level. There were always new discoveries.

So I have two follow up questions to that great answer. First of all, going back to this jazz pedagogy course you’ve been working on for students at Berklee. How do you help a young person feel confident enough to improvise on stage or even in a rehearsal? How do you get them to that point where they can do it? Perhaps especially as it’s something you say you didn’t learn until you were an undergraduate, yet you clearly teach it to students at a much younger age.

That’s a great question and that’s something we are asking ourselves all the time.

Now I’m diverting a bit here, but there’s a real push to get more young women started in jazz. You know, it’s always been very male dominated. There’s a colleague of mine who teaches at Newton South [a Boston area high school] called Lisa Linde who runs a statewide program called JazzHers for girls and non-binary people to get involved in jazz.

I always worked on that, too, at LHS, trying to get girls involved. And there’s a lot more to it. It’s not just a gender bias in a lot of ways. From my experience, high school age females are generally much more sophisticated and self aware than males, and that might make a lot of them more self conscious about putting themselves out there in front of a group. Where high school boys will do any stupid thing to make them look cool. [laughter] I mean, that’s a gross generalization! But that’s what I saw.

What you’re saying makes sense from my high school teaching experience…

So, what we need to do is start a lot earlier. Teaching improvisation should start when you first pick up your instrument. At the end of every lesson, if you’ve learned three notes, you should be able to spend a little time at the end of that lesson making up your own melody or do a little call and response.

It should start from when we first begin. Maybe you remember playing orff instruments in elementary school? Your music teacher asked you to take away certain bars so the notes all sounded good together, and you were asked to improvise. You were just experimenting. Then, you just add a little level of complexity at each age level until creating the music becomes as natural as reproducing the music.

But we don’t have that in our public school systems. That’s the way a lot of places need to do it. If you look at Switzerland and players and composers like Carl Orff, they were learning improvisation at a young age.

This was another thing along the way. The later you do it, the harder it is to get into it. I mean, some of it you learn and some of it you’re born with. That aural skill of being able to hear the melody and play simultaneously is not something everybody can do. It’s just not developed the same way with everybody, and it can be developed with anybody at some point, but there are obviously different levels of that.

What I also found is the better people were at their band and orchestra playing, the less comfortable they were getting into a jazz class and improvising. They didn’t like the way they sounded when they improvise and maybe mess up a little bit. They backed off. That’s why starting early with fewer cares can be really helpful, something that’s fun.

[Jeff then discussed a student who is now a professional orchestra bassoonist who simply couldn’t improvise in the jazz band. She didn’t feel comfortable making the mistakes, becuase she hadn’t learned it was ok to do so.] But after you got going, students would be more willing to put themselves out. We made a supportive environment where she could try. We gave feedback from within the class with modulated language. We got comfortable with each other and it was ok to make mistakes because we were all on a path forward.

It’s a little bit like creative writing in a way, isn’t it?

Yes, you see something similar in students in class with their writing skills. You might have top mark analytical writers who struggle with creative writing or at least with sharing it with the rest of the class. They often have a kind of rigidity or block that can then be overcome by making a trusting community in the classroom.

It’s a whole approach to learning in general that needs to be adopted, don’t you think?

Yes, that’s right. And you know we learn making mistakes in a comfortable and supportive environment. I felt like the jazz class really accomplished that. It comes down to the creative process.

And so in some ways, you’re saying jazz is really for anybody. Maybe this idea conflicts with that or maybe not: is jazz connected to identity in some way, in a personal way or an American way or an African-American way? What would you say about jazz and identity?

Very. Very. Much. So.

You know, jazz is America’s only indigenous art music form, as far as I know, and it’s accepted by the world that way. When everybody thinks of jazz, they think of the US.

It started in New Orleans where it was just the right atmosphere. It was a European city: it was French, it was Spanish, it was French. It didn’t become a part of the US until the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.

It’s also a southern city that’s a big port city. People coming from Mexico, from Haiti, a huge melting pot. The Cajuns coming down from Canada looking for a French speaking place. And it was a free state for a huge time. There were two opera houses. People were intermarrying. There were arts and creativity everywhere.

But jazz started to become out of oppression. It was the combination of African and European traditions. It was coming from European music but the sounds were from the African tradition.

There was a lot of status based on race (beyond slavery as well), including the one drop of blood thing. And you know slaves were permitted to go on Sunday to one place where they felt free and could dance and sing music. They brought their African drumming traditions along. Things started to get put together.

A big part of jazz was about individuality, about building up your own identity. Street vendors would make their own calls to help them stand out [sings]: blackberries, strawberries, cheeeeerrries!

Jazz musicians started to pick that up with their instruments. So there was this famous trumpet player called Freddie Keppard who played with a handkerchief over his right hand because he didn’t want anybody to steal his stuff. He wanted an individual sound, an individual voice, he wanted it to be him. Jazz musicians wanted people to be able to identify them by the first four notes that came out of their instruments — ah, that’s so and so!

It was a little bit of taking back their own personhood. That’s why it grew up there. It’s an expression of individual freedom.

Wynton Marsalis does some really great talks about this. You know, you can go to any jazz bar in the country and [we can all speak to each other through the music even if we don’t speak the same language.]

So it’s something that comes from a specific time and moment and people in history, but it’s also a human connection….

Right, and it’s developed that way. You know it’s funny, the Original Dixie Land Jass Band, which was a white jazz band in New York, was the first group to do a jazz recording. They were terrible! But they had the money to do go into the recording studio; they didn’t have the same oppression [that a lot of the Black players did].

Jazz was primarily Black music. In fact, the word jazz was a vulgar term. It was a sex act; it was the stuff of the brothels in New Orleans: there’s that jazz going on in there…and the musicians…they were playing that jazz music. It’s cool because back then it was totally outlawed and now we study it in universities.

That’s interesting, now it’s on a pedestal…

Yeah, right? But back then they used to used it in furniture ads to sell ‘jazz proof furniture’ that wouldn’t shake apart when the music was played. They used to use jazz as a taboo, something not to be played near schools.

Wow, I mean we can laugh now, but that’s just crazy!

Yeah, it paralleled a lot of other things in the Civil Rights Movement, including freedom of expression in writing.

Jeffrey Leonard (photo via the conductor)

My last question is very simple, like the first one, but maybe not so simple to answer. Are there three jazz albums out there that you love the most and would recommend for people to listen to or perhaps for jazz students to listen to in order to start to really understand it?

Jeff’s answer perhaps needs to be listened to instead of written down, as it includes moments of singing and awe. Here you go:

That’s a great - a big - starting point! Do you know Desert Island Discs? There’s a really good one with [Boston-based cellist] Yo Yo Ma. Anyway, now I think you’ve got your albums, or more than that. You’ll have to narrow it down for your BBC interview. [laughter]

Jeff followed the interview by sending me an even longer list for you all to enjoy. He wrote:

Here’s a link [to an article in the New Yorker that is] what I consider to be a very accurate and unbiased listing of important jazz albums. I think listening lists have to include: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane.

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These past two weeks, it was so fun catching up with old friends and also seeing how they’ve evolved. I felt the same about my interview with photographer Mike Ritter (a college classmate). But every conversation I have with artists teaches me something about the world and myself. I am grateful for these conversations and hope the ones I’ve written up here might resonate with you as well.

23. Jazz Conversations I

Gratitude is something I’ve been able to express to various people through this newsletter, although sometimes implicitly. By often grounding my experiences with literature and art (and truth!) through personal experience, often in the classroom at various times in my life, I’ve tried to show my thanks for these people who have inspired me or for the opportunities I’ve had. And I found this to be a common theme from my interviewees. Talking about their ideas and artistry inevitably led to gratitude for their experiences or mentors and collaborators. I think it helps us make sense of what we’re doing.

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