It’s not jazz camp ’til I cry

Jazz Camp concert – Alice Huebener photo

Sleep deprivation and the democratization of the arts

Charley Gordon finds his groove at jazz camp but suffers whiplash on re-entry into the real world, where the noise isn’t always joyful and the pros are competing for gigs with the wide-eyed amateurs

By Charley Gordon

LAC MCDONALD, Quebec — It’s about two hours before the final concert is to begin at the jazz camp. I’ve finished warming up in one of a dozen cabins set in the woods beside Lac McDonald in the Laurentians. I step out and hesitate on the step. There’s a light breeze and but music is everywhere, floating on it. From every cabin comes music — an accidental meshing of saxophones, pianos, guitars, basses, voices, each playing something different yet somehow blending into a complicated melody that has a simple theme: nothing matters but music and all’s right with the world.

This particular jazz camp, run by an organization called Ottawa JazzWorks (disclosure:I’m a former board member), probably has much in common, with arts camps all over North America. The campers — in this case, aspiring jazz musicians ranging in age from 17 to 84 — are sleep-deprived; they have spent days thinking of nothing but their art; they are nervous about performing; but they will come away exhilarated and empowered.

Camp does that for you. There may be a downside to having so many amateur musicians (or writers, or actors, or painters) emerging empowered into the world, but we’ll get to that later.

This one goes for four days and three nights at the CAMMAC Music Centre, a two-hour drive from Ottawa, from which most of its participants come. It is closer to Montreal and people arrive from there too, also from the U.S., from Toronto, from Kingston and Waterloo, from New Brunswick. There are two main residence buildings, a cafeteria-style dining room, several studios suitable for performance, two of them with grand pianos, a rickety old boathouse where serious jamming goes into the late hours, and — perhaps most important — the 13 cabins nestled in the woods, each with a well-maintained upright piano, chairs and music stands.

The 85 campers, as we call them, although most of them don’t actually sleep in tents, come in all musical shapes and sizes. A few are high school, university and community college kids, mostly at camp on scholarship. They tend to be the most virtuosic, the best informed in the technical language of jazz. A larger number of people are of retirement age, seeking to fill their hours with something meaningful. Of the middle-aged, a significant number are 50 and just beyond. It was noted at this year’s camp that a typical response to questionnaires about when people became interested began, “When I turned 50 . . .”

 A larger number of people are of retirement age, seeking to fill their hours with something meaningful. Of the middle-aged, a significant number are 50 and just beyond. It was noted at this year’s camp that a typical response to questionnaires about when people became interested began, “When I turned 50 . . .”

There are people who played jazz in their youth and gave it up when work and other responsibilities intervened. There are people who have moved sideways (some would say “up”) from folk and rock. There are a significant number of classically trained musicians who seek to solve the puzzles of improvisation and swing. And there are number of musicians who are more at home with the music and want to get better.

The faculty, 15 in all, consists of professional jazz musicians and teachers from Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. If you know Canadian jazz you will recognize names like John Geggie, Nancy Walker, Frank Lozano, Dave Restivo, Rob Frayne, Kieran Overs, Remi Bolduc, Christine Duncan. Many have been coming to this camp for more than a decade. They will educate, cajole shy musicians into taking risks, and they will inspire with their own playing in concerts and jam sessions.

The campers are divided into combos, according to their abilities, as revealed in demo tapes (or, more likely now, MP3s). When the camp begins, each cabin has a combo assigned to it for rehearsals. The combos, with about seven people in each, will rehearse five times for a closing concert that begins at noon on Sunday and runs for quite a long time.

Imagine, then, the culture shock that greets the arriving camper. First, he’s out of the city, away from family and work. There is no television. There is cafeteria food. The WiFi is so slow that he is dissuaded from checking baseball scores. All there is is music and many people he hasn’t met. Almost immediately he finds himself out in the woods in a cabin preparing to perform in a concert with some of those people.

None of this is familiar ground, which is a large part of its appeal. It is a bit like a cruise ship, in the way it is cut off from the real world. It is a bit like high school, in the way that friendships develop, efforts are made to impress the teachers (the faculty) and a certain amount of snark is heard at the cool kids table.

It doesn’t take too long for it all to seem quite normal, as if this is real life and the world of work, traffic, baseball scores and taking out the garbage is some distant memory.

The days and nights go by. There are master classes, to learn more about your instrument. There are workshops, to delve into the intricacies of improvisation, the relationships of chords, the infinite varieties of rhythm, the etiquette of communicating on the bandstand. How to get gigs, how to count in, how to play the bridge of Have You Met Miss Jones, what to do when the trumpet player is two bars ahead of everybody else.

There are rehearsal sessions with your combo. You are supposed to be all at the same level, but there will be discrepancies. The kid guitarist knows so much more than you that you wonder if you can keep up. On the other hand, the saxophonist doesn’t seem to be able to read all that well and the drummer keeps playing while the faculty member in charge of the combo is trying to talk. Somebody wrote an original tune and it doesn’t seem to make any sense. Plus it’s too high and in a key with too many sharps. This will never work.

There are rehearsal sessions with your combo. You are supposed to be all at the same level, but there will be discrepancies. The kid guitarist knows so much more than you that you wonder if you can keep up. On the other hand, the saxophonist doesn’t seem to be able to read all that well and the drummer keeps playing while the faculty member in charge of the combo is trying to talk. Somebody wrote an original tune and it doesn’t seem to make any sense. Plus it’s too high and in a key with too many sharps. This will never work.

Or so it seems, at least once during the three days. Panic sets in. This group is going to have to get up in front of faculty and peers, friends and family on Sunday and it’s hopeless.

“It’s not jazz camp ’til I cry,” said a veteran camper this summer, and it could mean this, the frustration, the sense of helplessness, the momentary despair.

Then it begins to come together. Some changes are made in the tune to make it more playable. The guitarist turns out to be patient. You turn out to be able to play a bit better than you thought. The leader has words with the drummer. The saxophone player makes everybody laugh. This is fun.

But tiring. Every night there are jam sessions after the rehearsals. They don’t start until 10:30 or so and they go on and on. You get to hear the faculty people play and they are amazing. You get to play with them a bit, which is a thrill. Just hearing them up close is another. Singers come up and try tunes. Some of them are more familiar than you would like. You don’t need to hear Cry Me a River again. You don’t need to hear Satin Doll or Twisted or Route 66.

But if you’re lucky, there’s a moment. You play on a tune you like — You Go to My Head, say — and there are good people with you, maybe even a faculty member. The groove feels nice. Your solo sounds OK, even to you. People applaud. Someone you just met says he liked your playing. You feel great. This is why you came.

And of course you can’t sleep. It’s 2 a.m. and your head is buzzing. You can’t wait to do it again. When you finally do sleep, it’s not long enough. This happens three nights in a row.

Blowing your own horn is the whole point of jazz camp. Photo by Lauren Walker

A miraculous and somewhat other-worldly thing begins to happen. The camp forms itself into a community of mutual appreciation. A trombone player tells a singer he never met that he enjoyed her song at the jam session last night. A trumpet player tells a pianist he’d like to get together in town and play some time. People who haven’t heard a compliment in years are awash in them. This occurs at all levels; it is not only the ace players who are hearing it.

By the morning of the third day everybody is punchy, from the sheer excitement of playing, not to mention lack of sleep. A mildly witty comment becomes hilarious. A well-sung song moves you to tears. You love everybody. Everybody loves everybody. You begin to understand how cults work.

But it’s not illusion. The playing and playing, the comradeship, the lack of sleep, the abundance of music — they all combine to open up your emotional pores. So when the tears come at the faculty concert on Saturday night, they are real. Music can do that to you. Music should.

For the lucky ones, that’s what “It’s not jazz camp ’til I cry” means.

The final concert on Sunday flies by, even though it is four hours long. Friends and family have driven up. A dozen combos play. There are highlights and train crashes, adventures with microphone cords, surreal (but temporary) changes of key. Some tunes have to be stopped because people have lost their way. Others move along flawlessly, with brilliant playing. There are more tears. A group of novice players nails the challenging song they have chosen. You watch the smiles on the players who don’t have horns in their mouth. There is an unexpected joy there. The more advanced combos impress with their musicianship. They affect an attitude of cool, but you notice, if you look carefully, that they are pretty happy too.

At the end of each performance is exhilaration, a round of group hugs, a thrilling mixture of pride and relief. When the concert is finally over, the campers get into their cars, after more rounds of hugs, and head back to the city, the music still buzzing in their hearts.

*   *   *   *

Then, inevitably and unfortunately, there is a return to real life. The camper, hearing echoes of jazz and laughter, has to face the traffic again, has to go through the email. A friend of mine commented last year that he arrived at the office the next day smiling at everyone and was surprised when everyone didn’t smile back.

Re-entry is certainly a problem. At camp, you feel appreciated, no matter what your level. In the real world, you can work for weeks on a project and no one says thank you. Gratitude and flattery are rare and under-valued resources.

Re-entry is certainly a problem. At camp, you feel appreciated, no matter what your level. In the real world, you can work for weeks on a project and no one says thank you. Gratitude and flattery are rare and under-valued resources.

The inferiority of real life to the arts brings people back to camp each year and it encourages them to try to bring the arts into their real lives. People who are not professional painters paint. They have art shows in church halls. People who are not professional writers write. They form writing groups. They blog on the Internet. And people who are not professional jazz musicians perform. The camp experience has given them some skills and the confidence to take them to the public.

Some say that’s not a completely wonderful thing. When the performing and literary arts are invaded by empowered amateurs, there are changes in the marketplace. When hobbyists perform for the sheer love of performing, they may take work that should belong to those who must earn their living from it. Because not every employer is all that discriminating, professional writers are displaced by amateurs, professional bands are squeezed out by garage bands. In Ottawa a few years ago, some professional musicians challenged their amateur colleagues not to accept less than union scale. Not everyone has accepted that challenge. There are too many club owners prepared to pay less, too many musicians willing to accept it.

Only weeks ago, a well-known Toronto jazz musician, one of the best in the country, agonized on Facebook over the pressure on him and other musicians to play so-called door gigs — where the club pays the musician nothing, other than a share of the cover charge. When the best professionals face such a situation, it doesn’t help that eager amateurs are in the marketplace too.

Masters of Sax – A saxophone master class. Photo by Lauren Walker

Quite obviously, jazz camp doesn’t have to take the blame for all this. Economics and technology have been working against the professional artist for many years. Jazz is not unique here, only typical. Those who see glass half empty see a reduction in quality. But there are those who see the glass half full too. They see a democratization of the arts. Who says you have to have a BFA to sing or act? Who says you have to graduate from Humber to play the blues?

Aren’t we always told that, after all, it is better to be doing than watching? Here are people venturing into the arts — dabbling, some might allege, but still being active, taking risks, getting up off the couch and away from the TV. In the grand scheme of things, that can’t be bad. They are enriching their own lives. Some of them might even be enriching the lives of others, emotionally if not monetarily.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of music in the lives even of people who don’t play it all that well. One friend, an accomplished musician who came to jazz later in life put it this way: “At camp and at jams I see many individuals who are also consciously making an affirmation to accentuate the positive, to live fully and to struggle, learn and laugh together. Perhaps those feelings, and the just plain fun of it, lie at the heart of the amateur experience in music.”

In the old days of a strong musicians’ union, clubs that didn’t pay a decent wage would be put on the unfair list and be unable to hire. Musicians who played for less than scale would be subject to sanctions. But it’s a different world now and problems have to be solved a different way. How you get to club owners is difficult to know. Some are enlightened and some never will be. But musicians themselves are reasonable people. Most of them, although they want to play, know their limitations. As for the faculty, they want to encourage and they are often deeply moved by the progress their charges, young and old, have made. Yet the best ones avoid over-empowerment. They can say: Yes, you just played the blues and it was pretty nice. Now listen to Charlie Parker play the blues and see how far you have to go. They can say: I’m glad you got swept up in the moment there, but your two was landing where one should have been.

As for the charges, those kids and older folks who are suddenly enraptured by the fact that they can make something resembling a joyful noise, the best ones maintain a respect for the music they attempt. “Playing jazz is so hard!” said a friend who is on the right track.

Yes it is, particularly if you’re trying to do it the right way. It’s easy enough to play something that sounds like jazz, much harder to do the real thing, just as it’s easy enough to paint a picture of a barn and much hard to make that barn into art.

In our culture, everything becomes accessible, particularly through the Internet. Where something like jazz was once considered unknowable, everything seems out in the open now. Go online and you can hear a dozen people playing the tune you want to learn. You can find the melody, the chords, transpose it into your key, learn some scales that work with it. The chord symbols can go onto your phone. There are dozens of Internet radio stations that play the music all day. All of this helps us learn. Beyond that, it gives us the illusion that art is learnable and encourages us to involve ourselves.

The beauty of art, however, is that the mysteries remain, the sounds that make you cry. That’s why you keep going back to camp.

THE ex-press.ca

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