A Touch of Optimism

It occurred to me looking back on my most recent columns that I’ve significantly diverged from my initial intent of sharing inspirational content. While I’ve always strived to be at least entertaining, I’ve gotten a bit grumpy while also (necessarily) taking space in my column to pay tribute to fallen greats in the jazz world. Nothing wrong with any of that—frankly including the grumpiness: it’s the privilege of age(-ing)—but it’s time for a good old-fashioned rah-rah dose of happiness and hope!

When one is striving for optimism in the hot jazz world, one need only turn to the youth performing our beloved music. I don’t mean the youth bands at festivals per se, as most of those young’uns won’t again pick up their horn or ever listen to a recording produced before 2020 once they’ve graduated (although there are some notable exceptions). I’m referring to those musicians who played when (very) young, and were bitten by the jazz (and/or ragtime, and/or blues, and/or simply performing) bug and have never recovered. For these individuals there is no choice but to pursue a career in music: there would be nothing else, no matter what was attempted, that would so completely fill their lives and hearts.

Of course, I have several examples. I’ll concentrate on some of the wonderful musicians I’ve known since they were teenagers or younger! I’ll not exhaustively recount their many accomplishments as you can very easily look them up online.

Let’s start with Dave Bennett. I first met Dave while he was playing with the New Reformation Band, a traditional jazz/show band out of Saginaw, MI. He was thirteen at the time. People were already remarking what a fluid style and fat sound he had on his clarinet, and what a fine young man he was. Over the years, as I got to know him better, I discovered that his clarinet idol is Benny Goodman. I really can’t think of anyone currently doing a more convincing homage to Goodman.

However, he didn’t stop there. He is also a fan-and one of the world’s greatest practitioners-of the piano styles and songs of Jerry Lee Lewis. Often a festival or concert hosting his quartet will request he include some rockabilly piano and vocals. As he’s aged (he’s now 41…gasp…bring out the walker) Dave’s turned as well to playing the electric guitar—channeling Roy Orbison among others—and has for several years composed his own clarinet and guitar pieces. Clarinetist, pianist, vocalist, recording artist, composer, entertainer: He’s here to stay and the world is better off for it.

Bria Skonberg is a name familiar to readers of this publication. A true success story, her mastery of authentic traditional jazz styles on the trumpet (Armstrong being a particular influence) is just the beginning. She has moved beyond one style to play, sing, and compose music of almost unlimited variety, all while leading her own ensembles, running jazz camps, traveling to international festivals and concerts, maintaining a steady presence in her adopted city of New York and being a full-time wife and mother.

I include her here because I met her when she was 15-years old, playing with a group from her hometown of Chilliwack, Canada called the 51st Eight (a pun on the fifty-first state). Everyone in the group was very accomplished, but the standouts were Bria, Evan Arntzen (reed player extraordinaire whose lineage in jazz music goes back to his grandfather!), and a young lady named Claire McKenna, who played a mean clarinet, but brilliantly sang and scatted a la Ella Fitzgerald. Her singing style was phenomenal—so polished and mature. I don’t dwell on her here because she moved away from full time music, opting to marry her love, move to Oklahoma, and start a family. I know she’s happy with her choices, but selfishly I consider them a great loss to the jazz world.

Back to Bria. She would soon be leading her own septet of Canadian women called Mighty Aphrodite, sporting talented women who would go onto successful jazz careers, among them trombonist Emily Asher and drummer Beth Goodfellow. I think at the time the oldest woman in the group was thirty-something, and most were in their late-teens to mid-twenties. From there, Bria moved to NYC, signed on with a major record label (and attendant promotion machine) and made it to the top. She bravely broke from the label to follow her own muse. After a couple of comparatively lean years, she’s stronger than ever and a blinding light guiding the path to both curating older styles of jazz and moving them forward with bold originality for a new, younger audience.

While both Bennett and Skonberg are most likely familiar to TST readers—and I’m proud to say both sat in with my band the Titan Hot Seven at festivals as they were progressing—pianist/composer/performer Christian Sands has not, to the best of my knowledge, appeared in TST, but is well-known to the general jazz aficionado. I first met him when he was only 20 and appearing at a music school performance series hosted by the Neighborhood Music School in New Haven, CT called Twilight Tuesdays. Christian performed the week before my old friend Jim Fryer and I appeared as our duo Classic Jazz Epochs.

In addition to Jim, the NMS has boasted many New Haven-based teaching and performing jazz legends including pianist Bill Brown, bassist Jeff Fuller and drummer Jesse Hameen, among others. Christian was one of the students at the school. He started at age five, learning from another celebrated performer and teacher, pianist Red Cadwallader. At the time, Jim told me to look out for this kid, and now he’s 36 and taking the jazz world by storm. WOW!

I can’t remember exactly when I first met Stephanie Trick, but I believe she’d just turned 20. Everyone was telling me about this slim young lady who was playing powerful stride in a manner more befitting of a 285-pound man over six feet tall. And she WAS! When she was younger, she was at the Scott Joplin Festival taking in all of the performers, including me. After I’d had a chance to listen to her that fateful year, during our subsequent conversation I asked her, “So what would you like to do with your life, Stephanie?” She answered, “I want to do what you’re doing!” And she has, and more! Nearly everyone knows her now, and she and her husband pianist Paolo Alderighi, are internationally in-demand.

I met Andy Schumm when he was even younger than Stephanie. In 2001 (or so), the Titan Hot Seven was invited to perform at the Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Festival in Davenport, IA. At the time, the festival was a town-wide event and the headquarters were downtown at the Holiday Inn. Being the new kids on the block, my band was volun-told to run the jam session that occurred on Saturday night in the hotel ballroom. It started at midnight and would go until it was over (that year it went until 4am). As one would expect, being an open jam session, players who ranged from accomplished to owning an instrument they should’ve sold came up to play.

Among these enthusiasts was a 16-year old kid wearing a boater, dressed in a candy-striped jacket and multi-colored bowtie, and brandishing a cornet, named Andy Schumm. His eyes were wild. He was possessed with the absolute need to play. He came up to the band and requested an obscure tune recorded by Bix (I recall it was “Goose Pimples”). I was the only one who knew it, so we did it together, joined by drummer Danny Coots, and it brought the house down. Andy stayed for the rest of the jam session, and every time he came up, he played Bix tunes and Bix’s solos flawlessly note for note, sounding just like Bix, but that was all he had at the time. If anyone called a tune that Bix hadn’t played a solo on, he sat out.

Fast forward to the present day, and Andy is a band-leader, drummer, saxophonist (primarily alto and bass, but really any sax will do), pianist, of course cornetist, arranger, composer, and who knows what else, all while he leads two weekly traditional jazz gigs in Chicago with his celebrated sextet, The Chicago Cellar Boys. Andy Schumm is one of the brightest beacons illuminating a positive future for classic jazz, and I can say I knew him when!!!

Although there are dozens of additional musicians I met when they were too young to drive that I’d like to discuss, space limitations dictate my choosing a final example of why I feel this music has immortality. You most likely have your own, and I encourage you to share them with me. Who did you meet at a barely post-pubescent age who moved on to future greatness?

My final subject is South-African-born, English-bred T.J. Müller, who I met at age eleven at the Keswick Jazz Festival in the Lake District in England. Anne and I were a featured duo performing an ambitious program entitled “From Baroque to Broadway” and this young fellow was in the audience. He came up to me at the end of the concert, announcing “I’m T.J. Müller and I play the banjo!” I replied, “How wonderful to meet you, young man. What music do you like to play?” T.J. rattled off innumerable influences, including a name that made me realize he was the real deal: Thomas “Spats” Langham. He then strode off and I thought nothing of it. “Cute kid,” I mused, “Though a tad intense.” Neither the intensity or the “cuteness” has diminished, but he now lives with his family in St. Louis and has become a huge force in the perpetuation of hot jazz from the 1910s-1930s: leading bands, playing not just banjo but guitar, tuba, cornet, trombone, and singing in his charming English accent. He’s in his early thirties.

I often get a chance to play with Bennett, Schumm and Müller. My wish is that they, and everyone else I highlighted herein, will continue to spread the gospel of American music from the 1890s-1930s for the next century or more!

How’s that for inspiring?

Jeff Barnhart

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Jeff Barnhart is an internationally renowned pianist, vocalist, arranger, bandleader, recording artist, ASCAP composer, educator and entertainer. Visit him online atwww.jeffbarnhart.com. Email: Mysticrag@aol.com