Three for the 21st Century : A Scientist, a Musician and an English Teacher. What They’ve Got in Common Are Vision, Enthusiasm and Staying Power. : Just Improvise: USC’s Shelly Berg Pushes New Ways of Teaching Jazz.
It’s hard to imagine a young John Coltrane toting his horn to the Happiest Place on Earth for four days of woodshedding. But times have changed, as Shelly Berg can attest. “I’m 43, and I’m the last guy who learned to play the way I did,” pianist Berg tells a crowd of teachers and aspiring musicians during a workshop at the Disneyland Hotel, site of last month’s International Assn. of Jazz Educators conference. “They closed the door after me.”
Like most jazz musicians over 40, Berg honed his craft in nightclubs that largely have vanished from the urban landscape. These days, the future of America’s quintessential art form mostly falls to colleges and universities. Yet even though he heads USC’s highly regarded jazz studies department, Berg is trying to move jazz education away from academic abstractions and closer to the real world. “The thing that turns somebody on to being a musician isn’t theory,” he says.
Thus Berg travels the world, promoting his ideas on organic jazz instruction to everyone from teenage prodigies to teachers who don’t know Dizzy Gillespie from Dizzy Dean. In the last year, he also has recorded two jazz CDs, orchestrated a Grammy-winning album for Kiss, composed music for the upcoming film “Three to Tango” and written a textbook on jazz education. If Berg’s students wonder how they’ll survive as jazz musicians in the new millennium, this is it. Says Berg, “I’m doing the things they’re striving to do.”
In his crimson dress shirt and dark slacks, Berg appears anything but an ivory tower intellectual as he dives into a solo on a Monday night at Catalina Bar & Grill, the elegant Hollywood jazz supper club. Though fewer than 20 people have showed up to hear bassist John Leitham’s exciting two-sax quintet, Berg burns hard, his fingers flying over the keyboard while his body nearly levitates off the bench. It’s a short but exhilarating turn, filled with breakneck parallel runs, sudden rhythmic shifts and harmonic modulations that leave him and the small crowd breathless. “Each one of his solos is like an adventure,” says drummer Steve Houghton, who often plays alongside Berg. Bassist Lou Fischer, a close friend and longtime colleague, likens the solos to musical time travel. “What comes through Shelly Berg is history. You hear Oscar Peterson, Keith Jarrett, Duke Ellington, Jelly Roll Morton.”
Berg’s musical roots extend back to an era when jazz education meant getting your chops on the fly at local clubs. Born in Cleveland, he studied classical music as a child and was turned on to jazz by his father, an aluminum siding salesman and avocational bebop trumpet player who counted the great saxophonist Sonny Stitt among his friends and even sat in a few times with Charlie Parker. When Berg was 15, the family moved to Houston, where father and son would hit nocturnal jam sessions at a local dive called the White House Motel. “Much to my mother’s chagrin, we’d come rolling in in the middle of the night on a school night,” Berg says. By 19, he had traded licks with a who’s who of jazz, including Stitt, Buddy DeFranco, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Arnett Cobb.
Though he worked his way through the University of Houston by playing for a Top 40 band with the period-evocative name Larry and Marilyn and the Brass Connection, the only route for a married father of young kids seemed a master’s and a job in academia. He joined the faculty of San Jacinto College, outside Houston, and built its jazz studies program. It wasn’t until years later, with the encouragement of esteemed trombonist Bill Watrous, that he began to pursue a serious career as a jazz pianist.
In 1991, USC knocked, offering a quantum leap in prestige but a significant cut in pay. “It was the first risk I ever took,” Berg says. Soon after, his marriage broke up, but his ex-wife remains a friend and co-worker in the jazz studies department. Under his leadership, it has flourished into one of the country’s best--a stature underscored when the prestigious Washington, D.C.-based Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz decided to relocate its performance wing to USC (the move will be completed this fall). The program also nurtures an unusual 11-member ensemble, Elf, which often plays the campus coffee house, Ground Zero. “I think [Elf] epitomizes what we’re trying to do at USC, because to be in that group you have to be a soloist, you have to be an ensemble player in a very demanding kind of chamber-music setting where sometimes the balances are very tricky to achieve, and you have to write,” says Berg. “I think it gives the students the aggregate experience that they’re going to need.” To the students, Berg is part cheerleader, part role model. “Shelly’s a great motivator,” says drummer Will Cruse, a sophomore jazz studies major. “He definitely gives me a lot of inspiration to not only do jazz but expand in other directions.”
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The late music critic Leonard Feather called jazz “the sound of surprise.” And so it is on a recent Saturday night at Chadney’s, when a freak drive-by shooting startles the musicians and leaves pockmarks in the window of the new Universal City restaurant. After the set, Berg seeks out his girlfriend, independent music publisher Julia Fraser. “Every time you play a ballad--if it’s not a blender it’s a drive-by,” he jokes after what may have been the first version of “Skylark” for jazz quartet and gunfire.
The incident serves as an exaggerated metaphor for the perilous life of the modern-day jazz musician. It’s a simple problem of supply and demand: too many players, too few gigs, too little money. Berg will pocket $80 for his night’s work at Chadney’s. “It’s a native American art, and it’s probably appreciated less in this country than anywhere else in the world,” says composer/arranger Johnny Mandel. “It’s an obscenity.”
Yet the field of jazz education is exploding, an irony that resonates with musicians: “What are we training all these kids to do?” wonders bassist Leitham.
In fact, the simultaneous rise of jazz studies and decline of the live-jazz scene is no coincidence. As clubs vaporized in the ‘60s and ‘70s, musicians looked for work as teachers in the fledgling programs that had evolved from stage bands at many colleges. At the same time, organizations such as the precursor of the International Assn. of Jazz Educators began advocating for what many viewed as an endangered art form. An institutional infrastructure formed. “The savior of jazz has been jazz education,” declares pianist Billy Taylor, a pioneer whose national Jazzmobile project has been training teachers and instructing kids for more than three decades. Berg agrees. The jazz educators group, of which he once served as president, has nourished many of the best players to emerge in the last 10 to 15 years, including Marcus Roberts and Roy Hargrove. So it’s a shock when he says that jazz education, for most of its history, has been a pedagogical disaster. The problem, he asserts, is an overreliance on modes and scales at the expense of an old-fashioned jazzman’s trick: listening.
This misguided approach, he and others say, yields technically fluent musicians who often lack the individuality essential to great art. “One of the mistakes that has happened in jazz education is that we’re not getting enough innovators, people with something unique to say,” observes Kenny Burrell, the renowned guitarist and founder of UCLA’s jazz studies department.
Berg and other reformers have pushed hard for a new approach, detailed in Berg’s 1990 book “Jazz Improvisation: The Goal-Note Method,” which incorporates more organic teaching techniques and more playing. Berg believes jazz education would benefit greatly from an overall shakeup of music instruction. “It’s time to drop the bomb and start over,” he proclaims. “I think music education in the next 20 years will totally reevaluate itself in terms of, is it experiential enough, are we throwing too many facts into people’s brains so that they’re not getting to play enough and replicate enough?”
Berg envisions fewer classes and greater emphasis on the creative music-making process. While pleased that campus jazz concerts are attracting more classical students than ever, he wants familiarity with jazz to become a requirement, not an option. “I’ve fought hard for respect--I’ve played classical recitals [at USC]--and I think we’ve got it,” says Berg, recalling the days when his students were barred from practicing on USC’s grand pianos. “That fight is going on everywhere. But jazz is a very important function in musical higher education. ... The world of music has changed so much that there’s no symphony player, no piano teacher out there who can afford not to understand jazz, popular music, improvisation.”
A degree in jazz studies may carry a certain social cachet, but it doesn’t do much to impress career counselors or console parents. So each fall, Berg lays it on the line. “What I tell them is, if you can’t imagine yourself happy doing anything else, then this is for you. If you can imagine yourself happy doing something else, do it. Because the very fact that you can even imagine it means that there’s room to vacillate, and there’s no room to vacillate if you’re gonna try and make it in this field.”