[Garry Richardson]

This thread has a lot of important themes in it. Thanks for getting it going, Mike.

A few of my reactions, reading through the posts:


Several years ago, I attend a great lecture by Kenny Werner over at Cap. It left the faculty and administrators slack-jawed on several occasions. He played a couple of tunes as only he can, then the first words out of mouth were "Who here masturbates?" (only 3 trumpeters put up their hands) and then started into a fairly lengthy comparison of masturbation and improvisation. It was a great attention-getter, but it got some of the staff squirming. He eventually went on a bit of a rant about the institutions that teach jazz, including where he taught. He thought the whole idea of running students through a preset curriculum as it pertained to performing on an instrument was a load of shit. He asked what was the point of moving a kid through a load of scales if they couldn't really play just one. He felt better as a teacher to spend as long as it took with his students on one scale until they actually learned it, and only then move on. He continued to make quite a case. I think at this point, some of the teachers were wishing he had stuck to masturbation.

As someone whose pace of musical development makes Doheny look like a wunderkind, I couldn't have agreed more.



I did spend a couple of years as a music major at a small town university in Nova Scotia. My prof was a classical clarinettist who gleaned what he knew about sax out of Larry Teal's Art of Saxophone Playing, a good start, but it doesn't scratch the surface of how to really play the instrument. Sadly, I hear he's still there teaching the same way 29 years later - somehow Mike Murley survived him. The music faculty was at each others' throats. There was a ton of politics and infighting. I quit after my composition prof left for a calmer campus.

When I moved to Vancouver, I took an extend break from music for quite a few years. I took an office job downtown and rose rapidly through the ranks. When people asked me what I'd studied in university to do so well in business, I told them there was no better preparation for the nasty side of office politics than a couple of years studying music. Bitter? Perhaps.



Finally, a few years back, I had a chance to drive by myself from Atlanta to Mobile. I stopped at Tuskegee. I'd read about the Tuskegee Experiment, how the US Gov't had infected black sharecroppers and returning black veterans with syphillis, without telling them, just to see what would happen over 40 years. I stopped at Montgomery and saw the places where Rosa Parks drew the line, and where Dr. King started preaching. Then in Mobile, while wandering downtown, such as it is, I came across nondescript marker stating that this spot had been the site of Mobile's slave market. The concept that I could have been standing on the very spot where my wife's and my daughter's ancestors may have entered the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, was almost too much to bear.

Damn right institutions here in Canada don't teach about the struggle of the people who created this music that we all have embraced, but they should. It's shaped the music and had a profound effect on the lives of most of the musicians through its history. I guess that makes it kinda relevant.