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- Other
than a short visit between set breaks at a recent Hollywood
gig, the last I spent any significant time with Aaron was over
a year ago at a restaurant just outside Boston. In town for
a gig with his OAM Trio, Aaron joined me and our musical mentor
and first jazz teacher, Bob Sinicrope, for dinner at a small
cafe not far from Milton Acadamy, our former highschool and
Bob’s current employer.
-
Aaron graduated from Milton in 1995 (a year before I did), deferred
his first year at Harvard University, and moved to New York
City to study jazz at the New School for Social Research, the
famous urban university founded in 1919 by philosopher John
Dewey and historian Charles Beard (among others). Over the years,
the institution has been home to an astonishing group of intellectuals,
from composer John Cage to poet W. H. Auden and anthropologist
Claude-Levi Strauss. Following in that tradition, the jazz program
(begun in 1986) is built aro
und a jaw-dropping faculty of jazz musicians: drummer Joe Chambers,
bassist Reggie Workman, saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, trumpeter
Cecil Bridgewater, to name just a few. If New York City once
was (and still is) the most important place for American jazz,
then the New School, located in Greenwich Village, is pretty
near to a center point as one can imagine: the criss-crossing
mix of musicians suggests a kind of Grand Central Jazz Station.
- That
Aaron would move to New York City, attend the New School, and
actually become a jazz musician seemed, at the time, natural
enough to me and my jazz-playing friends. Aaron, like most of
us at Milton, discovered jazz through Bob Sinicrope. Hired originally
as both a music and math teacher, Bob’s jazz curriculum,
a program built around small combo improvisation, has over time
grown large enough to demand his full-time attention. While
I was at Milton, Bob was still dividing his time between music
and math. However, since my years there (1988–1992) enrollment
in Bob’s courses has risen dramatically and the program
has blossomed into one of the best high school jazz programs
in the country. The recent success of the program aside, the
real legacy of Bob Sinicrope’s program will be the number
of devoted jazz listeners and musicians he created. Just about
everyone I knew who took Bob’s classes and became involved
in any depth in the jazz program is still playing, some professionally
(like Aaron), others informally (like me). But all of us have
committed our lives in one way or another—either as scholars,
educators, writers, or performers—to jazz music and its
many tributaries.
- After
a year in New York, Aaron moved back to Boston to attend Harvard.
Playing
frequently around the city, he became the house pianist at Wally’s,
a small jazz club in the South End of Boston that has been one
of the most prominent breeding grounds for the city’s jazz
musicians. In 1999 he released his first record, Turning
Point, with Mark Turner, Reuben Rogers, Eric Harland, and
others. Since then he has released another recording under his
own name (Unfolding, JCurve Records,
2001),
and three CDs with his OAM Trio (the recently released Live
in Sevilla: OAM and Mark Turner, 2003, Trilingual,
1999 and flow, 2002, both on Fresh Talent/New Sound Records).
For the past several years, Aaron’s primary gig involved
playing with prominent saxophonist Joshua Redman. He recorded
two CDs with Redman’s group, Beyond (Warner Brothers
Records, 2000) and Passage of Time (Warner Brothers Records,
2001). As is the case with most jazz musicians, Aaron has played
on dozens of recordings with other artists and has performed
live with many musicians including trumpeters Freddie Hubbard,
Wynton Marsalis, and Nicholas Payton, singer Betty Carter, and
saxophonist Jerry Bergonzi.
- Watching Aaron’s career from afar (through the press,
the occasional email, phone call, or chance encounter) I wondered
what it was like for a friend and fellow musician to “make
it” in the jazz world. What was it like to play at such
a high level and with so many great musicians? It all seemed
glamorous and removed from my life and this distance certainly
gave the jazz life an excitement and exocitism that was (and
is!) more complicated in reality. Being in and out touch with
Aaron for so long, I had hoped for a chance to sit down with
him and ask him not only what it was really like, but
how his thoughts on making and listening to jazz have developed
as a result of his experiences. After our most recent meeting
in Boston, I asked him if he would agree to be interviewed for
ECHO. With maybe a little hubris I thought that my
questions for Aaron might be of interest to a larger readership—people
interested in not only jazz but the contemporary world of gigging
musicians, i.e. people who derive the majority of their incomes
from performing. ECHO has interviewed other contemporary
musical figures: composer Lou
Harrison, jazz drummer Billy
Higgins, and former Schoenberg protégé Leonard
Stein. All of these people were at the end of their careers
(Harrison and Higgins both recently died) and were especially
sensitive and reflective, providing rare perspectives on their
life and work over the decades. With
Aaron, though, I thought ECHO might be able to capture
a different perspective, a view from the other end of the career
spectrum. Aaron’s busy performing schedule and permanent
residence in New York City precluded a face-to-face interview,
but I did manage to squeeze a few hours from him over the phone.
The conversation roamed over a lot of ground, and I hope, reflects
a diverse set of concerns.
- Jazz
occupies a curious place in American popular music. Despite
its recently gained toehold in the high art world of the concert
hall, it is still performed primarily in commercial venues,
bars and clubs—institutions dependent on paying patrons
and not charitable ones. Jazz record sales are thin and most
musicians must play out a lot to make a living.
The
music has the imprimatur of academic respectibility but still
lacks the same kind of institutional support such highly valued
art musics usually command. Perhaps because of this situation,
jazz has managed to escape the all too obvious stagnation of
America’s largest concert halls. It continues to flirt
with a range of other musical styles, especially those drawn
from other streams of global popular musics. While there is
no explicit theme that binds our conversation, certain issues
come up again and again: globalization, popular music, and the
relationship between art and commerce. In its struggles to be
relevant and important to American life, jazz is, in certain
ways, a microcosm of larger musical and cultural issues that
all contemporary musicians must confront.
- Dinner with Aaron and Bob was, for me, a curious form of double-vision,
not the drunken variety (the restaurant, under the ambigious
ownership and management of a mysterious but culinarily gifted
Christian sect, didn’t serve alcohol) but of a chronological
nature. It was, at one time, intensely nostalgic, the years
studying with Bob Sinicrope were exciting and inextricably bound
up with the minor triumphs and anxieties of high school. Even
now I look back at those years almost exclusively through the
lens of my musical experiences. But this nostalgia was tempered
with an excitment of future possibilities. Both Aaron and I
are at the beginning of our careers, with time for reflection
far off in the future. The interview here is a kind of progress
report and not a final summation. Our views will no doubt be
continually shaped and re-shaped like the malleable music that
is the focus of our discussion.
Andrew Berish
Los Angeles, California
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