lowquality.net

Some­time in 1998 I was attend­ing my first les­son with Whit Browne at Berklee Col­lege of Music. I picked Whit as my teacher after an incred­i­bly embar­rass­ing place­ment audi­tion. Whit was actu­ally one of the pro­fes­sors that audi­tioned me, and I won’t say I was totally hor­ri­ble, I just didn’t know what was expected of me. They said, “let’s play a blues” and I played a blues shuf­fle (a la Fred­die King), when what they meant was “play a ‘jazz blues’ ” (a la Oscar Peter­son). I fell flat on my face and took the first great shot to my ego of the many that I would receive at Berklee.

Later on, I’m in my first les­son and I’m bright-eyed and excited to be there. Fur­ther­more, I’m ner­vous as hell. It only takes you a few moments to real­ize that Whit is excep­tion­ally easy to get along with, but he can tend to come off like a Drill-Sergeant on first impres­sion. Any­way, Whit tells me to get set up while he fin­ishes writ­ing some­thing in his les­son plan. I get my bass out and I plug into this lit­tle Fender combo amp he has in his room and I notice the tre­ble knob is miss­ing and cranked almost all the way up. I make a con­scious effort to not fid­dle with the knobs, I guess, because, I’d heard some­where that it was rude to mess with some­one else’s amp. I sup­pose I was lit­tle gun shy after the place­ment audition.

So I play a lit­tle bit, noodling around, and he jumps up out of his chair and starts yelling at me “That don’t sound like no bass to me, man! Turn that tre­ble down, that’s why I took the knob off!” And he pro­ceeds to lec­ture me about how “the bass goes boom boom boom” and “they hear ya before they hear ya!” (He was refer­ring to an audi­ences’ abil­ity to know a good sound from a bad sound regard­less of their aware­ness of the musi­cal con­tent). I attempt to explain that I didn’t turn it up, that it was like that already, but he doesn’t seem to be buy­ing it. To this day I’m not sure if he turned that knob up just to mess with me. It wouldn’t sur­prise me if he did.

Then we start talk­ing about the way lessons work at Berklee, what he expects of me, pro­fi­ciency exams, etc. Then we talk about music, my favorite bass play­ers, what kind of stuff I am into, what I know and what I don’t know. At some point there is this exchange:

“Do you play Jazz?”

“Not really. I like Jazz, but I don’t have much expe­ri­ence with it.”

“If you don’t mind me ask­ing, why did you choose me to be your teacher?”

“Well you seemed kind of tough at the audi­tion, and I need some­one to kick me in the ass.”

“Well I can do that, but I’m known here as one of the Jazz guys, you don’t play Jazz?”

“No.”

“Do you like Jazz?”

“Yeah I like it, I don’t really know much about it.”

“Well this is a Jazz school. When in Rome you have to make the like the Romans. Have you ever heard of Ray Brown?”

“I’ve heard the name, but I’ve never lis­tened to him.”

“Well, there’s not much we can do this week. If you’ve never heard Jazz I can’t teach you to play it.”

“Ah. Well…”

“Your first assign­ment is to go buy a Ray Brown CD, lis­ten to it every day. You need to get the sound in your head.”

“Which CD should I buy?”

“Doesn’t mat­ter. You don’t know what the hell you’re lis­ten­ing to anyway.”

And that was the end of the les­son. I hung my head in shame and I walked down Boyl­ston to Tower Records on Mass. Ave (now Vir­gin Mega­s­tore) and I bought Ray Brown — “Some­thing For Lester” (1978, Con­tem­po­rary Records). It’s still one of my favorite Jazz albums. At the time I remem­ber that I looked at the cover of the CD and I saw Elvin Jones’ name– I’d never heard him– and remem­bered my neigh­bor, Tom Arey, a drum­mer, going on and on about Elvin so I bought the CD because I fig­ured that, if these Ray Brown and Elvin Jones guys were so great that this would be an ok album to buy. I had no idea who Cedar Wal­ton was so I just fig­ured he’d be at least good enough to hang with these other guys.

Jeez. Igno­rance is bliss. That seems like for­ever ago now. I’ve bought hun­dreds of CD’s since then based on “informed” deci­sions and I haven’t been nearly as pleased with them as I still am with this one.

High­lights for me: Ray tak­ing the melodies on “Geor­gia on My Mind” and “Sis­ter Sadie.” Elvin and Ray jam­ming over the intro of the first track “Ojos De Rojo,” I wasn’t sure if drums were sup­posed to sound that way or not.. I’d never heard any­thing like it before. Ray’s solo on “Slip­pery” makes me smile involuntarily.