Jazz Yarns U of I Jazz

The University of Illinois Jazz Bands were established under John Garvey in the late 1950s and continue today under Jazz Studies director Chip McNeill. There's always been a mythic appeal to playing in these bands. Making the top jazz band was something to crow about, but making any of the bands provided opportunities for aspiring and experienced musicians. John Garvey was a particularly eccentric, creative character—you didn't forget an encounter with him. He directed the band until he was about 70. He was succeeded by Tom Birkner, Ed Thigpen, and Thomas "Shab" Wirtel.

One of John Garvey's challenges was to get the University of Illinois School of Music to recognize the jazz band as a valued musical organization. Each successive director faced this challenge in different ways as they strived to institute a degree program for the art of jazz. As Jazz Threads gets underway in the year 2003, the School of Music, under director Karl Kramer, is officially creating a degree program in jazz studies.

Dan Perrino, saxophone player; founder of Medicare 7, 8, or 9; educator
When you heard the John Garvey jazz band, it was inspirational!

Jerry Tessin, trumpet player and road manager with the U of I Jazz Band beginning in 1965
The U of I had a very established band program. The jazz band created a little controversy in the School of Music because most of the faculty were oriented to the traditional instrumental ensembles—symphony orchestra, concert band, and the contemporary music scene. Many of the faculty were uncomfortable, first with jazz within a university setting, second with John because he was very unconventional, and third because they were worried that their students would pick up bad habits by playing jazz. What they didn't realize was that the students were, in a sense, obtaining an education that they couldn't get anywhere else. It wasn't a matter of picking up bad habits; it was playing music, learning different styles and different mediums. In my own case, I played in the contemporary music ensemble, in the concert band, in the jazz band, and in the symphony orchestra. It was a coming together of people, a coming together with John, a coming together with music. And all of a sudden you had this ensemble that was gaining notice—locally, regionally, and nationally—and it was little bit threatening to faculty. And they couldn't just attack it because the same brass players in the jazz band were sitting in the traditional ensembles and were the leading students in the studios.

Kim Richmond, saxophone/reed player, composer, educator
I went to the music school at the University of Illinois in Champaign, and I majored in music education and music composition (1958-1963). There wasn't any jazz-oriented curriculum at the time. But my second year, a teacher by the name of John Garvey started the University of Illinois jazz band. He was a string player, a violist with the Walden String Quartet, and so he had a little bit of respect there, because jazz was really put down at the school. There was a student union club which they called "Jazz-U-Like-It," and some of the guys that were prone to playing jazz used to play there all the time, In fact, there were a couple of well-known musicians [at the U of I] when I got there. Joe Farrell was the saxophone player and also Denny Zeitlin. They were in graduate school at the time I got there, but they weren't in the jazz band, because there wasn't one. But John Garvey, during my second year there, started this jazz band, kind of on the sly, because the music school wouldn't have anything to do with it. They got the student union to back it, and to provide rehearsal space, and we did a few concerts under their auspices. But it finally got some recognition, gradually. In the meantime, I got kicked out of a lot of practice rooms for playing jazz. (Excerpted from an interview in Saxophone Journal, September/October 1998)

Dan Perrino, saxophone player; founder of Medicare 7, 8, or 9; educator
John [Garvey] started the jazz band on campus in 1959 I believe. I will honestly say that the School of Music—the administration and I suspect some of the faculty—really did not accept jazz in the music school. So John was almost on the outside, I think he even had difficulty getting a room to rehearse in, and things like that. But when they found that John was getting success, it became more acceptable. And when the jazz band would play at the Thunderbird, the place was jammed. You had to get there an hour ahead of time in order to find a seat; it was always standing room only.

Pete Bridgewater, bass player, bandleader, radio host
John Garvey was the keyholder of the jazz band back then. I never played with them, but with his students. Ron Dewar—I worked with him quite a bit. He was with me at the Ramada when I had the band there. I knew all of the guys. Matter of fact, my nephew Cecil was in that band too. But they separated themselves pretty much, with the exception of one or two of them, to concentrate solely on the U of I jazz band. It was a good band. Garvey did one heck of a job. Garvey had them so busy. He took them to Russia, you know. They'd be in Michigan, they'd be in Indiana, they'd be everywhere on tour. But he held that group together in a good way. Music has been good around the twin cities, thanks to the University of Illinois and the jazz band, thanks to them.

Robert Morgan, 2003 U of I Alumni Achievement Award-winner, retired Director of Jazz Studies at Houston's School for the Performing and Visual Arts
Professor John Garvey, head of the U of I jazz program, was very much the Renaissance man: a classical and jazz musician, intellectual (with a mind that could absorb myriad interesting facts/processes about myriad subjects like a sponge), poker player par excellence, etc. Not to mention he was an excellent conductor/interpreter of music of many varieties. (excerpted from an interview in Illinois Alumni)

Tony Zamora, saxophone player and bandleader
The U of I Jazz Band, under the direction of Professor John Garvey, was performing great jazz during the period when my ensemble was flourishing. Garvey's band was comprised of an outstanding roster of enthusiastic jazz-minded students who were also seasoned musicians. They performed brilliantly in attaining new heights to where they won several National Collegiate Jazz Band Competition awards. The big band also toured on the international stage; they served as US musical ambassadors to the USSR. Professor Garvey's outstanding achievements in jazz at the University were enormous and deserve wider recognition.

Nathaniel Banks, trumpet player, bandleader, Director of the U of I African American Cultural Center
I attribute a great deal of my knowledge of musicality to John Garvey. I think that he was one of the best conductors, in terms of being able to relate the music to the musicians so that they would want to aspire to play it like it was supposed to sound. That was his gift. And most of what I know about ensemble playing came from John Garvey. Now he didn't know a lot about developing soloists, but in terms of the ensemble… I think that the reason the U of I jazz band was such a wonderful institution was because of the work he did with it. And his creativity in the area of being able to take words and make us understand what to do with music was also part of his genius. He could give us pictures with words and we could translate that into making the notes do what he wanted us to do with them. It's one thing to be technically proficient, but it's another thing to be able to take a group of people who are moderately talented and make an outstanding organization out of them. That's what John Garvey was able to do. And I am one of the people that would say my jazz career was very strongly influenced by John Garvey.

Thomas "Shab" Wirtel, trumpet player, composer, arranger, educator
This school [University of Illinois] has community cooperation more than any school I've ever been at. I attended Indiana University in 1963 and the whole time I was there, which was three years, the jazz bands never played a gig in town. Not one. Here, on the other hand, John Garvey had set up almost weekly gigs, with interaction at three or four places in town. Mabel's was a heavy jazz house around 1971. The Thunderbird Lounge used to host jam sessions starting at midnight at least twice a month. Nature's Table became the place to be. It became a tradition for U of I jazz bands and combos to play in clubs in town. More recently, the jazz program has maintained relationships with City of New Orleans, The Highdive, the Blind Pig, Clybourne, and now The Iron Post. It's a very rich heritage. It's good, it's expected, it's the tradition.

Jerry Tessin, trumpet player with the U of I Jazz Band, U of I School of Music Events Director
I came to the U of I in 1965 and was active in the band pretty much through the early to mid-70s. The underlying trademark of the Illinois bands—whether they were [John Garvey's] early bands, the middle bands, or the later bands—was that its strength lay in its arrangers and in the arrangements. We had some good jazz players who could improvise. But they weren't big band players. We all learned from John that we were rehearsing and playing music. Many times the rehearsals were quite tedious. There was a standing joke: we'd warm-up with a Count Basie chart and everyone would have smiles on their faces when we finished. And then John would say "OK, let's get down to work." And at that point, we would pull out a composition by Jim Knapp, for instance. He was one of the trumpet players in the band who ended up writing tone poems. And we'd spend the rest of the rehearsal just rehearsing Jim's music, working on blends, working on phrasing, working on all sorts of things. What made this music come to life was John rehearsing it, interpreting it, conducting it. Also, his musical tastes, his choices were just really unique.

Morgan Usadel, record store manager—Discount Records and now Figaro's/Record Service
John Garvey was amazing because, first of all, he didn't have a PhD and that really made him work harder. He was the violist in the Walden Quartet which was a pioneering string quartet. He had also worked in a dance band playing viola. I used to sit in on [U of I jazz band] rehearsals; they were at 5:30pm—a convenient time—and you could make tapes. What I learned about Garvey was just by going to rehearsals and seeing what he brought to the rehearsal process in terms of nuance, the subtleties of phrasing. Nuance would cover both variable pitch and playing in front of or behind the beat, the sort of things that you can't notate… I remember the Garvey farewell concert. It had two halves. The first half was the current jazz band, and the second half was an alumni band. And the alumni band just cut the current band to ribbons. I mean there was no comparison at all. Not that the current band was bad, it's just that the better players weren't coming here any more.

Thomas "Shab" Wirtel, trumpet player, composer, arranger, educator
I learned to write music at North Texas State University in Denton. I studied with a really talented teaching assistant by the name of Ed Summerlin—he went on to teach at City College in New York and has played with Ornette Coleman—and with Sam Adler who was director of composition at Eastman for years. The North Texas State band was called a "lab band" because it was conceived as a laboratory to play the compositions and arrangements of the writers. It was a hit hard, take no prisoners type of band. Here at the U of I, John Garvey used all of his very suave techniques from being a string player and he completely reinvented jazz phrasing. I mean no band anywhere in the area played anything like the Garvey band. It was totally unique. I considered it on an equal par with the North Texas band, but in a totally different kind of style. Garvey had so many subtleties. I taught at the U of I five or six times; I was sort of the resident replacement if somebody would go on sabbatical. And John would ask me to sit in with the band, and pretty soon I'd be playing with them every day. It was a great experience because he showed me a completely other way of doing things so that then I had the best of both worlds. That's kind of the way I teach now—I have those two backgrounds fused. Garvey taught me an awful lot about sensitivity and shading and stuff that ordinarily we weren't doing at North Texas State.

Jerry Tessin, trumpet player with the U of I Jazz Band, U of I School of Music Events Director
We used to go to Collegiate Jazz Festivals (CJF) which provided a way for the big bands within universities to compete, mix, and interact with each other. The granddaddy of those festivals was the CJF at Notre Dame University. We were doing a piece by Don Owens—who played fifth trumpet in the band, a contemporary piece, really far out, pointillistic, had all sorts of gongs and things. It was rehearsed meticulously. The piece ended with a huge tam-tam crash and the band would freeze as the sound of the gong filled the auditorium. And because the band froze visually—John had this concept—you didn't get applause. So then John had the band sing a few measures, on the syllable "woo," and then the band launched into a Count Basie chart of "Can't Stop Loving You." And the audience would just go up for grabs because of all the tension created by the contemporary music. Nobody knew what was going to happen. And it would bring the house down every time. That was the kind of thing John did.

Jerry Tessin, trumpet player with the U of I Jazz Band, U of I School of Music Events Director
The [University of] Illinois band rapidly developed a reputation as one of the leading bands in the country. And when we played at the Collegiate Jazz Festival, judges like Clark Terry and Lionel Hampton were amazed at the Illinois band and John Garvey because they never had seen anything like it or heard anything like it any place else. It was unique.

Jerry Tessin, trumpet player with the U of I Jazz Band, U of I School of Music Events Director
John was a great one for looking at a player and assessing the player's strengths, his talents, his interests. And he managed to channel that. So in my case, he knew that I was pretty organized, pretty good with details, and he asked me whether I wanted to manage the band. In Ken Ferrantino's case, he was not only a great lead trumpet player, but a great arranger and composer. Jim Knapp had this wonderful talent for doing tone poems. And when Cecil Bridgewater came in, he was doing vocal arrangements.

Laurence Hobgood, pianist, arranger, composer
One year, after a re-audition, I moved from the first band to the fourth band. It ended up being kind of interesting because it was a band of misfits directed by a guy named Doug Tidaback who was a trombone player in the first band and a very eccentric character. We went on not only to play more gigs than any other band that year—including the first band—but we made a record. I still have a few copies of it. The New Watusi Jazz Unit is what we called ourselves, not Jazz Band No. 4. We made a record, went to a couple of competitions, and were more active than any other band that year. I was really pissed-off about this fourth band thing when it happened, but I couldn't know then that it was going to turn into this really fun year.

Jerry Tessin, trumpet player with the U of I Jazz Band, U of I School of Music Events Director There were plenty of recordings in those days through Century Records. We'd put out records and sell them. The albums not only produced income, but maybe more importantly, documented the music and the styles of the Illinois Band.

Cecil Bridgewater, jazz trumpet player, composer, arranger, educator
John Garvey was always encouraging everybody in the band to write. Jim Knapp was writing things for the band, kind of in the style of Gil Evans. And some of the other guys were writing, and so I decided to try my hand at it. I remember a piece by Larry Dwyer, who's now up at Notre Dame heading the jazz department, and I think it was called "Beelzebub's Bulb" or something like that. There was another one called "Aardvarks Bark"—strange names. John loved those. Anything that sounded eccentric John just loved, title-wise and music-wise.

Nathaniel Banks, trumpet player, bandleader, Director of the U of I African American Cultural Center
John Garvey was a character. For some reason sometimes he would decide to do a somersault across the stage—in performance! He always used to have a kind of Sherlock Holmes type of pipe, and he used to wear a cape. He always had that on.

Jerry Tessin, trumpet player with the U of I Jazz Band, U of I School of Music Events Director
In the heyday of big bands, I'm told that Glenn Miller gave one rehearsal a week to his arrangers. And Miller may not have played some of that in performance, but he always gave the arrangers the opportunity to have their music rehearsed. And John Garvey was the same way. For many years, John would identify people like Cecil Bridgewater, Howie Smith, Ken Ferrantino, Larry Dwyer—and he'd copy the parts for their charts. If you look in the U of I Jazz Band library right now, you'll see a lot of charts in John's handwritten pen. And John controlled whose music was played, but if he believed in you as a writer he was willing to give you space to write and he encouraged you. And one guy's charts motivated another guy. So we'd have this flow of music come into the band on a regular basis and it was really high quality stuff. A lot of the writers said that once John got through rehearsing it, they just realized the tremendous amount of knowledge John brought to the piece. It wasn't the piece he started with. And there's a legacy because that music has survived.

Cecil Bridgewater, jazz trumpet player, composer, arranger, educator
In some ways, the band in the late sixties was kind of unfair to some of the other college bands because a number of us had been in school for a number of years. I mean Ron Dewar started in 1958, so by the late sixties he had been in and out of school; he'd go out on the road for awhile and then come back here to play. I had been in school from 1960-1964, and then I came back in 1968 after I was in Viet Nam and after I'd spent some time in Chicago. And there was a nucleus of guys who had been here for awhile and also had professional experience. So some of the U of I bands were much older and much more experienced than the normal college students. And in some ways, that was a little unfair.

Jerry Tessin, trumpet player with the U of I Jazz Band, U of I School of Music Events Director
We were at the Collegiate Jazz Festival in, I believe, 1967, and the Indiana band won the competition. And we were in the dumps about that. So that Sunday morning, after the Saturday night competition, we were sitting in the Blue and Gold Motel (South Bend, Indiana) coffee shop—Jim Knapp, Ron Dewar, John Garvey, Larry Dwyer, me, and a couple of other players—discussing how we felt let down and what we could do next year. We just started talking about the concept of a composition that would involve a lot of different things. 'Long about November or December, Jim Knapp brought in a chart he called "They just…" based on "Old soldiers never die, they just fade away." It was typical Knapp stuff—a lush, beautiful tone poem. And we started rehearsing this thing and it began to evolve over the next month or so. John decided that he wanted a brass group in it that would improvise brass chorales. And we decided that there would be some theatrical aspect based on the idea of a New Orleans funeral band. And then John was very much into gestures and was interacting with somebody from the Dance Department. So the next year at the CJF, we kept things pretty much under wraps until we knew we made the finals. Then John assigned one person to the lighting people, and one person to the sound guy. Indiana and North Texas State had already played, and everyone was wondering what Illinois had up its sleeve, so there was all this anticipation. The band got onstage, and I could see the line of judges from where I was. We started out with this lush tone poem and it got really dense. Then all of a sudden, you started to hear strains of a Dixieland band from the back of the hall. I was watching the judges turning around wondering what was going on. And just as they turned, the spotlights hit what I can only describe as a caravan. Two guys were carrying the bass saxophone case, which looked like a coffin. And the Dixieland band marched down the center aisle, very slowly, playing some type of strutting music. They went down in front of the judges, turned, and went back out. This probably took 3-4 minutes, as the Jim Knapp piece continued evolving onstage. And while all that was going on, the soft brass left the stage and began improvising German chorales. And the judges' heads were spinning as they heard three different kinds of music. And everybody was serious with it. Then the brass chorales faded away and we got a rhythmical riff going onstage, and then we began dropping notes randomly, but pantomiming the notes we weren't playing. So as the Dixieland band diminished, the brass group diminished, and suddenly the sound volume on the stage was diminishing and the melody was fragmenting because the players were going through the gestures of playing their horns but there was no sound. Finally there was no sound on the stage but the gestures of the band, and then the players started leaving the stage. That left Charlie Braugham, on drums, all alone, going through the motions of playing the drums. And as he got up to leave, a drumstick flew out of his hands, hit the floor, bounced tremendously high in the spotlight and came down leaving absolute silence. There must have been about 10-15 seconds of absolute silence and then cheers and applause that went on for 10 minutes. I've never heard an audience reaction like that. Some of the other band directors reportedly left the hall with colorful expressions, saying how their bands just played music so how could they compete against this! It was just unbelievable, a once in a lifetime moment. (Note: the judges named Illinois the best band that year.)

Nathaniel Banks, trumpet player, bandleader, Director of the U of I African American Cultural Center
I never got the sense that the School of Music administration even respected John Garvey, and I think at the time I was there, his frustration with the School's lack of vision was growing. The jazz program had a national reputation but there was no movement toward institutionalizing it. And that's why when John left, the program really kind of went down. I'm not saying that the other guys who came after John were any less dedicated to the music or anything, but they certainly didn't get any support either. I'm glad that it looks like things are starting to turn around now. But this is 30 years later.

Jon Burr, New York-based bass player
John Garvey was asked one time about why some of the guys weren't going on and playing with professional bands. And he said "They don't need to. They're playing with me." I mean it was a big jump leaving here. I was from New York, and it was a huge leap for me to leave the cocoon of Champaign. It was self-contained and really interesting here. One day you might be premiering a new music opera. Another day you might be accompanying a person like Gary Burton or Jim Hall on the Collegiate Jazz Festival. Or you might drive 250 miles and play with a ghost band. There was a core of guys from the U of I bands that would do things like the Kate Smith Mother's Day Show at McCormick Place in Chicago, or play with Johnny Desmond at Ravinia. We went to Toronto with Warren Covington and Dick Haymes. There was all kinds of professional stuff to do. The band here functioned as a territory band, if you will. It was like a descendant of the territory bands of the 1940s. We were guns for hire. Musicians would come out with a library and plug the band in. I left in 1975. I remember getting in the car, heading to New York, and even though my family lived there, it was a tremendous leap of faith. I was scared to death. But I set out to find my fame and fortune.

Sam Hankins, trumpet player, Edison Middle High School Band Director
When I got out of the Air Force Jazz Band, I went to school at the U of I and got involved in the jazz band there. I was playing under Tom Birkner. I can't say enough good about Tom Birkner. I mean he knew his stuff, had a great personality, and really pretty much was changing the whole outlook of the jazz program. It was getting popular again, he was bringing in lots of good students. And he was a great teacher. He could break things down and you could understand what it was all about—the jazz language, how to play over certain changes, things like that. He was especially a great leader. He could bring things out of you without really trying. Those three to three-and-a-half years I was involved, the band kept getting better and better. We were touring, playing everywhere, getting noticed. And people wanted to play with us, people like [trombonist] Bill Watrous, well-known groups and acts.