Jazzin' in da Quarter
Aug. 10th, 2010 09:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
infrogmationI spent the past week in the French Quarter at the New Orleans Traditional Jazz Camp followed by Satchmo SummerFest.
The "Traditional Jazz Camp" is the first of what is intended to be "a yearly musical event in New Orleans that will raise the level of musicianship and knowledge of early jazz." There have been such camps in California and elsewhere for some years, but this was the first one in New Orleans. The founders are friends and aquaintances, and I was one of the early locals recruited to join. It was based at the Bourbon Orleans hotel in the center of the French Quarter (yay, I had a quiet interior room, not one of the expensive ones overlooking Bourbon Street, where tourists taking turns as amateur drunks yell "Whoo" all night).
Some excellent musicians taught their respective instruments, in addition to everybody having ensemble classes with each of the instructors in turn. The trombone teacher was David Sager, a wonderful musician and music historian, as well as an old friend who lived here in NOLA in the '80s and '90s. He now has a day job working with the period audio recordings at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which is pretty close to a dream job for a 78 collector.
Just before Katrina I was playing with a variety of groups which were rather broadening and challenging for me. In recent years I've pretty much just been playing ensemble brass band parts, casual party bands, and with groups of limited predictable repertory. I felt that I hadn't really learned anything on my horn in 4 years, and as much of what I was playing was "bad and too loud" getting into bad habits. When Dave Sager visited town a couple months ago he asked me what I wanted to get out of the camp. I said simply, "to blow more and suck less".
The "Traditional Jazz Camp" is the first of what is intended to be "a yearly musical event in New Orleans that will raise the level of musicianship and knowledge of early jazz." There have been such camps in California and elsewhere for some years, but this was the first one in New Orleans. The founders are friends and aquaintances, and I was one of the early locals recruited to join. It was based at the Bourbon Orleans hotel in the center of the French Quarter (yay, I had a quiet interior room, not one of the expensive ones overlooking Bourbon Street, where tourists taking turns as amateur drunks yell "Whoo" all night).
Some excellent musicians taught their respective instruments, in addition to everybody having ensemble classes with each of the instructors in turn. The trombone teacher was David Sager, a wonderful musician and music historian, as well as an old friend who lived here in NOLA in the '80s and '90s. He now has a day job working with the period audio recordings at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which is pretty close to a dream job for a 78 collector.
Just before Katrina I was playing with a variety of groups which were rather broadening and challenging for me. In recent years I've pretty much just been playing ensemble brass band parts, casual party bands, and with groups of limited predictable repertory. I felt that I hadn't really learned anything on my horn in 4 years, and as much of what I was playing was "bad and too loud" getting into bad habits. When Dave Sager visited town a couple months ago he asked me what I wanted to get out of the camp. I said simply, "to blow more and suck less".
