MORGANTOWN – Eight bars in, and the band gets the groove.
“Blues by Five” was the tune. Miles Davis. A hard-bopping workout, it was.
And just out-of-kilter enough to make it sonically interesting, as jazz – that uniquely American sonic expression – always is to acclimated ears.
Davis, the taciturn trumpeter from East St. Louis, made the bulk of his music, his recordings his concerts, before the grandparents of this particular group of musicians from University High School were even a blip.
No matter. On this particular rainy morning, this particular ensemble owned it and turned the auditorium into a copacetic playground of cascading notes.
Mark Palmer, the UHS band director, smiled as he worked the bandstand, calling out instruction.
“I like what you’re doing, but you’re dragging just a bit,” he said to the trombone player.
“Don’t be afraid to hit that,” he offered to the kid at the piano.
The kid wasn’t – and Palmer beamed even brighter as said groove ensued.
“Perfect,” he said.
Next week in Monongalia County, the jazz goes driving again.
That’s because the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz will be here with a series of workshops followed by a concert.
Hancock is the jazz pianist who made his name with Davis before branching into his own explorations in the form.
Jazz is impressionable music, Hancock said, so who better to learn it than an impressionable audience?
“We’ve found sometimes that young people can learn about certain things better from kids their same age,” he said, “and one of them is jazz.”
Hancock won’t be here, but the performers he was referencing, will be.
The institute’s nationally renowned Peer-to-Peer Jazz Quintet, which is made up of five talented high school musicians from across the U.S., will present workshops and mini-history lessons – Hancock calls them “informances” – at Morgantown High School and University High.
Concerts at both schools are also on the bill and the institute’s time here will culminate in a free concert at 7:30 p.m. May 8 in the Falbo Theatre at West Virginia University’s Canady Creative Arts Center.
The evening will include performances by Don Braden, a saxophone player who has traveled the world performing with Hancock, Betty Carter, Wynton Marsalis and other luminaries; and vocalist Lisa Henry, a jazz stylist and blues shouter who jets across oceans for her art and was singing Billie Holiday tunes when she was 12.
J.B. Dyas, the institute’s vice president for education and curriculum development, will oversee the proceedings in Morgantown.
For him, what makes jazz exciting and worth checking out – especially for young audiences, he said – is the fact that the music, in its most potent form, is more often than not extemporaneous and improvised.
“Think of jazz like any other language: English, Spanish, French, Mandarin, Japanese,” he wrote in Downbeat Magazine in 2024.
“The overwhelming majority of what you hear in a jazz performance is improvised in the moment. It is not composed ahead of time – just like regular conversation is not prepared speech.”
