New jazz prof here to blow his own horn

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This article was published 18/07/2011 (5569 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Trumpeter Derrick Gardner showed us he can burn up a stage when he sat in with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra at last month’s jazz festival.

 

And we’ll be hearing more of him starting next month when he arrives in Winnipeg to fill the Babs Asper professorship in jazz performance — maybe even the day after he arrives to start teaching in the University of Manitoba faculty of music’s jazz studies program.

Gardner is scheduled to pull into Winnipeg Aug. 17, near the end of the music faculty’s annual summer jazz camp and the day before camp faculty perform at the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s Jazz on the Rooftop. It’s a good bet bassist Steve Kirby, director of jazz studies, will take Gardner and his trumpet to the gig to show him off to jazz fans.

Like some of his colleagues, Gardner will be balancing his new teaching duties with performing — here, of course, but also on the road with his band the Jazz Prophets and with any of the big bands that he often plays in. The Jazz Prophets performed last week in Philadelphia and at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola at Lincoln Center in New York. The band is booked at the Detroit Jazz Festival on Sept. 3.

He’ll be teaching at two jazz camps before he comes here — at the University of Massachusetts and at a camp in Wisconsin — then a couple of gigs in NYC, then back to Green Bay to get his car and drive to Winnipeg.

It’s important for a jazz professor to keep performing, Gardner says. “It’s an important part of education,” he says, to “bring those experiences back to the classroom.

“Students want to hear what it’s like out there on the scene,” he adds, and as a musician “you have to maintain your presence out there.”

Gardner is no novice to the pedagogical side of the jazz world, having taught at Michigan State University in 2002 after an 11-year stint as a musician in New York City, the Chicago native said in a telephone interview from Lansing, Mich., before leaving there on the weekend “never to return.” He taught undergrads and graduate students and was “the architect” of a master’s program there, he says.

At the U of M, he’ll be teaching jazz performance (styles and practices), jazz trumpet and helping to build up a jazz trumpet studio, Gardner says.

Gardner joined JALC onstage on June 14 during the orchestra’s performance at the TD Winnipeg International Jazz Festival for the Chick Corea composition Matrix, arranged by his brother Vincent, the band’s lead trombone player.

The brothers play together in the three-horn front line of the Jazz Prophets (along with a tenor saxophonist), which is usually a sextet but expands as needed.

Gardner has performed in Canada many times over the last two decades, often in a big band. He was at he Toronto Jazz Festival this summer with the Count Basie Orchestra and has toured with Harry Connick Jr.’s big band, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra and the Mingus Dynasty Band.

He prefers the freedom of small groups, he says, with “more chance to explore improvisation.” However, big bands “are always looking for brass players” and once you become known, there are more opportunities for a freelance musician to make a living, he adds.

The trumpeter might have made it to Winnipeg a year or so earlier, if he hadn’t been on the road when the original job posting expired. Assuming it was filled, he went on with life. But a suitable candidate wasn’t found then, and it was advertised again a year later. When saxophonist Jimmy Greene, a member of the jazz faculty, gave Gardner a call and told him he was a good candidate for the job, the trumpeter jumped at the chance.

chris.smith@freepress.mb.ca