My father enlisted in the Navy in 1945, the peak of the Big Band era, and was classified as a musician since he played the piano.  Soon he found himself in a band made up of recently graduated music majors from the University of Washington.

He told me they gave him “charts” of the tunes they were going to play and to his dismay, these charts had no notes written on them.  Instead they had the names of the chords and he was expected to know what the notes of those chords were.  He had never seen a chart before and had no idea what a Dm7#9 was.  So he just relied on his ear and managed to invent piano parts on the spot.  He said it was a “sink or swim” situation.

He taught me to play jazz bass the same way.  I badgered him for months to get me a bass guitar and when he finally did he taught me what the notes were and then sat me down to play with him.  I was expected to figure out which notes to play, just as he had in the Navy.

I ended up in another sink or swim situation last week when I found myself playing bass with two of the best jazz players on the scene today, flutist Ali Ryerson and guitarist Stan Smith.  The Arts Council had hired Ali to do a two day residency at the school followed by a concert for the public.  Ali assumed she would be able to hire a bassist and guitarist in Omaha or Lincoln and they could come with her to work in Albion.  Unfortunately, though she’s played all over the world, she’d never been to Nebraska before and discovered about a week before the concert that the few jazz players Nebraska has either couldn’t – or wouldn’t – come to Albion.

So she asked her friend Stan to play guitar.  Stan, head of the jazz department at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, rearranged his schedule and drove 15 hours straight to be here in time for a first-thing Monday school concert.  Ali completed her combo by asking me to play bass and my 15-year-old son, Thomas, to help out on drums.

I had never played with musicians like Ali and Stan and hadn’t played at all for nearly three years.  And Thomas had never done anything like this before.  We did the school concert without rehearsal.  Monday evening Stan taught Thomas a variety of jazz drumming patterns and techniques, Thomas’ first-ever lesson in jazz drums.

Jazz is an improvised and interactive music where the musicians feed off one another’s ideas and energy.  Performing with Ali and Stan was an incredible example of this. Playing with such skilled musicians brought out the very best in both Thomas and me, and though we were neither one perfect, we both played way above our pay grade.

Stan and Ali’s ability to bring out the best in other musicians was really on display as they worked with grades 4 through 12.  In practically no time Ali had every group she worked with improvising, and it was really something to see the students’ faces light up as they began finding their own unique musical voices.  All were thrown into the water, and every one of them was able to swim — it’s a real testament to Boone Central’s music program that their students had the foundation necessary to rise to the challenge Ali and Stan gave them with such confidence and ability.