NEA Jazz Masters Awards
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Paquito de Riviera on the clarinet |
On January 14, my husband, who is on the national board of the National Endowment for the Arts, and I had the great privilege of going to the NEA Jazz Masters Awards in NYC.
We had lunch with Jimmy Heath, who with his brother, Percy, created the Modern Jazz Quartet. We sat with Ahmad Jamal, the seminal pianist who coined the term American Classical music for jazz. And we had dinner with McCoy Tyner, who has played with all the great jazz musicians of the 20th century. All these musicians and the other jazz masters who came to the event are in their 80s. Their walk on to the stage betrayed their age, but when they played, oh my! Their fingers flew, ageless and flexible. The music inside them leaped out.
Sheila Jordan told the story of being too young to go in to the jazz clubs. So she sat outside the stage door, which Dizzy Gillespie had opened for her so she could hear the music. She then sang Sheila’s Blues for us, the story of how she became a jazz singer, complete with a scat duet with Ron Carter on the bass, singing these words, “And that’s why I am standing here before you today at 84, singing the blue -ooh -ues!”
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Jimmy Heath and Ahmad Jamal chatting at lunch |
I want to be singing at 84, too! I want to sing until I die. All of these octogenarians will play until they die. Ahmad Jamal said that the music keeps them alive. Words to live by.
The nature of life and learning music is to begin again and again and again. A new year is a good time to remind ourselves that there is no arrival point in music. Learning to sing or to play an instrument is a process of expansion. There may be moments of listening and sharing, like a lesson, a recital or an audition, but even those performances are only a snapshot of a particular time.
