This is New England Public Radio's Janz Beat. I'm Tom Rini with a podcast edition of On Janz Blog, which you can find at n E P R dot net. I'm speaking today with Paul Arzlenian, a pianist who was a founder of the Northampton Jazz Workshop, which over the past decade has been presenting jazz on Tuesday nights at two or three different venues in Northampton, Massachusetts. And I'd like to talk with Paul about that today, but what has prompted this conversation this morning is the recent passing of the sex one as Bootsy Barnes, a tenor sex one legend from Philadelphia, and when he wrote something about Bootsy on Facebook, Paul chimed in with a memory of his own from having work with Bootsy, back in the day.
And I knew that Paul had spent some time at San Francisco, but Philadelphia was entirely new, a bit of information for me. And I thought, you know, as well as I know Paul and many jazz fans in this area of the Connecticut River Valley know Paul. I thought, let's get his story a little bit more clearly defined here for the jazz beat podcast. So good morning, Paul.
Good morning, Tom. It's the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic phenomenon that we're in the midst of. How you doing? I'm hanging in there.
I'm hanging in there finding new ways to cope, you know, you got to stay loose, right? Absolutely. But I'm healthy and family's healthy and all that. So that's good.
Good. Plain piano. Quite a bit, yeah. Yeah.
I was just thinking I was playing a little bit this morning. Of course, I've only been playing solo now for about five or six weeks. And I used to shy away from solo concerts and stuff. And I'm getting used to it now.
Paul, as I recall, you came to this area, the Greater Amorous, Connecticut River Valley, Northampton, Massachusetts area back in the 1980s. But I know that your career preceded your arrival here in the valley. So would you remind me of what it was that you did come to the Northampton area? I moved here in 84, yeah, from California, directly from Oakland to here.
And how long have you been in California? Since 69? Oh, 15 years. Yeah.
Yeah. And where did Philadelphia fit in that timeline? In the middle there. My wife went to postgraduate school to get her doctorate here, Edd and Dance, in 1994, the 96, 97, somewhere around there, two and a half years.
And so we moved the whole family down there. I got right into the scene. I got some dance accompaniment classes at Temple and Swarthmore and got to meet a lot of musicians. I hung out at sessions.
So it was a good time. What was it that was San Francisco, kind of the launching pad, as it were, of your career, as a pianist? As a professional pianist, for sure. Yeah.
I went to Berkeley before that for a couple of years in Boston. And then on a summer vacation with a friend of mine going out to San Francisco, I stayed there. And so that was in summer of 69. When did you begin playing piano and when did jazz become sort of the focus and passion of your life?
I've been reflecting on that since you asked me to do this. And thank you so much for inviting me, by the way. It was probably when I was 12 or 13. My dad's big band and vocalist records and stuff started to, and my uncle's drumming, big band drumming.
He wasn't a professional, but he had a drum set. And just sort of sunk in and I started playing by ear on my mom's piano. So probably around there is when I started listening to jazz records. At the beginning it was big band stuff.
Jazz at the Philharmonic. My dad had a huge collection of those. That was exciting stuff. You know, my first real introduction to improvised communication between musicians at that level was just incredible.
So I think I got the bug right around there. You know, of course jazz at the Philharmonic refers to the concerts, packages that included Oscar Peterson and Hank Jones and Lester Young and Eleanor Jequette and Roy Eldridge and many jazz greats like them. When were you born? 1948.
And where did you grow up? Well, I'm an Air Force brat. So that's kind of a long story. I'm an only child too.
So it was Tampa, Florida at McTill Air Force Base for five years. I was over Air Force Base and lived in Ludlow for a couple of years. Okinawa for a few years. California.
I've known in California for a few years and then back to high school in Ludlow here. And then off to Colorado State University for a year, Berkeley for a couple of years and then back to California. So when you're getting into jazz and hearing the big band records and jazz at the Philharmonic era, we're talking about 1960, 61 and that time frame. Actually, you know, I remember my earliest memory and I tell this story.
I probably exaggerated many times now since then. My dad took me to an outdoor concert in a band shell and I think it was Dorsey Brothers with Buddy Rich on drums and I was able to sit on the grass in front and this is my memory. Buddy Rich was doing solo and I was going crazy, imitating him on the ground and he, after the song was over, pointed out and asked if I wanted to come play drums. So I think at that point I was really excited about music.
You were the first Air drummer as a drummer. And then so what happened from the early 60s and your formative period year of learning to play piano? I took a few, a couple years of classical lessons. Early on when I was about 11 or 12 I took a year or so and then I broke my hand playing baseball and luckily didn't have to do my recital that year.
And then I started again when I was about 15 classical lessons at Mr. Hart in downtown Springfield. And I would, you know, he would be angry at me, impressed but angry because I would memorize all my Bach pieces instead of reading them because I was never a very good reader. I did that for a couple of years again and at the same time was learning by ear copying songs and sometimes coming home baby started a little band in high school and we played for the senior show and stuff like that and it was mostly by ear.
When you went to college in Colorado do you have something in mind for a career besides music? Or was we were already on that? Oh yeah, well I didn't have it in mind but my parents did. My uncles in Italy are both doctors and they sent me over there for a few weeks to see if I was interested in becoming a doctor and I went to Colorado State taking sciences and stuff in preparation for that.
But I didn't last long. I had a couple semesters at the most and then I just started basically dropped out and stayed in the student lounge playing the grand piano there. Then came back east of Boston. Yeah, got a summer job.
I was working at the Mass Pike in Ludlow there at the gas station, a mobile station I think it was, and overnight shift. And this is another one of those moments in my life that I remember a lot. I was listening to, I think it was a radio station out of Baltimore, all night jazz station and they played Miles in the Skye, whatever song it was. And I almost started crying.
I was waiting for something. I didn't know. I was sort of a lost soul then. And I heard that and the interaction and Tony Williams is so exciting.
And so I begged my parents to let me go to Berkeley and somehow I got in. They were accepting a lot of people there. It was only like 700 students or something. So yeah, that's what I got serious about wanting to play music.
That's a beautiful album. It is. I still go back to that. I listen to it a lot when it came out and it really stands up.
So from Berkeley, did you major in piano? I think I majored in composition. That's basically how I got in, was on the strength of some songs that I had written. I guess they made sense to the people there.
And so I studied with Ray Santisi and somebody else, a stride player. I can't remember his name. But I was a pretty terrible student. Lazy, maybe.
I want to do my own thing, like a lot of people at age. I enjoyed the arranging classes and the theory and harmony. I learned a lot in a short time, I think. I still have my notes from them.
They were valuable for sure. But most of the time, I always had an apartment with a piano in it. We were able to rent pianos back then from the World Litzer Company for like $16 a month. So I had a $60 a month apartment in a basement apartment on Hemingway Street in a piano.
So that was the center for jam sessions. And that's where I learned an awful lot about playing, interacting with other musicians. I know where Hemingway Street is and that neighborhood of Austin I think it's probably referred to more often by Berkeley alums than any other. So did you jump from Berkeley to San Francisco?
I did. And what prompted that? My friend and I went on a fishing trip across country in a jeep that he had rebuilt. My friend is still around.
He comes to the club all the time and to hear us and stuff. Anyway, we got out there and I liked it so much. I stayed. I didn't live in Haidashbury.
I lived down on Polk Street. I was on Polk Street. I was in San Francisco for a little while and out in the Mission District. I'm very familiar with Haidashbury area.
Did you connect with the jazz scene there early on? I did. I was really fortunate. I wasn't that much of a player then, I don't think.
The spirit was there and the drive was there. Shortly after I got there, I was invited to do a jam session out near Seal Beach or someplace. In San Francisco. Honoring it was a birthday party for Russ Arnold and Kirk.
Me and a bunch of musicians that I didn't know were at this house there on the beach. He was there and it was great. I just happened to be the only person that was available. To play piano.
To play piano. To play piano. To play piano with San himself. Oh my god.
What a beginning. It was very exciting. Very nerve-wracking. Scary.
He started playing. We were doing a blues. All of a sudden after two or three choruses, he started going up a half step. Each chorus after that for 12 choruses and everybody had to do that.
I wasn't ready for that. I hung in and that was my first lesson. A whole lot of things bother me because a lot of people think that things are cool. People ride around in those cars and riding in airplanes.
Packing full of money and everybody thinks that things are cool. Even though Jay President accident would make you think that things are cool. But I'm here to tell all y'all. And him too.
We got a cross that we must bear. And the cross gets off of heaven. Now there's a black cross, a green cross, a white cross, double cross. The green cross.
And the lost cross. When I think of San Francisco in the Bay Area in the late 60s, early 70s, I don't think of it as an epicenter of jazz, sort of psychedelic acid rock and all of that. But you mentioned Rasson Rolen Kirk and if ever there was a jazz musician who was kind of connected with what feels like that zeitgeist, it was Kirk. What was the jazz scene like?
Did it feel like an age of Aquarius element to the jazz scene in San Francisco at that time? Not really. Not to me. There was a great teacher there at P&F Ed Kelly who taught at the Laney College, a community college.
And a lot of people gravitated around him. He was in the East Bay area, Oakland area. And they were all straight ahead players. Feral Saunders was a friend of Eds and they used to work together a lot.
Oh sure. I know Ed Kelly's name through Feral now. But I don't think of Feral as a straight ahead player. Well, I mean, he did play straight.
I've played with him several times, mostly in jam sessions, or playing harmonium on recordings. But he could play straight ahead. But I mean, you know, when Ed played with him, they played pretty straight ahead tunes, original tunes of Eds or something. He actually recorded with him under another name.
He just had a picture of his saxophone in a red shoes or something like that. Oh, I see. Feral recorded with Ed. Yeah.
But it was pretty straight ahead. And then on the East Bay, I mean, on the San Francisco side, you know, there was Eddie Marshall as a drummer there. And I used to play a lot. I had a group with Bishop Norman Williams.
And he was sort of the head, the bebop chair. And a lot of musicians went through him. You know, he always had a band. We called that a band for about five years together.
The one-mind experience. So I was in that small group of people that were into the straight ahead and bebop scene. And I wasn't much involved with the acid rock scene. I was in Boston a little bit when I was in Berkeley.
I used to go to electric, like no. Psychedelic supermarket. Yeah, yeah, yeah. CBB King and Janet's Joplin and all that.
But when I got to San Francisco, I sort of ignored most of that scene. It was stuck in the jazz. A lot of jam sessions. Played with Tom Harrell there for the first time.
He was young and it was so exciting and wild. You know, there's a lot of jam sessions. A lot of small clubs, basement clubs. Yoshi's was just starting then in the old place in North Oakland.
And there was a few clubs. Nothing. Was there a fair amount of work? Yeah.
Yeah. Well, it's hard to say. I was not on the upper echelon of players, you know, until, oh, never. But there was not a lot of jazz work.
I had my own groups. So I generated a lot of work. For a while I did, there was a lot of GB work, general business gigs where you just go play tunes for people at parties and stuff like that. And there was quite a bit of that.
But I didn't last too long in that scene. It was too frustrating to play, you know, non-interactive music. What would you have to say, you know, whether it's about yourself or just in general about the necessity of that drive to find work for yourself as a jazz musician? Going back just a minute.
There was a course in San Francisco, the Keystone Corner, which was a big, you know, scene there in the both end jazz club. Yeah. Freddy Hubbard used to come through there. Bill Evans heard a lot of good.
You know, so there was a scene. Aren't you Shep recorded there in 66? Oh, really? Yeah.
Great album. Yeah. I've been San Francisco. I've been sent to both end.
So I got to play there a lot. And through Bishop, we hosted a weekly jam session, late night jam session. So a lot of musicians came through there too. So there was a scene.
There was a scene. So what did you ask? Just about that necessity of, you know, not everyone has, but that drive to find work. Well, yeah.
I mean, I always, for most of my career out there, I always had some kind of extra gig, you know, big gig, whether it was carpentry, doing a lot of jobs here and there, or working in my first guy there in gas stations. That's all I knew. You know, this is something to survive. But then to find gigs, I started bands.
Basically, I had three or four different bands there. As a composer, my focus has been mostly composing. So I needed an outlet for that anyway. So I started several groups, one morphed into another into another.
And then would look for work. We had to find work because you couldn't keep the musicians if you didn't have the work. So, yeah, it's always a struggle between just wanting to play music and then having to make money. So I didn't.
Oh, the one job I did have that was playing music was I was a full-time dancer company at Berkeley High School in California. That was pretty sweet. For about three or four years, I got to study and come and play piano during the day. They had a great jazz department too, music department there.
I know that accompanying dancers has been a parallel track for your career. But before we go further into that, you mentioned composition. And the song of yours that I know best because it's been recorded by several different jazz musicians is a dance-related tune, Paud de Tois. When did you write that and where did that?
How did that get off the ground and become a known tune or a played tune by others? Well, I wrote it while I was on the road actually with a jazz-tapped ensemble based on it between Los Angeles and San Francisco. And it's a dance for three, you know, because it's a waltz. And I recorded it a couple of times myself, I think with the vibes player Fred Ralston and maybe I can't remember.
And we have it here today on the recording with Steve Neal. Yeah, so when I was working for Teresa Records as sort of an A&R assistant producer, editor, music editor, John Hicks was recording then. And with I think, Waltter Booker and Jimmy Cobb. No, no, no.
Mickey Roker? No, this was just a trio with the vibes player. Bobby Hoterson. Bobby Hoterson.
They were doing a trio. And I think maybe they were looking for material or something. But so I gave that to John and said why don't you try this one? And he loved it.
So that was the first recording of it that got out there was Bobby, Boogie and John. And then from there John recorded it several times, gave it to Roy Hard Grove, Birth of Hope. Lots of people recorded it. So thank you John.
Teresa Records, San Francisco based label, right? Yes. How did you get involved with them? One of the groups that I led, East Bay, no, no, it wasn't that one.
It was Namosha. He was the president of that company, the starter of the company, the one who bank rolled it and everything. Was a really good trumpet fluego horn player, mostly fluego horn. What was his name?
Alan Pittman. And he was a big time USDA researcher in polymer chemistry there in Richmond, I think it was, East Bay. And so he had some money and he had a love of music and he couldn't put that down. So anyway, he was in the band with Bishop and I and recorded our first album together and he decided to make that a label and named after his wife then at the time Teresa.
So it was Teresa Records and we did two or three albums just with that Bishop and One Mind Experience group before he started recording. He said, you know, I've got to do something with a big artist to get to sing off the ground so that's when he worked with Pharaoh. And then John Hicks came along with Pharaoh and did his own and did some stuff with, oh, Ken, Nat Adley, Joe Bonner, Penist. So I got to meet all those cats, sometimes play with them, but got to do music editing for them too.
I cut their 30 minute songs down to, would fit at that time on an album. Well, that, yeah, Teresa gave us a nice catalog of music from that period of those artists. I think Bobby Hutcherson led maybe one date for the label, but in any case, yeah, it's a nice substantial audio music on Teresa Records. Yeah.
Someone unusual too for the San Francisco jazz label during that time which we're talking late 70s. Yeah, I think at first recording came out maybe 76 and then he, I left in 84 and he was still struggling to, you know, keep it afloat maybe in through 88 or 90 and then sold it to evidence records, I think. Yep. And so from San Francisco, did you come east to this area?
I did. Well, that was in Oakland. Most of the time I lived in Oakland. That's where I met my wife.
We were co-operative, music and dance studio, everybody's dance studio in North Oakland. And we ended up running that until we moved out here in 84. So we were mostly in Oakland. And before you came here, let me just backtrack a little bit.
You got more, did your accompaniment of dancers begin with that gig at the Berkeley High School? Just a little before that, when the dance studio, we opened it up, it was actually a music and dance studio. Peter Barche, basses, was part of it. We were sort of an experimental improvisational group together then.
So he and I and a couple of other people and then several dancers opened the studio. Basically it was a dance studio, but we also taught some music lessons and accompanied the classes. This was probably 72, 73, 72. That's when I first started working with dancers and I loved it.
We did some, had some contact improv people come from New York and there's which is still going on and strong. So improvisation working with dancers was really exciting for me. Then Berkeley came a couple years later. I'm not sure exactly how that happened, but I fell into it and I've been doing it ever since.
And you've worked with some pretty renowned tap dancers over the years. Tell us the name of you. Well, Honey Coles, Jimmy Slide, of course everybody that I'm going to mention is probably gone by now. He's definitely gone.
Buster Brown, Fayard Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers, Savion Glover, Gregory Hines, Diane Walker, lots of folks, lots of folks. Started through the touring of that jazz tap ensemble which I did for four years or five years. And then when I came out here I was, I think it was, you know, it was Barry Harris. I was still working with dancers here and there in the Boston area, but Barry got sick or something and couldn't do this tour.
I'm Dan Sombrella, Tepdance tour with Savion Glover and Jimmy Slide, Diane Walker and stuff. And so they heard about me and asked me to do it. And that was with Alan Dawson and drums and John Lockwood on bass and we continued on until John and I are still working together after Alan passing. Ron Savage took over the chair.
So that's the trio that works all around New England here for, yeah, it was great. A lot of it. And I was going to say the tap dancers that I worked with, they were, you know, great musicians too. Some of them played instruments, but they all played with their feet.
They knew the tunes so well and it was like playing with another musician. It was great. You know, I remember the Northampton, the old Pleasant Street Theater, booked the documentary No Maps on My Taps, which would have been 1978 or 79 or so. And around that occasion there was a tap parade in Northampton that included San Man Sims and Jimmy Slide and other dancers who were basically profiled in that film.
It was a terrific moment in Northampton cultural history, a tap parade right down Main Street. Around that occasion and I saw that film again a couple of years ago in New York along with some other, I went to another program over at Lincoln Center, The Dance, you know, a program at Lincoln Center and saw some very rare footage of the great tap dancers. It was an amazing, like a two day immersion in tap two or three years ago in the city. All that stuff is on YouTube now.
It's just incredible. The dancing back then, you know, and that it's all available for the young dancers. It's a pretty big scene right now. I still work, well, actually the Boston Tap Vast got canceled for the summer.
I teach at it every year for a week and I did Jacob's Pillow several times for a couple of weeks at a time out there and of course that's canceled too. You know, you mentioned the musicianship of the dancers and it brings to mind a scene with San Man Sims who's performing with, might be Lionel Hampton, but it's a Duke Ellington standard cotton tail or a big D-8 trainer. One of those well-known Ellington tunes that the band of course is playing and San Man is doing like these four bar breaks and then the band completely lays out. And San Man carries that entire tune for like two minutes and you never lose sight of what their tune is that he's dancing.
So intrinsically musical through the taps and the sand of course too. Right, but that's near drum feel. There's also an incredible video of, you said, Ellington, Chuck Green, had huge feet. And he's one of his famous routines is A Train.
And the same thing, that's typical with the big bands, the dancer would do breaks and then they would stop or do stop time or something because it's a volume issue, you know. But that's incredible. I think that was in no maps as well. Well, you came to know what happened and you've been a wonderful and sort of prominent part of the scene since 1984.
What sustained you early on here besides the gigs with dancers? Well, I first got out here, I just looked for musicians to work with, did a lot of jobs here, Herman Hampton, bass player. And then I started working with Whitney Cronin, wonderful older bass player. I used to work with Buddy Morrow and Clyde Thornhill.
Claude Thornhill, sorry. So anyway, I learned a lot from him. We used to do duos and trios, work with Montenia, vocalist, Claire, play drums with this a lot. Claire Arrinias.
Claire Arrinias. And so we found quite a few gigs. You know, 75 dollar gigs, whatever. Different hotels, restaurants, stuff like that.
And so I managed to get into seeing that along with my little bit of teaching. I did at Collio Community College in the dance work. And I was doing, you know, sustain me well. Yeah, yeah.
That's how it started. And then the idea came to start the jazz workshop. And that's been my main focus since ten years now. Yeah.
But in between then, did you tour with some prominent musicians? Did you have some gigs with... Not really. I mean, I worked with, for a couple of years with Archie Shep after Tom McClung left to Europe.
I sort of took over that chair for a little while. We did, you know, just a little touring around here. It went to Montreal. Nobody else will prominent that I can think of.
It was mostly through the tap dance touring that I did where I got to work with, you know, Alan Dawson and stuff. So what prompted the establishment of the jazz workshop? Well, the basis, Dave Shapiro was struggling with, you know, physical and emotional things. And he needed something.
We'd always talked about the lack of a good jam session in San Francisco and in Philadelphia. I was always, you know, part of a weekly jam session. And it was just a great experience. And he did the same in New York.
Yeah. And so we decided to ask Jim Desmottie over at Green Street Cafe. I guess this was 2000, 2010, a year before Dave passed. If we could start, you know, a weekly thing, get a free meal and a hundred and fifty bucks so we could hire a guest artist.
And I figured, you know, it'd be a way to maybe get Dave back on track or something like that. That didn't work out in a few weeks into it. We had to, you know, he checked out basically and George Kay came on. So that was the basic idea was to get this jam session going for all of us, you know, for ourselves and for local musicians to be able to meet and play with some great players from out of town.
You know, I've been in the Valley since the 1970s and hosted jazz on the road since 1984, which is, you know, thirty-five plus years now. And for a lot of that period, until about ten years ago, it frustrated me that there wasn't a sort of central venue with a kind of local rhythm section available for guest soloists to come in and play. You know, because I knew that that was kind of the format almost, or the standard by which a lot of players got around, is dropping into different cities and locales and doing a night or a half a week or whatever. And this area just seemed to be sadly deprived of that for a long time.
You know, Hartford had something a little bit along those lines with the eight-eighty club, where there was, you know, of course, an active jazz kind of local scene for many years. So, you know, I used to wish for this kind of thing for a long, long time. And so, well, you're talking about it from the perspective of musicians who, of course, are always in need of a place to play. There was such a need for an audience perspective too.
Well, you know, we have some of the same people, core of thirty to fifty people, and we've been coming every Tuesday night for ten years now. And it's grown to close to a hundred people that come and just really dig it and need it, you know. And that's the appreciation I got of doing this to realize how important it is that we play this music. It's not just for us.
You know, I sort of knew that all along from playing sessions, and especially in the Black clubs in San Francisco and Oakland, how important music was to the community, but this revitalized me for sure, you know, doing this, seeing that the community really needs it. And it's uplifting for everybody. So, did you begin this Tuesday night series at Green Street Cafe with a guest soloist booking right from the start? Yeah.
We had two young women, Emily Duff, and I can't remember the other girl's name. She's not playing that much anymore. Two saxophonists. They were local, but they were the first guest artists in Saramaning.
No, it wasn't Saramaning. She came out in a year later or something. But, and then the second one was Scott Mullett. Oh, yeah.
The late great player. Oh, my God. And Eric Lawrence came on. These were all friends of ours.
And then we didn't hire any big names until maybe Gary Smolian. He was a little local too, so we didn't reach out to New York and all that yet in the first six or seven weeks. But then word started to spread. Once Gary got in there, it sort of gave us some credibility in the greater jazz world.
And we realized that it's a Tuesday night. It's not that far from the city. And musicians wanted to play. And we were, you know, we got some good tips and we were able to pay them enough to make it fun for them.
And where's WOW? It's been going now for, well, not standing the hiatus that the whole world has ended the moment for COVID virus. It's been going for 10 years this April. Yeah, we had scheduled a big bash with Gary Smolian who's played maybe two other anniversaries of ours, April 7 through 10 somewhere around there.
And so April 7 was supposed to be a big, big bash. Now you mentioned the coming into a greater appreciation for how vital this is for listeners, for audiences, for the players on the bandstand. I've noticed also Paul that a priority in the Tuesday night series has been the jam session. The open door policy basically for people who want to sit in.
And what inspired that? Well, that's just part of that scene. That's what we did in San Francisco at the Visitoro Club and the Both End Club and other spots where we had a weekly jam session. We'd play a little bit as a group and then open it up.
In 23rd Street, Cafe was named, I named the song for it. Bruce Clobber ran the session there and somehow I got hooked up with him and I became the regular house pianist for that. And that's where I met Bootsy Barnes. He would come in and play.
And usually Bruce, the drummer would hire someone to feature that night, mostly a local Philly person to feature, and then open it up as a jam session. And that's when I got to sort of appreciate vocalists. A lot of vocalists came by. And so when I started this, it just seemed totally natural to do it that way.
And you've also branched out, I think, through the workshop, through the Tuesday series, into some public school workshops and presentations, master classes with guest artists. Yeah, it seemed a logical extension through the jazz festival. I became involved as a producer for the jazz festival. What jazz festival was that?
Sorry, the Northampton Jazz Festival. I did the last two or three years when it was a big festival at the parking lot of thorns there. And then we took a couple of years off and started it up again as an October festival with different venues indoors around town. And so we were looking for some kind of community outreach program.
And I came up with the idea of, because I reached out to the JFK band director and it turned out their weekly rehearsals for their jazz band. She has two of them, actually, a seventh and eighth grade band. And she was there for Monday nights. So it was perfect.
We take the guest artists that was a good teacher as well and into it, that was coming on a Tuesday, bring them on a Monday, talk the hotel into giving a cheap room for two nights. And they'd go in and do a clinic with my trio. Gary Smolian was the first, what was it, Gary? Yeah, I think Gary was the first one to do it.
And then we do a concert along with some of the students the next morning on Tuesday morning, and then invite them to come to the club too. And it just seemed perfect. So I think Claire and Williams, band director there for being a great partner and willing to do it. And that's one of the saddest parts of this thing is we had, who was it, Joe Magnarelli was supposed to do this week.
And Pete, Phil Grenadier was going to do next Tuesday at the Northampton High School. We had one at JFK, we've got two of them now, one at JFK and one at Northampton High School. And that's sort of funded through the Jazz Festival, and the one at Northampton High School is actually funded through donations made in the name of Elliot Ross, a student of Northampton High, and JFK who passed away very young a few years ago. The parents asked us to start a program in his name too.
So this is the best way for kids to learn and appreciate and get to know and love the music is to actually see people with a high level of ability and love of the music playing in their own element. Sure. Now I don't mean to put you on the spot, but over the years, over the past decade of hosting the Tuesday night sessions with Northampton Jazz Workshop, an awful lot of guests, soloists have come in. Would you like to mention any of whom you've been amazed by who were maybe new to you and who we ought to know more about?
Oh my gosh, well, you know, it's been such an honor to play with some of these people. The most recent one that played was young Alto saxophonist, Irene Terracubo. Oh yeah, arena. Absolutely amazing.
I don't know how old she is now, maybe getting old 27, something like that. But she's absolutely amazing and she just gets better every time and plays like a 70 year old master or something, but with chops all over the place. Just really swings. Before that, Camille Thurman, saxophonist and singer.
Oh gosh, vocalist worked with her the first time. She passed away. Rebecca Paris. She could just deliver a song.
It was so much fun working with her. You know, so loose on the bandstand that you didn't care if you didn't know exactly where she was because you were there with her. You know, what else? The list goes on.
You know, Don Braden always surprises me. Houston Person. He was a great find. Our bassist, George Kay, worked for five years with him and Edna Jones on the road.
And so we were able to get Houston up here and he loves it. He's been coming up five, six, seven times maybe over the eight years or so. And you know, it's a joy working with some of these masters. You know, 52 weeks here.
Different guests each time over ten years now. It's been incredible. That's just a few of them. Well, I want to thank you for joining us today and thank you for what you provide the value.
We're speaking in the week in which Fred Tillis has passed at age 90 and Fred was among the many hats he wore as a professor of music at the University of Massachusetts as a composer of symphonic and choral music as a jazz saxophonist as a poet. Fred was also the director of the Fine Arts Center at UMass for a couple of decades and played such a vital role that can't be exaggerated really in elevating the status of the music at the university level and at the bigger cultural level of the Connecticut River Valley. And Fred was succeeded by Willie Hill who carried on a strong jazz profile for the Fine Arts Center at the university. And in a different setting, perhaps a little bit more grassroots, you have really built and sustained something here that means as you mentioned a hundred people every Tuesday night who just thrive on this.
But the influence, the impact of what you're doing I think is very significant. And it remains to be helping to advance careers of Raina Terracubo and Camille Thurman and others who are among the guest artists and of course the jam session element of it too. It was probably a very substantial building block for a lot of young players. So thank you so much for that, Paul, and thanks for being our guest today.
It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me, Tom.