Meeting the jazz community: A personal encounter (Part 1)

Jazz at the Sandbar, a live music series hosted by the Jazz Studies Department at the University of New Orleans, to give students an opportunity to play in front of an audience with professional musicians. Photograph by Drew Fink.

Ah, life in the Big Easy. You go down any street, you look to your left and there’s a New Orleans funk band playing at a club. You look to your right, you see a trad band playing at a bar. You look past that, you can see a Latin band playing at a restaurant, and a couple of acoustic guitarists playing outside that restaurant. On the other side, you see another bar where the band’s playing the classics: Gillespie, Coltrane, Davis. Keep moving forward, you see another bar with a band playing New Orleans funk. On the other side, a sole trumpeter playing unaccompanied in front of a tourist trap with T-shirts. You then notice that the majority of those T-shirts all feature topless women and for whatever reason, you panic and look away as fast as possible screaming “MINE EYES! MINE POOR, INNOCENT EYES!” … Just me? Anyway, that’s one of the great things about New Orleans: it’s all about the music.

My name is Drew Fink, and I can say that I’ve lived a very interesting life. I’d be lying, of course. My life story is pretty much the exact same as literally every other lower middle-class white average looking American. But I am in fact capable of saying the words “I’ve lived a very interesting life.”

I lived in Greenville, South Carolina, and I have been there almost my entire life. Greenville is a rather average city. Not too big, not too small, but it was ranked in the top five best downtowns in the country. However, I lived nowhere near downtown.

I lived on a literal hill about half an hour away from downtown. We had about three acres to ourselves and our “neighbors” lived far away, so we didn’t have much human interaction from home. Even if our location wasn’t all that conducive to social interaction, I wasn’t in any rush to make any friends myself. I had friends, mind you, but I saw them sparingly. I’d say it could’ve been because I was homeschooled from third grade through eighth grade, and while that may be a part of it, really I’m somewhere between mildly less sociable than average to a total recluse. I spent most of my time by myself either doing schoolwork, reading something, or playing video games. Seriously, between my reclusive nature and the whole “living on a hill” thing I’m on par with talking animals/Disney princess/waiting for the knight in shining armor to whisk me away. Well, I’m missing some talking animals and my Y-chromosome, anyway.

My knight never came, by the way, in case any ladies want to play the part.

As I got older, I really started getting into music I heard in video games, even going so far as to recreate it on piano through my own free will. I also started listening to more rock, classical (although, admittedly, I found most classical music boring), and jazz. I upgraded from being a clarinet player to being a saxophone player. I was around twelve at the time, and the saxophone was the instrument that I really connected with. I invested a large amount of time practicing and it really paid off. 

Before I entered high school, I was asked if I wanted to try out for the Fine Arts Center, a performing arts school in Greenville and apparently the sister-school of the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. I had heard horror stories about the jazz teacher there. Let’s call him Steve, primarily because that was his name.

I heard from an acquaintance of mine that Steve was an unrelenting taskmaster, extremely serious, and “just plain mean.” I prepared a couple tunes (“Watermelon Man” and “Doxy”) and nervously prepared for my audition. I arrived at the Fine Arts Center, waited in front of the building, and expected the worst. The worst did not come to meet me.

What did come to meet me was a short, nearly bald man with a mustache who almost always had something funny to say. Meet Steve Watson, the head of the jazz department, and my first real mentor in the jazz community. Not only was I to enter high school and start attending a public school for the first time in my life, I was also going to take my first steps to becoming a jazz musician.

Long gone was Drew Fink: the lower-middle class better than average looking white American of the past and replacing him was Drew Fink: the lower-middle class kind of good looking white American that I was in high school. There was excitement! Action! Romance! And I was still far too reclusive to actually take part in any of it, so I mostly just went into a practice room (we called them caves) and practiced. People were scary. The closest thing I got to any romance was that I was the designated victim for the dancers to mess with, which isn’t necessarily all that bad of a position to have.

The jazz scene in Greenville was … well, not quite “uptight” but certainly pretty serious about the music. Jazz was art! It’s serious! And it’s very technical! There was certainly fun, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any trace of the whimsical side of jazz back home. This annoyed my mother, who is a big fan of Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima. In fact, there was a stronger lean away from classic jazz than towards it.

The jazz scene in Greenville resembled New York more than New Orleans with its heavy emphasis on modern jazz. I, like my mother, am not the biggest fan of modern jazz, so I couldn’t help but feel a little awkward when I heard someone raving about this new artist and all I could do was think “… who?” At a jam session, no matter where it was held, I genuinely think I knew pretty much everyone in the jazz scene.

In college, I was playing the exact opposite of this high-technique, super-complicated jazz. In a trad jazz combo in New Orleans, I turned in an assignment for melody accompaniment that I worked my hardest on and was told (quite correctly) that it was too complicated. The lines I turned in were closer to bebop. I tried again, did a much better job at it, but to this day I still struggle with simply playing simply. But I’ve been learning, and it’s improved my playing immensely.

I never felt fully integrated with the jazz scene back home. Other musicians my age seemed to connect in ways that I couldn’t. Some of the guys I knew were even going out gigging, but I was never invited. Part of it may have been due to my reclusive nature, but I genuinely made an effort to be a part of it. I offered my services, even joked about doing it for less money than the competition, but the bands were mostly clique-ish. They played with their friends. Of course, no adult would go out on gigs with a high schooler, so I got the short end of both sticks.

Part 2: New Orleans

Editor’s Note: This story is one of a series reprinted from the book A Guide to South Louisiana: Stories of Uncommon Culture. Each author was a student in Rachel Breunlin’s “Storytelling and Culture” course for the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Orleans in the Spring of 2017. The Neighborhood Story Project sponsored the project as part of its mission to publish collaborative ethnography in high quality books in which the authors receive royalties for their creative labor.