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NW0109 Vinny Golia Quintet - The Gift of Fury
NW0112 John Rapson - Deeba Da-Bwee
NW0118 John Rapson - Bu-Wah
NWCD0130 Vinny Golia Large Ensemble - Pilgrimage to Obscurity
NWCD0211 Oddbar Trio - Lost Art Cafe
NWCD0235 Johnson County Landmark - Daydreams from the Prairie - JCL plays the compositions of John Rapson
NWCD0252 John Rapson - Water and Blood (The Billy Higgins Improvisations)
trombone, composerMy career as a professional jazz musician and teacher has been concerned with the multifaceted dimensions in which composition and improvisation intertwine. In this statement, I describe the nature of my creative activity and summarize how it has contributed to my teaching. In the course of tracing my career, I will also include aspects of my philosophy of education and indicate future directions for my work.
My creative activity has consisted of recording, performing and composing in what has loosely been deemed as the 'experimental jazz' field. This appellation refers not only to the contemporary techniques and modalities employed, but also to the practice of borrowing materials from non-jazz traditions. I took a keen interest in this field during my last years as an undergraduate and moved to Los Angeles in order to meet its practitioners. While in graduate school, I spent many hours downtown meeting and playing with the innovating musicians that hovered around the Century City Playhouse, a theatre partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts which presented experimental jazz artists every Sunday night. It was here that I first met a circle of musicians and lifelong cohorts who took their lead from the informal mentorship and examples of such heroes as John Carter, Bobby Bradford and Horace Tapscott. In truth, I was going to two graduate schools.
On recommendation from relationships formed in Los Angeles, I received my first opportunities in 1980 to record with New York artists Tim Berne and Walter Thompson, respectively. In the fall of this same year I received my first teaching post and, retrospectively, now regard it as the time when my professional life began. I was writing compositions primarily in the world of western art ("classical") music while performing primarily in the world of jazz, yet incorporating improvisation in both activities. While continuing to tour and record with musicians from Los Angeles, I took up compositional studies with Barney Childs who helped me explore a myriad of ways to use improvisation in my compositions. My academic responsibilities at Westmont College were largely centered around the teaching of music theory, but I founded a jazz ensemble and later, courses in jazz history and improvisation.
In 1984, I made a significant decision to unify my efforts in composition and performance and, further, to create a music that could successfully bridge the gap between tonality and atonality while blurring the distinction between classical and jazz. I received a faculty development grant to record my first album as a leader, Deeba dah bwee, for the Nine Winds label and composed all the music for the session as a performing member of the ensemble. This album led to a number of reviews and performance invitations that provided my first international recognition. Many of the reviews characterized my work as following the path of jazz innovators like Charles Mingus and George Russell whose improvisational approaches were intimately wed to their compositional conceptions.Over the next six years I received opportunities to play with Bill Frisell, Herb Robertson, Tim Berne, Vinny Golia, Bruce Fowler, Clay Jenkins and Kim Richmond in addition to my former mentors, John Carter and Bobby Bradford. These performances included three successive trips to the DuMaurier Jazz Festival in Vancouver, British Columbia where my octet shared the stage with musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Ray Anderson, Jan Gabarek and Gary Burton. In 1989, my ensemble opened for Henry Threadgill's Septet which arguably was the most critically acclaimed band of 'experimental jazz' at the time.
While continuing to record as a soloist for other ensembles, I recorded a second album as leader, Bu wah, in 1986 for Nine Winds and in 1989 received an offer from the German label Sound Aspects to record Bing, later recognized by the Village Voice as one of the year's top recordings. My compositional studies had continued with Nobuya Matsuda (a former student of Karl Hindemith and Roger Sessions) and Henry Brant. Mr. Brant showed great interest in the directions I was pursuing and prodded me to take the next step in my professional career. It was on his recommendation that I decided to move east in order to work with musicians in Boston and New York and to study at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where there were a number of forward-looking musicians from a host of traditions.
It came as a fortuitous surprise to learn that Anthony Braxton would arrive at Wesleyan the very same fall as myself. To borrow his expression, there is no "trans-idiomatic musician" with a greater reputation. Mr. Braxton has been copiously recorded (over one hundred albums) and, to date, has had four books written about his music. In 1994, he received the MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius award "given to exceptionally talented individuals who have given evidence of originality, dedication to creative pursuits and capacity for self-direction." I had been familiar with Braxton's music for close to twenty years and had a few, sporadic interactions with him in California. After spending a year as his teaching assistant, I was hired as a colleague at the passing of Edward Blackwell. I played in Braxton's ensemble for three years and in 1992 was invited to make a recording of his music for Black Saint.I took full advantage of Wesleyan, learning to play musics from many traditions that included Afro-Cuban salsa, West African highlife, South Indian (Carnatic) solkattu, Trinidadian soca, Brazilian samba and Javanese gamelan. My performances included two separate appearances at Lincoln Center and another at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art with groups that were formed from Wesleyan connections. I also took advantage of making new relationships with prominent jazz musicians in Boston and New York, recording with Julius Hemphill, David Murray, Allen Lowe, Doc Cheatham and Loren Schoenberg. It was a particular delight to receive opportunities to play at such venerable jazz clubs as Sweet Basil in New York and Sound Stage in Boston.
In the fall of 1993, I came to the University of Iowa where I became director of Jazz Studies. In the following spring, I initiated a project where I recorded a series of free improvisational duets with Anthony Braxton, transcribed the resultant tape and crafted compositional fragments from the initial improvisations. The compositional fragments were later recorded by a quintet in Los Angeles and fused together with parts of the original duets to create an album, Dances and Orations, which was released by Music and Arts in July of 1996. The initial press on this project has noted how the most recent technology was employed to maintain the impulse and energy of the improvisations in the fabric of the resultant compositions. The process has spawned a number of new ideas for recording projects that I am currently pursuing with cohorts on both coasts.
In 1995 I was requested to be the artistic director for a ground-breaking experiment that would link musicians at three different sites in Iowa with musicians in Japan in a joint performance via fibre optics. The project was largely funded by AT&T to showcase new technology and to be presented at the closing of the annual conference of the U.S./Japan Association as the first, live trans-Pacific performance. My task included composing an original work that could demonstrate the full range of the technology and to contact the musicians in Japan that could help us realize such an endeavor. Among the musicians that participated were Miki Maruta whom I met when she was a visiting fellow at Wesleyan and Akira Sakata, a composer/saxophonist introduced to me by Vinny Golia. The event received full media coverage throughout the nation and was declared by Governor Branstad to be "one of Iowa's finest hours."Two and a half years ago, I founded a twelve member group of local professional musicians called the oftENsemble that is dedicated to the production of orginal work in an effort to connect the community with my students. I also founded the Iowa Jazztet, an ensemble comprised of graduate music students that most recently toured and taught in Brazil in the summer of 1996. I co-lead Tiny Prairie Landscape with New York drummer, Matt Wilson (a native of Galesburg, Illinois) which has performed in Iowa City and done short tours each of the past two years. Each of these groups has created its own repertoire and made plans for future recording projects.
In my approach to teaching, I believe the academy should present a balance between creating and conserving culture. It is this thinking that has led me to focus the content of Johnson County Landmark (UI's premiere big band) on repertory materials. Because many of the watershed compositions of jazz history are not available through the conventional press, I have made it a priority to find original unpublished scores or to produce transcriptions of classic recordings in order to expose students to the primary sources of the genre. My composition and improvisation students are also involved in the process of producing transcriptions that I hope will one day be a significant library of material. Johnson County Landmark released its first CD last year and has followed with a second recording project to be released at its concert in Clapp Recital Hall this fall.
I have overseen a library project that has brought over five hundred new jazz recordings to the University of Iowa and I recently authored a proposal to offer a graduate performance certificate in Jazz . As a part of re-vamping the current curriculum, Jazz History will be offered for the first time as a G.E.R. in Cultural Diversity in the spring of 1997. Each year I sponsor eight to ten on-campus workshops with the prominent jazz musicians who visit Iowa City, including those who come to Hancher Auditorium. In October of 1996, I hosted a workshop with Dee Dee Bridgewater that was the first I.C.N. fibre optics broadcast from Hancher to other sites around the state, a tool developed largely on the success of the U.S./Japan conference.
Just as I endeavor to bring professionals into the academic environment, so have I sought to put students in professional environments. In addition to recording compact discs, I have developed a small jazz ensemble program in which the bands rotate weekly in a performance masterclass in the Wheelroon at the Iowa Memorial Union. The performance final exams are held at the end of each semester in the downtown clubs. Each of these groups works to develop a group concept which includes writing and transcribing their own repertoire. The big bands also do club dates once a semester, including one date each year in Chicago, Minneapolis, St. Louis or Kansas City.
In the fall of 1993, I became a founding member of the Global Alliance for the Teaching of Creative Musicianship at the behest of Ed Sarath from the University of Michigan and Joe Lukasic from the University of Colorado. This organization seeks to reunite composition and improvisation with the teaching of music theory in response to recent mandates from the National Association of the Schools of Music and the Music Educators National Conference. I am currently the vice president and have served on the board each of the past three years. In the summer of 1996, I taught a two-day workshop entitled "Improvisation in the Public Schools" at the University of Iowa that was co-sponsored by GATCM.
Many of my students from Westmont, Wesleyan and the University of Iowa have gone on to become professional musicians or teachers. Professors of jazz from Augustana College, Grinnell College and Indian Hills Community College have come to the University of Iowa to study with me and one of my current teaching assistants is a professor of jazz from Campinas University in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 1994, Jake Varmus won the Jazz Competition sponsored by the International Trumpet Guild and in 1995 Scott Dart won the annual jazz composition contest sponsored by California State University at San Diego. Eric Thompson won a full scholarship to do graduate work at New England Conservatory as a runner-up in the annual competition sponsored by the Thelonius Monk Institute and other former students are working as professional jazz musicians in New York, Boston, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles.
