The lilting, wailing sound of a saxophone trills above the punctuated sound of drums on a frosty winter evening as Mark Colby entertains a handful of listeners at Wednesday Night Jazz at the Rusty Pelican restaurant in Lombard.
The mood is mellow. Fans overhead stir the air slowly, and the crowd is hushed as a pianist breaks into an improvisational solo.
Jazz in the western suburbs used to be hard to find. Devotees had to drive to Chicago to hear their favorite groups, but more and more, the artists are finding that there is a great sleeping giant of an audience out in the suburbs, and they are starting to tap into that market.
“People out here are starving for more of this kind of music,” said Jeff Newell, saxophonist who also plays occasional Wednesday nights at the Rusty Pelican. “A lot of people who used to live in the city have moved out here, and they are accustomed to having this kind of music available to them all the time.”
Jazz is booming right now, said Jack Mouse, who runs the jazz combo program at Illinois Benedictine College in Lisle.
“There are more jazz magazines, more jazz clubs, more jazz festivals, more jazz radio stations, more jazz study programs and more concerts than ever before in the history of the music,” he said.
Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune jazz critic, agreed.
“The rising jazz popularity is a national phenomenon,” he said.
The main reason, explained Reich, is that colleges and universities began launching jazz programs in the late 1950s and 1960s, giving the popular music form a recognition it never had before.
“This is what built this whole new generation of listeners. Even if you weren’t studying it, you heard it because all the schools had jazz bands,” Reich said.
In fact, several of the colleges in the area have strong jazz studies programs, each with its own individual emphasis.
Northern Illinois University, for instance, has long been recognized as a supporter of jazz studies. Its award winning ensemble was named the best college jazz band in the country by Downbeat magazine in 1983, said Ron Modell, director.
Northern has a degree in jazz studies and has three big band ensembles and about 10 combos. They are strong in presenting instructional clinics to local high schools.
“The NIU jazz ensemble, without doubt, does more concerts and clinics than any other college or university in the U.S.,” Modell said. “Last year we did 36 concerts and 28 clinics.”
Typically, the ensemble takes a top name performer, like drummer Louis Bellson or trumpeter Clark Terry, to a high school with it to serve as a mentor. After the high school band performs, the college players will meet individually with small groups of high school musicians. The clinic concludes with an evening performance.
The NIU Jazz Ensemble has been leading clinics at St. Charles High School for 24 years, said Jeff Childs, director of bands, and the kids just love it.
“The response from the kids is great because they get to spend the day with one of the stars Modell brings with him,” he said. “The students especially like when the performer sits down and they work on improvisations, or he shares his stories. We make sure to ask him what it’s like in the business.”
Illinois Benedictine College, which was listed as having one of the top 10 jazz studies programs in the country last year by Jazz Times Magazine, specializes on solo improvisation, rather than large ensemble playing, Mouse said.
“Jazz always was and always will be a solo art form, and we try to concentrate on that aspect of it,” he said.
IBC is well known locally for its Faculty Clinic Series, Jazz at Noon free concerts on campus, the Janice Borla Vocal Jazz Camp and the Days of Jazz Series.
The jazz faculty at IBC are only part-time educators. They still spend a great deal of their time performing, Mouse said, and that is another draw for students to study there.
“People come to this school because they can work and study with nationally known players,” said Mouse, who formerly played with the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman bands.
Guitarist Tom Leeman, 34, a senior at IBC, recently won the award for top player of the year at IBC. He plans to become a professional musician and went to IBC because of its jazz program.
“I play all kinds of music, but I’m studying jazz. It’s a really good preparation for basically anything I want to do,” he said.
Elmhurst College, which will host a jazz festival Friday and Saturday, puts its emphasis on its traveling college band.
“We have been to Europe 11 times,” said Doug Beach, festival producer and director of the college’s jazz studies.
“We are going there this summer and will play at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and the Nice Festival in Monte Carlo.”
Beach believes that performing is important for the students. The band has also done a fair number of recordings in the college’s recording studio, he said.
“We have a brand new CD coming out in a few weeks,” he said.
College of Du Page, on the other hand, turns its emphasis inward, said Tom Tallman, director of jazz studies.
“Most of what we do is geared toward our students here,” said Tallman, explaining that, although COD does still have one big 18-piece ensemble big band, many other schools are downsizing and emphasizing smaller combo bands. COD also has three smaller jazz groups. “These give us a chance to get at the heart of the music,” Tallman said.
The COD program hosts six concerts a year, and they usually invite guest performers such as clarinetist Buddy DeFranco, tenor sax player Scott Hamilton, Bellson and Terry.
“The students gain from hearing them,” said Tallman.
Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove has a jazz program under music department coordintor Gibby Monokoski that has taken first place in the Western Illinois Jazz Festival for the last five years.
“We do a lot of playing in the community and for different festivals,” he said. The group is planning to travel to the Wichita Jazz Festival in Kansas in April.
Many of the musicians who have graduated from these college programs have in turn become high school educators, so the jazz studies programs have filtered down to the high schools.
“There’s an explosion in high schools of jazz bands, and they’re great jazz bands,” Childs said.
Tribune critic Reich agreed.
“We now have kids in high schools who play at incredibly sophisticated levels,” he said.
Jazz studies have even reached the junior high students.
Tom Sulek, director of bands at Hubble Middle School in Wheaton, has three student jazz combos. Last year one of them took the award for best junior high band in the Illinois Grade School Division I, he said.
“Every middle school in Wheaton has a jazz band,” said Sulek, who tries to give his students every opportunity to perform, whether it is at PTA luncheons or school concerts.
Jazz is a good music style for junior high age students to study because of its emphasis on improvisation, Sulek said.
“They can speak their emotions through their instruments, just like writing a story or painting a picture,” he said.
“You can give a middle school student an instrument and four or five notes, and they can improvise all day using those notes,” Tallman added, “and that’s the essence of the music and what people are starting to tune into at that educational level. We don’t necessarily think of big bands when we think of jazz today, and that bodes well for the future.”
And the future, most musicians and educators agreed, lies in solo and small band performers, rather than the big band ensembles. The big bands are just too expensive.
“When I first came to Northern in 1969,” Modell said, “there were at least 10 to 12 road bands working 50 weeks a year. Now we’re down to about one.”
“The future of jazz is where it’s always been,” Mouse said, “in the solo, improvisational art form with a small group. Right now is a real neat time to be a jazz musician.”
