By Michael Jeffers
Since the early 80's, the name Art Davis has become known to Chicago music
fans as one of the most musical trumpet players in town. Recently, we had the pleasure of sitting down and talking about the different paths his life has taken, all of which have contributed to his musical development.
From his early beginnings on trumpet, to performances with Ray Charles, Rosemary Clooney and The Chicago Jazz Orchestra, Art talked about how
he grew into one of the most accomplished jazz trumpeters in Chicago.
AAJ: How did you get started?
AD: I didn't pick out the trumpet; when I was a child my parents asked me if
we wanted to be in Band. They never asked us what we wanted, they just went out
and rented the two cheapest instruments, clarinet and trumpet. My older brother
at first wanted to play the trumpet, but since he had asthma, he had to play the
clarinet, so I got the trumpet. I was happy to play it even though originally I wanted to play the drums. My parents said it was going to be too loud, so I got the trumpet. This was in 5th grade. I grew up in Virginia and ended up playing and taking lessons with George Morhan.
AAJ: Is that where you started developing your chops?
AD: Yes, since my teacher was in charge of all that, I got immediate feedback
on my playing . He was a pretty tough character and he really put me on the
right course. Because of this, I felt like I got a pretty good background on
brass performance even before I got into jazz. At that time, I was listening to
jazz but I didn't really play much.
AAJ: Did you start playing jazz in college?
AD: I ended up going to University of Illinois at Champaign; it wasn't a great
brass school, nor was it a great jazz school. It wasn't that it was in the
curriculum. The traditional faculty, meaning classical, opera and musicology never recognized jazz in the school. But because we had this professor John Garvey, who was a string player, not a jazz player by trade, he really liked the individualism and creativity of the music. Because of him, Champaign became sort of a place that oddballs that fell through the cracks of other major
universities went to develope their talents. That's where I
met Ron Dewar, Jim McNeeley, Ed Petersen, Dan DeLorenzo, Joel Spencer, Kelly
Sill, Dennis Luxion, Marlene Rosenberg, Mike Kochar, Jeff Stitley, Eric Schneider. The list goes on.
AAJ: Did John Garvey actually start the Jazz Band?
AD: Yes I think he did. He not only was a member of the Walden String Quartet,
but also a world class conductor in new music, experimental music. At that time
Champaign was also a hot bed for experimental music, going back as far as the
late 30's. The U of I scene on the surface was sort of this old stodgy type
feel, but underneath there was this subculture, both jazz players and new music
players intermingled.
AAJ: How did you guys develop as jazz players when none of the jazz was
actually sanctioned through the school?
AD: Well, we played a lot. We had jam sessions almost every night. Some times in the dorm, other nights in peoples’ off-campus houses, and anywhere else we could find a spot. The emphasis was definitely on playing and getting your chops
together. Practicing was a great thing too; I remember spending most of my free time in the day at the practice hall. I would see Ed Petersen, Dennis Luxion, and a lot of other great players always there practicing. Because of all the playing and competition, there was a lot of motivation to get good.
AAJ: Who was one of your biggest motivators in school?
AD: Ron Dewar was the prime motivator for most of us down there. He was about
10 years older than us and he already was just a dynamite player. A big part of
hanging out down there was going over to Ron's house and listening to all
different kinds of music. He didn't really teach as a normal teacher would, but
he would teach by example. He turned me on to all kinds of different music,
African, Indonesian, Indian Music and all kinds of jazz. He was a true “Eclectic” in every sense of the word.
AAJ: You had to basically teach yourself to play?
AD: Yes. I got a lot of my knowledge from hanging with different guys, playing,
and asking questions. Ed Petersen helped an awful lot, because when I met him,
he already knew a lot about changes. He was a pretty good piano player, in fact,
at the time he was a better jazz piano player then he was at sax. All of us knew
the importance of learning transcriptions, tunes, and with the jam sessions
always happening, we would always discover new tunes. We went through phases like listening and learning Be-Bop tunes while everyone else on the radio was playing jazz fusion. Then we would start learning Wayne Shorter, John Coltrane, and things like that. I'm glad I went through it that way, step-by-step rather then jumping all over the place because it made more sense how each style grew out of the other.
AAJ: Did you finally finish your degree?
AD: I managed to get my degree in Music Education, but then I actually lived in
Champaign after graduating. I got to get together some of the things that I had
not done yet. And actually, a lot of us stayed on and basically, there were enough gigs that sustained us. Nothing great, just low-rent situations, but I stayed on for the few years and actually that was the time that I did my first road gigs. The first one I did was with the old Eddie Howard Orchestra lead by Norman Lee. It was fun; a majority of the guys on the band were older guys who had been in the Big Band era. So I learned a lot from them.
AAJ: After leaving Champaign, did you come straight to Chicago?
AD: I came to Chicago; my original plan was to go to New York, but I heard of a
house opening up with musicians living in it and thought I would come to Chicago
and save up some money first. That never happened. In fact, I was barely making a living for the first couple of years. There were gigs for rhythm section players, but it was hard for horn players. Even now, if you get on a gig, you have to know tunes. Leaders would get desperate and then I would get a call. The first question was "How old are you?" Next question: "Do you know any tunes?"
At first I thought to myself " Yeah, I know tunes" but I learned very quickly that there were a whole lot of tunes being done in the professional scene that I never knew about. This really motivated me to learn the repertoire that I need to know.
AAJ: When you are teaching in College, how do you go about telling the students
to do that?
AD: I learned in a large way through humiliation. From college all the way
through to being a professional, I would get songs called and I couldn't play
them. Often times I would go on a gig and the other guys would tell you to just
lay out. To me, that was humiliating, but it was a great motivator. In my teaching today, I find it very hard to motivate my students to learn tunes. Unless you go out to a gig or a jam session, you will never learn the importance of learning tunes. I sometimes ask them do you know a certain song, and they say yeah, sort of. So I will sit down at the piano and they mess up the melody. I feel the melody is a very important vehicle. Your solo is important too, but it is all one organic process; you go from the melody into your solo. But if you can't play the melody, then you can't play the solo, so you have messed up the whole tune.
AAJ: Unlike when you were first learning all about music, in the year 2002, you
can go to a college, major in Jazz Studies and have all of this knowledge given
to you. Do you find the students today as hungry as you were back when you got
started?
AD: I teach at Northern Ill. University and I have had a fairly small
percentage of students that are really hungry and do all the things you need to
do to achieve as a player. A large percentage are pretty hungry, but not to that
extra degree. It has made me realize that there is a huge filtering down
process that goes on from the time we are in elementary school. That whole pool
of players from a young age that actually become world class musicians is
extremely small. I think that even among college musicians, the amount that will
become world class jazz musicians is extremely small. Let's face it, it’s hard to play jazz, hard to stay motivated. We don't get a lot of instant credit and feedback. Look at some of the old jazz cats that were playing the music just for the beauty of it. None of them thought anybody was noticing them. We don't realize how little known people such as Bix Beiderbecke, Eric Dolphy, Booker Little and Fats Navarro, among countless others, were hardly even written about in their time.
AAJ: What was your first big gig?
AD: I was called to sub at the Wise Fools Pub, with the top Big Band in the
city. This band had a lot of studio musicians from town in it. Art Hoyle, Bobby
Lewis, Roger Pemberton and many others routed through the band. The Wise Fools
Pub was also a place where musicians hung out. I got a call to sub for Art Hoyle
on the band. As luck would have it, Art actually walked in and heard me taking some solos on the gig and we ended up hanging out for awhile that night Soon after that, Art called to sub for him on some studio jingles. Actually, it was a
McDonald’s commercial, I thought to myself that this cannot be this easy to get
these gigs. And it wasn't, but it was a great gesture on Art Hoyle’s behalf, and
all of the guys on the session were great as well. I think they saw that I was
truly interested in jazz and playing changes and not pretending I knew things I
actually didn't. So that helped a lot and then I started getting gigs with Bill Porter and Roger Pemberton and other various bands and musicians.
Jazz-wise, things started opening up for me around 1982. I started my own group.
Well, it was sort of co-lead, but they called it the Art Davis Group. It consisted of Dan DeLorenzo, Mike Freidman, David Onderdonk and Ed Petersen. We got a steady gig at a club called Orphans and had that for years. Also that year we played at the Chicago Jazz Festival on the Main Stage.
Then I guess the next step was I went on the road with Ray Charles. That was
the year of the plane crash. On the landing, the plane went off the runway, slid
down an embankment and cracked up. The plane was totaled, but nobody onboard
died. It was a miracle; there were some injuries, but we all made it. I had a
couple more months on the gig and I finished the tour, but I took that as a sign
that I really didn't want to do this anymore.
My next major event in my life was that I got into African drumming. To make a
long story short, I meet my African drumming teacher Gideon Alorwoyie, who is an
authentic master drummer from Ghana. I was able to get Gideon a job part-time at
the American Conservatory of Music here in Chicago. I began playing a lot with
his groups and taking lessons from him and learning African Drumming. Through
the lessons and the drumming, I became interested in Ethnomusicology, so through that, my old professor John Garvey found out I was interested in going back to school. He asked me if I wanted to come back to school and do an assistantship in jazz. This was about 1988 and I enrolled in graduate school with a major in Ethnomusicology, which was a huge undertaking and if knew how enormous the
undertaking was going to be, I would have never enrolled. I am however grateful
that I did; I got scholarship money to go to Ghana and research my thesis, which
was a biographical study of a master drummer.
AAJ: You took all that time off of playing in Chicago?
AD: No, I was still close enough to Chicago that I would come back on weekends
and play gigs. I was known around town and I still got calls even though I was
in Champaign.
AAJ: When did you move back to Chicago?
AD: It was 1991 that I moved back to Chicago. I wrote my thesis once I moved
back to town. I felt like I had a huge weight off my shoulders once I got that
finished. The other thing once I moved back to town was that I was really felt
like playing again. I started playing with John Bany at Andy’s on Mondays. I
also got the teaching job at Northern Illinois University. All this happened
shortly after I moved back to Chicago.
AAJ: Who were some of the guys in town that you used to go and check out?
AD: As far as jazz trumpet, Art Hoyle was someone I really enjoyed watching
perform. Also at the time I was just starting in Chicago, John Campbell had a hot trio with Joel Spencer and Kelly Sill. There was a wonderful Brazilian group
called Som Brazil; Ron Dewar, Breno Saur and his wife Neusa were the core of the band. Paulhino Garcia was also in that band. They had some steady gigs that I would try to attend.
AAJ: Who were some of the trumpet players that really influenced you?
AD: I can name a couple, but the first one was Blue Mitchell. Blue Mitchell was someone who had some of Clifford Brown's sound but wasn't as technically
challenging. Then I moved to Clifford Brown; Clifford was a genius. Still I'm
in awe of his playing. I was always checking out Miles. I wasn't copying him as
much, but I listened to him. All those records with Coltrane I played way too
much. Then I was into the earlier periods of Freddie Hubbard. I admired his tone, his technical facility and the quality of his lines. Also at different periods when I was working with traditional bands, I was heavily checking out Louis Armstrong. Every time I hear him play, my jaw drops because of his sound and his ideas.
