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Gerard D'Angelo: Who's Kidding Who?

Gerard D'Angelo: Who's Kidding Who?
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The old adage about those who can do and those who can't teach doesn't fit nicely into any music tradition. If this fallacy were to hold true, then it would be best for music history books to write off Joseph Haydn for taking on pupils—Beethoven being one of the more famous ones. That old idiom penned by George Bernard Shaw doesn't hold up for traditional Western music, it doesn't hold up for other musical traditions where practitioners are required to go through an apprenticeship with a master, and it certainly will not hold up against the jazz tradition. Without great sages that act as mentors to younger musicians, there is a risk of losing tradition. Without tradition and history, moving forward to stretch boundaries become more difficult.

Prior to being part of the faculty at Manhattan School of Music and The New School, pianist Gerard D'Angelo had a healthy career as a sideman. The New York native has played as Glenn Miller, Zoot Sims, Ira Sullivan, Mel Lewis, Nat Adderley, Red Rodney, Bucky Pizzarelli and others. Before teaching notable artists—both privately and in classroom settings—like Robert Glasper, Manuel Valera, Anat Cohen, Ambrose Akinmusire, Becca Stevens, Marcus Strickland, EJ Strickland, Fabian Almazan and Christian Sands and countless others, the professor himself studied under past masters like Jaki Byard, Lennie Tristano, and Charlie Banacos.

Despite a feathery touch on the piano that harkens to Bill Evans, D'Angelo has only released one record as a leader through Mapleshade, Not What My Hands Have Done (2002). Today, 12 years after his first release as a leader, D'Angelo plans to showcase the voicings and exercises he's taught students in his latest album, Ninth Avenue Jam (Self Produced, 2014).

All About Jazz: Your father knew how to play stride. Did he teach you how to play at an early age?

Gerard D'Angelo: My dad played piano by ear as a hobby and he played everything in stride. The kind of influence it had on me was that it was fun to have music around the house. We always had a piano, a little organ, and drums. Playing music around the house was something he always did. I believe it had a really big influence on me because he loved music.

My dad was a dressmaker who had a shop. We lived in Long Island and his shop was in Brooklyn, where he grew up. My dad had this talent where he could hear a song once and play it. Although he played everything in C, he was good at it.

AAJ: [laughs] Really?

GD: . [laughs] Everything! No matter how sophisticated the harmonic structure of a song was, he reduced it down to a tonic, dominant, sub- dominant thing and it all sounded good! He could make "Stella By Starlight" sound good with just C and G7.

He mostly played songs from his era. He knew songs like "Ain't She Sweet?" and these really old songs that were from the 1930s and 1940s that really had that kind of harmony of tonic-dominant relationship. But the truth is, he really could play anything he heard. If he heard a Beatles song, he could play it once. If he heard a classical piece, he would be able to play the theme. He would do this thing with octaves and move up down to fake the whole thing. So he had great ears and he was a beautiful influence on me.

AAJ: I assume that you played a little bit by hanging around your father, but was there a particular moment—or a record perhaps—that really made you want to pursue music?

GD: I recall a certain record and a certain time when I said, "Man, this is great." I was only 12, but I remember hearing Ramsey Lewis' The In Crowd (Argo, 1965). It was a really funky, boogaloo, jazz piano [record] that made it to the commercial scene. It was one of those things where a jazz player has a song that makes into the commercial scene. The In Crowd was really cool and funky; it had those bluesy Horace Silver licks and a little bit of an Oscar Peterson vibe. I thought that it was the coolest sound that I had ever heard.

I had taken piano lessons prior to that but I was just learning stuff on my own and figuring it out. I figured out a blues and a few simple tunes. I had a small repertoire of songs that I would just play endlessly. Although I wasn't getting that much of a sophisticated education, I was jamming a lot with my friends and I was beginning to enjoy the art of improvisation with very simple blues scales—like a lot of kids.

But I could copy my dad from looking at him. I would watch him kind of like how someone would watch a player piano. I ask him, "Dad show me something." So he was always there and he was kind of my fake book except I'd look at his playing instead of reading music. The reading came a little later for me.

AAJ: You've mentioned that your dad would take you as a kid and the two of you would catch Bill Evans at the Vanguard or at this club in Midtown. What were some of your early recollections of watching Evans play?

DG: I was around 12 to 14 at the time and I was just enjoying my own little thing and I never thought that I wanted to pursue [music] in any professional way; I never really even thought that I was talented enough to do that. I was just playing a lot and I was having fun. Then at 14 or 15 I heard Bill Evans. A friend of mine, Joe Zappa, who also played piano and I would teach other what we knew.

So here we were showing each other stuff and we both liked Ramsey Lewis and a few other jazz players, but we didn't really know jazz that well. All the sudden, he gets hooked up with someone who knew about Bill Evans, so I got this Bill Evans record and I thought it was the greatest thing I ever heard in my life. I found myself going back and listening to his earlier records, but basically [Evans] sounded like the coolest thing in the world to me.

So that was what really prompted me to study more seriously. I started taking lessons with Milton Krauss on the north shore of Long Island. He was an amazing musician and he could read anything. He graduated from Juilliard back in 1820.

AAJ: Really?

DG: [Laughs] No, I'm kidding! He was around 70 in the '70s, so he might have gone to Juilliard in the 1930's. He was a phenomenal musician; he could read and transpose anything. I studied with him while I was a junior in high school. He was teaching me all my basic chords and he taught me how to read a little bit. He was really blown away and upset that I could play a lot of piano and couldn't read anything. He would put simple things in front of me like "Camptown Races" and I couldn't read it, but I could move around the piano with stuff I knew. So that kind of irritated him, and he really got me to read. I learned all my chords and all my scales. Then my father discovered Berklee and he said, "Why don't you take a summer course at Berklee?"

But in the meantime, I fell in love with Bill Evans and I showed my dad who Bill Evans was. My dad had never really heard modern jazz. My dad was born in 1920 so he was 50 years old by that time, and he was really brought up on popular music. He loved all kids of music, but he [listened] to Erroll Garner, Art Tatum and Count Basie. But he knew the popular jazz guys, he didn't really even know people like Evans, Peterson and Thelonious Monk. My dad turned me on to all kinds of music during my life and here I am as a teenager turning him on to all the jazz. It was kind of like "Hey dad, look at this," and he just loved it and he said, "Wow! We gotta go see this guy."

We only lived a half an hour from the city, and we used to drive in and catch Bill Evans play at the Vanguard and Top of the Gate. As I remember Top of the Gate, you would walk down a few steps and there would be Bill Evans playing. So [Evans] would play there and the Vanguard. There were a couple of times where he would play at this club in Midtown called The Half Note, but it was mostly at Top of the Gate or Vanguard.

AAJ: So it was mostly the downtown scene?

GD: Yeah, mostly the Downtown scene and not much in Midtown. So my dad and I would always come into the city whenever Bill was in town. I was a young kid so I had to get in to the clubs with my dad. I remember when the Vanguard was $5 and I remember when it was even $3.50. I remember when it went up to $5 and I thought, "Wow! It's getting expensive."

Back in those days, Bill would play all night. He would do four or five sets. It was never called a show; they were just called sets. Later on they [billed] it as a show so they could charge each set as an individual entity, but back then it was just a gig with sets. There were times that he would play up until midnight or later! I would go there and hear four sets!

Sometimes there would be no one there at the fourth set. There might have been four or five people there on a weeknight and [Evans] would go back up and play. There was this one time at Half Note where he went on to play when there was no one there except for my father, this couple and me. He was really upset and he had a spat with the owner and he just left. It was just unbelievable to think that here was Bill Evans- -who I thought was one of the greatest musical geniuses—go through that. I felt like watching Bill Evans play was like getting to see Beethoven play.

AAJ: What was Five-Week program like for you at Berklee?

GD: It was my the summer of my junior year in high school and I really felt like I wanted to do music. I thought it was great to be at school and hang out, listen to records, and play. I went to Berklee and I met a lot of people who had a similar vibe as me. I enjoyed it thoroughly and it was an incredible summer. That summer was more about realizing how important it was to be motivated. The jazz stuff—even the theoretical part of it—was really fun, and I was able to get into it.

AAJ: Who were you checking out by that point?

GD: By that point, I was constantly buying records here and there. I had discovered all the major cats by that point. I knew Oscar Peterson; I fell in love with him and bought all his records. Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, McCoy Tyner, Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, Red Garland, Wynton Kelly, Phineas Newborn, Jr.. You name it and I loved it.

When I heard Bill Evans I knew that there had to be more people like him. Before I went to Berklee, I just bought any record that said the label "jazz piano." I figured if [Evans] is around, then there had to be more. It wasn't really until I had started meeting more friends and people, discovering WBGO, and meeting other players who were jazz oriented who would say, "You gotta hear Oscar Peterson."

So I was listening to all those people. When it came to watching shows, I was watching a lot of people. I saw a lot of Bill Evans because he was the most accessible and inexpensive. The reality was—as I remember—Oscar Peterson wasn't playing a lot of the small clubs in New York at that time. I don't ever remember ever seeing Oscar Peterson at the Vanguard. Seeing was Evans was easy because it was affordable. A lot of the other guys weren't playing those clubs until later on in the '80s. During those years, in the '70s, when I was in high school and post-high school, I would go to the clubs and listen to Sonny Stitt, Red Garland in Boston, McCoy, Ramsey Lewis and other people.

AAJ: What happened after high school?

GD: I went to Berklee for a year and I got a gig from this team, Bobby and Pat—it was this husband and wife duo. Bobby came up to me one time when I was in a practice room at Berklee and said, "Man you sound great." He needed a pianist to play bass. Back in those days, in the commercial world of club dates, bands rarely had bass players. All pianists would have to play bass.

AAJ: Really?

GD: Yeah, go back and ask the older guys. There were bass players but they weren't using them. It was cheaper for bands to get away with pianist who could play bass—we all had split-bass. We had Fender Rhodes that had the bottom two octaves act like a bass. It was all about how well you could play bass lines. Bass lines on piano were something I grew up doing so I felt comfortable doing it. It was perfect for me because as a kid I was always playing boogie-woogie for years. I couldn't play stride like my dad, so I played more bass lines.

So that was one of my first gigs and I did that for a year. I couldn't manage both things— school and gigging. So I ended up moving back home and I went on the road with a few shows. But my dad really pressured me to go back to college. He said, "You have to get at least an Associate's Degree." This was the early '70s and it was getting important to get an education from college because it was becoming clear that a degree was essential to earning a living.

I ended up at Five Town's College and got my Associate Degree. Believe it or not, but while I was there, I got my first teaching gig. Within the first year, the school gave me a teaching gig and I ended up teaching enough to pay my tuition. So I got my degree and I taught there for two years.

AAJ: So how did you end up getting your Bachelor in Music degree?

GD: [Laughs] So I got my Associate's and to brush through the whole thing, I was gigging until I'm 36. So I move into the city and I managed make a living gigging. I did all sorts of gigs. So I hit 36, and I start subbing at The New School thanks to Gary Dial.

AAJ: So Gary Dial was teaching at New School?

GD: Gary was one of the first teachers at New School. He was with the first group of teachers from the very beginning. He was really instrumental to introducing me to everyone at the school. So I was subbing for him, it went well, and all the kids liked me. Then a class opened up and Gary said, "Hey, there's a class opening up."

AAJ: What was the class?

GD: It was a harmony class, it's the same one I've been teaching. That's all I ever taught! Eventually the Theory and Performance class opened up at New School and I began teaching that. Around the same time I also began subbing at Manhattan School of Music and I eventually became part of their faculty.

So here I am teaching kids that are about to graduate with a Bachelor's Degree and some of them were graduate students at MSM and I only had an Associate's Degree! So I went back to Five Towns College and finished my Bachelor's. I think they're a little bit stricter now with that and I probably wouldn't have been able to teach now without a degree.

AAJ: You mentioned that you played with Billy Crystal. What was that like?

GD: He would do his stand-up routine and I would improvise behind him. I remember this gig I did with him at this venue called my Father's Place. He was midway through his routine and people started booing him off the stage. But even throughout all that, he never doubted that he would make it big and became a star. He would just play these college gigs and these venues that were not really that big of a deal. But even after that night at Father's Place with someone throwing an orange at him, he still was upbeat that he was going to make it, and he did. He got into Soap, rose to stardom and that was the end of that story. I've never seen him since then.

[laughs] Usually when people become successful, I don't see them anymore.

AAJ: Well, I guess that's a nice segue to talk about some successful people that you know. You've seen musicians like Robert Glasper, Fabian Almazan, Ambrose Akinmusire, Christian Sands and Takuya Kuroda in your classrooms. They've definitely all achieved great things. By your estimation as a teacher, what is it that about these students that propelled them to have great careers?

GD: I think it's a lot of things and it's different for different people. But if you go back and listen to anthology of John Coltrane when he was 18 years old in the navy band... he's really not that good. If I heard him then and I was auditioning him, I would think that he's not a very good player, but as we all know, he went on to be John Coltrane.

You can never really tell when you hear someone who is 18 years old. Some of the most deceiving people are a lot of the kids that are fancy when they're 18, but it doesn't mean that they're going to be the best. Some of the greatest kids that come through really worked hard through their college career. Robert Glasper was very talented when he came in, but when he left he was much better.

Sometimes it's really obvious when it comes to talent. I think Christian Sands is a good example of someone who is really talented as an incoming student. But I've had a lot of students who did not show that. I think when everything is said and done it's different for different people, but what they all have in common is the desire and passion to work really hard.

AAJ: I've met a lot people from your generation who were able to go on the road right away after college. In some cases—like yours—they didn't even have to finish college. Do you think it's just a different time and a different industry? Or are we all just lazy and should all just transcribe more?

GD: When I was young, you could work if you wanted to work. Lounges all across the country had live band, every hotel had a live band, and bars had bands—my friends grew up playing rock and roll in bars everywhere. You had all of that music and you didn't have to be the crème of the crop to work, which was good. Not everybody can have the greatest jazz gigs, but what about everyone else who needs 10 years between 20 and 30 years old to hone their craft?

I was lucky to have worked in Bermuda where I played in a hotel band for a year. I would play piano six nights a week. The thing that was happening for a lot of us, in terms of developing skills as a commercial musician, was learning how to function in different situations. I played with the Glenn Miller Orchestra and when I first started playing in the big band I didn't know what to do! I never played in big band when I was in school and when I started playing the bandleader told me, "Hey man, you're playing way too much." But they were willing to tell you those things! It wasn't like you were hired then you were fired. They knew that they were never getting a ready-made artist or musician. Everyone was rough around the edges in [his or her] 20s. So they would work with what they had and that was okay.

When I think about the amount of hours I gigged, I was up at the Rainbow Room six nights a week and five sets a night playing dance music! I had to go in and play tunes all night long and 80 percent was without music and they were medleys. You would go and play and they would say three flats and that was it. So you were learning tunes, how to play, and how to function in that role. You couldn't be super hip and you had to comp a certain way.

It's a much bigger thing that the artist and it reflects the music business. I feel bad that a lot of younger people don't get the opportunity unless they're extremely gifted ones. I'm happy for the talented ones and of course they deserve it, but I feel bad for everybody else who can't get the opportunity to get out there and play. I hope something changes in the music business that causes people to change their attitudes to listen to artists who are growing and not this finished product.

AAJ: I edit a lot of self-interviews at All About Jazz through the Take Five section of the website. It's really a great service that the website does for the musician who is trying to reach a wider audience. One of the common grievances that I see in these articles are older cats complaining about younger generations and their reliance on fake books, play alongs, and to some extent, jazz education. It seems like a lot of them are saying that they learned how to play in the "streets" while we're learning how to play via YouTube and bitTorrents. Being a jazz educator from that generation, what's your take on this matter?

GD: I think you can't compare because it's a different generation. It's ridiculous to compare the generations because it's a different era. Life was a certain way when I was growing up and the culture reflected that. The culture reflected the way we learned and how we did what we did. Jazz institutions were beginning to become popular. Berklee was great, Five Towns College was offering music courses, Manhattan School of Music opened up in the '80s. A lot of my friends were going to Berklee and it wasn't that much different from what you were doing at New School. But even then, the older guys would say the same stuff to us! They were saying, "We never went to school!"

Everyone has their war stories and everyone likes to tell how they did it and how it should be done. The reality today is that people are doing what they need to do in order to learn. There's not a lot of gigs so you have to create the situation.

I was fortunate to have grown up to having grown up with Gary Smulyan who lived closed by and we played every night. I was fortunate that I had a big nice downstairs and my parents let me play there. They were happy that I wasn't out at night running around. My friends would come over every night and we would play all the time.

But let me tell you something about play-a-longs. Years later, my friend Gary Dial began playing with Red Rodney. Red was a trumpet player with Charlie Parker and it's around 1980 and Gary's a young kid—he's around 20-something years old— and they began playing "Giant Steps" and Red Rodney couldn't solo over it. He was playing things like "Blues For Alice" with Bird but he couldn't solo on "Giant Steps." So Gary Dial was writing out exercises for Red Rodney to hear and feel the changes and then Red Rodney began using Aebersolds to learn.

Red was a genius, he played amazingly well by ear, and he could bop with the best of them. He didn't really know any of the technical terms and that's sort of how he learned. He loved young players and he had no problem with anything, for him it was just about playing how you played.

The thing about Red was when things became a challenge, he used play-a- longs and he thought it was great. No one thought it was bad yet. But on the other side of the coin, it's not good when a musician gets stuck on it. What happens is that—I know what the older guys that are my age are talking about—it [hinders] the communicative element and that's the biggest thing. We played everyday when I was a kid and we would laugh and hang out. When we played a whacky chord we would respond. For better or worst, we were communicating and it was all about communicating. It was all about getting a groove going. If you play with play-a-long records from the time you're 18 to the time you're 25, you're not going to get that. But to do it for a few years in high school could be very rewarding.

A lot of older players have to realize that a lot these kids are young. Where were you at when you were 22? You have to try to remember when you are that age because a lot of development really happens between 20 and 30.

AAJ:You think so?

GD: Yes, because that's when you're out there. That's when you're out there and you really start to get your ass kicked and you really start to develop as a player. That's when you learn how to comp as a pianist. I really hope that gigs for younger people happen again, because for me, that's when I felt I really started to develop much more. Again, if you take the extreme like Glasper then that's different, but I was just one of the regular kids. I was just trying to learn this thing so it took a lot of time.

But you need that time. A lot of my students come in and they want to be really good at be-bop by the end of the year and I'm like, "Take your time and let it grow." But I understand that, I remember feeling that way myself.

AAJ: You took numerous gigs throughout your career, is there anything in particular that stands out?

GD: There was a lot. I was playing with Gary Smulyan during my early years. I was playing with someone who was a naturally gifted person. He had photographic memory, he could bop ass off, he digested every Cannonball Adderley and Bird record he ever bought and he went on to become a really successful musician. It was really great for me to play be-bop with him constantly in those early years. I always tried to play kind of like him in my own way and try to capture that energy a little. So he was really wonderful.

I had a gig in Bermuda and Garry Dial and I worked in separate hotels. We used to get together after the gig and play all night. We were in our 20s then and we would take out index cards with ii-V's in every key and play all night long. We made up exercises for each where I would comp and play bass lines and he would solo. The chord changes could go anywhere and he would just have to solo and he would do it for me. We would try to make it sound like bop, except we didn't know the changes we were playing and it was really more about playing by ear.

I had experiences playing with Red Rodney, who is a legend and that was wonderful. I played with Nat Adderley. I played with Nat for a year in Florida and he would tell a story on every show. On every gig he would get up and tell a story.

Red Rodney was wonderful, and I realized it was really about the art of being good and not being different. Rodney's solos weren't that much different, but they were really great. A solo was a work in progress. It was almost like he was working on the same solo every night. I realized that everyone has [his or her] own way of perceiving it. For Miles Davis, it was about being different and new rather than being good. Although Miles was great, he was willing to take a chance for it to not be good rather than playing "Stella By Starlight" his whole career. Bill Evans on the other hand, played "Stella By Starlight" for 30 years and made it really good. It's a different [philosophy] for different players. Bill Evans played "My Romance" throughout his entire career. I learned a lot of from Red Rodney. Chris Potter was in the band with Red and I never experienced anything like that kind of playing.

But an outstanding moment for me was playing with Brian Stokes Mitchell, which was not a jazz gig. He was such an outstanding singer—he won a Tony for Broadway- -and he just got this gig at the Lincoln Center. Believe it or not, he heard me during a holiday party; it was like a scene out of a Hollywood movie. We were at a Christmas party and my friend had a piano and he told me to play, so I sat down and I just played for a few hours and no one was really listening. I didn't really know anyone at the party so I didn't really care and I just sat there and played. Eventually a guitarist started playing with me and I didn't think anything of it. A year later Brian Stokes left Broadway and his [regular] pianist was very busy for the gig so he thought about me from that party. He called up my friend Gregory Generet and he called me up and gave me the gig.

So he gave me the gig on the basis of hearing me play during a party. We got together and we really worked well. That was great for me because having done all the gigs I've done in the past really allowed me to be able to play with him because I had to play Broadway style, I had to play jazz, solo piano, I had to play with an orchestra, the Boston Pops, all these different orchestras, and duo. I had to play with him duo in front of 2,000 people; you have to smash that thing up. He wants sound, he wants it big and Broadway.

Suddenly I realized that I acquired skills that not even really great jazz players could do. The benefit of doing a lot of music is that it makes you function well in a variety of commercial settings. There are so many types of music. If you put me on a hip hop gig with Eminem, then they'd probably fire me. So everything has it's own specialty. It was a great time with Stokes and I played with the National Symphony Orchestra in D.C. It was Marvin Hamlisch conducting.

Another great moment was going over to Japan and playing with the Glen Miller Orchestra. We travelled all over Japan and we were really well received. It was really fun to travel and be able to do that. I like gigs that had nice venues.

AAJ: [laughs] Of course, who doesn't?

GD: [laughs] I played in all the clubs where people threw up on the piano and people are just screaming "Quit playing!" The beautiful thing about being a musician is that you're playing in that dive in downtown with a drunk throwing up in a piano, and the next thing you know, you're playing for royalty in the most prestigious venue.

AAJ: Another very famous student you had was the actor, Ben Stiller. How did that happen?

GD: I have to thank Gary Dial. About three years ago, he had been in with a lot of big time people. He was going to teach Ben Stiller but then he was so busy that he couldn't. So I ended up working with Ben for four months. He didn't play a note of piano and I used to go his house and I used to teach him piano. He had to play four songs and sing.

AAJ: What songs were they?

GD: The play was House of Blue Leaves. It was about a guy from Queens—played by Ben Stiller—who worked in a zoo. His character was a zookeeper, but he was also a wanna-be singer-songwriter. So it was like a weird comedy with a dark side to it. It was Ben's first big professional gig around 1980. Ben was in the play back then but he was going to do it as a star.

From what I could see when I got to know him, he's really a hard worker and he really wanted to play the piano. He could have just sat behind the thing and had someone else play, but he wanted to play it. I would go to his house two to three times a week and give him lessons.

AAJ: Does your teaching approach differ between a celebrity like Ben Stiller, your music theory class, and your private students through MSM and New School?

GD: First of all, it's important to understand that you're teaching people—human beings. People have feelings and we're all in the same boat. Developing a sincere rapport with people as human beings and having a respect for people is important and that's my thing. It's not just a hierarchy; I'm dealing with human beings who have goals and dreams just like myself. That helps put it perspective because it creates this feeling of communication and a vibe that I'm real. I think that this allows you to begin to see where this student is. It's not about me; it's about them. It's not about showing them how skilled I am, it's about trying to find out what they know and what they need to know. My wife has helped me with this. In the beginning, I would get freaked out and get anxious. They would all just be staring at me. I don't know what they're thinking and they're just sitting there. It's the first time in college for some of the kids and they're young so they're trying to impress each other, and no one gives it up.

It can be intimidating and I'm thinking, "What are they thinking of me." But my wife would say, "It's not about you. It's about why you're there." Whenever I get intimidated or psyched out, I always just try to remember that I'm there to help people out. So that's where I start and that's the common denominator with everyone whether it's a vocal student at Manhattan School of Music or Ben Stiller.

I never asked Ben about any of his movies. I didn't even acknowledge him as a movie star. It was all about what he needed from me at that time, which developing piano skills.

But you really develop a lot of things that you can kind of draw on. It's like having a jazz vocabulary where you can draw on stuff when it's a blues in F or a Bb rhythm changes. You kind have your raw elements but you're also improvising—like we are now when we're talking. Some kids don't flourish with technical jazz studies, other kids do. You have one kid that can play incredible bebop but he can't even spell C7. Another kid might know a lot of theory but he has trouble feeling 32-bar forms. You really have to be flexible, but at the same time you have to listen and try your best to help.

You also need a strong repertoire of material. Sometimes [students] aren't thrilled about it, but sometimes they know that it's going to help them and they need to know things like modes. If they're a serious student of jazz and they're in music school, you don't want them leaving without knowing certain things.

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