Home » Member Page

Charles Jennison

About Me

My Jazz Story

I met Dizzy Gillespie when the University of New Hampshire featured him in a concert with the Seacoast Big Band at the Field House in Durham, NH in 1978. My first encounter with Dizzy Gillespie was at UNH when the Seacoast Big Band invited him up to play a concert at the Field House. This was one of the earliest concerts jazz studies director Dave Seiler organized after his arrival in New Hampshire from Wisconsin. Dizzy came up from New Jersey with a conga drum, his trumpet and a drummer from one of his groups. He sent the music up in advance, and the band spent a couple of Monday nights working out the bugs before Dizzy’s arrival. The day of the performance we ran the charts in the band room, then went out for a bite to eat before the show. Things went more or less according to plan until about 2/3 of the way through the concert, Dizzy requested that our drummer take a break, and called his drummer up on the stage out of the audience. This did not win any points with our drummer, who wasn’t too happy with the turn of events. I thought Dizzy should have at least warned him something like this might happen. One other trick he pulled was to have our jazz trumpet player walk down to the front of the band and swap licks with him off the cuff. To his credit, our man gave it a good try, but he really was no match for the master. Despite his antics, Dizzy was a force of nature; during rehearsal, he went back and forth between conga drum and piano to give musical illustrations to the band, and there is no question in my mind that everyone played their best for him that evening.

My House Concert Story

Maine clarinetist Brad Terry, bassist John Hunter and I played a few house concerts in northern New Hampshire one summer two decades ago. Our hosts had no pianos, so we brought a light electronic keyboard to the gigs. Their homes were sumptuous and expansive; there was plenty of room for us to set up in the living area and still have a good sized audience as well, sitting informally on folding chairs. This group never rehearsed extensively; we all shared a common vocabulary of standard tunes from the Great American Songbook and would often put our set lists together on the fly. We all felt this helped maintain a degree of spontaneity and even allowed for requests from the audience!