Back in the day, the music was passed on through the bandstand community. “There used to be a lot more spontaneous playing,” says trumpeter Jim Nadel. “But in my time there’s been a demise of the jazz session.”
Nadel, a lecturer in music and founding director of the Stanford Jazz Workshop, has spent 36 years building a place where bones and pork chops (trombones and electric bass) can swing. “We’ve set up a community here where informal interactions can happen, and the discussions at lunchtime are just as important as what happens in the classroom.”
This summer, some 600 aspiring drummers, saxophonists, pianists and vocalists, ages 12 to 17, will trade licks during three weeks of the workshop’s jazz camp. Then comes a week of grown-up camp for adults and advanced students. Nightly, June 27 through August 9, the concerts will flow.
Although some 120 faculty will teach master classes and sit in on impromptu combos this summer, Nadel couldn’t be happier about one name on the roster: bassist Larry Grenadier. “He’s played with all the rock stars of jazz—[guitarists] Pat Metheny and John Scofield, and now he’s touring with [pianist] Brad Mehldau,” Nadel says. “He has a high level of musicianship, he reads well, and when he solos, there’s a flow of ideas. But what he brings to the music is a real knowledge of the history of jazz bass playing, and he can play very freely, if that’s what’s needed, or very inside.”
Grenadier, ’89, started attending the summer jazz camp when he was still in high school. “I think what affected me the most was simply being close up with the teachers, listening, watching and talking to them, and getting a direct ‘link’ to what I had been hearing on records,” he says in an e-mail exchange from Europe.
As an undergraduate, Grenadier played with saxophone great Stan Getz, who “taught through his horn.” Grenadier says he learned “so much about sound, time, patience and maturity.” Now, as he considers how he will approach the music as an instructor, the former English major says, “I do believe much of what makes music great cannot be verbalized. But a lot can be passed along.”
