It was almost ten years ago to this day that I started classes at Berklee. I think my first course was probably Ear Training, on a Monday at 9am. It was Ear Training 4. Apparently I got a perfect score on my ET entrance exam but Berklee insists that folks like me had to take SOME kind of ear training course. So the ET4 class I was in was not the same as the ET4 class someone would take in their 3rd or 4th semester. We were solfeging Coltrane. We were singing four-part harmony on Four Brothers. We solfeged the modes of melodic minor with their related 9th chords.
It was a punch to the face. This was Berklee? What the hell had I gotten myself into? My class was almost entirely made up of entering students with perfect pitch. I was not one of them. My teacher liked to play tricks on the class where he would write something on the board in the key of F but sit down at the piano and play it in E. It was dog whistle, and I was clueless. I managed to snag a B- or so, because while my ability to learn movable do in chromatic jazz systems after a lifetime of zero solfege knowledge was subpar, my desperation to do it as best as I could, plus a little bit more, was transparent to my professor who compassionately treated us like science experiments. The first friend I made in that class was a fellow trumpet player who would notably analyze Ron Carter’s compositions at the Regattabar in real time while we sat in the back of the room, and I was the best man at his wedding two years after we graduated.
Not all classes at Berklee were to be like this. Music Preparation 1 was a class equally as brutal as ET4 but without the humanity. I was one of only a few that passed, with a heart-stopping C-. My professor once worked as a copyist for Gil Evans. For every ledger line not drawn perfectly straight, evenly aligned vertically, and properly spaced horizontally, we got a point off. Our first assignment was to buy expensive paper, calligraphy pens, and a compass and protractor. And white-out, if we didn’t have a problem with being publicly shoddy. Most of us quickly learned that music that was not perfectly written was not music. When your ability to communicate information is muddied, and when the orderliness of notation falls apart and forces the reader’s brain to unnecessarily comprehend excess information, you have failed as a copyist and composer. So it was remarkable that any of us passed at all, since I’m sure that we all failed our final project of writing out an orchestral score. When a sofer scribes a Torah, a single mistake means he must restart the entire page. Under the eye of God the sofer has it easier than we did.
Berklee does not require this class for writing majors anymore. I attended the public forums where faculty and students could openly debate the pros and cons of this class. Ultimately it was decided to make it an optional elective, because kids today only use notation software. Personally I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t know the proper height of a stem, whether they’re using software or not, but what can you do.
That first semester I was in an ensemble, a big band where I played split lead with a fine trumpet player from Japan,whose name I sheepishly never fully knew until the end of the semester. That ensemble was the now-defunct Back Bay Brass Jazz Orchestra, a raucous big band that played Maria Schneider, Brookmeyer, Stan Kenton, Bill Holman, and all kinds of other artists that didn’t get enough/any attention in the rest of the school (though Schneider in particular would be the number one imitated composer around that time. Are you at a concert of jazz comp students in 2004? Then you are listening to Maria Schneider form copies I hope you love nothing else). Ben Elkins was the bandleader, a man who probably would not have a place in jazz education anymore. He played bass trombone with Stan Kenton. He drank before our Tuesday night rehearsals every week without fail. He would in one moment lose his temper and throw creatively inoffensive slurs at us, and in the next fall publicly in love with our playing. He wrote his parts by hand and had a sensitive soul. Berklee had changed too much too quickly for him and he only lived for that band, waiting to get fired as a jazz martyr, defender of The Way Things Were and Goddamnit Should Still Be. We crowded into a small room to make a lot of noise and it was amazing.
I also was placed in a “latin jazz” small group. This had the potential to be an amazing few months, but it was not to be. When your teacher winces in pain when you play your first note of the semester and says “I hate trumpet, please take everything down an octave and play very quietly,” it affects you. I really liked the other guys in the band, but our professor somehow managed to pit us against each other with a misguided “this is how they do it on the street” approach to building a band. We were made to harshly critique each other on arbitrary and personal issues. We tore each other down because we were 18 and here was an authority figure who we so desperately wanted to learn from. The piano player may have gotten it worse. The teacher was a pianist, and sat next to him on the bench for 120 minutes every week, all but holding his hands. Wherever you are man, I hope you recovered. You didn’t deserve that. None of us did, and we all came out with low self esteem and a stronger-than-ever “I just need to practice more” attitude that ruins too many musicians with its lack of focus and encouragement.
Ben Elkins retired several years ago. My small group professor still teaches there.
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Berklee was a lot of things to me. Stimulating, fearsome, nurturing, abusive, exhilarating, uninviting, sociable, exclusive. It was a colorful gamut of experiences, mostly positive, and I’d do it again if I could. It’s been ten years since I started school. I moved to Boston in ‘03, moved back to Texas in ‘09, and moved back to Boston again this summer. It’s incredibly surreal to be back here. The last time I moved to Boston I was 18 and I couldn’t wait to get out of Texas. I knew I wanted to write and knew I had put myself on the right path, but I had no idea how that path would actually look or what stops I’d make along the way. I was also impatient, angry, resentful, and insecure. Ten years later I am none of those things, but it took some time to get here.
During school I tried not to judge and I did. I tried not to covet the awards and I did. I tried not to feel inferior as a student, as a writer, as an artist, and as a person when anyone else found any amount of success that wasn’t my own, but I did. And I couldn’t change it. At the same time, I don’t know how I could have done it differently. I could have hired someone to follow me around and every time I complained about anything he could leap to my side and quietly and sternly ask me: “So?” Or maybe “Yes but that doesn’t matter you know.” But I surely would have felt invalidated and even indignant.
I strongly feel that the trumpet and overall brass department at Berklee works together to create a great community, a big family of horn players who help each other out and never cut anyone to get ahead. My best friends are trumpet players and I gave and received countless gigs and opportunities to and from my trumpet brothers and sisters. There was no competition except in my head. In my actions I did fine, but in my mind I was being judged every day and my entire life and career depended on every performance. This was, of course, not true. But it scared me away from many opportunities. And much worse than that, my defense mechanisms kicked in and I judged others, often unmercifully, always undeserved. This quickly spiraled outside the brass department to my major and beyond. Almost no one was good enough for me. By the time my own career crashed upon take off during the financial collapse of ‘08, there was no one left to project my insecurity onto, and thus my self-exile back to Texas.
In the last four years I have taken took a hard look at myself, at what is important in life, and at what I can do to make myself better. In the last three months I’ve made friends I should have made a long time ago, I’ve enjoyed music and people I should have enjoyed a long time ago, and I’ve seen Boston the way I wish I could have a long time ago. There are no incompetent players anymore, only great musicians doing what they do best and working on the rest, which is a lifelong process that can never truly be completed. There are no bad charts any more, only drafts, experiments, orchestrational investigations, and writers learning as fast as they can in a world that offers precious few opportunities to get the experience our idols soaked up generations ago.
My advice to those of you starting school this fall: keep an open mind. Not just about the music or books or lifestyles, but about yourself. Take the time to see a counselor. Work through your roadblocks. Be a positive influence on others without making them feel incapable. Be experimental and work within a series of artificial boundaries. Be entrepreneurial and make friends with someone who knows branding. You are not too good for anything and you can never learn enough. No one can know All Of The Things. Be the best at what you do, but remember that there is no such thing as competition. Talking shit is time wasted. Be honest and empathetic. Take breaks.
So have fun, and in ten years let me know how things are going, cool?
