NEW ZEALAND FAREWELL

My last few days in New Zealand were kind of hectic. The day before yesterday, I got up early to leave my apartment in Christchurch and take a prop plane 45 minutes north to Wellington. Wellington is even more compact and village-like than Christchurch. Everything is close to everything else and the one or two story houses hug the hillside in a pleasant looking way in the country’s capital city.

Wellington, arguably, is a bit more of a culture center, but that is hotly debated. In fact, I mostly heard people putting down Wellington in Christchurch--albeit in a very polite and not very aggressive manner. The consensus was that people in the south island prefer Christchurch, but they could certainly manage in Wellington. Unsurprisingly, Wellingtonians felt just the opposite.

There are four jazz schools in New Zealand and I had clinics at 3 of those (actually, the fourth is a branch of the Wellington School in Auckland so it doesn’t really count.) In Wellington they kept me busy with a steady stream of students and workshops. Then we all headed off to a gig and I sat in with Nick Tipping, the bass playing director of the Wellington jazz program, and Reuben Bradley, a fine drummer. The students came out in heaps (as they say here) and were enthusiastic, hanging and making a rather sonically difficult situation (a rough room and the always challenging electric piano trio) well worth the trouble. Obviously, this is the ongoing struggle of being a pianist--good pianos are not always available, and even a good instrument doesn’t always suit an individual player’s taste. Still, it gives us the opportunity to pursue humility (as so many things in life do, like it or not.) When I am struggling with an instrument whose sound I don’t particularly enjoy, I try to concentrate on what’s there--the interaction with the other players, the ways you can vary rhythms--you always have these parameters to play with, when harmony, tone, touch and other nuances of expression are not available. 

My old friend the drummer John Rae from Edinburgh came out and sat in on this gig as well. It was lovely to see him and play with him again. There was a period when I first started traveling to Scotland when I was playing with John, Phil Bancroft and Mario Caribe about 4 times per year and so we got to reminisce about the heyday of my honorary membership in the Edinburgh jazz scene. John moved to New Zealand about 4 years ago (his wife is a kiwi) and he has been interestingly engaged in a lot of different things over there--presently he has a composition residency grant and so he is writing contemporary classical music (for lack of a better name for it) mostly music for large ensembles. 

The next day was the same sort of schedule, up early after a night of insomnia (it hits me from time to time) and then another flight, this time to Auckland, the biggest city in New Zealand (by quite a lot). Nothing brings Christchurch and Wellington people together as much as their shared dislike of Auckland. It’s big, it has too much traffic, there’s no center and it has no soul, I heard, although I must say, I rather liked it myself. There’s not much public transportation, I gather, so it’s sometimes offered up as the New Zealand version of Los Angeles. I guess for those who live in the smaller cities (Christchurch is 400,000 people, I believe, and Wellington about 300,000) Auckland at 1.3 million is overly big, but as a vacationing Brooklynite I liked it fine. I hung out with another excellent drummer and extremely cool dude, Ron Samson, the director of the Auckland jazz program in the afternoon. Ron, in his merciful way, only scheduled one workshop for me with the whole school for a couple of hours, but I felt that as long as I had come this far, we ought to keep the parade going and I went another 90 minutes or so after that, although I was a bit crusty from the lack of sleep. As the students started trickling out, I figured I’d better bring it to a close--it’s a little discouraging to be the last one standing at your own clinic. 

So, even though it was short, it was great to connect with these fine players and their students--to go to another country and pick up the threads of what the jazz scene is like there. I really do feel incredibly lucky to be able to do this and Ron (who is a fun and mellow guy to hang out with) and I drank flat whites (cafe lattes more or less) and munched on salads into the early evening hours talking about the jazz life around he world.

Very few places that I travel to are younger than the US and New Zealand is such a place. Auckland had a relaxed almost European vibe, a bit counter-culture-ish--very comfortable and very very new--at least it seemed so to me in my 20 hour visit there.

Ron then turned me over to Roger Manins, a great sax player that I had worked with 10 years before when he was living in New York. We did a recording session for an Australian drummer (Toby Hall) who was doing graduate work and studying with the bassist Mike Formanek. I remember that session particularly well because the engineer was a big drag, an advocate of what I thought was a sort of misguided sense of how people used to record. It was a pseudo-audiophile approach that some people were a into back then--set up one great old mic in the middle of the room somewhere and have everyone play to that--ideally without headphones. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that in theory, but whether it will generate a good sounding record has a lot to do with how good the room sounds, whether you are getting good sounds or even enough volume level from each instrument, and of course how individual players play. Sometimes an engineer who is an advocate of a particular approach can be dangerous--especially if his concept comes at the expense of the music. Anyway, on this particular recording two things stand out in my memory--one is that no matter how much we complained we couldn’t seem to get enough level in our headphones to hear Mike, mainly because the engineer had decided to place the bass mic aimed at the fingerboard of the instrument (almost near the tuning pins) instead of the usual placement. After 40 minutes of frustration relating to this Mike  said--”Maybe you’d hear it if you put the mic where the sound comes out” and he held the bass up to the mic--near the f hole--and  thwomped the bass, sending everyone’s headphones flying off their heads. The other thing I remember about that session is that while we were recording the engineer was often outside, smoking little hand rolled cigarettes and grumbling about the musicians--iI think he would have been happier to find a way to record music without them.

So I renewed my acquaintance with Roger, went back to his house and hung out with his wife Caroline (a great singer who played me recordings of her singing Ladino (Spanish medieval Jewish) music that she had arranged (very beautiful) and their precocious and extremely adorable daughter Millie. They were incredibly hospitable, opening up their home to me, and a few hours later I felt like we had been hanging out for the last 20 years. Although I didn’t get to hear Roger play this time, sometimes you know just from hanging with someone that you will hook up with them musically and I am hopeful that we will get the opportunity to play soon. I had to leave at 3 am so I packed and showered when they went off to bed and met the cab in front of their place, a little the worse for wear after my two nights of no sleep, but very glad that I had made the stop in Auckland. 

As I’ve said before, one of the great pleasures of my life is meeting musicians and music students as I travel from place to place. The world is pretty big, but the jazz world is fairly small, and wherever I go, I see how other like-minded folks are continuing on, in life and music, and I think meeting each other, playing or even just having a coffee together, is encouraging for all of us. Hopefully, I can bring some different energy to each situation, they get to meet another person who is thinking seriously about practicing and playing, another player with a voice and a musical personality that keeps evolving over time. Anyway, it was great sharing the last few days with all of these players and I hope I meet them again in the near future. Thanks for taking such good care of me, kiwis!