Local jazz talent shines at annual DocFest
Drummers have heard all the drummer jokes. Joel Fulgham offers one of his favorites.
“What’s the difference between a jazz drummer and a large Dominos pizza?” he asks. “A large Dominos pizza can feed a family of three.”
Fulgham then drums a comedy drum roll on the side of a table with a disposable plastic coffee cup lid serving as his cymbal for the rimshot.
But Fulgham has no regrets about his life choice, a second generation percussionist who has dedicated his life to the drums, as a student, teacher and performer.
“What we do is fun,” he says. “It makes us more social than we might otherwise me. It can be tough, trying to be creative. But we get to do interesting stuff. Making music is wonderful.”
A Houston native, Fulgham grew up with a father who played with the Houston Symphony. He learned from his father and also attended the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts just two years after it was opened. He graduated in 1976 and headed to the University of North Texas, where he played in the storied One O’Clock and Two O’Clock Lab Bands. He has, in the years since, fronted small and large combos of his own, and worked frequently as an accompanist for jazz greats including Arnett Cobb, Freddie Hubbard, Joe Henderson and numerous others.
On Tuesday he’ll take part in the annual DocFest concert, a fundraiser named after the Robert “Doc” Morgan, who headed HSPVA’s
jazz program for years. Funds from the show go to a scholarship in Morgan’s name at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York. Another tradition at DocFest is the honoring of distinguished HSPVA alumni with a Hall of Fame honor. The distinguished saxophonist Everette Harp (class of ’79) was the first inductee, honored in 2014.
“That year he had no idea we were doing that,” Morgan says. “So he cried on stage, he was so surprised. It’s a little more difficult now to surprise anyone.”
But he calls Fulgham “an easy choice.”
Fulgham’s induction will be accompanied by that of Edward Trongone, who died in 1987. Trongone came to Houston from Boston in the 1940s to play with the Houston Symphony. He also worked in education and, in 1971 was hired by HSPVA founder Ruth Denney to be the school’s first director of instrumental music. There he helped set the framework for the school’s storied jazz program.
Morgan arrived as director of jazz studies there in 1976, two years before Trongone’s retirement, and oversaw the education of numerous successful musicians until his retirement in 1999. Two of those students also will be inducted, including pianist Jason Moran, who returns home from New York.
An inventive and acclaimed instrumentalist and composer, Moran will play a solo piano set at DocFest as well as part of a trio that includes the drummer Denardo Coleman and bassist Chris Walker, class of ’86 and another distinguished HSPVA alumnus. The event also will honor the great drummer Sebastian Whittaker (class of 1984), who died of cancer in July.
Walker co-founded the event in 2013 with singer Tamar Davis, who will host this year’s show.
Despite more than 40 years worth of students, the HSPVA alumni have a comfortable manner with one another, regardless of when they attended the school. Fulgham never formally taught Whittaker, though Whittaker once attended a rhythm section class he led. He also remembers one sesson with Eric Harland, a top jazz drummer.
“He didn’t know how to play a shuffle,” Fulgham says. “But he knew what he was doing. He didn’t even need the whole lesson. We worked for about 10 minutes and he had it.”
Fulgham is the instructor of drum set at the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston. Performances fill up his nights, and instruction his days, part of a continuum of instruction that has evolved greatly in his years. Though he didn’t study with Morgan at HSPVA, he considers Morgan, like Trongone, essential to Houston’s storied reputation in New York’s jazz scene.
“When people say there’s something in the water down here, what they really mean is guys like him,” he says of Morgan. “Guys who put the right people together. Helping guide young artists whose out of balance egos are still forming.”
So Fulgham is joking when he says of HSPVA, “the thing I appreciated most was no gym glass.” And he’s more serious when he talks about the rudiments of his trade and how the school nurtured it.
“It raises the level for everybody here,” he says. “Nobody has any secret (expletive) they get to keep to themselves.”