My education in jazz

For the past few years, I’ve taken vacation time to attend the University of Pittsburgh’s annual Jazz Seminar, which was started in 1970 by Nathan Davis, who was then director of jazz studies and a former member of the Jazz Messengers. The seminar culminates in a concert, often referred to as a “once-in-a-lifetime jam session,” that takes place on the first Saturday of November. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity not only to interview but also meet some of the greatest musicians in the history of jazz.

You might think that, since I’m not only a lifelong Pittsburgher but also a musician and a Pitt grad, my history with the seminar in particular and my understanding of the history of jazz in general would go back farther than they do. You’d be wrong. • My late dad was a bass player of some repute but never took our family, even me, the only other “cat” in the family, out to hear live music. I don’t know if that was because he just didn’t want to or I came across as resistant. As I told him, kids didn’t listen to jazz, and since I heard it at home all the time, I just didn’t feel the need.

In my childhood and teen years, I was a musical rebel, at first preferring Top-40 radio, which I discovered at summer camp one year; over time gravitating to horn bands with some jazz influences, most notably Chicago and Tower of Power; and later favoring the softer sounds of what’s often referred to today as “yacht rock,” performed by the likes of the Michael McDonald-era Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins and Toto. (As a high-schooler, most of the time my radio dial was set to 96.9, WFFM.)

In addition, I took only three music courses when I was a full-time college student in the early 1980s, two of them improvisation courses with Mr. Davis. Other than that, because I had different priorities then, I barely touched my saxophone. • In 1999, the year after I started covering smooth jazz, then a commercial powerhouse and still my favorite style of music, I was assigned a feature about the seminar for the Post-Gazette. Before long, fulfilling a promise I’d made to myself that I would take up the horn again after finishing at Pitt two years earlier, I started playing out.

And I eventually learned that the music I grew up with had a far more comprehensive history than the straight-ahead acoustic-oriented small-combo jazz Dad favored.

I didn’t know that my “rebellion” against jazz was part of what made it jazz in the first place; it has always blended different elements. Indeed, among this year’s seminar participants, drummer Kassa Overall also does hip-hop and is trying to merge the two styles, and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel confessed his admiration for Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton, neither of them jazz players. (”Jazz is restless,” said the late trombonist J.J. Johnson in a 1988 interview with Downbeat magazine.)

I also didn’t know that jazz had originated as dance music and that most musicians at the time also were dancers. Funny then, that I got into dancing about eight years ago. I also realized that jazz, precisely because of its more complex modern complexion, is now even more of an acquired taste.

Morever, jazz must be experienced in person, not simply studied; it’s never been that conducive to radio play since it’s best heard live, in the moment.

• That’s how the performers could pull off the concert put on at the jazz seminar two weeks ago at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. You can grab a group of musicians who have never met and and perhaps don’t even speak the same language, but, if they know the tune, they can play it together without rehearsing. In fact, that’s one point of the seminar — understanding how that happens.

In 2000, I did a review of “Century Americana,” led by David Amram and performed at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, which felt as much a history course as a concert. I wasn’t fazed.

As I wrote then, “Jazz is a lab course, you know.”