Jazz school in Berkeley expanding
Susana Pineda was studying vocal jazz at a university in Medellin, Colombia, when the American singer Madeline Eastman came to perform in 2013. After the show, Pineda tracked Eastman down for a career tip.
“She said, ‘There’s this really cool jazz school in California,’ ” recalls Pineda, who followed that lead to the California Jazz Conservatory.
That title suggests something more than what turns out to be the basement of a bookstore in downtown Berkeley. But downstairs, Pineda discovered the only accredited stand-alone music college devoted to jazz and related
styles of music in the United States.
“I found everything I needed here,” says Pineda, now 26, with a bachelor’s in jazz studies, a CD and a touring act. “My bandmates, my producers, my mentors and my vocal sound.”
Her only regret is that it ended two months too soon. In December, Pineda gave her final recital in a makeshift concert hall where you can hear the footsteps of people shopping for books overhead.
On Sunday, Feb. 25, the conservatory will emerge from this basement to open Rendon Hall, an intimate, 100-seat performance venue designed to evoke the spirit of Minton’s Playhouse, the famous Harlem club that gave rise to the style of jazz known as bebop.
An expansion of the main campus, which will stay open, Rendon Hall is the centerpiece of a $3.5 million build-out into the ground floor of a brick storefront. Called the Jerry Fiddler Annex, it will include the conservatory’s first-ever music library of 8,000 titles, largely on vinyl with turntables for playing them.
With Freight & Salvage, a legendary home for folk and roots music two doors down, Rendon Hall will elevate this block of Addison Street to a regional destination for hearing traditional American music.
“Rendon Hall is small by design because it reflects the type of club that was popular in the 1940s when modern jazz began,” says Susan Muscarella, founder and president of the conservatory.
The opening week will showcase performers who are on the conservatory faculty. Brazilian pianist Marcos Silva will play Sunday. On Wednesday, keyboardist Wil Blades and drummer Scott Amendola will launch a weekly series called Jazz in the Neighborhood. On Thursday, the Montclair Women’s Big Band will test the limits of the acoustics by Meyer Sound. Student performers will open some shows and headline others.
“I want this to be the Rutgers of the West Coast,” said Muscarella, in comparing her 60 college students to the major public university in New Jersey with its Institute of Jazz Studies. “But I also want it to be the Juilliard School for jazz, a small preeminent school capable of taking freshmen and turning them into artists.”
It sounds like hyperbole, but you cannot underestimate Muscarella. She started 20 years ago by teaching jazz piano in her Berkeley home and now runs a unique academy with a $2.5 million annual budget.
“That little place is super important to the jazz ecosystem in the Bay Area,” said Randall Kline, executive artistic director of SFJazz. The jazz ecosystem, as Kline explained it, starts in the high school jazz programs, like the one at Berkeley High and the all-star band at SFJazz itself.
These feed into the prominent college programs, nationwide and at the conservatory. The finished artists aspire to the 700-seat Miner Auditorium at SFJazz, the 300-seat Yoshi’s in Oakland, and the recently opened Back Room, 93 seats on couches and chairs behind a brick restaurant, just two blocks from Rendon Hall.
“Anything that comes on the scene here where musicians have a place to play and get paid is a godsend,” Kline said. The SFJazz Center is filled to 95 percent of capacity for 400 shows a year. A good part of its audience, and even performers, can be linked to the the conservatory across the bay, in one way or another.
“To me it’s about Susan Muscarella,” Kline said. “To have the strength and the wherewithal and the drive to make that thing happen is amazing to me.”
Muscarella opened the Jazzschool, as it was then called, in 1997 in a building that she purchased by mortgaging her home in the Berkeley hills. Within five years, the school had outgrown that building and she sold it to lease a larger space in the historic Kress Building, once part of Samuel Kress’ national chain of fiveand-dime stores.
The main entrance is on Shattuck Avenue but there was also a side entrance on Addison with a narrow staircase down to the basement for accessing the former shower curtain department. This is the space Muscarella turned into the Jazzschool in 2002.
At the sidewalk entrance is a “Learn Jazz Here” sign and another that reads, “Hear Jazz Here.” Between them is a steep stairway and you cannot see what is at the bottom, just like the classic jazz joints that were in basements where the rent was cheap and the air stale with cigarette smoke.
At the bottom of the steps is a small cafe and a smaller jazz record store. To the rear is a warren of studios with glass walls so you can look in on classes and rehearsals. An open area outside Muscarella’s office has tables and a bandstand at one end. Called Hardymon Hall, it offers concerts on weekends only.
“The only thing that is not down here is a makeover booth,” says Muscarella.
When the Jazzschool attained college accreditation, in 2009, it was rebranded the California Conservatory of Music. The Jazzschool still functions, offering community music classes to 600 students, mostly at night.
But it is the day school, the conservatory, that draws from across the nation and around the world, including Susana Pineda.
Just to get here took a 10hour flight from Medellin, and along the way she had to jettison two years of nontransferable credits from Universidad EAFIT.
She started all over as a freshman, tuition was steep, and the conservatory offers no housing. The four-year program to earn a bachelor of music in Jazz Studies costs $72,800 for instrumentalists and $75,200 for vocalists, which is about one-third more than UC Berkeley charges California residents.
Her student visa did not permit her to get an outside job, so the school offered her clerical work, all day Saturday and Sunday, which put her underground seven days a week.
“I wanted a place where I knew everybody,” she says, and it didn’t take long. When she couldn’t figure out the copy machine, fellow student Zach Mondlick, from New Haven, Conn., came to her rescue and she had met her future husband.
Jazz is a live spontaneous art form, and Pineda soon learned that it can break out at any hour of the day at the conservatory. Touring musicians often come by just to hang with the students and the faculty, many of whom tour themselves. Pineda was amazed to see Gretchen Parlato come down the stairs while touring her acclaimed album “Live in NYC.” Next came Becca Stevens, and those were just the vocalists.
“Touring musicians will look for a place where they can perform and do master classes, and this is a great spot for them,” said Jeff Denson, a bassist and composer who tours with the Jeff Denson Quartet and the San Francisco String Trio.
One of three full-time faculty members at the conservatory, Denson also runs a nonprofit recording label, Ridgeway Arts, and does his talent scouting while working his day job. An album he produced for Negative Press Project, which is comprised of four conservatory alumni, just got a four-star review in Downbeat, the prestigious jazz magazine.
“I’m seeing my students play all over the Bay Area and tour the world,” Denson said. “When you have something like this it draws musicians who want to progress and it stimulates the scene.”
After hearing Pineda sing at a school recital, Denson offered to record her with fellow student Luis Salcedo, from Marin County, on guitar. The tracks for “Opaluna” were laid down at Fantasy Studios, where Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock and Bobby McFerrin have recorded. The producer, Denson, played bass and another conservatory instructor, John Santos, was on percussion.
This led to a summer tour of Colombia, 10 shows in venues holding as many as 150 people. When she came back for her final year, Pineda put together a full band, Susana Pineda & the New Quartet, all students or graduates of the conservatory.
Pineda writes the music and her husband, Zach Mondlick, does the arranging. They are now in Medellin, recording and making a music video. The CD should be out in April and Rendon Hall would be the right place for a debut concert.
“I’m sad I didn’t get to enjoy it as a student,” Pineda says, “but hopefully I will as a performer.”