Keeping his standards

Jazz
fans may get a feeling of deja-vu Thursday evening when Bill Dobbins takes the
Kilbourn Hall stage to conduct the Eastman Jazz Ensemble. From 1973 to 1994,
the name Dobbins was synonymous with the Eastman School’s big bands. But in
1994, Dobbins left for Germany to become principal director of Cologne’s WDR
Big Band, one of the world’s top jazz ensembles. Eight years later he’s back in
the program he helped create.

            For his first concert back, Dobbins
is pulling out all the stops.

            The first half will showcase two of
his arrangements for the Cologne band based on Bill Evans’ recordings, two
charts by composer-arranger Dave Horler, and three miniature pieces by Eastman
graduate student Eric Schmitz.

            The first half closer, Bill Holman’s
arrangement of “Limehouse Blues,” written for Stan Kenton in 1961, will set the
stage for a second half conducted by Holman, a legendary arranger. Among his
credits are hundreds of albums by artists ranging from Buddy Rich to The 5th
Dimension. He’ll be conducting his arrangements of Thelonious Monk compositions
and his own recent works.

            In Germany, Dobbins got a taste of
how seriously jazz can be taken; conducting a big band in Europe is like being
principal conductor of a Symphony Orchestra in the United States. Dobbins
conducted a third of the concerts, programmed the music, and selected guest
artists. He also worked with the 55-piece Netherlands Metropole Orchestra, a
big band augmented by 25 to 30 strings, an oboe, French horn, harp, and
tympani. It’s a 40-year old ensemble that would be unthinkable in America.

            “They consider art, music, and
theater something that is not just a frill but something that is essential for
quality of life,” says Dobbins. “The governments make sure that those kinds of
things are provided at an admission price the general public can afford.”

            While in Europe, Dobbins and the
band collaborated with soloists like Paquito D’Rivera, Clark Terry, and Benny
Golson. His small-group recording, A
Tribute to B.A.C.H. (Bill Dobbins/Rolf Römer Quartet), was popular enough to
spawn a 20-concert tour.

            “We took Bach’s themes and developed
them in a harmonic and rhythmic idiom more related to what’s been happening in
jazz for the last 40 years,” Dobbins says. “Because Bach was so ahead of his
time, the thematic material and ideas worked out very well.”

            Of course, Bach would not be
uncomfortable in contemporary jazz contexts.

            “He improvised a lot,” Dobbins says.
“People who were around when he was alive wrote that a lot of things Bach
improvised were even more amazing than what he wrote down.”

            Dobbins began studying classical
piano at the age of nine. When he was 14, a friend played him albums by Erroll
Garner, Ahmad Jamal, Dave Brubeck, and the Modern Jazz Quartet.

            “It completely changed my life
forever, because I realized that this whole harmonic language I was so in love
with from the classical tradition, it was really jazz musicians who were
continuing to use this music in a more vital, individual and creative way.”

            Dobbins considers it a blessing that
his high school didn’t have a jazz program.

            “There was an advantage to learning
jazz on my own,” he says. “It forced me to really go after things and not wait
around for somebody to explain it to you and give you all the answers.”

            When Dobbins entered Kent State
University in 1964, there was no big band, so he and a group of students
started one, writing their own arrangements and transcribing them from records.
It proved to be a valuable lab experience.

Dobbins has
maintained his
position at the top of his field at home and abroad by adhering to high
standards. He refuses, for instance, to embrace the popular music of the last
several decades no matter how wide its appeal.

            “One of the aspects of the
dumbing-down of culture in Western society has to do with the pervasive
influence of pop culture and the fact that it encourages people to be
ignorant,” he says. “In popular music in the 1930s and 1940s, you have people
like Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern, and Alec Wilder writing music that
was pop music then, who knew an awful lot about music and were always trying to
learn more. Today the pop scene is, for the most part, people who don’t know
anything about music, but they’re proud that they don’t know anything about
it.”

            The simpler and cruder music is,
Dobbins says, the more people respond to it — even Eastman students.

            “Without their even realizing it, a
lot of the people they listen to in their spare time, looked at objectively
from a musical standpoint, are not nearly as good musicians as the students
themselves.”

            So high are Dobbins’ standards, he
even rejects the conventional wisdom that The Beatles’ music transcended the
depths of pop.

            “They came up with some catchy
tunes, but I don’t think there’s anything harmonically in what the Beatles did
that comes close to what was happening in the 1930s and 1940s. The language of
rock ‘n’ roll, coming from r&b, was so simple — three or four chords —
that, when the Beatles put a couple chords in there that most people weren’t
using, it suddenly sounded like some big revelation. If you compare it to the
tradition of what people call The Great American Songbook, there’s no
comparison.”

            “Herbie Hancock put a CD out called New Standard; the idea was to find
examples of contemporary pop music to use as vehicles for improvisation. If he
wanted to show that there are popular songs that can still be that kind of
vehicle, in fact he proved the opposite. If you objectively take the songs that
are on the album, some of them may have interesting melodies, some may have an
interesting rhythmic hook, but the way those pieces deal with all three musical
elements — melody, rhythm, and harmony — together, you can’t compare it.”

            In Dobbins’ view there are only a
few people writing today who rival mid-20th-century songwriters, citing Johnny
Mandel and “a few things by Stephen Sondheim.” He believes the melodies of Bill
Evans also sit in this tradition.

            When discussing the evolution of
jazz, Dobbins applies a similarly stringent philosophy. He bemoans the general
assumption that artistic and social developments must contain more information
and more complexity. He believes progress can happen more simply, through a
deeper sense of understanding. He contrasts John Coltrane’s approach with that
of Bill Evans.

            “However great anybody views
Coltrane’s various periods to be, you have to admit that what he did in any of
those periods, whether it’s the standards or exercise tunes like ‘Giant Steps’
and ‘Countdown,’ the modal period or the free-jazz energy period, that he was
mapping out things that he himself never really took the time to explore in
depth. He did some things that were really good with all of them, but they’re
all areas that could be explored for an entire lifetime. Bill Evans didn’t try
necessarily to go into different styles as he evolved as a player. He carved
out an area for himself in his early 30s, during the time he was with Miles and
just after that, which was close in its own way to the tradition of the
American popular song. He continued for the rest of his life to go deeper and
deeper into that.”

In addition to
his career as a bandleader, pianist, and educator, Dobbins continues to contribute to jazz
scholarship. His current project involves the music of Duke Ellington.

            In recent years, a large collection
of Ellington’s scores was discovered and given to the Smithsonian Institute.

            “Getting to play that music with
that [Cologne] band was a huge revelation. I’d been involved in jazz for all
these years. Even though I realized Ellington was important, it hit me like a
lightning bolt. At that point I made Ellington’s music a specialty in my
study.”

            Dobbins made several visits to the
Smithsonian and began transcribing Ellington’s arrangements. He’s now writing
an analytical book on Ellington’s composing and arranging techniques,
encompassing all of the band’s different periods.

            Diving deeper into Ellington
reinforced Dobbins’ decision to choose the big band as a vehicle for expression
in the first place.

            “To me the big band is the American
equivalent of the symphony orchestra,” he says. “It’s the only ongoing large
ensemble that developed uniquely in America and developed around the creative
vision of using it as a vehicle for American music. Ellington’s music is
uniquely suited to study the evolution because he’s really the only person who
maintained a group year in and year out from the 1920s, when he had virtually
the same instrumentation of the New Orleans bands, until the group had grown to
the size of a modern big band by the middle of the 1940s.”

The Eastman
Jazz Ensemble plays a free concert on Thursday, December 5, in the
Eastman School of Music’s Kilbourn Hall, 26 Gibbs Street, at 8 p.m. 274-1100.

This article appears in Dec 4-10, 2002.