Jazz has given me many
unexpected startling pleasures. Years ago, at
Basin Street East in New York, Sonny Stitt
suddenly broke into a stop-time chorus, without
the rhythm section, and all conversation
stopped. It was as if time itself had stopped
but was still swinging.
Five years ago, at Arbors
Records’ March of Jazz in Clearwater, Florida—a
tribute to Ruby Bratton his seventy-fourth
birthday—Sonny LaRosa’s ‘America's Youngest Jazz
Band', Featuring Musicians Ages 6 to 12 was
scheduled first on one of the mornings.
Remembering what Charlie Parker famously said,
“Music is your own experience. . . . If you
don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn,”
I wondered how much these kids could have
experienced.
I’d listen to a couple of
numbers, I thought, and then take a walk on the
beach. But the band hit with a “Bugle Call Rag”
that almost knocked me out of my seat. I stayed
for the whole swinging set, which included real
lyricism in the ballads. Only a very young girl
trying to sing of romantic love broke the spell
until the return of the instrumentals. I’ve been
following the odyssey of this band ever since.
It won a gold medal at an international jazz
festival in New Orleans, was convincing at the
Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and was
the youngest band to have ever played at
Preservation Hall in New Orleans, where it fit
right into the jubilation.
During this year’s Labor
Day weekend, the world’s youngest road band
worked the Sweet & Hot Musical Festival at Los
Angeles Airport’s Marriott Hotel. In the
audience was Rosemary Soladar, the longtime
companion of one of the most joyous of jazzmen,
the late trombonist Al Grey. (I’m eagerly
looking forward to her book about him. He is—not
only just was—in the jazz pantheon.) “The band,”
she told me, “had one of the few standing
ovations for these merely astonishing
youngsters, led by the eighty year-old Sonny
LaRosa—now in his twenty-eighth year as the
arranger-conductor-mentor. and a model to these
kids of how meaningful an educator can be to
their lives.”
As Jalon King, an alumnus
of the hand, wrote Sonny three years ago: “You
have taught me the heart of passion and
communicating through my music. ... You are a
true tower of inspiration to anything in my life
that I do.” Sonny who played trumpet with the
underrated band of Sam Donahue, among others—and
for years after taught trumpet, piano and guitar
in New York, moved to Florida in 1978,still
teaching. and then started the nucleus of a band
“with five or six kids who could play with good
conceptions.”
Duke Ellington once told me
how he wrote individually for his musicians
because, he said, “I know their strengths—and
their weaknesses.” In the November , 2000, issue
of The Floridian, a section of the St.
Petersburg Times, Lane DeGregory described
the LaRosa method: “Most kids who come to him
have never heard jazz. . . . Sonny shows them
videos of Buddy Rich, Louis Prima, Billie
Holiday. . . . He arranges all the songs
himself. He writes out each part by hand, for
every instrument, individualizing the approach
to like each musician’s ability (or lack
thereof). He draws the notes in black marker.
The fingertips beneath in red. And he pencils
the chord names in on top. He knows which kids
can hold a long low C and who can hit a high F.
He knows whose arms have grown long enough to
extend a trombone slide and who still needs help
counting.”
Listening to the band at
its various gigs, jazz musicians of renown have
told Sonny, “Boy, I wish I had that when I was a
kid!” As a failed musician able to read any
piece of music but unable to speak jazz on my
clarinet, I sure wish there had been a Sonny
LaRosa when I was a kid. Maybe I could have
eventually fulfilled my dream of subbing for
Barney Bigard in the Ellington Orchestra.
Sonny is eager to have his
youngsters be heard that he’ll split the
expenses— and sometimes raise enough to pay them
all—to fulfill a gig. It is utterly inexplicable
to me that America’s Youngest Jazz Band has
never been invited to play at George Wein’s JVC
Jazz Festival in New York, at the annual
International Association for Jazz Education
events or even in their home area at the
Clearwater Jazz Holiday. But for International
Association of Jazz Educators (IAJE),
especially, to have overlooked this hand is what
I call educational malpractice.
In Sonny’s current band of
twenty musicians, the age range begins at seven
years, and there are two fourteen-year-old
players (“to inspire the other kids,” Sonny
says). But that’s the cut-off age. There are
always openings in the band, and parents in the
Tama Bay area are invited to come hear the band
with their kids who have shown an interest in
music. The band's 2006 CD is titled "Sonny's
80th Birthday Edition: Keeping Swing and Big
Band Jazz Alive!"
Sonny sometimes thinks of
retiring, but as he told Lane DeGregory: “I
never bad the natural talent. I didn’t have
great ears. I wasn’t a great improviser. God
doesn’t make everybody great. But the reward,
for all my playing and praying, it’s coming
now.” I’ve heard Sonny play his horn. He tells a
story, his own story Like every jazz player
who’s made it. And he’s also made it as a
teacher with big ears.
