This Teenager Has Got It

By NAT HENTOFF
For more than 60 years, I've seen recurring obituaries of jazz. The threnodies are being prepared again—in the National Endowment for the Arts' latest survey on public participation in the arts and with such questions as "Can Jazz Be Saved?" in which widely respected music critic Terry Teachout wrote regretfully in this paper last summer, "I don't know how to get young people to listen to jazz again."

Both the survey and Mr. Teachout's column attracted rebuttals in print and on the Internet, of course. But the most exhilarating one I've heard is musical— "Confeddie," the debut CD of 19-year-old alto saxophonist Hailey Niswanger, and a work with the joyous feeling of the first day of spring. More remarkable, Ms. Niswanger is still a student, at Boston's Berklee College of Music. It's an institution that continues to have many active jazz professionals among its alumni. She wrote all the arrangements for "Confeddie" in collaboration with three impressive Berklee students: Michael Palmer, Greg Chaplin and Mark Whitfield Jr.

This self-produced, self-released quartet session, which is available on Amazon.com, has such a vibrantly building thrust of swinging surprises that listening to it I was suddenly a Boston teenager again fantasizing, as I played my clarinet, that one day Duke Ellington would call and say, "We need a sub for Barney Bigard tonight. Can you make it?"

Ms. Niswanger has already played at festivals, concerts and other gigs with such masters as Phil Woods, James Moody, Benny Golson, Wynton Marsalis, McCoy Tyner and with the Next Generation Jazz Orchestra at the Netherlands' North Sea Jazz Festival. In May, she was a featured artist at the Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington (where, the year before, she won the saxophone competition).

She plays with remarkable authority and drive considering her relative youth, and with the élan and dynamics of an unmistakable pro. But I asked her how it felt, at 19, to be on stage with such renowned, longtime headliners.

"It's a remarkable experience to be that close to all those years of experience in one person," she said. "I have only a fraction of that, with a whole lifetime ahead."

A growing realization she especially enjoys is "the feeling of connectedness with the people listening. I don't know them, never met them, but with my horn, we connect!"

Also, having been close to Mr, Golson during a master class the tenor saxophonist and composer taught at Berklee, and having been in his band at a concert, Ms. Niswanger feels she learned about being in the jazz life by watching how "he so wanted to give—to give what he was feeling—and tell his stories, not to be famous but to invite people to be part of who he is."

I asked her reactions, however, to the prospect of spending a lifetime in this music that, according to the doomsayers, fewer and fewer young people are interested in hearing.

Her instant answer: "I go to a music school surrounded by young musicians passionate to learn about this music. There will always be people who love jazz and want to give their lives to it. So how can this music ever die?"

Such thriving jazz elders as Mr. Woods and Clark Terry have told me the same thing.

This summer, Ms. Niswanger performed in combos in and around Portland, Ore., where she grew up and taught piano to children ages 5 to 7, and woodwinds to the 12 to 18 age group at a nearby camp. It was there, when Ms. Niswanger was 8, that she played her first note on a clarinet. During her school years she also began learning the alto saxophone as teacher-mentors helped convince her, the only musician in her family, that she had found her calling.

"In high school, when I was 14," she told me, "I first learned how to transcribe solos, starting with trombonist J.J. Johnson and then John Coltrane!" And, performing both with local bands and around the country, "finding how to do jazz, I discovered how much fun this is. It's always changing. I play a song on one gig and on the next, it comes out so different!"

Why "Confeddie?" I asked of her title. She explained that it comes, in part, from "confetti" to mark the festive flavor of the music, and she added the first name, Eddie, of saxophonist Eddie Harris, whose spirit pervades the session. Included are her personalizations of the jazz canon by Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Kenny Dorham and Mr. Golson—starting bravely with Thelonious Monk's "Four in One."

Understandably, in view of that challenge, she says she felt "a great sense of accomplishment once I had it under my fingers. I wanted my version to be different from the other versions of this song, so I decided to play the melody as a duo with piano and saxophone to add some flavor to the arrangement."

Having immersed myself in Monk's music, starting in the 1950s, and having gotten to know the composer, I believe he would tell Ms. Niswanger, "You got it."

After two more years at Berklee, Ms. Niswanger expects—while still performing—to do graduate work at the Manhattan School of Music, the Thelonious Monk Institute in Washington, or Juilliard. The last possibility reminded me, I told her, of sitting in Monk's living room one afternoon when Gigi Gryce—a passionately personal alto saxophonist and composer whom I'd known in Boston—burst into the room.

"Monk," he shouted, "I got into Juilliard!"

After a characteristically judicious silence, Monk said, "I hope you don't lose it there."

Ms. Niswanger, having already deeply "got it," won't lose it anywhere.

At Berklee, her principal teacher and mentor is alto saxophonist Jim Odgren, who is assistant to the dean of the performance division. Among his own previous performance gigs were three years with vibraphonist Gary Burton.

"What sets Hailey apart, even from some players already in the business," Mr. Odgren told me, "is that she is a musician—not an apprentice. She's really playing—really focusing on—what she is feeling. Telling her own stories. And she does it with such authority that if you played her recording for an established jazz musician during a blindfold test, he'd never guess her age."

As for the current sorrowful portents of the last rites of jazz, there will be, as is already evident, new generations of musicians for whom this music will be as important as life itself—as John Coltrane once described it to me.

There will also be future listeners of all ages—as I can attest from phone calls I occasionally get from readers who need this music to lift their spirits when nothing else will break through lengthening shadows. I am one of them with this need, and so I'll always know where to find Hailey Niswanger's "Confeddie" when I need it.

—Mr. Hentoff writes about jazz for the Journal.


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