Let's Honor Our Teachers

[Pete C]

This is inspired by some comments on another thread. Share your teacher tributes here.

Nanette Natal was my singing teacher from about 1983-87. I think she was the best teacher I ever had, for anything. In fact, it was Nanette who inspired me to start teaching creative writing. After I started working on performance pieces with Elliott Sharp, I decided I wanted to write some songs, and sing them. But I had no singing background, and I didn't want to embarrass myself, so I looked in the Village Voice classifieds, and saw Nanette's name. I actually owned her first album, which I had bought after hearing her on WRVR, live from the Tin Palace. When I first met her she said, "I'm not a 'voice coach.' If you want to study with me I'm going to teach you to be a musician." But she also taught me techniques that were extensible to other areas of life, like ways to stretch yourself, get out of your comfort zone, take risks--but with an underpinning of the proper tools or techniques. I went multiple lessons with her where I almost didn't open my mouth at all--she had me working on internalizing rhythm, by practicing hand-clapping notated rhythms against a metronome. Or she gave me songs that were just totally things I'd never choose for myself: Sitting on Top of the World (the blues), Good Morning Heartache, Imagine. She would tape every lesson, review it, and then use it to figure out where to go next and to give feedback--she had no fixed direction, it was all based on the individual. She was expensive, and worth every cent.

[fasstrack]

I'd be writing for years thanking all the great teachers I've had. I'm damn lucky. But the warmest spot in my heart goes to a man named John Edward Foca. He died in 1994, and when I suggested a tribute to his widow ten years later the place was jam-packed w/people whose lives he touched. John was an accordian virtuouso as a kid, but epilepsy and modesty-and a true gift for bringing out the best in others made him change course. He played osgan in a silly club date band weekends and taught all week out of his Mill Basin home. 2 hour lessons covered lots of bases. I became the kind of musician that knows lots of tunes b/c he was. I was 21 when Ralph Rea brought me over, and a wild-ass bundle of nervous energy. He saw past that to the good. I never actually studied w/him regularly for a good while. Instead Ralph, me, Big Gary B., and other 'delinquents' would rap on his door at midnight and he'd let us in after a hard day's work for food, vino, listening sessions, soul-searching, ball-breaking. Since we were

[fasstrack]

...kind of fucked-up youth and looked up to him, the question always boiled down to 'what's the answer?' He responded in identical fashion every time: 'You have to give of yourself'. John was a composition/theory major at Manhattan School under the tough-as-nails Ludlima Uehlala, who hated jazz but loved him. His students included Mark Marino, a great guitarist he took on at 17 and brought way out, and Teddy Randazzo, a brilliant songwriter who wrote for everyone from Little Anthony to Sinatra. John-whose professional name was Johnny Solo-was 56 when he died from a grand mal seizure after quitting Dilantin. He taught me to be a man.

[fasstrack]

Bump. C'mon, y'all. This thread deserves better than premature burial at Potter's. Someone besides Pete and myself had to have had an inspiring teacher or two. Give it up, lads and (lasses)!

[Tim McG]

Well, being a HS teacher myself I didn't think it appropriate for me to chime in. Nevertheless, and in deference to Joel's request, I can point out several teachers I had who inspired me to become a teacher as well as a better student of Life.

One in particular was my 4th Grade teacher, Mrs. O'Neil. Coming from a lower-middle income family with constant marital strife and other related family issues, I was not heading in the best of directions. Mrs. O'Neil saw that in me and took me under her wing. She not only instilled in me the academic discipline I was lacking, but she also made me feel like I was a somebody; a person worthy of good things. For the very first time in my life I started getting good marks in school and was far happier. I had a minor set-back that Spring when the school bully jumped me from behind and I let the rage I felt from home come out and beat the living daylights out of him. Mrs. O'Neil and three other kids pulled me off of him. Then, she went to bat for me in the Principal's office. She knew that if I got suspended, the beatings and verbal abuse at home would have been far worse than anything the school could do to me. As a result, the bully got a three day pass and I got to stay at school. Her humanity and concern for my safety won out over arbitrary school rules regarding fighting. I honestly felt loved by a human being. To this day, I have felt that if she could do that for me, then I want to be that teacher for students of mine who just never got an even break in Life.

In short, I saw this as my calling even at the age of nine. And now, after 34+ years in the biz, I can say without boasting that I have been that guy for a legion of kids. It means more to me than the academic fields I am charged with teaching. Even as an adult, I still remember Mrs. O'Neil and the care she showed to me and I still love coming to school for that very reason.

And I can't wait to see my knuckleheads when we get back after the Labor Day holiday. Thank you, Mrs. O'Neil.

Edited August 31, 2012 by GoodSpeak

[fasstrack]

Pete's request. He's the OP, and it was a great idea.

[JSngry]

The older I live, the more I realize just what a hero this guy has turned out to be for me:

Frank Setzler - HS math teacher fall of 1970-spring of 1974, for all math classes save Trig, and coach of the Number Sense club, a thing where you learned to perform complex calculations mentally by knowing various formulas, shortcuts, properties, etc. The guy also gave slide rule tutorials. I was fairly good at number sense, went to some competitions, did ok, and took slide rule, which was fun but useless, since affordable portable calculators were just beginning to come on the scene. But - good background, and a reinforcement of the concept of numbers as tactile "objects" that had real value, not some random squiggly lines that could be used interchangeably. Same with number sense, it was all about finding connections, exploiting commonalities, factoring in anomalies, and always, always, using knowledge to provision a sane & sensible (aka ACCURATE) conclusion. At the end that "=" was either true or not. Some things were open for interpretation. Equations were not.

It all sounds dry and boring, but Frank was anything but. He loved this stuff, you could see his excitement as he's put some bizarreass equation up on the blackboard that left you befuddled as hell, and then he'd say something like, "start with what you know you can do, then see if that leads you to something else you know you can do. If it doesn't, you've either done something wrong, or you need to learn something new. Either way, keep going, keep trying, and don't keep making the same mistake over and over. The answer is there."

And then, when we hit a wall (and we always would), he'd not just tell us what to do, he'd pose a series of questions based on what we were looking at realtive to what we were looking for, all of them designed to get that light bulb to go off, that a-HA moment where you saw something that was there all along, you just weren't looking at it. The answer WAS there, you didn't have to invent it, you just had to know how to look for it. And when you finally found it, he'd laugh out loud, not at how dumb you had been, but at the joy of seeing a discovery being made.

One of the best summer experiences I had was when the school bought one of the early video cassette recorders,one of those things that was the size of a large suitcase and used tales the size of an oversized Russian novel. Frank decided that it would be cool to tape a bunch of math tutorials on things ranging from the more basic to the more advanced. He needed a cameraman, so he got me and Don Mullins to come up to the school (which had yet to be air-conditioned) for a few hours a day for a few weeks in early June, and we'd just record this guy doing his classroom routines w/no interruptions from the students.

The more he did it, the more he'd stretch, and start going off into alternate ways to approach the equations, different ways to the same end, and pointing out things you think would work but don't (and why), etc. It was like watching a man enjoyably lose himself in the world of numbers, connections, possibilities, dead-ends, ways out and around of dead ends, all the stuff that math provides you with. And when he'd make a mistake, he'd go back one step at a time to figure out not just what his mistake was, but WHY he made it - and that would trigger a talk about how you need to make sure you that what you think you're seeing is actually what is there, and all that. This guy got into a ZONE. Don and I were in awe, even if the whole thing seemed a bit odd...you know, it's just numbers...this guy's getting REALLY happy about numbers...

Of course, it wasn't too much longer that I began to get into music on a serious level, and as time went by, it became apparent that Frank Setzler's joy of finding relationships between values, at being able to take them apart and put them back together, to change one form of The Same into a totally different form of The Same, all this stuff had a direct bearing on what I was getting into with music, jazz in particular. And I never forgot - never forgot - the laugh that spontaneously arose when somebody, anybody, hit on something that worked and set up the opportunity to keep going, because, you know, the answer is there.

The only picture I can find online of Frank Setzler is this one, from the 1958 Gladewater HS yearbook.Third row down, first picture on the left. I hope the image is visible to all. He was a young guy then, but if you look closely, you can see the sly, secret smile of somebody who's probably working with numbers in his head while his picture's getting taken. Working with numbers and everything's clicking, and oh MY how good it is to be alive.

You go ahead on, Mr. Setzler, you go ahead ON!

[A Lark Ascending]

I moved school a lot - went to 4 different ones between 11 and 18, moving on as I burnt down the previous.

I was lucky to have a string of very good history teachers. My inspiration was one Mr. Lavelle in Cornwall who had me constantly spellbound. He was way ahead of his time - most people of my era recall history being about making notes in silence and then doing essays and tests. When we moved into a brand new (flame-resistant) building with all mod cons we got the very first overhead projectors I'd ever seen (1969) and he used them brilliantly. Even more, he brought in his own slide projector - he'd take photos manually from books and use them just to give us a visual image of what we were studying (what he could have done with Google and Powerpoint!). He also use to just leave the curriculum occasionally and do a one-off lesson on something quite different - I still recall one based on his own photos of the long vanished Newquay canal.

He was always trying out new ideas - role play debates etc. I can still recall us playing Gladstone-Disraeli Snap. The cards had a policy of one or the other; if you recognised that two from the same PM went down together you went 'snap'!

Another teacher I remember with great affection, even though I only experienced his teaching for about three months, was a Geography teacher who took me in hand when I arrived in my last school, three terms into the Sixth form, told me my study skills and note-making were hopeless and just showed me how to organise myself.

Oh, and an art teacher I had for a term at the age of 14. Most of the time we had let-it-all-hang-out hippy types who played James Taylor and let us express ourselves. This lady taught us perspective. I loved it. Had she stayed I'm sure my drawing talent would have blossomed. As it was I just felt adrift and spend two years drawing endless album covers with virtually no feedback (apart from the day I brought in a very carefully drawn and shaded version of 'In the Court of the Crimson King' - the hipster went wild with excitement and said if I'd shown that sort of flair before I could have really made something of myself. I didn't have the heart to tell him it was a copy - he was clearly not that hip if he didn't recognise a pretty iconic cover!)

[Big Wheel]

Fascinating, I never would have pegged Jim as the "math" type (seems like the musicians I know are split 50/50).

Like the idea of this thread a lot.

The first guy is not very well known at all but is really an excellent teacher and musician, showing tons of patience with students often thought too young to learn improvisational music. His name is Brent LaCasce and he runs the music department at tiny Fryeburg Academy in rural Maine (also teaches at other places). Were it not for this guy I might have given up music around age 11.

The second, Mike Gerber, you might have heard of. Gerber played in New York for bit and also with Jaco (who I think he met in Florida) for a while. A reasonably good summary is here: http://www.alldeaf.com/deaf-news/31797-blind-partly-deaf-piano-man-plays-heart.html

Gerber has been blind from birth and his hearing was not great either when I studied with him in 1998-99. But yeah, a genius for sure. As you might expect, an outstanding ear, able to pick out complex piano voicings from the record on the first try. And where so many teachers didn't give a shit about anyone besides the 5 or 6 giants who influenced them most (usually: 1) Bill Evans; 2) Wynton Kelly; 3) McCoy Tyner; 4) Herbie Hancock; 5) Keith Jarrett; 6) A wild card but probably Art Tatum or someone) Gerber actually appreciated and absorbed random bebop players - Walter Bishop, etc. I respected him for that and it made me pay attention in a way it didn't with other teachers.

And he was the first to really dig into the transcriptions we worked on and help through the parts that didn't "make sense" from a theory perspective but nonetheless were definitely on the record. One part I'm thinking of is that voicing that Herbie plays on bar 7 of "Eye of the Hurricane," which I think we worked out has a natural 13th and a sharp 5th on top - usually considered a no-no. (I forget what the bass is playing but the voicing is basically a rootless Bb7 chord, so it has a Gb, G, and Ab in the voicing which doesn't correspond to any traditional chord-scale theory and is usually considered to be an unacceptable dissonance.)

It's funny, we never talked about Tristano or Andrew Hill and probably not Jaki Byard either.(late edit: I think we may have discussed Byard briefly, because Byard was killed around the time I was taking lessons, but I probably didn't own any Byard recordings yet then that would have sparked studying his playing together.) It would have been interesting if I had discovered them back then.

Edited September 1, 2012 by Big Wheel

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

I hated school. It was a long time afterwards I found people who could teach me stuff.

1 My wife. I was a mess before we met. She straightened me out; taught me a modicum of common sense, particularly as far as money was concerned.

2 When I was promoted and moved to Wales in 1974, I was working in the Education office for Wales and met Barry Davies; a senior executive (not my own boss, but from another branch) who was a hobbyist local historian. He saw something in me and explained lots of stuff. It's to him that I attribute an understanding of the importance of what's NOT said; in legislation, the words of politicians and in other areas. He also encouraged me to read African history.

3 In the early 80s, I worked in the economics field for a guy called Gareth Evans, who was from a mining family in Merthyr Tydfil. Gareth was a joy to work for; he was keyed into the highest levels of employment policy and shared his experiences with me - not just the substantive discussions, but the way people showed they felt about each other. He taught me improvisation. He'd pace around in my office and we'd be talking about some problem - there were LOTS of employment problems to talk about in those days - and he'd start writing something, still pacing, with me scribbling like crazy, because I knew we wouldn't remember a thing afterwards! But I got what he was doing was rather like a jazz musician playing; once you got a grasp of your materials, you could do anything and make it up as you went along; go as far out as you needed to and still be yourself, even if you were working within a framework that you were entirely out of sympathy with (as he and I both were with the Thatcher government of the day). It's to him that I owed my vision of government as a method of providing me with a fun way of making a very good living.

MG

[jazzbo]

The teacher I would most wish to honor is Michael Stern, OBE, who was the founder and headmaster of the United World school Waterford Kamhlaba in M'Babane, Swaziland. Stern had sought to open a multi-racial school in the Republic of South Africa and had been forced to open it in Swaziland instead, and he built a true melting-pot, and a school that has endured as possibly the very best on the continent for four decades and more.

His heart and soul were in education and improvement, and his organizational and motivational skills were excellent. His ideas and his example have meant much to my life. Plus he accomplished a very difficult task in my opinion: he brought me up to speed in Latin when I walked into the school with no Latin learning and into his Latin class, that was starting the third year. He was far more than a great Latin teacher, but I'll always remember sweating bullets when the headmaster stood me up in class on the third day and said that in three months I would be caught up with the rest of the students. Little did I know that in six months I'd be head of the class.

A great man who I am sure is missed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stern_%28educator%29

[Pete C]

I hated school. It was a long time afterwards I found people who could teach me stuff.

In the best of all possible worlds we're all teachers. I'm a great fan of the social theorist Ivan Illich.

Edited September 6, 2012 by Pete C

[Jazzmoose]

Janet Watson made me like math. None of you can top that. I went from automatic brain shutdown whenever the word 'algebra' is mentioned to someone who actually enjoyed solving math problems. If she had been Catholic, she'd already have one miracle in the bag.

[Pete C]

I did a graduate degree in creative writing, but my only real writing teachers were the writers I learned from by reading, especially Pinter, Beckett and Gertrude Stein as a young adult. I also learned a lot about writing from the music of Thelonious Monk and Anton Webern and the paintings of Barnett Newman and Mondrian.

I think this piece of mine, from 1980, part of a series, is an illustration of the above.

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/113.html

This was the first piece I wrote for a series called Bagatelles, which started as an attempt to come up with a "geometric" literary style inspired by Mondrian, and named after Webern's Six Bagatelles for String Quartet. It was a breakthrough for me as a young writer.

Edited September 6, 2012 by Pete C

[jeffcrom]

The first two music teachers I thought of - neither of whom taught me anything about jazz:

Bob Cowles, my first private saxophone teacher. (I had a year of public school group instruction by the time I started with him.) I still remember my first lesson with Bob, as a gangly, unattractive 8th grader. He seemed to see something in me right away. He taught me that music was more than the sum of the notes, and that every phrase had to go somewhere. Later, as a fellow teacher, I was proud to see him honored as the GMEA (Georgia Music Educators Association) outstanding teacher of 1998.

Tom Wallace, a professor at the University of Georgia. He was just always around, for those inquisitive music students - the coolest and most interesting member of the music faculty. He was the guy you could actually talk about Stockhausen with. The two widely varied classes I had with him were 16th Century Counterpoint (which he managed to actually make interesting) and 20th Century Composition, which in his hands became an amazing roller coaster ride. I remember him taking Varese's "Density 21.5" apart note by note and phrase by phrase, and his passion for the music kept us on the edge of our seats. And I'll always be grateful to him for introducing me to Messiaen - the week we spent on Quartet for the End of Time was intense and life-changing.

Later, as a member of The Peachtree Brass, a brass quintet, Tom often visited the schools at which I taught. One of the "young peoples'" programs they presented was a concert of dance music through the centuries. Of course, when they got to the 1960s, Tom would thoughtfully ask the kids, "Who would like to see Mr. Crompton dance the Twist?"

[fasstrack]

That was great about Mr. Wallace. And Pete, there's a direct corellation for me between Monk, Beckett, and even Webern: ruthless self-editing.. They pared away all the fat and everything keft was essential. Beckett is especially remarkable for starting out as a virtuoso just aswim in words (his own multi-lingual translator, no less) and ending up a miniaturist of genius. His sparse later pieces were just as hilarious as Watt-just less wordy. And listen to Monk at Minton's. You could almost swear it was Teddy Wilson!.A few short years later he's as terse as Beckett. He could still DO fast-it just didn't FIT anymore. Totally themselves and nothing wasted-especially anyone's time.

[Pete C]

Joel, you know exactly what I was getting at. I do, however, indulge in logorrhea on occasion:

http://www.mungbeing.com/issue_23.html?page=14

And here's a little piece about my relationship with Beckett's work:

http://sixsentences.blogspot.com/2008/07/on-style.html

Edited September 7, 2012 by Pete C