For many jazz musicians in Santa Cruz County, Cabrillo College stands as a great bastion of jazz. With Ray Brown teaching jazz improvisation and arranging and with a legacy of excellent jazz groups led by the now retired Lile Cruse, Cabrillo College can rightly be considered as the wellspring of jazz for the northern half of the Monterey Bay region. I owe a great debt of gratitude for the excellent education I have received from music classes I have attended at Cabrillo College. However, I have realized during recent months that the time has come for me to find other schools and other teachers of music.

The tipping point was a concert I performed in early November 2006 with the Cabrillo College Jazz Ensemble. The group, led by Jon Nordgren, is an intermediate-to-advanced community jazz big band with a couple of area pros as well as skilled amateurs and advanced students. I've worked with the group off-and-on for more than 15 years. During recent years, though, playing in the band had become a chore, a duty performed as much out of personal loyalty to Nordgren as for a weekly excuse to work out on large-format jazz ensemble material. I started to feel that the group offered me few challenges and few opportunities to advance my musical skills.

When the band started to prep for the November 2006 concert, which would feature Mic Gillette, a funk/R&B trumpeter once of the Tower of Power horn section, I realized once and for all that my skills and interests had outgrown the group. I found myself dispirited with the music--which I considered to be derivative, high school-level jazz-funk--and frustrated with the sloppiness and brutishness of the players. H.L. Mencken once wrote, "There are no bad stories, just bad writers," and I feel that a similar axiom applies to music. While I'll credit that there is bad music, I believe that a good musician can elevate even poor material by applying finesse and artfulness in the playing. This just didn't seem to be happening with the Cabrillo College Jazz Ensemble. When I started to understand this as the nature of my discontent, I knew that it was time to leave the group. Offered as a class at Cabrillo College, the jazz ensemble is founded on teaching. Since I didn't feel that the class offered anything more for me to learn, I made my apologies to Nordgren and served notice that I had withdrawn from the class and would not return to play with the band after the concert featuring Gillette.

I feel bad about leaving abruptly, and I have felt some ill-will from players in the band mystified by my decision. But, more than three months later, I know now that it was the right thing to do. I can see that I had trapped myself into believing that the musical universe around me was small. The many opportunities Cabrillo College has offered me to play--both in a classroom setting and in a professional setting as a hired member of a musical theater pit orchestra--have given me many skills and a good deal of solid performing experience. But Cabrillo College is a school, after all. As such, it can only provide a foundation upon which a musician may build toward musical mastery. It cannot provide that mastery--only point the way.

So, it's time for me to undertake my own quest for musical mastery, time for me to teach myself what I need to know to take my musical understanding higher.