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.

My frustration with the same old-same old jazz in Santa Cruz (see entry below about Cabrillo College) inspired me to seek out and start playing the music that I wanted to play rather than relying on joining bands led by other people. The thing was, few of the really good jazz musicians I knew in the area could relate to the musical influences I wanted to explore. I realized that the solution was to write the music, then assemble a group to play it. I'd have to teach the band about the sound I had in mind, but if successful, I would have an excellent opportunity to play music that I found challenging.

Well, after nearly six months of writing, reading about jazz composition, rewriting, demoing and transcribing, I've managed to complete nearly half a dozen original tunes and put together a group to play them. I've posted some demos and written transcriptions here.

Every jazz musician must early on learn about the great American songbook, songs from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway from early- and mid-twentieth century songwriters like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and Geroge and Ira Gershwin. No agreed-upon canon of these songs exists, but so-called fake books have by default established which ones have endured.

Every jazz musician must early on learn about the great American songbook, songs from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway from early- and mid-twentieth century songwriters like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart and Geroge and Ira Gershwin. No agreed-upon canon of these songs exists, but so-called fake books have by default established which ones have endured.

After a mild quarrel with a dear friend over the merits of a classic of American musical theater, Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein's The Sound of Music, I've tried to understand just what appeals to me in the beloved show and film. Like many other fans of musical theater, I long considered it as merely cloying family-oriented fare. Strangely, though, reading a couple of histories of the Cold War and trying to understand how American has come to understand its role in the world that has piqued my admiration of The Sound of Music.

My thinking about the show evolved from reading academic studies of musical theater penned by Raymond Knapp (The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity) and Andrea Most (Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical). Influenced by Knapp and Most, I started to view musicals as vehicles for constructing a sense of American nationhood, and it's in that light, I've come to believe, that The Sound of Music has much to offer. For me, The Sound of Music is a testament to American exceptionalism, both a cautionary tale to Americans to honor simple folk traditions above urban sophistication and a celebration of American detachment from the wicked political entanglements of Europe.