Let's call this guy Sydney Greenstreet. Not so much for his girth (I fought girth all my life, after all . . . ) but as a way to identify him in the context of the Greenstreet characters late of the cinema: the plotting, the deviousness, the sureness of his evil intent, the shiftiness of the eyes which evade contact with other warm-blooded creatures.
In January, I was knocking around the rooms of my old college because my enamored one was teaching that night, It so happened that her teaching was being done close to the music building. The new music building is a deeply-flawed new building which replaced a deeply-flawed old building and now looks to be 20 years older than it is because the budget no longer allows for simple maintenance. Once there were mighty musicians who trod the boards in the (old) building. More about that in a future posting which will shamelessly plug a reunion of these musicians.
So back to January. I had driven myself to the college with my horns in the trunk—some of them anyway—thinking that if I could play a few notes it would be a good night. What I walked in on was a crisis.
Sydney Greenstreet was nowhere to be found, although he'd made a commitment to playing a semester at the helm of the reed section in the jazz ensemble. He was not answering his mobile and, in fact, he may have been still out of the country on a vacation. I walk in and offer my services to the band director, who plugs me in and that is that. The rest of the semester I am playing lead alto in the current version of a band that I joined in January of 1973, an interval of 38 years.
Sydney shows up finally a couple rehearsals later, plays loud tenor and complains throughout. On packing up, he quits.
I was (happily) oblivious what was going on with Sydney and the band director, but they seemed to have a cordial enough thing going between them while they were having phone tag, but the band director was visibly shaken when Greenstreet welched on his commitment to even play tenor—featured tenor, mind you—that they had made in the prior semester.
I did my best to lead a section of scruffy learners who had a tendency (especially the tenors who plugged into the section to replace Sydney) to forget about rehearsal even though it was the same time every Thursday night. Not the best readers, the section fought its way to resectable concert performances anyway.
Cut to the start of the current fall semester and I find myself drawn as if a moth to a flame to the music building once more for a look at the first rehearsal of the band. Actually it was the vain hope that someone else, someone far more qualified, someone who could count two bars without slowing down at the top of a tune, someone who had been to the Big Show (also with Kenton) would this semester lead the band. But there was the band director, and there, in due time, walked Sydney Greenstreet.
Everybody in the music racket knows a guy like Sydney. He has an agenda and the way he carries it out is to play more notes louder and faster than anybody else in the tri-county area. His warm-ups are legendary for their ear-splitting volume. He'll never subsume his sound into a section because he just won't share the spotlight. Jazz for him is a contact sport, one that begins the moment he takes his own out of the case and runs endless diminished scales at top volume.
It's all about Greenstreet, all the time. He's usually in a small enough town that he won't get his ass handed to him. And he has his protectors. They are usually band directors who think, "If I could only harness his loud sound and flurry of notes for my purposes many good things could ensue for my band."
They are wrong.
Improving the band's quality is off the table. Only the self-aggrandizing alto feature will capture the interest of Sidney Greenstreet, so you're looking at an endless number of them.
Once, in LA (at the Big Show, which is held in two places only in the US, both of which I lived in) I played in a big band that had a sax section made up of four Greenstreets and me, The problem is that when you've got a Greenstreet, let alone four Greenstreets, you better have a backup for each one. I had to back up all of them at one time or another, because each of them had important business that would draw them away from rehearsing or even performing with the band. I became a floater in that section, alto one week, baritone the next, then tenor.
This I fear is the fate of my old college band: Having looked at the situation and figuring that I had no interest in backstopping Sydney Greenstreet, and after a rehearsal on the low tenor chair I told the band director that I thought my business at this place was done. That's something, when you consider how many years I have in this place.
Better it should happen in that first rehearsal, when things are all new and everything is possible.
Now that some of it has come back to me due to to certain wagging tongues that were in the rehearsal room, let me say that I wanted to save myself the bother of watching Sydney Greensteet subvert the very nature of jazz and of the band. I don't want to see the band director press jazz education into a neat pyrotechnic box where the players become automatic wind-up toys and explode on cue.
Jazz is pretty important to me. I've learned that it's the gentle stuff that matters. Not all ballads, but an approach to every subgenre that has respect for what's going on.
Here's what Tony Campise taught me: "Swing your ass off. Remember the blues. Put things into their right places."
I couldn't do that in the rehearsal room for a new semester, so that's why I faded into the parking lot. I hope my fellow saxophonists in the section I left behind understand that that's why I decided not to join the band this semester.
I haven't talked much about Tony Campise since he passed. There was no better example than Tony of someone who COULD have turned his considerable talents and abilities into the Greenstreet of all Greenstreets.
But in his Aw-shucks-Texas kind of way Tony, son of Sicilian greengrocers in Houston, realized that jazz is fun and you ought to grab all the fun you can get your hands on.
Tony never let his prodigious technique get in the way of his ability to play the blues. Nobody I ever heard could do what Tony could do. He never resorted to the film flam of running all-purpose diminished patterns over every dominant seventh chord in a tune.
And Tony played better flute than most classical flute players. (Tony would never show up without all his doubles to any rehearsal or gig, however modest.)
There are plenty of examples of Tony Campise on YouTube, some of them awful cell phone camera affairs from great distances, all of them worth checking out.
My favorite album of Tony's is the most straight-ahead. It's called First Takes.
I believe that Tony Campise is the anti-Greenstreet, and I urge you to listen to his music and feel the joy in his playing.
