’Round about midnight
For much of the last 30 years, D’earth has made much of his living teaching young people to play jazz. At one point, he held down simultaneous teaching gigs at five separate schools: UVA, VCU, JMU, St. Anne’s-Belfield and Tandem Friends School. He is now the Director of Jazz Performance at UVA and the jazz artist-in-residence at VCU.
“There are people who teach who happen to be able with music and can do a very nice service to their students. And then there are a handful of people who are extraordinary musicians who are able to impart the essences to their charges and John is one of those…It’s often by osmosis. It’s not just the words you say and the assignments you give. It’s by kids picking up on your deepest intrinsic merits.”
Those are the words of Doug Richards, founder of VCU’s widely respected jazz program and for a decade the director of the Great American Music Ensemble, which performed regularly at the Kennedy Center’s terrace concert series and featured the best jazz musicians from the mid-Atlantic region. D’earth often played the role of great Duke Ellington and Count Basie trumpeters like Sweets Edison, Cootie Williams, and Shorty Baker under Richards’ direction, and he’s watched him nurture a generation of new players in his program alongside saxophonist Skip Gailes, another talented player who teaches.
Lisa Mezzacappa started at UVA in 1993. She was a rock musician and biology major who hadn’t been exposed to much jazz and she says D’earth’s influence on her life “can’t be overstated.” Now a professional jazz bass player in San Francisco, Mezzacappa recently returned to UVA with two other alums who turned into professional jazz players—Kait Dunton and Kathy Olson—to perform with D’earth’s UVA Jazz Ensemble.
“I remembered just how much I adore him and how fantastic a musician he is, but I forgot about the way he takes care of everyone in his life,” Mezzacappa said. “Partly that’s his students, but it’s also the musicians in his bands and it’s also kind of the whole the jazz community in Charlottesville. I feel like he’s been keeping everyone together and moving things ahead for a lot of years.”
Watch John D’earth playing live at Miller’s during a performance last month…
The glue D’earth has used to keep everyone together is his Thursday night residency at Miller’s, a gig that’s served as his own performance outlet but also as a proving ground for scores of students. UVA musicology professor Marita McClymonds opened up the school’s jazz program to D’earth in the mid-’80s, and D’earth, in turn, held it open for players like Jospé, bassist Pete Spaar, and saxophonist Jeff Decker. Along with piano player Bob Hallahan, that core group, which founded UVA’s well-regarded faculty jazz combo, The Free Bridge Quintet, has performed and recorded together for decades and formed the nucleus of a jazz scene that brought young players into contact with top talents from New York, students from other schools, and each other.
Mezzacappa subbed for Spaar, her bass teacher, at Miller’s on Wednesday’s for a year and often sat in for him on D’earth’s Thursday night gig.
“It was sort of this amazing experience, like family,” Mezzacappa said. “The way they kind of love you unconditionally and tell you you’re capable of all these things early in your career that really made Charlottesville a great incubator for a young artist.”
D’earth’s students nearly always use the word “family” in describing the way he teaches. When I asked him where that came from, his answer was more matter of fact than I expected.
“I like to be that way partly because when I was coming up in music in Milford, Massachusetts, with all these Sicilian-Americans teaching me, they treated me like that,” D’earth said. “I just treat my students exactly the way my teachers treated me. They loved me. They made me feel like I had a burden of responsibility to develop myself. But mostly it was love. That love between musicians is a very big thing for me.”
Victor Haskins graduated from VCU’s jazz program this spring after studying with D’earth and Gailes. Haskins is a major talent who came to the program with a classical trumpet background and left having cut a record of his own jazz compositions. The first time he played Miller’s in October of his sophomore year of college, he’d never driven a car longer than an hour on his own and he’d never played in a club environment where the performers weren’t treated as background music.
D’earth called him up to play the jazz standard “On Green Dolphin Street,” which Miles Davis made famous. The performance had a profound impact on him.
“He’s a particular kind of player because he’s got such a big sound,” Haskins said. “And the way I hear things it’s not as big, it’s more of a smaller, quieter type of deal. But it was different being up on the bandstand and realizing that with this level of energy happening you have to deal with that.”
Haskins would return to play over the course of his time in school, and he credits the gig with much of his development as a performer.
“I’ve learned a lot of stuff at VCU being in school, but the most poignant lessons I’ve learned are from going up to Miller’s to sit in with John…” he said. “It’s one thing to be in a lesson and learn all this theory and kind of nitpick and worry about the small technical details. Once you’re on the bandstand that’s stuff’s kind of like out the window and it’s really about making music in the moment and trying to make it happen.”
Recently a 17-year-old student of D’earth’s told him it had taken him a long time to open up with him because he thought he was fake.
“Fake?” D’earth asked. It was the last thing he expected to be accused of.
“Yeah,” the kid said. “Because you tell everyone they’re great.”
“I don’t do that,” D’earth said. “What I do do is I insist that people acknowledge their strengths, which I think is really hard for people to do. There are things about what they are doing that are very good often times and they have no clue because those are innate things. It’s like a fish in water.”
Daniel Richardson met John D’earth when he was 14, a struggling student and a talented drummer who briefly joined the Charlottesville Albemarle Youth Jazz Orchestra, which D’earth started. Richardson liked D’earth and the orchestra, but it wasn’t enough to keep him involved. He hated school, which led him first to leave Albemarle High School for Murray, the county’s alternative high school, and then eventually to drop out of school entirely.
“My mother, who was so exasperated and sort of feeling clueless about what to do with me… because I was sort of circling the drain at that point in school, even personally,” Richardson said. “So I think she just decided to send John this really long e-mail talking about me and asking him to do something.”
D’earth agreed to meet him for lessons. Richardson stayed up late to compose a song on piano, his first ever composition, the night before their first session.
“The thing about John is he has this sort of mythical status built up around him, at least among musicians, probably with other people. I don’t know how much that was affecting me, but I know I was pretty nervous,” he said. “This guy is the real deal. I can’t bring any bullshit to the lessons. But then I met him and he was the coolest dude. We kind of just became friends like that. We are very similar people.”
When D’earth heard Richardson’s song, he couldn’t believe it wasn’t an improvisation. Richardson played it back note for note and a bond was formed.
“He sort of gave me the impetus to push things and keep moving. I finally met someone who does what I do. You know? And does it at the highest level and really pushes themselves, just fuckin’ rockin’ it,” he said. “I’d never been around someone who does what they love with such an intense passion, that’s part of it, and does something that’s actually meaningful.”
Richardson, a remarkably lucid 18-year-old who’s performing around town (Escafé on Saturday nights) regularly now, told me that a lot of the things he’s learned from D’earth about music are lessons about life that have “a broad, ecumenical application.” It’s an impression I got during our interviews, too, that he’s always conveying a philosophy of living as much as he’s talking about music.
He compares jazz to Zen Buddhism, a discipline built on practice in search of freedom and spontaneity. The lessons he passes on come from the form, not from him.
“Playing jazz is like science. Or playing jazz is like poetry. But playing jazz is also like digging a ditch, or going home and having dinner with your family,” D’earth said. “Everything is everything. I’ve always believed that.”
While Doug Richards calls D’earth “the pied piper of Central Virginia jazz,” students like Lisa Mezzacappa see him as a kind of musical parent, forever growing his family. This is a guy who learned to love jazz from a father with undiagnosed PTSD by playing drums on metal tray and listening to Diz, the same guy who can’t help turning an interview into a trumpet lesson.
“He brings everyone along with him. And I think he’s made a lot of sacrifices to do that,” Mezzacappa said. “I recognize that the way your parents stop their lives to raise you. I feel like there’s a strong parent role in the way he’s mentored so many of us. You can’t teach with his level of commitment and enthusiasm and also come home and have energy to close out the world and write your next opus in the four hours you have left before you go to sleep.”
D’earth’s own feelings about his teaching aren’t simple. On the one hand, he wouldn’t trade his experiences, but he sees his own frailties in the way he champions his students but will take the foot off the gas in his own projects, particularly the ones focused on him.
“It is a true thing that I learned about myself in my 40s. I learned it at Tandem Friends School, because I became so enamored of my students and my work, that I had an epiphany,” he said. “I realized just based on my own history, my own psychology, that I was willing to do for anybody else what I wasn’t willing to do for myself.”
When I pressed D’earth, for example, about what kind of trumpet player he is, his answer reached all the way back to the Al Porcino days.
“In a big band, and I’ve done a lot of big band work, I play third or fourth trumpet, what they call the jazz chair,” D’earth said. “I take solos and nail the lower parts. I’m the jazz guy, not the lead guy.”
It’s not false modesty, it’s a type of loyalty he’s expressing. Like most other great players, his trumpet “is always a little bit in the doghouse,” and, like his students, he sees his weaknesses more clearly than his strengths.
When you talk to the people who have played with him, like Richards, their praise is effusive, almost hyperbolic. Haskins called him “without a doubt one of the best out there.”
“John is a master if you just want to isolate the concept of rhythm, but the notion of sound, pure and simple sound, is what John blesses us with,” Richards said. “You don’t hear this kind of sound, even from the creme de la creme, you don’t hear anything greater than his sound.”
Restoration Comedy, a record D’earth cut in 2000 on Double-Time, shows off the sound Richards is talking about. Is it timing, clarity, volume, tone?
“You’re dealing with musical character. Something, to me, sorely missed with much of today’s music,” Richards said. “There are many people who are extraordinary musical acrobats. John D’earth has technique that is absolutely staggering, but it’s his character, his persona that makes him so strong.”
Never imitate, have your own thing. Boots’ rules that D’earth is still enforcing on young talents.
“Since Wynton Marsalis, jazz has gone into a very conservative mode. In one way it’s wonderful because everybody is looking at the old musicians, which to me, you just can’t look at it enough, but the problem is that now most of the great jazz trumpet players who are out there, people we dig, are classically trained,” D’earth said. “For me, I like something more rough and ready. I like something that’s more breakable. It’s like we’re breaking something and we’re breaking out of something.”
A musical lesson that he applies to his life, like the way he helped Daniel Richardson find his feet in the music game.
“In a way he’s a very normal dude, he just somehow does everything normal people do on an extraordinary level,” Richardson said. “And I think that may be his message in some ways. That anybody can do what he’s doing. You don’t have to be some mythical creature.”
I asked Mezzacappa what she wanted to see D’earth accomplish over the rest of his career. She gave me a family answer.
“I hear he’s got a record that’s almost done and I would love for him to take the opportunity to let the world know what he’s been up to. Find a way to do that, let people help him do that,” she said. “He’s always used to doing everything by himself. I think there are a lot of people who want to support him back, the way he’s always supported them.”
It’s inevitable that every part of Charlottesville’s music scene is evaluated in relation to the Dave Matthews Band shockwave, and this is doubly true of John D’earth’s music, because he was so instrumental in setting the stage that Dave Matthews stepped onto.
For instance, my own journalistic logic told me that if D’earth was a worldclass player, he’d have made it into the band, because Carter Beauford, LeRoi Moore, Tim Reynolds, and Butch Taylor, all of whom played with D’earth at Miller’s, made it into the band.
So I asked him the question: Why did he take touring work with Bruce Hornsby for all of those years and not ride with DMB collecting songwriting royalties? He could have made enough money to quit teaching and play jazz, right?
“I’ll tell you the truth about this. I would love to be in the Dave Matthews Band for that exact reason that you mentioned, about the fiscal advantage,” he said. “I have a different emotion that is actually more important to me than that, which is I love [Dave] and I just want him to do what he wants to do. And I know exactly why he didn’t have a trumpet in the band at the beginning anyway, because he’s not hearing that. He’s hearing saxophone and he’s hearing LeRoi.”
D’earth told me three stories about Dave Matthews. He remembered the first time he saw him on stage at Trax with TR3 singing some kind of cover, a Bob Marley song maybe, and thinking about his stage presence, the way he transformed the room as a nondescript kid dressed down singing a tune everyone already knew. Then he told me about seeing him on stage during a theater production and thinking how great he was as an actor. And then, finally, the day Matthews told him he was writing songs and D’earth invited him over.
“He came to my house. He sat down on the piano bench. And he was playing his guitar showing me some music,” D’earth said. “The way it works with music is you can talk to people about it, but you don’t know anything until you play with them. And then the minute you play with them often, if it’s gonna be at this other level, it takes no time, and I swear my hair was standing on end.”
As a writer, the DMB question was important to me, because I was trying to figure out why one musician can make it big while another has to work for salt peanuts.
“Meatball,” D’earth said. “It’s like the R. Crumb comic book where meatballs start falling out of the sky in L.A. and the people they randomly hit become instantly enlightened and satisfied with their lives…even a jazz musician gets hit.”
The answer was crucial to the story, because it speaks to D’earth’s senses of humor and his particular type of humility, which is fundamental both to his compositions and to his ability to draw younger musicians to him. He is a player, so he’ll allow himself to be self-centered but not jealous. You can’t bring greed into the game. Boots wouldn’t have allowed it.
“[Dave] tapped those musicians because he knew them and he’s a smart guy and he knew they were great,” he said. “Some people think I had something to do with that, and I don’t think I did. What I do think is that he was influenced by some of the music we brought here.”
When D’earth talks about the musicians who came through Miller’s, he calls them out by name: “A lot of those musicians played with us at Miller’s: Carter, LeRoi, Butch Taylor who came later… it’s just a whole family of people in this area who have played together for years. Hundreds of man years,” he said.
And that in itself is part of D’earth’s miracle. Because we’re in Charlottesville. A jazz hinterland before he got here. And now a place musicians seek out because of the quality of players.
Take Chris Keup, for example, who moved down from New York after cutting the mustard there both as a solo artist and a producer, before deciding to start White Star Sound, a residential recording studio with big ambitions, in large part because of D’earth.
“One of the reasons a lot of people move to New York is you want to measure yourself against the real deal. You want to see if you can hang. Once you do that, you start to think about whether that cost of living should be determining what creative choices you can make,” Keup said. “You look around for little enclaves of like-minded musicians, but you don’t necessarily want to take a cut in the quality of musicians you’re working with. John, I think, represented that. Here’s this guy who’s clearly as good as anyone who’s making music right now and he’s in Charlottesville and he’s drawn a good group of people to him.”
Keup briefly had a deal with Red Light Management in a prior incarnation, which he earned by playing a regular gig at Trax. But he first found out about D’earth when he tagged along with a bunch of jazz musicians from the Billy Taylor jazz program in Washington D.C. to one of D’earth’s shows at Blues Alley.
“The debate they were having is ‘Is John D’earth the greatest trumpet player in America?’ Seriously,” Keup said. “And it seemed to be the majority opinion that yes, in fact he was… he was in that league for them.”
Later on, he ran across D’earth through the DMB scene while recording at Rutabaga Studios in Northern Virginia, which is how he got the idea to ask him to work on his solo record Subject of Some Regret, a gem from 2000 that sounds a little bit like Daniel Lanois’ Bob Dylan record Time Out of Mind, both because of the production quality and Keup’s raspy talking voice and narrative lyricism.
D’earth composed the string parts that are prominent on songs like “Still Down” and “The Colder Months Ahead.” After the record was released, Keup started fielding calls from big name producers Larry Kline and Steve Lillywhite, telling him how much they liked it.
“It became pretty clear that what they were really blown away with were the string arrangements,” he said.
These days, Keup’s working on the business project of turning the scene D’earth helped create into a professional recording community, on the one hand getting regular session work for proteges like Colin Killalea and Daniel Richardson, on the other hand offering a place local songwriters can cut, produce, and release single tracks. Like Motown with a socialist heart.
D’earth, meanwhile, has continued to compose, a line of work he got started in by writing arrangements for 10 of Dave Matthews’ appearances with the Richmond Symphony Orchestra and that he’s pursued on commission with chamber music groups like the Kronos String Quartet and pop outfits like Moe.
Forty-six years ago, John D’earth and Robert Jospé met for the first time in a high school English classroom, then walked straight to a drum set and jammed. When I spoke to D’earth at his studio two weeks back, he’d just come from doing that exact same thing after watching a DVD of Miles Davis and the Lost Quintet, whom the duo used to see play live in the New York days.
“It was like for a religious person going back to a text that you hadn’t looked at in a long time and going, ‘That’s why I’m in this church. Because of this exact thing,’” D’earth said. “Feeling that again was amazing.”
There’s only one thing I got right about D’earth before I met him: He’s a jazz guy. Talking to him and the people around him taught me what that means. He’s loyal to the form and to other players, which means he’s never satisfied with his instrument, never willing to trade freedom for money, always at Miller’s on Thursday nights, forever burning to make better music.
“I don’t think I ever had a picture of how I was going to be successful. I really just thought that if I developed my talent to the max, it would all take care of itself,” he said. “And I have not done that, O.K.? I have not developed my talent to the max.”
It also means he’ll wince his way through this hagiography and that he was as wrong as I was about him: He’s the first trumpet, not the fourth, as much because of the music he makes with the people around him as for the kind he makes with his horn.
His message is in his music, and his wisdom, stated contrafactually, is for anyone who cares to listen: “It’s like Coltrane said, ‘We practice so when the doors of perception are open, we’re prepared to step through.’ That’s a great model for anything.”