The Music Man:
“Don’t go Back to school, kid”
By Jeanne McDonald
It’s always there, says Jerry Coker—a melody playing in his subconscious, one of thousands of songs he’s performed in smoky nightclubs or concerts or has fallen asleep to in lonely hotel rooms on the road. “I can be driving or watching a movie,” he says, “and I find myself fingering the keys. Then I turn off the subconscious and suddenly become aware that I’m hearing chord progressions. I’m actually practicing away from the horn!” Coker recalls a conversation with the great West Coast Cool Jazz trumpet player, Chet Baker, who was watching Coker’s fingers moving on the table between them as they talked. Baker leaned forward and said in awe, “You do that too?”
“The keys” Coker refers to are the keys on his tenor saxophone, which he has played all over the world with many of the best jazz artists in the business. Critics have praised his music for its lyricism and his ability to improvise melodies with phrases that segue seamlessly into one another. Now in his seventies, he still plays but gets more excited about teaching budding young musicians, many of whom are involved in the nationally renowned Jazz Studies Program that Coker instituted at the University of Tennessee in 1976, modeled after a wildly successful curriculum he had set up at Miami University years earlier.
Although he officially retired from UT in 1997, Coker continues to teach Jazz Piano and Analysis of Jazz Styles with the aim of “working an overnight revelation for the students so they can see where their careers are headed.” The program, which also covers Jazz History, Theory, Improvisation, Composition, Arranging and Pedagogy, has also had great success with its student and faculty jazz ensembles. And like Coker, his fellow teachers in the program are proven musicians: Program Coordinator Mark Boling; Donald Brown; Keith Brown; Rusty Holloway; Paul Haar; and Vance Thompson.
Jazz grew from the roots of the blues, spirituals, ragtime and African music, evolving as blacks moved to the cities. Wynton Marsalis called it “. . .the nobility of race put into sound. . . . It is the hardest music to play that I know of, and it is the highest rendition of individual emotion in the history of Western music.”
As early as age six, Coker knew that he wanted to play the saxophone like his father, a professional musician, but his fingers were too small, so his parents first steered him toward the piano. His teacher, Joseph Artis, was the first black man Coker had ever met. Artis, says Coker, “had great wisdom” and taught Coker the basics of music. When finally, at eleven, Coker was allowed to play his father’s horn, he knew he had found his lifelong passion.
“Anything you can hear in your head, you can reproduce,” says Coker. He studied music at Indiana University, where his master’s thesis, “Improvising Jazz,” was discovered by a book salesman and subsequently published by Prentice Hall. The very word “improvisation” seems to suggest spontaneity, but, says Coker, it has to be learned. “In jazz music, you respect the melody at the beginning and the end. The improvisation in between comes from the chords, mostly dissonant chords, and the progression will have moments where it is absolutely magnetic, and that takes an intellectual player. In the beginning, I don’t think anyone could foresee that jazz would become so complex that you needed to study it.”
At 20, Coker, whose earliest style was influenced by Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz and John Coltrane, was determined to get an audition with Woody Herman, whose band was playing in Rochester, Indiana. Herman, thinking Coker looked too young, kept putting him off, but the female singer for the band had heard him warming up and urged Herman to give him a try. “Okay,” Herman said. “Tell the kid to come up at 12:30. He’ll get tired of waiting and never come back.”
But Coker endured. He waited and he played, and at one a.m. he packed up his horn and was walking down the hall when he heard footsteps behind him. It was Woody and his manager. Woody said, “Don’t go back to school, kid.” He gave his horn player two weeks’ notice and hired Coker. It was an auspicious beginning for a young musician, but one night a month later, musician Al Kiger came to one of Woody’s concerts and afterward said to Coker: “Do you find that playing in a band like this stagnates your playing?” Coker had already begun to feel a little bored and upset that none of the band members wanted to talk about music theory. But Woody was crushed when Coker left. “He had treated me like the son he never had,” says Coker. “And he gave me a great stepping stone for my career. Years later I went to one of his concerts in Knoxville and asked his forgiveness for leaving so abruptly.
“Well,” said Woody, “we all have to forgive.” And they sat in the Holiday Inn in downtown Knoxville and talked for three or four hours. “Two weeks later,” says Coker, “I dreamed that his dead wife, Charlotte, touched my hand and said, ‘Don’t worry about Woody, Jerry. He’s fine now.’ I later found out that he had died at the same time I was having the dream.”
Coker, a perfectionist, had never had the opportunity to hear himself play, but “once,” he says, “we played a concert with George Shearing, and, afterwards, I was riding with Erbie Green, and he turned on the radio. I heard a solo by a tenor saxophonist that actually made me feel jealous. I asked Erbie, ‘Who is that?’ Erbie laughed. ‘That’s you.’ I had no idea that the show we had just played had been recorded.”
During his career, Coker played with some of the finest artists in the industry, and he has a story about every one of them. On Frank Sinatra: “He was the most consummate entertainer I’ve ever met. He was great at all aspects of orchestration. For example, Gordon Jenkins, who wrote “It Was a Very Good Year,” was a fine song writer but a lousy conductor. During one rehearsal, Frank got behind him, put his hands on Gordon’s hands, and said, “This is how you do it.”
On Wes Montgomery, the famous jazz guitarist: “He couldn’t read music, but he could hear a song just once and play it brilliantly, chord for chord.”
On Chet Baker: “He was a great musician and a sweet guy, but not much of an intellectual. When he met Vittorio Mussolini, son of the dictator, Benito Mussolini, he shook his hand and said, ‘Hey, man, sorry about your dad.’”
On Miles Davis: “His spiritual state was questionable, but he played beautiful music.”
Jerry Coker also has a great love story to tell because the gorgeous singer who recommended him to Woody Herman would eventually become his wife even though she was married when they met. On an Asian tour with the band, Coker heard that Patty was sick, and he left the tour early to visit her, carrying two volumes of Gibbon’s The History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Patty finished reading them in two days. Although Jerry was a confirmed bachelor and totally dedicated to his career, the couple eventually fell deeply in love. After they spent two years in a platonic relationship, Patty’s husband approached Jerry and asked, “If I let Patty go, will you take good care of her?” The proof of Coker’s love is that on Sept. 23, 2006, he and Patty celebrated their fifty-first anniversary.
Ask Coker to name his best student, and he ticks off a half dozen who were outstanding, “But the brightest I ever had,” he says, “was Alan Wyatt, who’s now teaching at Cleveland State. As an entering freshman at UT, he walked into my office and waited patiently as I played a dissonant chord for another student. ‘Oh, I know that one,’ said Alan. ‘That’s a D major triad over an E flat major seventh chord.’”
And that’s the kind of enlightenment that keeps Jerry Coker excited about teaching music.
