Turner Ashby Jazz Ensemble - An Essay - Music - http://maxpages.com/goodbar/Turner_Ashby_Jazz

For my entire high school career, the one thing that stuck by me when all the others classes came and went, was the jazz ensemble. From 1995 until June 1999, I was the principal drummer for the Turner Ashby Jazz Ensemble. The ensemble basically helped form my playing technique, dynamics, tone, rhythm, time-keeping and other performance methods that a drummer should know. Plus, the group found an emotional place in my heart from my freshman year and to this day.

During middle school, the only instrument that I played in school was trumpet. The trumpet was fun, but I never really thought about it as a primary instrument. In eighth grade, I started asking if I could play the drums on some songs and the director said yes. So I played and the people were impressed, so that was a nice thought. But still, the attention did not make me want to seriously pursue that side of music. I never practiced trumpet at all, it was just an instrument to me; instead I played my FS800 keyboard and my electric drums (cheap JCPenny catalog brand).

Ninth grade came around and I decided not to play trumpet anymore, I just wasn’t interested in playing that instrument. About a month into my freshman year, my friend TJ mentioned the jazz ensemble to me. Actually, he was talking about some girl trumpet player who was tall with blonde hair, and he thought she was fine. But anyway, for some reason I asked who was playing the drums and he said “some girl, I think that she is the drummer already.” But I decided to go to the next practice and see what was going on.

It was a Wednesday night and I just walked into the band room, where the members had already started playing. There was a good number of people there: Mr. Nash (director), about 7 saxophones, 4 to 5 trombones, 6 trumpets including TJ, piano, guitar, bass and a girl drummer. A girl drummer, ah!! I did not like her style of playing; it was so gentle and quiet for a jazz big band. Then came “A Little Chicken Soup”, this funky little ditty that sounded really cool. The girl drummer, her name was Jennifer, looked at me nicely and handed me the drumsticks. I started to play and I admit that I was a little rusty but I guess it was good enough.

There were two or three others standing there with me by the drum set that night, supposedly they played in this ensemble too. The next week came and I kept on going, bugging all those other people standing there, waiting to play. Don’t get me wrong, I was not skilled or really good by any stretch of the imagination; but I thought I was better than Jennifer and all the others. The more that I showed up hogging the drum set, the more the others stopped coming.

Finally in December, Jennifer switched to saxophone and I became the sole drummer for the Turner Ashby Jazz Ensemble. But I wasn’t really a drummer yet; I had no drum set (the electric set was busted), I did not listen to jazz at all and I could not even practice. The only way I could practice was to mime to my favorite records: James Brown, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Marvin Gaye, basically a lot of older music that had actual acoustic drums. So I looked forward to jazz ensemble every single week, it was the one thing in my ill-fated freshman year that I really loved.

I hated being a freshman to death. It was like starting over because in eighth grade, you were the top dogs of the school. Now, you were degraded to freshman; all the other classes were allowed to taunt and belittle you, however much they pleased. My grades were terrible in ninth grade. I listened to the people that said, “it’s not hard at all”, so I just procrastinated. Middle school never prepared you for high school at all, most of my eighth grade year was slack; I don’t even remember doing homework that year. But I remember doing some stuff in ninth grade though, because it was mostly cramming and getting no sleep. Also, the only medical shortcoming that I had emerged with nasty strength that year: stomach cramps.

I’ve had stomach cramps since I was 4 years old, nor the doctors or anybody knew what was the cause. But by my freshman year, I was having stomach pains almost every six weeks, right about the times when report cards came out. So it seemed that the pains were caused by stress. Luckily, the jazz ensemble kept me as much as in the balance I could be.

But the jazz ensemble could cause stress too. I was getting complaints or “constructive criticism” every week from anyone and everyone in the ensemble. They were not used to my playing, nor was I. I did not have any type of style; I just went to the rehearsal, tried out any new fills or little things that I had learned, and just played. But unfortunately, I could never leave a practice without some type of crappy comment towards my playing, especially when it came from Jennifer. Jennifer played saxophone too, so by the time the first semester was over, she was playing saxophone in the ensemble. That did not matter; she still would make terrible faces at me and nag to others in her section if I did not play the charts (sheet music) as they read. Reading was just another problem.

I had never read drum music; I had never even seen it before. Luckily, Mr. Nash hired a guy to help me learn the music, Mike Tipton. Mike was awesome technically, so he really helped me out the first couple years in the ensemble.

At the end of January, I failed my English class for the third six weeks. My parents were upset and so was I. They took away a lot of things, including jazz ensemble. I was not allowed to go for 2 or 3 weeks, it was terrible. They thought that would help my grades, but it did not. I passed my English class the next six weeks, but it was only a letter grade up from the last report. During that forced “hiatus” from the ensemble, a good number of people from the ensemble actually missed me. They were all asking Nash when I was coming back; I was really flattered and I couldn’t wait to go back. So in late February, my parents finally let me go back to the ensemble.

In March of 1996, there seemed to be some kind of improvement in my playing. I was not speeding up the rhythm as much as I used to and there were fewer complaints. And my reading was getting better too, so the whole thing was more fun. Also in May, we were going to compete in Williamsburg at Busch Gardens, so basically we were gearing up for that. The band was definitely sounding stronger and I was finally making friends outside the rhythm section of the band. Mark Lane, one of the trombone players, was becoming a fast friend, so I was always venting about something to him.

On May 3rd, we had a dress rehearsal for the wind ensemble and the jazz ensemble and it went very well. I was ready to go to my first competition. We left at 4 a.m. the next day. I only listened to one song the whole way there, “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder. The drum track, also played by Stevie, was my favorite part of the song. It was so funky, tight, and so right on the money that I would rewind it back just to hear specific times that I loved: that feeling of tightness would stay with me for the rest of the day.

By the time the jazz ensemble got in the warm-up room, I was ready to play. We started playing “Rite of Swing” and usually, I would play the song straight ahead with not too many fills. But May 4th was a different day and I played the hell out of that song. I have no idea what came over me, but it happened and I just scared everybody half to death. The parent-helpers were there and they loved it, too. I was saying to myself “I don’t know what just happened.” But in whatever did happen, I tried to duplicate it again on the stage and it worked.

Later on, after we all had our fun in the Gardens Park, we went to the amphitheater for the awards ceremony and basically, went absolutely crazy. The Turner Ashby Jazz Ensemble swept all the awards in our category: Best Rhythm Section, Best Saxophone Section, Best Overall Ensemble, etc. We were ecstatic! That was the best moment, we were all so happy on the way back to Harrisonburg. Unfortunately, we would never achieve that kind of success again at a competition.

My summer consumed of waiting until the band camp started, because for the first time, I would joining the wind ensemble as a percussionist, not as a trumpet player. The differences between playing trumpet and playing percussion were startling and hard to get used to. You work different parts of your body and it’s a different state of mind; the halftime show that we were doing was a jazz/big-band theme and I was playing drums. Easy? No, unfortunately not. I would have to start to incorporate real quickness into my drum performance, which was something that I had done yet. I had heard of sixteenth notes before, but I had never played them. Sixteenth notes are just as fast as the sound of a machine gun, counting in fours: rat-tat-tat-tat-rat-tat-tat-tat-rat-tat-tat-tat-rat-tat-tat-tat. The first night that I had to learn sixteenth notes for the marching version of the Weather Reports hit “Birdland”, I cracked under the pressure. I went home and started crying and I told my dad that I didn’t know if I could handle doing band and playing percussion. But he told me that I would be all right and that I’m good enough to do what I’m supposed to do, because Nash thought that I was ready for marching and wind ensemble. So I kept my head up and went on.

Once the sophomore year began, I finally got a drum set. It was a Ludwig five-piece, including stands and cymbals. After we got it settled in the house, I started playing on the set non-stop; I would practice everything that I could, my favorite solos, songs, fills, everything. But it was not until March, when others (including myself) starting seeing improvement. I was able to improvise, which is to perform anything on the spur of the moment (Webster 718), and being able to improvise with the rest of the ensemble was a good help.

In May, we went to Myrtle Beach for competition and we were all psyched and having a great time. But for me, it didn’t last much longer. The jazz ensemble was playing “Impressions” by John Coltrane, which is a very fast-paced swing tune. There were a few solos during the piece, and I had one also. But two measures into the song, I did something that I had never done before: My drumstick came right out of my hand. I didn’t know what to do, I froze right there. The song went on and someone grabbed my stick and I played on, but I was humiliated. We got a lukewarm response and I was just shocked. I couldn’t believe that it just happened to me; luckily the other 2 songs that we performed went just fine, but for me, the rest of the night was a downer.
People were just very supportive about the situation; I mean no one really knew how it felt to be in my shoes, playing the drums. It took me to get over what happened, but eventually I did. Later that May, I performed my first solo drum set piece entitled “Instrumental Contusion” at the high school’s Annual Pops Concert. Everyone thought it was really good; it was something different, I didn’t think that anyone would really like it, they would just think of it as an extension of my ego (which I was hoping it wouldn’t turn out that way). But it turned out all right and as a result, I would perform a solo drum set piece at the next two Pops Concerts.
My sophomore year was the year that most of the students in wind and jazz ensemble were graduating. The majority of the students in jazz ensemble were seniors and by the time the year was over, most of them were good friends with me. I was going to miss them, they were the heart of the group; at that time I thought that they were the best of musicians and people. It was never the same after they left.

During the summer, I played my drum set to death. I worked a lot on the jazz ensemble songs, getting my chops up, I mean really sweating on those drums. Once my junior year began, I could see the change immediately. I enrolled in a new class called Jazz Combos, which was an improvisation-music theory class. It was a way for me to play in a different setting not with a lot of musicians, but more of one person on each instrument. It was strange to get used to, but it was another challenge, challenge is always good.

Things had definitely changed my junior year. I became more assertive because I was the oldest one in the ensemble and I felt that I knew exactly what the songs should sound like. I also felt that I had reached a certain plateau, to the point where I thought that Nash did not need to invite Mike Tipten to come back and instruct me how to play. It seemed as if he got in the way because I approached the drum charts in a more experimental way, about as experimental as you could get with big band jazz. There’s always a formula, a tradition if you will, for jazz. Depends on who you play with and who you talk to, they all have different definitions. In that case, whatever the definition may be, I wanted to grow and do things that someone wouldn’t normal hear in jazz; more drum solos, just great playing. The problem was that I was growing, but I was fighting with people along the way.

Mr. Nash and I had gotten along just fine for the first couple years. But during my junior year, maybe because of this personal “growth” that I was experiencing, I started to disagree a lot with him and fight with him about how certain things should be in the ensemble. Maybe because I felt that I had some seniority in the group, I thought that I had some kind of say in what was going on. Nash and I had our own clouts, so we would be stubborn on a lot of issues. Because of this “clout”, I don’t even remember what these disagreements were. But I do remember that because of them, I did threaten to quit the ensemble a few times. I know you’re saying, “He threatened”? Well yes, at the time, it was a threat. Everyone knew that I was an asset to the ensemble, because there were literally no other drummers in our school that could replace me and Nash knew that too. Nash acted like he could get anyone and although I knew he really couldn’t, I was still scared about losing my place in the ensemble, because I still loved it. After a while, I finally stopped fighting with Nash and everything went smoothly from then on.

Another problem was the ensemble was that after the seniors graduated, their replacements were mostly freshmen. These freshmen had never learned or played jazz music before, never. They were completely new to the situation, so comparing their performance and dedication (most of them did not come to rehearsals all the time or would not practice their music often) to the previous years’ group; it was really a different jazz ensemble. Most of these guys were playing to the most of their abilities, but their abilities hadn’t even become to the fullest potential. The jazz ensemble was not the challenge that it had once been: before I was playing with experienced musicians who knew what the songs sounded like, now the freshmen were faced with the challenge of playing with the drummer that had been in the jazz ensemble for the past two years. Whew.

It’s true that I was an asset to the jazz ensemble and because of it; I was treated with more leniency than everyone else. Imagine that? A junior being treated as if he was a senior, that’s just not right. It wasn’t right, but I did not notice it until one day in wind ensemble. Everyone was talking and not paying attention to Mr. Nash. Then he looked up at me and said, “Thank you, Kelli. You will get extra credit for standing there, paying attention and being ready to play.” It was actually a rarity when I am picked out to used as an example of good behavior in that class, I really didn’t know what I was doing, I just knew that I was ready to play. Because of that, people in the class got jealous of me and started calling me Nash’s pet. At first I was surprised and hurt, but I just said that if they can’t accept what is going on, then so be it. I wasn’t doing anything wrong; it was Nash picking favorites. How could I be Nash’s pet? I was not, by any means. Most of the time, I talked back to him and I was very smart aleck with him too, but usually he took it with humor. But anyhow, I went and talked to Nash and asked him to treat me like everyone else and soon, everything went smoothly. But that was not all of my junior year.

I noticed as time went by because of my certain “clout” in my junior year, I was ignoring all those other things that came with playing the drums: musicality, technique, quality, volume, etc. My technique was not perfect by any means; I did not really practice rudimental studies, which are hands exercises executed at different speeds (Whaley 3). So because of that, my playing was advancing like it should have been. But I decided that I was not getting anywhere without these certain methods of practicing, so I started and my playing got better.

I was really practicing over the summer for my senior year and I had higher hopes for the jazz ensemble, because hopefully the freshman had grown over the past year and decided that they wanted to put some dedication into the group. Seriously, I felt I was ready to come on to college anyway, so I was just hoping that my senior year would be a great last year and I could go to college and Turner Ashby would be gone. Not so easy.

Band camp started and I was “promoted” to percussion section leader, so basically I was in charge of the percussion section and I didn’t know that I would have so much fun doing it. Not only by my senior year did I gain the respect of everyone in my section but also in the entire band, which was very enlightening and humbling, because just less than a year before, I was attacked with jealously and hurt. But this was a new feeling, it felt good and I felt sad that it took all four years for my friends and school band mates to get to that point.

By the time that I had graduated, I had definitely left my mark with the Turner Ashby Jazz Ensemble, establishing the Percussion “Stomp” Ensemble, and showing that I was a musician (although most students thought I was a magician when it came to playing drums) to the rest of the graduating class of 1999. At the awards ceremony for the graduates a couple weeks before graduation, I had the opportunity to perform a drum solo at the end of ceremony, but before everyone left. The solo got everyone’s attention and then I was finally content and assured that the people knew what was up with Kelli Strawbridge.

I’m glad that the Turner Ashby Jazz Ensemble was neither easy nor hard for me, because I got to experience all those ups and downs that a musician has to go through. The ensemble will always have a special place in my heart, a lot of “firsts” for me happened in that ensemble. I had never played live on the drums before, ever. The Turner Ashby Jazz Ensemble broke me in.

-- Kelli Strawbridge

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Kelli Strawbridge
Richmond	Virginia	23231
United States Of America Freek!!
(804) 938-0757
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