Making music with a legend

Clark Terry is 82 years old and just getting back into playing shape after a fight with cancer that began a year and a half ago. An alumnus of the Basie, Ellington and Tonight Show bands, he is an encyclopedia of knowledge about 20th century American jazz. He also is one of the best musicians who ever picked up a trumpet.

Terry will be at Southeast Missouri State University Friday for the fifth annual Phi Mu Alpha/Clark Terry Jazz Festival. Eight bands representing seven junior and senior high schools from the region will compete from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in three different venues: Academic Auditorium, the Baptist Student Union chapel and the Newman Center chapel.

A panel of three judges -- Conn instruments representative Larry Green, jazz trumpet player Mike Metheny and retired high school band director Larry Bennett -- will provide taped and written comments along with mini-clinics.

Terry will be featured at 7 p.m. when Southeast's 18-piece Studio Jazz Ensemble performs at Academic Auditorium. Among the pieces will be a Duke Ellington tune -- Terry was a longtime member of the Ellington orchestra -- and "Mumbles," a song Terry became known for while performing with the Tonight Show Band during the 1960s.

The ensemble is directed by Barry Bernhardt, director of bands at Southeast.

Jumping off point

In an interview from his New Jersey home, Terry talked of growing up in St. Louis -- he is on the St. Louis Walk of Fame -- and listing to jazz musicians brought there by the riverboats. "St. Louis became one of the major jumping off points," he said. "It was a very special place for pretty women, good cooking, good times and booze -- everything that went with the life of a musician.

"... There were good joints to hang out in."

After serving in the Navy, Terry went to New York where he played in the bands of Charlie Barnet, Charlie Ventura and Eddie Vinson before landing with first Basie and then Ellington. Ellington and Louis Armstrong were the two best musicians he ever played with.

Ellington, he said, was creative and learned. His genius, Terry said, was his "utilization of space and time." Armstrong was one of jazz' first innovators and creators of improvisation. "He was just a gifted person," Terry said. "He had a nice big, fat sound and the ability to give vent to his feelings."

Miles Davis said of Terry: "He became my idol on the instrument ... I learned a lot from listening to him play the trumpet."

Terry is credited with reintroducing the mellow sound of the fluegelhorn to jazz. "I always liked that sound," he said. "When I was playing on the trumpet I would put felt over the bell or a broken down raggedy hat hanging over the bell of the horn." He worked with the Selmer company to produce a new fluegelhorn. In 1957, he played it for the first time on an album with Billy Taylor.

Miles Davis and others played a fluegelhorn after that, too, but they used it because they could play higher notes.

"I wouldn't think of putting hot sauce on ice cream," Terry said, laughing.

When "The Tonight Show" moved to Los Angeles, Terry stayed in New York and began concentrating on session work and playing festivals. He also began working as a jazz educator.

Terry is the director of the Clark Terry Great Plains Jazz Camp and an advisor to the National Association of Jazz Educators. He also has written two books about playing jazz.

He doesn't miss the constant touring, telling a story about all the musicians having to get out and push their unheated bus when it quit running.

'A hard life'

"It was a hard life," he said. "But once I got old enough to realize what I had been through, I love every minute of it. It has prepared me to be able to survive."

Making it as a jazz musician takes "stick-to-itiveness," he said. "Put your best foot forward, believe in it and work at it.

"It's like going to the bank and telling the teller, 'I want to draw out $100.' The teller says, 'You've only got $1.31 in the account.'

"You get out what you put in," Terry said.

Though he has devoted much of his time to jazz education during recent years, Terry is still very much a performer. He and drummer Max Roach, another legendary musician, have just released a new CD called "Friendship." Much of it consists of just the two of them playing duets.

Next week, Bernhardt will accompany Terry to Vienna, Austria, and to the Bern International Jazz Festival in Bern, Switzerland, filling in for the jazz master's ailing personal assistant. Bernhardt is taking a camera and tapes. "I'm going to document the whole thing," he said.

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182