Metro Pulse/Gamut/Jazz

For jazz neophytes, there's no better first acquaintance than through trumpeter Miles Davis' classic 1959 release, Kind of Blue. Featuring seven of the genre's most storied performers—including Davis himself as well as saxophonists John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderly—the record saw bandleader Davis move away from chordally complex bebop and into more melodically focused modal jazz.

"It's one of those records anyone can appreciate," says Improvisations' Tuesday night host Ashley Capps. "It can be listened to on a superficial level, or it can take you places. And it introduces you to some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time; you can spiral out from there."

Capps often recommends that new listeners begin with other recordings possessed of similarly broad appeal. His other suggestions include Davis' orchestral jazz masterpiece, Sketches of Spain (1959), with conductor Gil Evans, and Duke Ellington's 1957 Ellington Indigos, labeled by one critic "the greatest make-out record of all time."

Thursday host Randy Fishman, whose own predilections run toward '40s and '50s vocal and bebop jazz, likewise recommends Ellington's Side by Side, with saxophonist Johnny Hodges, and another '59 Davis landmark, 'Round About Midnight, a record notable for its compositional brilliance as well as for stand-out performances by Davis and Coltrane.

Friday night's Cy Anders, though an aficionado of small-ensemble jazz of the bebop era, nonetheless includes one of Ellington's big band recordings, Live at Newport 1958, in his catalog of essential listening.

Improvisations hosts John Habel (Monday) and Paul Parris (Wednesday) are more daring in their suggestions for novice listeners. Having a keen appreciation for jazz influenced by so-called folk and world musics, Habel's less conventional selections include Water from an Ancient Well, an early '90s recording by South African pianist/composer/vocalist Abdullah Ibrahim, and Around Small Fairy Tales from Italian reed player Gianluigi Trovesi. Renowned for fusing Italian folk melodies and American jazz song forms, Trovesi is backed by a chamber orchestra.

Parris, who favors a brand of more compositionally sophisticated European jazz, recommends Crescent, one of Coltrane's later and less traditional recordings, as well as an obscure release by German trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff, Now Jazz Ramwong.

"That (Ramwong) is one of my desert island records," Parris says. "The playing on it is superb, and it sounds wholly original, like the musicians weren't influenced by anybody else. It was recorded in 1965, but it still sounds fresh today. I have to resist the temptation to play it on Improvisations every week."

—M.G.

Music radio tailored to cultivate aficionados

by Mike Gibson

In the 1970s, when the University of Tennessee had but one radio station with virtually no student-oriented programming, a handful of curious undergraduates began lobbying for airtime on the college's FM 91.9-WUOT.

With expansive ears and even more expansive record collections, they targeted student listeners with new programs like the Unradio Show, a late-night forum for music—mostly rock—little-heard on mainstream outlets.

A few of them would soon venture outside rock's restricting perimeter. There had been previous efforts to bring jazz programming to WUOT, to be sure, and the station had accumulated an impressive library of jazz recordings. So student deejays like Ashley Capps, a philosophy and religious studies major from Knoxville, and Cy Anders, a tri-cities native who grew up on '60s rock 'n' roll, availed themselves of the opportunity to broaden their own listening habits to include the likes of Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, and to share the music of those artists with audiences even as they were discovering it themselves.

"We weren't experts, by any means—we just had a common interest in music," says Capps, now a regional music promoter as head of Knoxville's A.C. Entertainment. "We were indulged, in that we got to learn about jazz on the air."

The result was a constancy of jazz programming that in the mid-1980s would take the permanent form of Improvisations, a 90-minute show devoted wholly to jazz and its permutations. Now one of the longest-running programs on local airwaves, the show airs Monday through Friday on WUOT from 6:30 to 8 p.m.

"Jazz has always been the black sheep of fine-arts radio," Capps explains. "The classical contingent would like to see public stations program classical music only; some of them don't even think jazz is music, or whatever.

"Other people would like to see all NPR-type programming and don't want music at all. It's almost like a culture war. There was a time in the '80s when the powers-that-be here wanted to get rid of all jazz, which really upset us. Fortunately, it upset some of the audience, too."

Besides Capps, who can be heard every Tuesday night, Improvisations' hosts include John Habel (Monday), Paul Parris (Wednesday), Randy Fishman (Thursday), and Anders (Friday.)

Capps is the only one of the group whose career is music-related. Habel is a Western Carolina University history professor, Anders is president of the Ober Gatlinburg ski resort, while Parris (a systems manager) and Fishman (a scientist) work in Oak Ridge.

What unites them is their love for what is arguably this country's only indigenous fine art, a musical form rife with colorful tradition and capable of evincing both heart-rending beauty and mind-boggling complexity.

"What's the appeal of jazz? If I could put that into words, I could triple listenership overnight," says Anders with a chuckle. "For myself, I like that jazz players are able to express emotion and communicate so much, even through a popular song with lyrics."

"I like the risk-taking, the adventure part of jazz," Parris says. "It's very open-ended, and it's never played the same way twice. It's a very intriguing way of making music. It breaks boundaries, but in a different way than, for instance, punk rock."

One of the drawbacks of having five diversely-employed hosts is that Improvisations is rarely broadcast live in the studio, an unfortunate concession that limits the direct interaction of listeners and deejays.

"We all have fairly crazy schedules, so most of the shows have to be pre-recorded," says Capps. The day he speaks to a reporter is a case in point: it's Sunday, on the cusp of nightfall, and he has a roughly four-hour time window between AC projects and personal obligations to record an upcoming segment at the WUOT studio on an upper floor of the university's College of Communications on Circle Park Drive. When the show airs two days hence, he won't be in town to hear it.

"The Internet and email have opened things up a little more, and I'm always pleasantly surprised by the feedback I get. I hear from people pretty regularly, several times a week, people wanting to know more about the music they heard. And really, that's the reason I do this."

Most of the Improvisations deejays now rely on their own CD collections for material, Capps says. And though they're apt to play music from across the entire spectrum of jazz on any given program, each host has his own area of special interest.

"If you listen to all five of us, you're going to get a nice portrait of the breadth and depth of what jazz is all about," Capps says. "My interests are constantly changing, but right now they have a decidedly modernist slant. The essence of jazz is the here-and-now."

His song selections on this night are reflective of those predilections. He starts the evening with "Crystal," a cut off a new album from saxophone player Dave Murray, a mid-tempo Latin big-band number that draws impetus from a swaggering baritone sax line. He follows that with recent work from sax legend Wayne Shorter ("Alegria"), a standard from vocalist Diana Krall, and finally "Dorothy's Love Letter," a lovely ballad written and performed by pianist/composer/UT music professor Donald Brown.

"Donald has recorded an extraordinary body of work the last few years," Capps says of the pianist, who is an internationally-recognized figure in jazz circles. "It's amazing to me that he doesn't have greater appreciation in the town he lives in."

Having become enamored of the music, jazz fans are often further consumed by its study. Capps notes that serious aficionados draw no small pleasure in unraveling jazz history, tracing the cross-pollinations of styles and artists through decades of evolution.

"When I first started, I went through the WUOT library and systematically educated myself," Anders says. "I worked through the entire library, taking home one or two albums from each artist. I wasn't a jazz buff when I grew up, but I was when I left here."

"I always want to know where things come from," Capps says. "When I hear 'Girl from Ipanema' (the bossa nova classic popularized by tenor saxophonist and bandleader Stan Getz in 1963), I want to know who wrote it, who sang on it, who played every instrument.

"The best jazz at any point in history was music that embodied that moment in time, that captured the time it was created. There's a joy in that discovery. Louis Armstrong in the 1920s sounded very different from Fats Waller and Duke Ellington in the '30s, or Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker in the '40s. When you listen to those artists today, the music has the weight of all this tradition. But back then it was outrageous. It was cutting-edge."

Capps' WUOT apprenticeship would eventually influence his career as a concert promoter. Though jazz concerts are frequently unprofitable, Capps has invested years of time, effort, and resources into bringing legendary musicians to Knoxville—Herbie Hancock (pianist), Wynton Marsalis (trumpeter), Tony Williams (drummer) and Mal Waldron (pianist), to name but a few.

"My concert promotions started out with a lot of jazz, which from a business standpoint, is completely insane," Capps says. "But I was doing it for fun, and I've now met a lot of the artists I've loved and admired over the years. I've had more fun with jazz artists than any of the others I've worked with."

He has fond memories of sipping Dom Perignon with Hancock and Shorter backstage at the Tennessee Theatre ("Since I was paying for it, I was delighted to get to drink some of it," he chuckles), of taking avant-garde saxophonist John Zorn out for fried chicken livers and barbecue upon his arrival in Knoxville, of watching Marsalis linger for nearly three hours after a show to give impromptu private lessons to local youngsters who arrived at his concert with horns in tow.

"It was 1 a.m., and the custodial staff was freaking out," Capps remembers of the concert at the UT Music Hall. "There was one kid who got left out, so Wynton made a raincheck with him. They apparently stayed in touch. Two years later he played another show here, met up with the kid afterwards and gave him a follow-up lesson. That was inspirational."

Though each Improvisations segment features a rich variety of jazz performers, the show isn't programmed solely for devotees. Says Habel, "For all five of us, one goal is to give our listeners a taste of the wonderful music that is ignored by the major record companies and the commercial media."

Capps echoes that sentiment, adding that he strives to broaden his audience, even as he indulges his own eclectic tastes.

"I used to lay it out more, play 30- or 40-minute cuts of intense sax soloing," he says. "Now I shy away from that. I want people to listen; I don't want to separate the hardcore fans from the new listeners. If they hear something they can relate to first, and they're that interested, they'll get there."