UMass Music Department / Home / Winter Table of Contents
UMass Music Department / Home / Winter Table of Contents
HE ANNUAL HOLIDAY PARTY of the New York City chapter of the Duke Ellington Society is a thoroughly Manhattan affair. There is wine, and there are mussels on the half-shell, and cheeses for every palate, and as the crowd of two hundred-plus shuffles for seats in the snug basement of St. Peter's Church on East 54th Street, the banter is of the Warhol show at the Whitney, Christmas bargains at Macy's, and, with Duke's surviving sister Ruth moving resplendently through the audience, the mythic moments of jazz.
With his beautiful unseeing eyes peering out from under the brim of his cap, jazz progenitor Benny Waters sits at the front of the room. For this man who has shared the stage with such late jazz giants as Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges and Doc Cheatham, there will be no showy entrance tonight. Blowing a few riffs on the alto sax nestled under his arm, he waits for the members of his quartet to settle into their places. Behind him and to his left is drummer Vinnie Johnson, a man whose black skin will gleam with a passionate sweat once the music begins. At his side, Cyrus Chestnut, a spiffy, rotund, endearing man whose tapered hands find their heaven on the keyboard, is surrounded by admirers.
"Genevieve?" Benny Waters is listening for the last member of tonight's foursome, and instantly she is there, a vision in black velvet, stepping out from behind the big bass viol.
"Right here, Benny," replies Genevieve Rose, coming up close to his ear.
"Do you know what the chord progression is for `Prelude to a Kiss'"?
"I might have it in a book here..." She slides a thick volume of standards off the baby grand and in a moment is back with the answer. "At the beginning it's D9, G9, C7, F major seven" Waters has lifted the mouthpiece and is following along "then the bridge is two beats of E major seven, then C sharp minor seven, F sharp minor 7 flat 5..."
To the non-musician it's all Greek, the theoretical cipher that undergirds the songs our hearts know so well. To those who play, it's the universal language that bonds a UMass student from Feeding Hills who was born in 1976, to a man who was born in Brighton, Maryland, in 1902, before jazz itself was born. Since last fall, Rose, a third-year jazz performance and music education major, has been appearing at gigs with Waters, who is on the solo circuit after a lifetime of backing up the big names in swing and Dixieland.
Genevieve Rose '99 in concert with jazz great Benny Waters.
Their conference is interrupted by a fan who approaches Waters with an outstretched hand. Perhaps in his enthusiasm the man has forgotten that Waters had become sightless since cataract problems brought him back to the U.S. after forty years as an expatriate in the European music scene. Rose is not so lost in the music that she doesn't notice Waters' hand groping the air to return the greeting. Very gently, she guides his hand into that of his well-wisher.
Extra chairs have to be brought in from far closets of the church, for now the audience has swelled out to the walls and is jostling for room on the carpet in front, practically at the musicians' feet. Waters lifts a signal finger, gives a quick "1-2-3-4," and off they go, on a tour of Ellington's musical landscape. From "Solitude" to "Take the A Train" to "Perdido," the musicians pull out tune after tune, alternately working together and tossing each other solos like so many frisbees. Rose, who is seven sylph-like inches shorter than the six-foot bass she cradles in her left arm, juts her upper body out into the sound as if to wet her head in it. A black patent leather toe taps out the beat, hair swings as she dips and nods to the rhythm. Her left hand skates over the long neck of her instrument, while her right plucks out the low notes that ground the melody.
Like it or not, it is a fact that many women in the performance arts get their breaks by looking good. With the face of a seraph in a fresco, Genevieve Rose could do that. But her first break came from a blind man who has never seen the muscles working under the skin of her long forearm, or how her fabulous smile, with its big square teeth, lights up a stage. It was her sound alone that made Benny Waters want to hear more, the day she participated in a jazz workshop he led after a Northampton concert called "Outrageous Octogenarians." And it's her playing that got her invited to accompany Waters a man who, his manager says, has made "many professional bass players pretty unhappy with his demands" at a CD release party at Sweet Basil's in the city in November, and again at the annual conference of the International Association of Jazz Educators in January.
Rose was hardly a neophyte when she signed up to take that workshop with Waters last year. Even before she came to UMass, she was a twenty-time recipient of most-valuable-player awards at high-school music festivals in New England and Canada. She was the youngest person ever to hold a faculty position in the Jazz in July program at UMass. She had accompanied pros at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton and at StageWest in Springfield. She had entertained Vice President Al Gore at a Democratic fundraiser, where, she laughingly remembers, Secret Service men all but dismantled her instrument in their routine search for contraband.
So when Benny Waters asked his manager, Russ Dantzler, who was making that great sound in his workshop, Dantzler wasted no time booking Genevieve Rose for several engagements as a "road test," playing with Claude "Fiddler" Williams, the first jazz guitarist in the Count Basie Orchestra.
"She held up beautifully," says Dantzler, adding that Rose was just the person he had been seeking for some time someone mature enough to have some polish, but young enough to perk up the school children to whom he brings "walking history books" of music through his agency, Hot Jazz. Though jazz is a relatively new and forever expanding musical form, its aging stars don't always shine brightly enough to hold the attention of youngsters, he said. With Rose on the school tours, the energy level jumps.
"She's an unusual character by being a young, white female playing the bass," says Dantzler. "All of a sudden you've crossed all these barriers. Now that disinterested young woman in the back of the classroom is sitting up asking questions."
If choosing an instrument were based solely on portability, Rose would probably have gone for something less cumbersome that the stand-up bass, which is a bit like lugging around a small skiff. In fact, for many years, starting when she was eight, it was the more toteable classical guitar that Rose played. That formal training gave her a solid foundation, but her improvisational nature yearned for a freer way to express itself. One day she literally opened the door on her answer: she discovered a stand-up bass in a closet of the music room at Agawam Junior High. Something inside flashed yes, and she asked the teacher if she could take it home and play around with it on her own. The infatuation with the instrument turned into a love affair, though Rose is quick to point out that her marriage is with jazz the medium. "I just happen to be fascinated by the bass," she says.
Genevieve Rose admits that the bigger the audience, the more at ease she is. Reached at home in Northampton, where she now lives with her artist mother, Candis, she seemed more unnerved by a single interviewer's questions than by an audience of music aficionados. As are many artists, she is more articulate in the practice of her art than in her attempts to explain it. With engagements lined up through the year including Claude Williams' ninetieth birthday this month and a European tour with Tradewinds, the UMass jazz ensemble, this summer she will have plenty of opportunity to show, if not tell, a smitten public how a twenty-one-year-old can shine like someone who's inhabited smoky, swinging music halls for several lifetimes.
