Want to learn more about improvisational jazz – such as what the genre even is? If so, spend today with vibraphonist Gary Burton.
The master of the genre will lecture in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, but some of you might be wondering what exactly the vibraphone is. While the instrument appears to be a xylophone on steroids, there are major differences between the two – for example, the bars on the vibraphone are metal while those on the xylophone are wood. The result: an entirely different sound.
Chuck Redd, a university lecturer on jazz percussion, is a fellow vibraphonist who praised Burton’s talent level.
“He’s in a class of rare virtuosos that you don’t find very often,” Redd said. “He’s amazing, absolutely amazing.”
Burton grew up in a musical family, and was urged by his parents to take music lessons, he said. At age six, he began to take lessons on the vibraphone after watching and listening to his sister practice on the piano. Slightly more than a decade later, success appeared in the form of Burton’s first record contract in 1960 at age 17.
Since then, Burton has been nominated for 12 Grammy Awards and has won five, the most recent for 2000’s Like Minds in the Best Jazz Instrumental Performance. The album was recorded with Pat Metheny, Roy Haynes, Dave Holland and Chick Corea, the latter whom is his current touring partner. The pair played a sold-out show at CSPAC yesterday.
But playing jazz music isn’t the only part of the craft that Burton enjoys.
“I spent a lot of years in music education,” he said. “I was a professor at Berklee College [of Music] and was ultimately the Chief Executive Officer of the school for the last decade that I was there. I’ve been in music education for 33 years until I finally retired from that four years ago.”
Because of his years of experience, he is often offered opportunities to do workshops when he plays shows on college campuses, Burton said. He said the music students who attend his lectures frequently ask him about improv and its techniques.
“Trying to explain [and] break down the process of what you do mentally when you improvise and how to get better at it, how to practice and develop these particular skills as a musician,” he said. “We learn how to play music in written form, but we don’t learn how to do it spontaneously.”
He explains the process in a way most college students would understand – by relating it to taking a class.
“It’s like learning English only in reading and writing, and never learning to have a conversation on the spur of the moment with the guy next to you,” Burton said. “That’s what improvisation is like. You use the same rules of language, the same grammar and vocabulary, but you do it spontaneously without pausing to construct the sentences word by word. You just picture what you want to say and the sentences kinda come popping out of your mouth.”
Burton will lecture in the Joseph and Alma Gildenhorn Recital Hall in CSPAC from 10 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. today.
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