Jazzschool founder and Director
Susan Muscarella.
July 2004
All That Jazz
Susan Muscarella’s Vision Created an East Bay Jazz Revival
by Suzanne Saucy
The stairway to the basement of the old Kress Building on Addison Street in downtown Berkeley leads to an underground scene crackling with music and intensity — a spawning ground for jazz performers and educators. The once 7,500-square-foot shoebox with concrete floors has been transformed into a beautiful performance facility that is a magnet for aficionados and students. It’s the Jazzschool, founded by Oakland born, UC Berkeley graduate, Susan Muscarella, who has designed a program she describes as “one-stop shopping” for jazz.
Weekdays, you’ll find her teaching jazz piano and the rudiments of improvisation in one of the 12 studios that lead off the main hallway. No two practice rooms are the same size, shape, or color. There are few, if any, 90-degree angles between walls. The architecture reflects the very nature of jazz with its reliance on rhythm and spontaneity. And it all seems to fit.
“Jazz is in the moment because of the idea of improvisation,” says Muscarella. “It is like life. Unless you are in the moment, you are not fully experiencing what’s happening around you. We often listen to music with our minds on something else. When jazz musicians improvise, they’re in a place where there is nothing else but that moment, playing one note and then the next note and the next. That’s the highest point, when there is nothing else but you and the music you’re creating.”
Today, a 15-year-old student listens to Kenny Barron’s There is No Greater Love recorded in the early ’80s and then begins playing along with him in unison — music that Muscarella has meticulously transcribed, imitating Barron’s phrasing in one of the longest solos in jazz history. “There is very little written music when it comes to improvised solos,” she notes. “To better understand a particular artist, a jazz musician will capture a snapshot of their live performance by transcribing an improvised solo and then analyzing all of the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic material in it — in this way, you are looking into someone’s musical mind to capture the elastic, organic, and very human nature of jazz.”
Piano Prodigy
Muscarella, who was recently inducted into the Alameda County Women’s Hall of Fame, began piano lessons at 8, improvising right off the bat, even as she studied the classics. At 14, she remembers connecting to Ramsey Lewis on AM radio playing In Crowd. “When I was 14,” she recalls, “I knew music was the most important part of my life, and I set out on an exciting journey to become a professional jazz pianist and composer.” At that time, she met Wilbert Barranco, a jazz artist who played at Berkeley’s Claremont Hotel. Her Saturday lessons with Barranco became the focal point of her life for almost two years. The 40-year-old mentor inspired her to make a serious musical commitment to practicing 4-6 hours a day.
As she approached college, Muscarella returned to her classical music studies. She became fascinated with 20th century modernists like Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Weber and their explorations of 12-tone composition. Then, in the early 1970s, she worked as musical director of a dance theater while pursuing a composition major at the University of California, Berkeley. Her talent was immediately recognized, and this led to her appointment, in 1975, as Associate Director of the UC Berkeley Jazz Ensembles.
All the while, she continued to grow as a jazz piano virtuoso, performing locally and recording original compositions on her own record label. From 1984-1989, she served as director of the UC Berkeley Jazz Ensembles, mentoring numerous students who went on to become top jazz performers. Her protégés from this period include New York composer/ pianist Peter Zak, bassist Peter Washington, and keyboardist Rose Ann De Malanta, aka R.A.D., who now performs with Prince.
Birth of a Vision
After her 5-year tenure at UC Berkeley, she decided to return to performing and private teaching. In 1996, during a world tour with trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, Muscarella found herself at a crossroads. Scribbling in a notebook on a bus across Japan, she began envisioning a new model for jazz education in the Bay Area. A year later, she put her life savings into an historic two-story Victorian building on Shattuck Avenue in Downtown Berkeley and opened the Jazzschool with 130 students. Sharing space with Dorothee Mitrani-Bell’s popular La Note restaurant, the school quickly outgrew its original home. Five years later, Muscarella was able to find and design the Jazzschool’s new home, which opened on Addison Street in 2002.
The school’s centerpiece is a small, trapezoidal performance hall with a same-level stage for musicians. Round cherry cabaret tables and chairs are scattered across the wooden floors, and the facing wall bears a 10 x 20 foot metal sculpture of jazz great Charlie Parker’s classic composition, Yardbird Suite. Muscarella chose this canonical work (inspired by Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite) for its compositional integrity and, even more so, for its rhythmic variety. The piece’s notation served as a perfect fundraising motif: the longer the note, the bigger the donor. Nearly every note transcribed on the wall bears the name of a financial donor who contributed to the Jazzschool’s transition into the new building. The whole note in the center of the sculpture carries the name of “Jazzschool Angel” Vaughan Johnson. Muscarella believes it’s important for donors’ support to be visible “since they are so instrumental to the success of this project.” (The school switched to nonprofit status only about a year-and-a-half ago, so its initial donors were philanthropists of the heart who received no tax deduction for their contributions.)
On a typical day, Muscarella balances administrative tasks with a five-hour schedule of private instruction. Mornings find her working on a course catalogue that has grown to over 60 pages each quarter and includes more than 120 artist-educators. She books and produces performing artists for a weekly concert series and supervises a part-time administrative and production staff of 20 as well as a corps of interns and community volunteers. This “one-stop jazz shop” now includes from 85-95 classes a week, jammed-packed rehearsal spaces, a book and CD store, photography gallery, performance hall, and The Jazzcaffe, owned and operated by Kristine Seinsch.
Muscarella knows most of the students on a first-name basis, and her warmth is felt throughout the school. She auditions every student who participates in the 40 performance ensembles. The quarterly student performances showcase a vibrant musical community coming together to experience the joy of self-expression and the celebration of accomplishment. Sixteen-year old Julian Pollack started studying at the Jazzschool at age ten. “Susan made it so I could understand jazz,” he says, “not just the intellectual side, but the emotional aspects, too. She knows how to get a beginner up to a place where he’s expressing himself.”
Jazz Revival
The Jazzschool has helped establish the East Bay as a blue-note Mecca. You can hear jazz performed afternoons at The Pizza Collective on Shattuck in Gourmet Ghetto; at the Albatross Pub on San Pablo; in concert-hall settings at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall; across the street from the school at Downtown; and, of course, at Yoshi’s in Oakland’s Jack London Square, which nightly features world-class jazz artists and ensembles. Piano faculty member Mark Levine praises the school as the “jewel in crown” of the Berkeley Downtown Arts District. Its diverse activities have made it a community cultural center as well: Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates and Assemblywoman Loni Hancock are lunchtime regulars at the Jazzcaffe.
Muscarella traces the Bay Area’s current jazz renaissance to Berkeley High School teacher Phil Hardyman. She named the Jazzschool’s performance hall for this pioneer jazz educator who, in the ’70s, lit a fire under many students who went on to become today’s headliners — among them saxophonists Joshua Redmond and Dave Ellis.
She laments the loss of music education in elementary and middle schools due to budget cuts: “To see that go is a shame. Music contributes so much to students’ intellectual growth, mental health, and creativity.... One project that I have always wanted to design is where advanced high school jazz workshop students serve as mentors to Berkeley High School lab band members or in one of the middle schools. It is sort of the big sister/big brother idea.”
Muscarella has not always been as enthusiastic about pursuing a life in jazz. “There was a time,” she says, “when the music was associated with late nights, drugs, and smoke-filled bars. That’s changed. Today, young musicians are more health conscious. They go to juice bars and practice yoga. And the venues are changing as well. There are more festivals up and running, and performances are just as likely to be found in a large concert hall as they are in a traditional small club. Also, in the early ’70s when I was a student, jazz education was all but absent from most school curricula. Now you seldom find a university that doesn’t offer some jazz courses.” Muscarella feels that jazz is flourishing. “Although some popular music may be very good, jazz satisfies those who are searching for music that challenges the mind and nourishes the spirit.”
As we finish our tour of the school, I gaze through a classroom window to watch a Brazilian jazz class. When the lesson is over, everyone slowly files out, and Susan introduces me to Vaughan Johnson, “The Jazzschool Angel.” He tells me how he discovered the school and became a student there. “It came at the right time. I was 55 and considering retirement from my general surgery practice at Kaiser. This community presented me with a wondrous opportunity to put some time into my passion, playing flute and drums. I was taking 6 or 7 classes a week. The school needed money to keep it going, and I was able to give back when the need was greatest. It just worked out that I could do it.”
Johnson’s gift made Muscarella’s vision possible: a school devoted to the study and performance of jazz in all its guises, whether to African or Brazilian roots, whether the style and groove is rock, bebop, ballads, or blues. Above all, it’s a school devoted to creativity, integrity, and artistic growth where students of all ages and diverse talents can celebrate all that jazz.
Suzanne Saucy works as a writer and Business Manager for CG. She lives in Berkeley with her son, an aspiring jazz musician.
The legendary Heath Brothers will perform at a benefit concert for the Jazzschool on July 23 at Coventry Grove in Kensingon. For more info, call (510) 845 5373.
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