Harwood Union is renowned for its award-winning jazz program and the teacher behind this well-deserved reputation, Bruce Sklar, is retiring at the end of this year. Sklar agreed to an interview with The Valley Reporter ahead of a final school jazz night with friends, peers and students on February 9.
VR: How many years have you been at Harwood?
BS: I started working full time in 1999. But I’ve been doing jazz on some level since 1994, or something like that. Chris Rivers heard about me from a student of his who was also a student of mine. Chris brought me in and started making a jazz band. At that time, it was seventh to twelfth grade. So the first major change was to start a jazz band in middle school as well, which was crazy. I was not trained as a teacher; I kind of figured it out as I went along.
VR: Tell me about your arrival in Vermont and your educational background.
BS: I went to UMass Amherst and was the first person to get a performance jazz degree from UMass Amherst. They didn’t really have a jazz program you could specialize in until sometime after I started. I kind of bounced between a few schools, but I started at UMass. But I had to enroll in the classical major, because when I was auditioning, the program hadn’t started yet. I started school in the fall of 1974.
I had always come to Vermont. I’m from Newton. I have good friends who had ski houses in the Mad River Valley and had been coming and doing 4th of July in Warren since 1974. I ended up marrying someone from The Valley, bought a house in Moretown and raised my family there. I came to join the Pure Pressure group. That’s why I moved to Vermont. I also gave private lessons. I had been involved with Harwood for about, I guess, five or six years when Chris said, and also the manager said, they were probably going to create a position for me.
VR: And tell me how you became a musical child?
SB: Music held great value in my family. There was my grandmother’s cousin, Lillian Rock, who was a major star in the 1930s and 1940s. There was always the family idea that we have that as a value in the family. The idea of jazz theory appealed to me when I was about 12 years old. I went down to the Newton Center and there was a music store called Kota Audio. It was a pretty progressive place in many ways. And met the teacher, whose name was Gene Ashton, now known as Cooper Moore, one of the pioneers of the jazz world. He taught me from when I was 13 to 17 when he finally moved to New York. He gave me everything and, you know, at an age where everything was so visceral more than intellectual in some ways, even if that was also about that. So that’s what got me into it.
VR: You have really developed an incredible program here. He has an incredible reputation throughout the state and beyond. How did it happen? Is it the students? Was it the combination? Was it the community support? Tell me a bit about how the thing became the thing.
SB: All the foregoing. I had a vision of what he wanted to see happen there. He arrived as a young teacher, just after his master’s degree in teaching, and really set things up. He saw that jazz was part of the curriculum he wanted to have at Harwood. He could see that I was actually good in front of a group of kids that I knew how to do, even though I had never had an internship in any way about teaching students.
VR: Did you invent it as you went along?
SB: Improvisation is a life skill. It’s more than how you approach music; it’s, can you think on your feet, can you read people, read what they need, and all those things that I’m able to do quite easily. And it was recognized. When I was offered the job it was part time the first year, but then they made it full time. I also have an expertise in music technology, and Chris and I started to figure out how to share the kids because the jazz band and the band always met at the same time. At the time, we had a lot more horn players. We had group A and group B, both were about normal size, large groups. About five, six years later, I also started doing rehearsals on Monday nights. It was an extracurricular. We just did. And we had the investment of the kids that they would show on Monday night for a few hours and rehearse. So a lot of the success had to do with how Chris and I managed to cooperate and share the same kids. They had this pretty intense experience in terms of the depth of what they were receiving. Really, the basis of it all is that we were able to work cooperatively and have as many opportunities for the kids to play as possible. And certainly, the community support has been phenomenal throughout.
VR: Some of your students are very good friends of mine. I found myself excited about jazz because of the extreme passion you engendered in those kids. It’s palpable. How did you do that? You really brought jazz to life, not only for the kids, but also for their families and their community.
SB: There’s a whole bunch of things that happened, like right from the start, when I started. First of all, they had a teacher, Matt Clancy, who was very into jazz. I received children who were already exposed to the masters, but there was a culture that settled in very quickly, because we had a group of children who were already playing very well, everyone could hear it. So I was able to start at a high level right away and really challenge them. It’s just the luck of the draw. I was there I was able to serve them they were there they could fully take what I gave them and run with it as hard as they could so the whole program benefited because a lot of other children were getting more motivated than they might otherwise have been.
VR: You’ve mentored incredible musicians and then there are a lot of kids who probably didn’t know fame and fortune. There are so many kids for whom the structure of Harwood’s music program has really framed and informed their lives and they’re still playing, even though they’ve gone on to do something completely different. There is a value to the discipline of being a musician. Talk about it a bit.
SB: I met a former student a few years ago at Waterbury who is now a lawyer. He was telling me something he had found legally, that no one had thought of that way before. It synthesized in his head just now. He has the ability to bring these ideas together and synthesize something. You know, what is it? It’s improvisation. It is a human ability. We happen to apply it to jazz, but it’s broader than that. There are many other kids who have done amazing things, engineering, rocket scientist, PhDs and there are many more. It amazes me that people have that kind of ability and that kind of focus. But they were all in on it and just had this natural propensity to be able to improvise.
VR: Yes, it’s interesting. People tend to think of, for example, pure academics as die-hard academics. And I think there’s often a missing link between the value of, as you say, being able to improvise, but being able to think in three dimensions. It’s a different way of thinking in three dimensions.
BS: Yes, yes, absolutely. I mean, a lot of it comes from a very intellectual standpoint as you sit down to figure this stuff out. But when you play with a band of people, that’s what I talk about with all my bands, is that synchronization, rhythmic synchronization, that’s that thing that human beings can do. And there’s been a lot of research under the hood by scientists on this for a long, long time and putting people in the MRI machines and measuring their brains when they sing, alone or with other people and watching what is happening. But certainly when synchronization occurs, when a group is touched, something seems different. It’s really hard to explain what it is, but once it happens, it’s like, well, my teacher called it going to the other side. And it’s as if something took over. But when you improvise and things are really in rhythm, other things take over. It’s the practice. It is the practice of life in general. I mean, you do enough of it, and you start to see it start to boil and boil in other ways in your life, or so I’ve noticed.
VR: One last jazz night at the Harwood Auditorium on February 9 at 7 p.m., what should people expect?
SB: at some point after being hired I decided we needed a jazz night here. After that, we have them from time to time. It will be my last. I sent the message to everyone, at least on my Facebook page, that it could be a crazy night, and some of them have taken the ball and they’re up to something with oldies. It could be wild.