From Greene County to Greenwich Village

By ANDREW MCGINN
a.mcginn@beeherald.com

What really sold John Mosca, director of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, on Eric Allen’s pitch to write what would become a four-pound coffee-table book on the history of the Grammy-winning jazz ensemble was the author’s analysis of “Body and Soul,” the ballad that has been a standard ever since Coleman Hawkins’ recording of it in 1939.

Allen’s book, “Body and Soul: The Evolution of a Tenor Saxophone Standard,” was published in 2015.

“A real work of scholarship,” Mosca said. “Right away, I thought, these are serious guys.”

It was only much later that Mosca learned of an unlikely connection between them: Jefferson.

A native New Yorker who’s played trombone in the orchestra since 1975, Mosca is the son-in-law of Jack Oatts, the late Jefferson high school band director immortalized as the “Father of Jazz Education” in Iowa.

Allen, a Chicago-area jazz saxophonist, is an Ogden native who took private lessons from Oatts in Jefferson as a high school student in the late ’80s.

“That’s fantastic it comes full circle,” Mosca said.

Allen’s new book with co-author Dave Lisik, “50 Years at the Village Vanguard: Thad Jones, Mel Lewis and the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra,” is the first comprehensive overview of the innovative ensemble that took a Glenn Miller-sized band and gave it a hip, John Coltrane sound.

“People who’ve read it have described it as exhaustive,” Allen said.

“Not exhausting,” he added with a chuckle.

“I do feel we were the perfect people to write this book,” he said.

On the surface, Jefferson would seemingly be the last place on Earth to have anything to remotely do with the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.

Here’s a band that for 51 years has played every Monday night at the Village Vanguard, that most New York of New York jazz clubs, where Coltrane recorded a landmark live album in 1961 and where the likes of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and Woody Allen once perfected a new kind of cerebral comedy.

By comparison, Greenwich Village could ostensibly be the name of an assisted-living facility in Jefferson.

And yet, Allen and Lisik’s new book will arguably be the first of its kind to garner news coverage in both DownBeat magazine and The Jefferson Herald.

Dick Oatts, a 1971 graduate of Jefferson Community High School, single-handedly bridged the two cultures in the ’70s when, as an aspiring, 24-year-old sax player, he joined what was then known as the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra.

Oatts is today its artistic director and plays lead alto in the orchestra, eventually rechristened the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra after Lewis’ death in 1990.

Lewis was preceded in death by Jones in 1986.

“Everything I dreamt as a kid in Jefferson came true,” Oatts told the Herald in 2015, recalling brushes with such legends as Count Basie, Miles Davis, Charles Mingus and Dave Brubeck.

Brother and trumpeter Jim Oatts, a 1969 Jefferson grad, briefly toured with the band in 1978.

Before long, youngest sister Nancy Oatts, a 1976 Jefferson grad, married Mosca.

For good measure, alto player Billy Drewes is married to a woman from Fort Dodge.

And now Allen — a 1990 graduate of Ogden High School who credits the elder Oatts with turning him on to the likes of Lester Young and Dexter Gordon — provides yet another improbable link between rural Iowa and Lower Manhattan.

It was something of a dream come true for the Oatts family when the entire 16-piece Vanguard Jazz Orchestra traveled to Jefferson in 2015 to play a benefit concert in the middle school gym.

A poster for the Jefferson show is included in Allen’s 328-page book — an inclusion not to be taken for granted considering the band’s history also includes a 1972 tour of the Soviet Union as part of a State Department cultural exchange program.

Allen, whose grandparents lived in Grand Junction, received his introduction to the music of Thad Jones and Mel Lewis through Jack Oatts and the Tuesday afternoon lessons that proved so influential he still remembers Oatts’ address on West Russell Street.

Jack Oatts started Iowa’s first high school jazz band in 1954 while teaching in Earlham, but to ease the minds of community members who presumably might fear their kids would “Take the ‘A’ Train” and then take up heroin, he was artful enough to call it a “stage band.”

Oatts came to Jefferson in 1966 and created a high school “stage band” that’s still the stuff of local legend — a crew of indoctrinated youth who could hold their own with such high-profile guest artists as trumpeter Clark Terry.

Just winning the approval of Jack Oatts meant you were midway to success.

“I knew if I worked hard, I’d have a chance at success as well,” Allen, now 44, said.

Allen would eventually meet his collaborator, Dave Lisik, as graduate students at the University of Northern Iowa.
Allen became just the second person to graduate from UNI with a master’s in jazz pedagogy and has since authored “Success in All Keys,” a series of band method books, in addition to “Body and Soul,” in which he transcribed and analyzed nine versions of the standard beginning with Coleman Hawkins’ landmark version.

Lisik, a native of Canada, is now coordinator of jazz composition at the New Zealand School of Music and co-director of the New Zealand Youth Jazz Orchestra — a role that has led him to cross paths with various members of the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.

After hearing their stories, Lisik was convinced there was a book in there.

“We feel lucky we’re the first ones to climb this mountain,” Allen said.

While not an official band project, Allen said “having the cooperation of the current band was essential.”

Allen’s connection to the Oatts family turned out to be their golden ticket.

“The band didn’t know us,” Allen explained, “and they’re protective, rightfully so, of their legacy.

“Dick (Oatts) sent me home with a tube full of his personal posters. He said, ‘Here, scan these.’ Him trusting me in that way with these priceless items convinced the other band members that if Dick Oatts trusts him, we should, too.”

By all accounts, the finished book — which so far is only available online at thadmelvjobook.com — nails it, with Dick Oatts calling it “a fantastically thorough representation of what the band is about and its complete history.”

“I was so impressed in their dedication and passion for detail,” Oatts said in an email. “I think that shows their love of the music and the guys who love to play it.”

“The book totally represents and reflects the spirit, direction, history and the reason it keeps going,” he continued. “It is about our love for the music. The true reward is not in a trophy or worldwide recognition. It is what it gives back to us by playing and learning from it.”

As Mosca puts it, “I didn’t know they’d unearth so much stuff.”

According to Allen, what the orchestra did was to pioneer a “small group within a big band approach.”

Trumpeter Thad Jones and drummer Mel Lewis, co-founders of the multiracial band, were alums of the Count Basie and Stan Kenton bands, respectively, but allowed their soloists “to stretch out and play much longer solos,” Allen explained.

“That has helped to attract and keep top talent throughout the years,” he said. “Before, someone might sit all night in a big band and only play an eight-bar solo or 16-bar solo.”

Jones and Lewis had also suffered together in Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band in the early ’60s.

Mulligan had impeccable credentials as a member of the Miles Davis nonet that revolutionized jazz between 1949 and 1950, but he was slightly less adventurous as the leader of his own 13-piece band.

“They would either not solo at all in a night or just a little,” Allen said of his musicians, which included Jones and Lewis. “Thad and Mel decided there had to be a better way to do this.”

Then in 1965, Count Basie commissioned Jones to write an entire album’s worth of music.

Basie rejected all of it, deeming it too difficult, and not his band’s style to boot.

Basie, however, at least had the decency to pay Jones for his work and let him keep the nine tunes.

“The fact that Basie let Thad keep those charts was the real impetus (for the orchestra),” Mosca said.

Even after more than 2,609 Monday night gigs at the Village Vanguard since that first one on Feb. 7, 1966, Jones’ arrangements still make up the foundation of the band’s repertoire.

“They never get old,” Mosca said. “It’s hard to date some of them they’re so advanced.”

Jones’ arrangements are indeed technically complicated, Allen said, but enjoyable at the same time.

“It’s hard not to listen to one of his compositions and not feel good,” Allen said.

In a way, the Thad Jones-Jefferson connection began even before Dick Oatts joined his band.

“When I was in high school, we played the music of Thad Jones,” Nancy Oatts said, recalling her dad’s selection of Jones arrangements like “Big Dipper” and “Groove Merchant” for the high school stage band.

Nancy Oatts, who went on to become a graphic designer in New York and later designed the poster for the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra’s 2015 concert in Jefferson, is frankly surprised a book on the band wasn’t already written.

“It needed to be done,” she said.

“It took these Iowa guys to do it,” she said. “We get things done.”

Admittedly, Allen’s book exceeded all expectations.

“You know who I wish could’ve seen this book? My dad,” Nancy Oatts said. “He would’ve been so proud.”