By Erasmus Baxter
Kevin Woods started his jazz education when he was two years old. The current director of Western’s jazz program, Woods grew up with a trumpet player for a father.
“I would listen to him practice and play and get ready for gigs and I would try and figure out what he was doing,” Woods said. “He didn’t really teach me lessons; I never really had lessons until college. So just through hearing him do it, and hearing the music in the house I got influenced.”
He got his first instrument, a bugle, when he was two or three years old. On road trips he would use a comb and a bubble gum wrapper to kazoo along to Louis Armstrong solos.
“I could play all the solos,” he said. “Just basically singing them, humming them, was my initial training in jazz before I even knew what I was doing. I was emulating and copying what I was hearing. I had very tolerant parents.”
Woods thinks this self-taught style helped him gain a better understanding of jazz, an art form known for improvisation.
“I came up the way most of the jazz greats did,” he said. “Where there wasn’t a bunch of written music and it was more of an oral tradition. I would love to have all my students train their ears first and then match it with theory and all the academic side of music. Once you learn the academic side you can rely on that too much and not have good or trained ears.”
He notices that it is easier now to listen to a wide variety of music, instead of being limited by what records or cassettes are available.
“When I was coming up I used to go to a music store and I’d buy whatever jazz album they had that a cover that I thought looked interesting.”
Now with so much music available it is harder to focus in on one piece of music.
“I skip around, which I think is detrimental to the deep learning process that it takes to begin mastering an art form,” Woods said.
However, he does think that the internet has made it easier for people to pursue music and to find people to play it with than when he was growing up.
“There weren’t really, in Walla Walla and Spokane, any young people who were interested in the only music I knew existed really, which was classical and jazz music,” he said.
Perhaps because of this, Woods has adopted teaching as way of sharing what he loves.
“I think if you really love something you’re going to end up teaching it, because you want to pass on that tradition and your experience and knowledge,” he said. “[It’s] similar to performing, you’re sharing something that’s a part of yourself.”
He first started teaching music his freshman year of college, and found he liked it. Later he went on to teach English at a university in Korea.
“There are a lot similar things to teaching somebody who is learning ESL [English as a Second Language] as there is to teaching someone who is learning JSL — jazz as a second language,” Woods said. “I think was able to be somewhat successful as an ESL teacher because I had previous experience teaching a language, or a vernacular of a language through music.”
After graduating from Western in 2005, Woods taught as graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder and worked as an adjunct instructor at Western in 2008 and 2009 while also running the Whatcom County Community College jazz program at the same time.
When the economy crashed he was forced to go out on tour and perform across the country. After having toured across the country, and briefly in Europe, Woods found that his real passion was teaching.
“It seems glamorous, [but touring is] really hard,” he said. “The older you get the harder it is on you. Trying to eat healthy on the road, trying to exercise and stay in shape when you’re in a car or van or bus for 12 hours. It wipes you.”
Now, in his second year as the director of Western’s jazz program, Woods says he’s hoping to build a great jazz program and invites people to come check out a performance.
“We do a lot of performances,” he said. “A lot of off-campus performances. The community in general, for the size of Bellingham, has a vibrant live music scene which everybody knows about, but some of that is jazz.”
This winter they are collaborating with Western’s orchestra for a production of The Nutcracker. They will take turns playing the original arrangement and Duke Ellington’s arrangement. It starts December 2, in the Performing Arts Center and Wood’s hopes people will check it out.
