My Integrated Life V
Welcome to the rest of your life...
Dartanyan Brown is an Iowa musician, journalist and educator with a 40-year career in the arts. He is an inductee into the Iowa Blues, and Rock ‘n Roll Halls Of Fame. Dartanyan and his late father Ellsworth Brown are both inductees of the Iowa Jazz Hall of Fame. He lives in Des Moines, Iowa with Visual Artist Paula Egan.
Dartanyan Brown began telling his remarkable story in Volume V, Issue 1 of Rootstalk. A native Iowan, born at nearly the exact middle of the 20th Century, he has been front-and-center for many of American culture’s most defining struggles, particularly the Civil Rights movement and the advent of revolutions in music and technology. Where many people content themselves with one career, Brown has had at least four: in journalism, in musical performance, in the tech sector and in education.
In the first excerpt of his story, Brown told of his musician parents, his early years as a journalist with the Des Moines Register, and his adventures in the burgeoning musical—and cultural—scenes of the 60s and 70s, when he began playing Rock-n-Roll, blues and jazz with various Midwestern bands. In the spring of 1973, he hit the big time when he was called to join Chase, the jazz-fusion band fronted by seminal trumpet player Bill Chase.
In the story’s second excerpt, Brown described the dramatic arc of his personal history, taking him from Des Moines to Chicago, and then into a grueling schedule of gigs and recording sessions which would last for a single whirlwind year, ending when Bill Chase and two of Brown’s other band-mates died in a plane crash on their way to a concert date in Minnesota. While that was the end of Brown’s adventure in the front ranks of the 70s jazz-fusion scene, it was far from the end of his journey. In typical fashion, he picked up the pieces, returning to Des Moines to begin an entirely new adventure as societal changes reshaped America’s cultural landscape yet again.
When I got back to Des Moines in the Fall of 1974, I saw that many things had changed.
I returned to Drake University, where I found the jazz band energized by several new young members who had a lot of enthusiasm. Robert Weast, band director and now a good friend, introduced me to a freshman woodwind player named Marcia Miget early in the 1974-75 academic year. Marcia, from Perryville, Missouri, immediately charmed anyone who heard her play either woodwinds or keyboard. We shared an instinctive musical communication, and before long we were playing together. Marcia played in an off-campus band called the Midwest Express. Beside her, the group included Drake student and keyboardist Bobby Parker, Des Moines resident musicians Danny Nicholson (guitar), Terry Condor (bassist and incredible visual artist too), John Grgurich (drums) and the miraculous blues shouter Big Mike Edwards, who rounded out the group. Big Mike brought an intense vocal energy which really made the band a popular force in town. It was great to jam with kick-ass players on the local scene again. No big egos, no high stakes; just play your ass off and have fun.
I’d really wanted to concentrate on finishing up my degree and even, possibly, return to reporting. I’d felt like I’d “been there, done that” as far as music was concerned and I certainly didn’t anticipate having a band as fun or successful as Chase again soon—if ever.
After a few months at the Des Moines Register, though, it was clear that the old days were long since gone. Technology had completely transformed the production of the paper and ownership was in transition. Frank Eyerly, who had been the paper’s managing editor during my previous tenure there, was gone. The newspaper’s editor was Michael Gartner, a local boy who had gotten his start at the Register as a janitor in his teens, and had then gone on to editorial posts at the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and the Louisville Courier-Journal before bringing his business acumen back to the Register’s newsroom. His business-friendly approach to journalism seemed at odds with the investigative roots I had sprouted while I was there from 1967 to ’70.
The assignments I was given at the Register were few and far between, which also sent a message about what I could expect to achieve in a career there after graduation. It wasn’t especially encouraging.
Where I had once hoped for a career in journalism and writing, I now realized that even if I hadn’t messed up my own chances at a career, the business of journalism was already showing signs of serious decline. One former Register editor termed it “our dark period.”
During those dark days of 1975, the paper “All Iowa Depends On” began a three-decade slide into what has become the paper “all Iowa descends upon” with frustration at the paucity of its coverage. The purchase of the organization in 1985 by Al Neuharth and the Gannett Corporation only seemed to accelerate the decline. It seems incredible that the flagship newspaper from a major agricultural state has no Washington bureau. But, so it is.
The year I spent as an “intern” at the Des Moines Register upon my return to Drake University was enough for me to know something had really changed. I didn’t realize it in 1975, but technological developments that would disrupt our entire culture were well under way in the news business and the music business. Typesetting, formerly done by well-paid union labor, was now being performed not in a hot, dangerous environment, but in a well-appointed office.
Music—formerly composed or played almost exclusively by human beings who played real instruments—was now increasingly composed and programmed by a new cadre of musicians who could control computer-driven instruments to replace the humans formerly employed as studio musicians.
I might have been happy working at the Register again if it had been like it was in 1967, but those days were gone and 1976 was right up ahead.
Crazy fun
The Midwest Express band was turning out to be crazy fun. With each new rehearsal or show, I lost that jaded feeling I had gotten from life on the road, and frankly the musicians on the local scene were pretty awesome.
Each member of the band offered something very special. Danny Nicholson could soar on guitar, while pianist and electronic music enthusiast Bobby Parker was the brain of the band. Classically trained and soulful as a plate of fried catfish and black-eyed peas, Bobby was de facto arranger for the Midwest Express. Marcia, whose own family performed as a 4-part harmony vocal group, also brought huge arranging talent to the band.
Soon Marcia’s and my musical friendship blossomed into something much more significant. We were married in November 1976. With the band and our families in attendance, the reception/jam session went on for hours.
With the birth of our son Jaimeo in January 1978, I reformed the band, expanding the lineup to include keyboardists Lynn Willard and Sam Salomone, guitarist Rod Chaffee and Latin percussion master Bobby Aguiniga. (Fortunately there are recorded archives so stay tuned…)
In 1979, we produced a very well-regarded boutique-label LP titled Influences. Co-produced by the band and local radio legend Ron Sorenson, it featured funk, Latin-jazz and Americana, remains a sought-after collectors’ item in Europe as well as the U.S.
It was at this time that Marcia and I began trying to pull all the threads of our creative and academic lives together. Jazz education became the focal point for both of us.
Let me briefly describe how we decided on a new direction:
During my time with Chase, I would sometimes tag along while Bill Chase did “clinics.” Clinics were master-class sessions where he would discuss his personal journey as a musician and demonstrate examples of the technical issues inherent in playing brass instruments.
Hearing Bill describe how musicians worked together reminded me of watching my father practice with other musicians in our home when I was a kid. It struck me how different jazz education was from the relatively sterile music environment I had experienced in high school. I realized that the oral tradition—the powerful, but simple method of communicating across generations—was going to be key in my efforts to create a fun and challenging Jazz education program.
I started submitting grant applications to the Iowa Arts Council in 1976 for funding to offer a program of music history, performance and education from the perspective of an African American Jazz musician. These applications were unsuccessful for several years, until 1979, when Marcia and I were asked by Iowa Arts Council director Nan Stillians to meet with Dr. A.B. Spellman, a site-director for The National Endowment for the Arts who was visiting from Washington D.C.
Mr. Spellman, impressed with both our music and our approach to education, introduced us to Dr. Larry Ridley, a Rutgers University professor who was himself an internationally acclaimed jazz bassist. Ridley formed the Jazz Artists-in-the-Schools (JAIS) program, which was sponsored and endorsed by The National Endowment for the Arts.
Marcia and I were selected to participate in the founding conception and im- plementation sessions of the JAIS. They were held at Duke University in North Carolina, and the original crew of artists and educators included the late Dr. David Baker from Indiana University, teacher Jamey Abersold, pianist Kenny Barron, clarinetist, the late Alvin Batiste, guitarist Ted Dunbar, trumpeter Bill Fielder, composer Frank Foster, trumpeter Pat Harbison, Thelonius Monk’s alto saxophone soloist Charlie Rouse, and drummer Art Taylor. My old Chicago friend from five years previous, Arnie Lawrence, was on the original crew, too. From our initial sessions in 1979 at Duke University, JAIS artists were dedicated to delivering a more culturally balanced and rigorous approach to teaching the fundamentals of jazz improvisation within the k-12 music education curriculum.
Conveying what that meant in practice requires a little explanation.
Jazz music, like most organic African-American forms of expression, had to run the gauntlet of acceptance into the American experience. Coming from the lowest rungs of the social and political hierarchy, African-Americans were caught up in a dichotomy: discriminated against as an ethnic group, some were lionized nonetheless as creators, innovators and heralds of a new American voice in the Arts.
America, naturally, looked at things through the lens of its European cultural roots. The wildcard, though, was the advent of slavery and the introduction, willing or not, of humans from the African diaspora into America’s economic and cultural life. The integration of European and African cultural expression in America produced a new consciousness which expressed itself in music, visual art, theater, dance, and many other fields of endeavor.
Jazz began stretching music in two directions from the center—ever more harmonically intriguing while at the same time exhibiting a rhythmically-seductive energy that would eventually set the world jitter-bugging, bebopping and scat singin’. While it may have been recognized as a new popular music, it was, until the 1980s, viewed as totally unworthy of “legitimate” study by most of collegiate music education.
I remember stories of students in the early 70s in Drake University’s conservatory-style music program being in big trouble if they were “caught playing jazz” in the practice rooms.
This attitude, completely understandable from the perspective of the European-Classical ethic, represented a reluctance, or in some cases a refusal, to acknowledge the dawn of the new, highly technical form of music which now required the player to incorporate her ideas in real-time concerning note choice, dynamics, and literally dozens of other decisions directly into the performance, instead of just interpreting the notes as written. Music educators’ heretofore-condescending attitude toward jazz music began to fray, though, as academics began looking under the hood at the innovations that Armstrong, Ellington, Parker, and Basie were exhibiting in their compositions and the performances that were taking place nightly on stages across the world.
Some African American jazz artists in the 70s referred to their oeuvre as Black Classical Music, attempting to wrest a measure of respect from the conservatory that only grudgingly admitted its legitimacy. An important corollary of the civil rights movement was its drive to define the Black experience outside of the usual American (read: White) perspective of things. To sum it up in a phrase: we now proclaimed that Black music was Beautiful.
With that being said, jazz—while originating in the African American community—was from its inception a multi-racial and multi-ethnic experience. Classical music, on the other hand, was almost conducted as a high priest-hood where African American musicians, while talented enough, often found themselves on the outside for “other reasons.”
Of course, there were notable exceptions to this condition. Iowa’s own Simon Estes became an international star as the pre-eminent African-American bass-baritone operatic singer of his time. In fact, Simon, who performed for presidents and Popes, is credited as one of the first of his generation of black artists that opened the way for others to contribute also.
Chicago’s Richard Davis, the esteemed classical and jazz bassist (and one of my early teachers), developed a resumé of accomplishment in the worlds of live jazz and classical performance, studio recordings and later education as a professor of Jazz and African American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Richard performed under the baton of Leopold Stokowski with the Chicago Symphony during the 1960s, while at the same time recording and performing as one of the premier talents in jazz music. As jazz music gained in popularity in academia, uninformed, inexperienced teachers began mis-applying the standards of their classical or marching band training to the teaching of jazz music, which often fell short of giving students the true essence of the improvisation experience.
This refusal (or inability) to recognize creative music rooted in African American culture as legitimate was rooted in cultural chauvinism, and a negative force. It was, of course, the legacy of an America where renowned Black artists could command the stage in performance, but still had to stay in dive hotels or eat in back rooms because of America’s deeply ingrained and unrestrained white supremacist tendencies in those years.
These perspectives might have continued to be seen as valid, if the marching band/symphonic band experience had continued to predominate. In the new jazz era, however, the thorough-composed orchestra was being replaced by small free-wheeling bands that used song structure. Rather than allowing this to be a strait jacket, artists in these groups used these songs as wings that enabled them to tell their own stories through the chord changes.
Indiana University professor Dr. David Baker developed a method of breaking out jazz’s harmonic, rhythmic and melodic developments into units for study. His groundbreaking work greatly enabled jazz education’s acceptance into the academic world. In terms of rigor, it encompassed a number of things. It meant learning to play your ideas in any of the 12 possible key signatures. It meant learning to play your ideas accurately at tempos anywhere from 50 to 150 beats per minute. It meant learning to play your ideas in 4/4, 3/4, or even 7/4 time signatures, spending at least six hours a day practicing your instrument, going to jam sessions with the goal of having the best ideas, and memorizing as many songs as you possibly could.
…Now, about the subject of rigor.
Developing the idea of chord/scale relationships (as in: if you hear that chord, play this scale) was a pretty important concept for study. The Great American Songbook (popular song standards of the 1920-1950s) provided the material to which those chord/scale relationship studies would apply.
The intervening years have seen a blossoming of jazz education worldwide. It flourishes because it is difficult and demanding, and it continues to attract life-long learners because of its dual role as a balm for the spirit and a spur for the mind.
In maintaining that Oral Tradition, I pass what I learned from my father Ellsworth Brown and Dr. Larry Ridley, Speck Redd, Bob Weast, Richard Davis, Sam Salomone, Frank Foster and Dr. David Baker on to new generation of students and musical seekers. Having made that explanation, I can return to my experience with the Jazz Artists-in-the-Schools (JAIS) program.
Beginning with workshops in the Des Moines Public Schools, our program blossomed to include residencies in Montana, Arizona, North Carolina, Louisiana and Wisconsin. We still hear from students today that we mentored as middle or high school students during that period from 1979 through 1985.
Inspired by artists like John Cage and interdisciplinary projects like the Black Mountain College, my first conceptual objective was to highlight music’s rela- tionship to history, mathematics, creative writing, and, of course, science. I focused on two prime elements for development: education and learning. In my limited view, education is the yin to the yang of learning. An inefficient education system may not necessarily foster learning in the minds of the students subjected to it.
Learning is what an individual must do in order to gain mastery over a situation. It is most effectively fostered by two elements: survival and curiosity. Put another way, curiosity is the itch that learning must scratch.
When education enables playful pursuit of one’s curiosity, it opens the door to lifelong learning. Education fails when insufficient resource and inspiration leave curiosity with no positive outlet. We in education do our students and our communities a disservice when we forget that students themselves are ultimately in charge of their own learning process. If they are allowed to make decisions and experience the results of those decisions sooner rather than later, they do it just fine.
I bought my first Apple Macintosh computer in 1984 at Computer Emporium, a Des Moines company co-owned by Richard Skeie, Donald Brown (no relation) and John Kirk. The company sold computers, but more importantly, the company wrote software for them too, an enterprise which eventually drove the company’s transformation from the Computer Emporium computer store into CE Software, a software design company that would become a major player in the Mac software universe of 1984-94.
Don Brown, a Drake actuarial grad, was the company’s lead programmer. Don wrote Side-kick, the first successful Personal Information Management utility for the Mac platform. That success led to QuickMail, an email application that propelled the tiny West Des Moines company into the elite of early Mac software houses.
Richard, Don and I were all Drake University grads, and I had met them because they were fans of my music. Later, I would hang around the Computer Emporium geeking out on music and computer possibilities.
In 1986, I was approached about starting a new recording studio in Des Moines. Entrepreneurs Roger Hughes, Dr. Jim Skinner, and Chief Engineer Pat McManus were interested in building a new type of studio using computers to augment traditional recording methods.
I already had experience with digital audio and the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), a protocol that enabled communication between computers and electronic musical instruments, so in mid-1986 we opened Audio Art Recording Studios just over the 9th St. viaduct south of Downtown.
It was an immediate success. Songwriters and small producers who needed high-quality work with faster turnaround than they could get at the bigger, busier studio in town flocked to us. We used cutting-edge digital audio tools for traditional band recording, song-writer demos and corporate video projects, and before long our work was being used in local advertising on radio and television stations in our market. Technology, art, and now commerce were all integrating nicely.
The California years
I was working at Audio Art Studio in early 1987 when I got a call from 2,000 miles to the West. Teja Bell, one of my closest friends was on the phone asking me whether I’d consider taking a trip to Northern California. Teja and I had been friends since late middle school. He had been one of the first of us to actually pick up a guitar and learn to play Beatles songs. This was 1964-68. As the civil rights and anti-war movements spun up, we played folk songs from The New Christy Minstrels and protest songs by Pete Seeger in the high school’s student center.
In 1987 Teja was making digital music history, writing, performing and producing a critically acclaimed (and hot-selling) album entitled Dolphin Smiles. It was noted as one of the best of the new genre dubbed New Age, which integrated acoustic music from around the world with synthesized tones designed to invoke an ambience conducive to meditation.
I never would have dreamed that two decades [1967-1987] after high school my friend would call me from San Anselmo, California, to cajole me into considering a trip to San Francisco for the purpose of recording, performing and basking in New Age wonderfulness.
I flew out in October 1987 to check out the scene, arriving late in the evening on a flight from Minneapolis to SFO. On arrival, Teja and audio engineer Daniel Ryman picked me up at the airport. We glided north on the 280 Freeway, heading toward the Golden Gate Bridge and Marin County. The full moon was rising over the San Francisco Bay to our East as we crossed the Bridge I’d only ever seen before on TV.
When I arrived in San Anselmo, my senses became aware of two things: a steady, gentle rain on my face and the aromatic fragrance of wet redwood bark and Jasmine. These two sensory experiences were my cosmic baptism into life in Marin County, the New Age capital of the world at that time, where hippies with computers and guitars were dedicated to saving the world with sound.
Teja and I collaborated on many projects over the years but one of the most fun was the soundtrack for the Des Moines Science Center Planetarium Show which included voice-over sessions I produced with the great William Shatner.
Ray Lynch (the creator of Deep Breakfast, which in 1989 peaked at Number Two on Billboard’s “Top New Age Albums” chart) was there.
The pioneering synthesizer programmer Suzanne Ciani was also in Marin, after moving from NYC. Don Buchla was building synthesizers in the East Bay. Dr. John Chowning, a Stanford University-based researcher, invented Frequency Modulation (FM) synthesis which combined up to six digital oscillators to either emulate existing instruments or create new, unique sounds.
The late David Wessel was running the Center For New Music and Technology (CNMAT) at the University of California, Berkeley, and inventing new input devices for the music of the future.
While all that was fun, I was soon driven by the necessity to look beyond music performance to earn enough to keep body, soul and hungry children together.
The Mac Garden
Thanks to my Iowa tech background, I was prepared to grab a job at The Mac Garden, a computer store located a few blocks from our house in San Rafael. It was one of the first Mac-only retail stores anywhere, and its owner, Chet Zdrowski, was looking for a new sales/ tech support person. I was hired, and now I was holding a mouse instead of a guitar. The mouse was connected to the Mac, which in turn connected me to an insane collection of artists, musicians, programmers, visionaries, charlatans, seers and other digital New Age hippies who gathered in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1989 and 1991.
The staff at the Mac Garden was a crazy crew of first-generation Mac retail sales zealots. To us, selling Mac stuff wasn’t selling; it was enabling people to follow their passions and dreams. Want to write a book? Get a Mac and a Laser printer. Want to make a movie? Get a Mac and a camera. Want to identify atomic elements? Get a Mac and a scope.
In San Rafael, George Lucas’s pioneering special effects studio, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), was where work was conducted on little projects like Star Wars and Terminator 2. In 1989, George’s guys, including John Knoll, were coming into the Mac Garden, demoing the beta version of their custom digital image manipulation software that would later be sold to Adobe Inc. and released as Photoshop!
Stewart Brand, founder of The Whole Earth Catalog, and Howard Rheingold, co-founder with Stewart Brand of The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link) both came in. Ted Nelson, the man who coined the term “hypertext,” became a good friend. I was also thrilled to work as a computer consultant for the late jazz drummer and composer Tony Williams, who lived in San Anselmo.
While the experience I was garnering at The Mac Garden was important, it was Richard Skeie, owner of Computer Emporium back in Des Moines, who set me on quite another path into Silicon Valley. In January 1990, I was in San Francisco, attending the MacWorld Expo—what used to be Apple’s annual Haj of the Mac faithful. While roaming the aisles, I encountered Richard in the CE Software booth.
After a handshake and a howdy, he hired me on the spot to be part of his company’s West Coast marketing team.
I traveled the Western region with marketing director Brad Sharek, evangelizing CE products to eager digital disciples. Presenting at Lawrence Livermore Labs in Mountain View, California, or in front of the Portland (Oregon) Macintosh User Group (PMUG) was a spectacular experience.
Unfortunately, though, the advent of the Internet—great for Apple and Microsoft—by 1993 rang the death knell for little companies like CE Software. The company’s business model was eviscerated when Apple made the decision to rely less on outside developers like CE, instead writing its own business application software. Since Apple is valued today at a trillion dollars (give or take), I’d say they had the right idea!
While still at CE in 1991, I met Henry Norr, the news editor for MacWEEK a Ziff-Davis owned trade publication that functioned almost like an early WikiLeaks, providing hot tips, product news, and sensitive information poached from inside Apple which had some bearing on the nascent Macintosh computer market. Henry hired me away from CE, and the investigative/writing skills I had honed during my time at the Register now served me well during a 17-month assignment as a staff writer and reporter.
One highlight of the job was getting to interview the late Steve Jobs while he was in exile from Apple in 1992 at NeXT Computing. He didn’t allow me very much time, but as we shared a mordant chuckle regarding Apple, led by then-CEO Michael Spindler, I had a feeling he was plotting his comeback to Apple, and (duh?)I was right.
Back into the classroom
This was now 1993-94, and as our son Jaimeo was heading into high school, our marriage was dissolving. Thankfully, we maintained our relationship as committed parents, but I felt a strong need to spend much more time with both our children. My work at that time included long periods away on business which— while good for my career—was not so good for the relationship I needed to maintain with Jaimeo and Marisha at a critical period in their lives.
That was when I left MacWEEK and signed on as a computer lab director at San Rafael High School, where my son was a freshman. This was the dawn of networked-computer labs in education. While I wasn’t a certified teacher, my experiences as a tech-savvy artist proved to be pretty valuable in that environment. Offering new perspectives on problem-solving is the heart of education. I saw time and time again that improvisation and the sense of adventure inherent in playing jazz were also vital ingredients for a fulfilling educational experience.
In his 8th grade year at Davidson Middle School in San Rafael, Jaimeo won his division of the Marin County Science Fair. Our computer could act as an oscilloscope, so we decided to record and display the waveforms of equivalent acoustic and digitized electronic instruments. For example, Jaimeo sampled his mother’s saxophone and compared it to a synthesized woodwind instrument. He did the same with my acoustic bass violin, contrasting it to an electronic version.
The project was relatively simple but, of course, not many people were equipped to use computers in such a way at that time, so he won on originality and for the cool data the project produced.