Don
Vappie knows about boring music.
In the late 1970s, boring music prompted him to sell most of his instruments and give up playing. And while some people consider traditional jazz dull, Vappie begs to differ.
"I got really bored when disco came out," the New Orleans native said last week, talking about his time in a Top 40 group. "I always remember when I quit the band - I was playing bass - I said, 'You could teach a chimpanzee to do this,' because it was so repetitious.
"I actually quit playing music for about three months, and it drove me nuts. I bought most of my instruments back."
A problem was that Vappie - who was born in 1956 - didn't like the music of his era. "I guess maturity was setting in," he said. "I wanted to be challenged." That was when he started seriously studying and playing jazz, as a reaction to the tedium of disco.
"Playing jazz is really something you have to think about," he said. "It's hard. You have to analyze it. You have to think very quickly. It's very interesting. It's expressive music. And the tools that you refine ... are useful in every style of music there is. I guess it was just an awakening kind of thing. ... It just started me on a path of study."
Vappie and his Creole Jazz Serenaders will this weekend make their first appearance at the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival.
And if you expect the Serenaders' brand of jazz from the 1920s and '30s to be about as scintillating as disco, Vappie has heard it before - even from fellow musicians. A well-regarded sax player once approached a member of the Creole Jazz Serenaders, asking: "You're playing traditional jazz with Vappie? Must be kind of boring."
Vappie will have none of that. "This is very interesting and complicated music," he said. "It's not just chaos. When you have polyphonic improvisation going on, you can't get in each other's way. Figure eight guys having a conversation. Everybody's kind of talking, not necessarily together, but at the same time."
The bandleader and banjoist also sees parallels between his Creole heritage and the beginnings of jazz. "Young people are not exposed to the genius of the early styles of jazz," he said. "That was a very creative period. Here something was born out of a combination of a number of other things. I guess that sort of connected to me, too. I'm a Creole from New Orleans. I have a very diverse background."
What's evident in a conversation with Vappie is that he needs stimulation. So it's not merely jazz itself, but the freedom to explore different styles and moods. He played in New Orleans' Preservation Hall Jazz Band, he said, and found that tiresome, too. "We were playing a lot of the same songs," he said. "I toured with them five years, basically played the same show."
That
led to the formation, in 1995, of the Creole Jazz Serenaders. Part of
the appeal, he said, was that the cultural stew of New Orleans means
that the label "classic jazz" encompasses so many different
styles. "There is no blueprint for a New Orleans band" in the
1920s and '30s, Vappie said.
And Vappie and his band can draw from all the cultures that have contributed to New Orleans. The Creole Jazz Serenaders play everything from Jelly Roll Morton to King Oliver to McKinney's Cotton Pickers to Louis Jordan to Creole music to originals in the style of Martinique and the Caribbean.
Vappie has played with Wynton Marsalis on a Jelly Roll Morton program, and the Creole Jazz Serenaders premiered a pair of "lost" Morton tunes that the legend had been rehearsing with his band before he died.
Vappie said that he understands that some people, like the saxophonist who called the music dull, don't think they'll like old-time jazz. His job is to beckon them closer.
"I always believe it's in presentation," Vappie said. "It's how you present something. I'm not going to get up on a stage and start playing some weird stuff that's going to turn people off right away. ... It's like inviting someone into your house, you know. You don't bring 'em in and start throwing stuff at 'em. You invite people. That's the same with performing. When you get on stage, you musically invite them into your world."
He also said he understands that the transition from disco to Jelly Roll Morton might seem odd to some people, but folks from New Orleans have jazz in their blood.
"If you grow up in New Orleans and you're a musician, it [jazz] is part of the social structure," Vappie said. "It has a social purpose." Even playing with pop bands, he said, at social clubs the introduction of members was accompanied by a march, and then a New Orleans jazz tune.
"So, I guess I've always played jazz," he said. "It's part of life in New Orleans."
Don Vappie & the Creole Jazz Serenaders will perform as part of the Bix Beiderbecke Memorial Jazz Festival, July 26 through 29 at various sites in Davenport. For a schedule and more information, visit (http://www.bixsociety.org).
For more information on Don Vappie & the Creole Jazz Serenaders, visit (http://www.vappielle.com).
