Oral History Program Rod Rippon Interviewed by Adam Rosenberg 31 January 2009 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Rod Rippon Interviewed by Adam Rosenberg 31 January 2009 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. Archival copies are placed in University Archives. The Stewart Library also houses the original recording so researchers can gain a sense of the interviewee's voice and intonations. Project Description The Weber State College/University Student Projects have been created by students working with several different professors on the Weber State campus. The topics are varied and based on the student's interest or task for a specific assignment. These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Rippon, Rod, an oral history by Adam Rosenberg, 31 January 2009, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Rod Rippon. The interview was conducted on January 31, 2009, by Adam Rosenberg. Mr. Rippon discusses his knowledge of the Junction City Big Band and his involvement in their progress. AR: Alright I'm here with Rod, and could you spell your full name for us? RR: Rod Rippon. AR: Alright thanks Rod, and so you are ... and the date is January 31st, 2009. Wow. So we're just here to interview you about the Junction City Big Band and you're involvement with it. And I guess we'll just get started with the questions. How did you first get involved with music? RR: Well, let's see. My mother was very musical. She taught the piano so as a little kid we always had lots of her students in the house. In fact some of them would actually babysit us when there were two or three sisters from the same family. You know they would trade some babysitting for lesson time and so forth. So we always had music in the house. My grandfather really, really liked music and he started taking us to the symphony when I was in about sixth grade. The Utah Symphony and I just loved that. I just fell in love with it. So about sixth grade I started taking trumpet lessons and learned how to play the trumpet. And I tried piano because I had a piano teacher in the house, but that didn't last very long. I said, "I'm going to learn both instruments" and after about one month of trying to practice both instruments every day I just said, "The heck with that". I kind of regret that because piano is such a useful skill to have that you can use your whole life long. But I stuck with the trumpet and have been playing it ever since 1 and have done some really neat things with my music, and still do a lot of neat things. So, I even make money at it, so it has been quite enjoyable. AR: Right, wow that is neat. So the music. You said you started listening to symphonies. Now did you gear towards symphonies or was it jazz that you fell in love with; or which was your first love of music? RR: My first love would have been classical music; and that's probably still my primary interest, and I really like jazz a lot also. I like them both. In fact I can find something of interest to listen to in any kind of music, but I think that these two are probably a little more sophisticated and I think they're a little more rewarding once you've made investment in understanding it and enjoying it. So I think it's much more rewarding than some of the other things that are out there. AR: Yeah, that's true. You can't go to sleep with jazz. You know, I don't know. That's what I've found. So with the big band, with the Junction City Big Band, how did you initially get involved with it? RR: Well, most of the people, most of the personnel in the band are former students of Earl Ericksen when we went to Weber State years ago and we played in the jazz band. We got to know him quite well there. They started the big band, you'll have to get the exact details from Earl, but I believe they started it while I was away teaching school after I first graduated. I was teaching down in Emery County and I believe they started the band up. Then we moved back up here to be close to our families and a lot of other things too. Actually I play third trumpet in the group and my predecessor was Dan Rich, my former trumpet teacher when I was in college. Very, very fine player from the Bountiful area. And he's still teaching and still playing and I asked him one day, "Dan 2 how long are you going to keep going?" He says, "Until I can't do it anymore", you know because he just loves it so much. He loves education. He loves kids. He loves music and the brass stuff. Anyway the point in time came where he needed to drop out because he had so many other commitments, and that's when Earl asked me to come take his place. So I've been there ever since. I don't remember the exact time; I'm guessing the late '80s probably. I've been there a long time. AR: So there's a lot of former students of Earl and a lot of former colleagues at work? Are there? RR: We have, of course, Don Keipp is the jazz instructor up there. We have playing first alto right now, he wasn't in any of the pictures, is Bob Wazzell. He's the department chair at the University of Utah. His primary instrument is clarinet and he is a very fine clarinetist; but he also likes to play alto sax. So he's... You know we don't get paid a whole lot for these deals and we do it mostly because it's just so much fun. We love the music and we kind of love the era, we love the harmony. We just love everything about it and we just have lots and lots of fun. So we don't do it for the money. We do it for the fun. AR: Wow and so the music that you guys play, is it more... do you like read the charts when you're playing it? RR: We read the charts. We don't practice. There might be once every three or four years, there might be something really important with a lot of really important people in the audience. Something that's really, really important, if we're going to try something new or something special, we might call rehearsal, but I can only remember going to maybe three rehearsals in the last twenty years. So we all read music well, we play well, we 3 don't really need to practice. We probably have, I'm guessing, maybe four hundred charts in our book, so, tons of music. AR: Yeah so how does improvisation work for you guys? Is it just when somebody is soloing they're just improvising? RR: Yeah in a standard jazz tune, a lot of times the composer will leave a section open for improvisation solos and so the person and their music will have a chord progression to follow and then they just make up the melody on the spot. It might be something they've practiced many times, or something that comes out different every time. That is something I'm not very good at. A couple of us aren't too good at that, but you know I just love listening to other guys do their solos. And that is one of the real treats there because it's different; it's fascinating, it's fun to listen to. So there's probably five or six guys in the band that are really, really good at improvisation, so they all do a few solos every time. And the rest of us get an odd solo here and there, and sometimes it goes well and sometimes it doesn't. But it's just fun to listen to that and the audience loves that. They love when the people do their solos. Earl always tells everybody, "Stand up" like they did in the old days. Sometimes just like in high school trumpets don't always do what they're told so sometimes we don't stand up like we're supposed to. Yeah that's a lot of fun. I play in a lot of different groups and do lots of different styles of music and that's one thing I wish I could do a little bit better. I think you have to have maybe a natural gift for it and then you have to put in a lot of time learning your chords, and your progressions and listening to the pros improvise. That's just one thing I wish I could do a little better. AR: Yeah, yeah so you as a trumpet player, who were some of your influences? 4 RR: Well, I really like, on the classical side I really like Maurice Andre. He's probably one of the finest, probably the finest trumpet player that's ever lived in the history of the world and I really like him. Wynton Marsales does both classical and jazz. I like him quite a bit. On the jazz side one of my favorites is probably Maynard Ferguson. He just passed away a couple of years ago and he's been playing since the late forties, early fifties. He's just a fantastic player. He was from Canada. I like Doc Severinsen. There are quite a few of them who are really fun to listen to and I've got quite a collection over there of all kinds of jazz stuff and trumpet stuff so. AR: So how does jazz and big band ... How are they different? Or how are they similar? What's the difference between the two? RR: Well jazz kind of began in the New Orleans area, you know back around the turn of the century with a very heavy African American influence. You know a lot of influences came together to make that, so jazz is one art form that is truly American. Most other things have come from ... you know the classical, western music has come from Europe, you know across the ocean. But jazz was born here in America and there's lots of different phases of jazz. Big band part of jazz had its hay-day in the thirties and forties. So for about fifteen to twenty years Glen Miller and quite a few of those guys they would take their bands around to entertain the troops; and it is what the kids were dancing to in high school. And that is why we do those reunions, you know the fifty-year reunions and things, the people just love the stuff because that was the music of their time when they were growing up. So, you know, the era is passed. And there are still big bands today and some of them emulate like the County Basie band, Duke Ellington bands and some of those. There's even kind of a, oh I can't remember the name of the 5 group. There's a couple of groups that kind of put their own twist on big band stuff. Anyway so it's still going pretty good and people love to dance. You know a lot of high schools and colleges will have big band, I don't know what they call-the dance clubs. You know they learn all those moves from that kind of "music; then they come out and dance to some of these big band things. And they just love it because it's fun happy music. It's fun to dance to. It's got nice rhythm. There was quite a resurgence maybe two, three, four years ago across the country and people are finding that it's a way fun way to spend time and have dates and so forth. So when we do our dance stuff up here at the college every month during the school year, there will be a lot of high school kids and college kids and they're just having a blast. AR: Wow so do you think there is a revitalization of jazz music, or big band music? RR: Well, yeah there has been of the big band stuff. I think jazz, and you know jazz, and like I mentioned jazz and classical music don't have really large followings and so the recording industry's had a really hard time in the classical recording industry with MP3s and sharing all the ... you know all the plow sharing has been really hard on the recording industry. And sometimes in some places it's hard to fill concert halls and things. But so, you know, classical music will live forever. You go to a concern and listen to something by Beethoven, you know that music's been around for two hundred years, and people all over the world still relate to that and enjoy it, so it will be around for a long time. And I think big band's the same way. It's something that people will enjoy for many years. It's just a very fine art form with a lot of good things about it. AR: Yeah, that's true. So do you feel your audience has changed, or is it kind of the same people? 6 RR: I think we've seen over the last fifteen or twenty years, we've probably seen more young people coming. Some of the older people that grew up with this stuff of course are passing away. You know we've lost some of the regulars that have been coming for years. Yeah so it's changing, uh huh. AR: So what do you think it will be in ten to twenty years, jazz music? Do you think it will keep the resurgence or? RR: Well you know, the avant-garde, you know jazz gets into that stuff. That's kind of very intellectual and not appealing to a lot of people. You know back in the big band era and even the fifties, a lot of jazz still had a beautiful melody and a beautiful harmony and a lot of that stuff. Then you start moving away from that and then few people are interested in it. And uh I think there's in the past ten years,' there's probably been a little bit of a 'going back to', and the same thing in the classical world; getting away from the stuff that's so weird that nobody likes it and nobody wants to come to the concerts. Nobody buys CDs. Nobody wants to pay money to go. So I think there's been some 'going back' to things that have melodies and things that appeal to a larger audience. AR: Right, right, so do you feel as far as melodies go, how do you feel about vocals in big band music? RR: We love that. We love the vocal stuff. If you think of Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett and those guys. It’s just marvelous. It makes it even better and that's why we're so happy to have Ruth start singing with us. AR: Right that is neat, so is there a lot of improvising that she does as a vocalist? 7 RR: When a vocalist improvises, it's usually called SCAT singing. Are you familiar with that term? I can't do it of course. It's when you do ... well it just uses symbols. She's done a little bit of that. She's been trained in singing so she knows what she's doing. She doesn't do it very often, but yeah she's done it. AR: Really, wow that is neat. So as far as the improvising goes in the big band, there's just a small percentage, not really a big percentage of the song. It's more of like sixteen-bar solo, right? RR: Yeah you might have a section where twelve bars, sixteen bars, maybe twenty-four bars, and you usually only have two or three guys. Some solos are written in and patterned after the original artists who played those particular solos. You know and sometimes we'll play that as it's written, and I have a few of those. Sometimes we'll just ignore that and do our own little thing. But yeah usually there will be a section where the solos are to be done and then they'll have, sometimes different. Earl will just say, "Clayton you want to take one. Skip you want to take one. Ron you want to take one", and they will have three or four people lined up to play through those solos. And that's a fun part because, like I mentioned earlier, it's just... you never know for sure what they're going to do. Warren Trillson on the tenor, he can play some pretty fast notes and he'll throw in... I mentioned that Clayton will throw in some pretty funny licks once in a while. Warren will do that sometimes and when he throws a lick in that we all recognize, we just start laughing. AR: Wow, that is cool. So have the venues changed a lot that you guys have played in? RR: During the school year we play in the ballroom at the college and we've done that the whole time. We just have the regular series of dances, usually about seven or eight 8 throughout the school year once a month. And then all the other places we go are you know going to be like I said earlier, a business function. We just did the State School Board Convention. I believe there were about three thousand people in the audience. The hall was packed. We just did a show, about a half hour show, and they absolutely loved it. AR: Really. So a show is different than like playing for a dance, right. RR: Yeah a dance is going to be three hours long with a half hour intermission. Usually during the half -hour intermission we'll have a floor show like your high school from Morgan High will have their jazz singers or whatever you call, show choir, come do a show. So we'll invite somebody to come do that so the audience will have something to do while we're on break. Three hours is a long time to play. Chops get tired sometimes and the high notes won't come out anymore. AR: Geez. Wow, wow. So of course you cater to those audiences right. Like for a dance you would play different songs than you would for just a show? RR: A lot of the songs are the same. Yeah, we probably change that a little bit. AR: So how do you think the younger generation...? RR: The ones that come out, they just really enjoy it. They are quite athletic and young, and so you'll see the guys swinging their gals all around, over ... I don't know what all the moves are called, but you'll see them throwing those gals around and their just having a blast. It's really a lot of fun. My wife and I took some ballroom dance classes in college and just had a blast, and of course the years have gone buy and I can't do it anymore, 9 but she still can. When things slow down a little bit we'll probably go take some more lessons. When she comes to our gigs of course, I have to play. AR: Right, right. RR: Normally we'll do Valentine's dances for some of the churches and things. AR: So you guys stay pretty busy in the big band? How many times a year to you think? RR: Well, we probably play, I'm guessing, maybe twenty times in a year. AR: Wow, wow, and you mentioned you play in other bands? RR: I play in a lot of groups. I play in the New American Philharmonic Orchestra. I play in Ogden Concert Band. I play a quintet and I play freelance for other churches for their religious services, like Eastern Christmas and things like that. I've got six different wards I use for various purposes and at different times. I play the Nutcracker Ballet. We do that for three weeks in the year; November, first of December. So sometimes I'm gone quite a bit playing. As a brass player that's an advantage, though, because you know if you don't have the muscles built up there, you just can, you can't do it and you can't build them up in one night. So to have a lot of places to play, then you're able to keep those chops in pretty good shape. AR: Right, wow. So you said you have six different trumpets? RR: Uh hmm. AR: So for those different trumpets, do you like to use more than one in a given night? RR: Sometimes. In the big band we use a regular trumpet, then we use what's called a flugelhorn, and you saw that in some of those pictures. It's a big round thing like this. 10 For the classical stuff I have trumpets. They are different sizes and different pitches; like a C trumpet, an E-flat trumpet. And I have a little piccolo trumpet about like that and we use them for different things like when I do Messiah we will usually use our piccolo trumpets because it sounds really nice on those instruments. AR: Right, right, so do you have to learn different chords for the different keys? RR: No the thing is all the same. They're all the same, but you're part you're reading has to be transposed for the different trumpets; and if it's not then you have to transpose at sight. So do you understand what that is? AR: Right, yeah. RR: So it says C, but we're playing in an orchestra and we're playing one tune where I have to read each note up. It's a Wagner tune, Tannhauser Overture to Tannhauser. I have to read everything up in ' augmented fourth. Do you know what that is? AR: Yeah, yeah. RR: So it's a fourth plus a half-step. AR: Oh, wow. RR: But you get used to that and you just do it. Yeah. AR: Really, so you just do all that. RR: Then we have a coronet and the coronet is rolled up differently than a trumpet. A coronet is more mellow sounding. I don't know if you have heard of the Bridge Bass Band deal. They have very, very mellow sounds in the group. So in our concert band that we all play in, we all have coronets in our section. And there are a few times when 11 we use a trumpet, but most of the time we use coronets. They blend better. They are a smoother sound. It gives you a different feel with the music in the group. AR: Oh wow, that is really cool. That is very neat. So I guess uh ... so do you guys play a lot of different places in the big band, or is it Salt Lake and Ogden maybe. RR: It's mostly the Ogden area and the church deals we'll get up to Morgan once every year or two. And we'll go out to Roy sometimes in those areas. We've been all around. AR: And how many players are there in the band? RR: Uh, there are about seventeen, I want to say. AR: Is there a lot of influx? RR: Nope a lot of us have been there pretty much forever. AR: That's a good thing because you know each other, you know, and then it's easier to play with people that you know. Wow, that's cool. So what is your favorite memory in the band? RR: Uh, I don't know. I'd probably have to think about that one. I think just we laugh a lot. When we get together we check up on how each other's doing and how our kids are doing. You know if anything new has happened in our lives, and we tell stories. But we laugh a lot. We'll make small observations about what's going on, on a particular night. Sometimes they're good and sometimes they're not. But yeah we just have a good, good time together. We love the music; we love playing; and we love spending time with each other. AR: Yeah, wow, so there's a lot of... 12 RR: Camaraderie. AR: Yeah camaraderie, yeah. Wow that is neat, and how does that play in with the audience. Do you guys feed off of the audience? RR: Yes, uh. I'll tell you one story but I'm not sure I want Earl to hear it. When Ruth came along it energized the whole band. I mean it's one thing to have a singer, but it's one thing to have somebody belt the stuff out like a professional does, which she does. And the audience just absolutely loved it, and we loved it. And we were maybe going a little too far with our enthusiasm, you know our display of our enthusiasm for Ruth. You know so one night you know Earl suggested that maybe we curb that just a little bit. And we looked at each other and said ... Skip and I were good friends in college and we just said, "Yeah it's just like in college". Here we are fifty years old and we're still getting chewed out by the director. But yeah she has just really energized the group. We just love that and the audience loves it, and yeah, we'll feed off that. AR: Yeah, that's a lot of neat information. Is there anything else you want to add? RR: Well, I don't know, it's just lots of fun. We really enjoy it. AR: Just keep listening to good music and you're able to play. That's neat. Wow. Well cool. Thanks for the interview. I appreciate it. RR: You bet. AR: And I can ... you give me permission to use for Weber State right? Because I didn't have a form to fill out so I need to ask you on the... RR: That's fine. AR: Well thanks. That was easy, right? Well thank you. 13