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Spontaneous Composition
When Classically trained pianist Michel Camilo discovered improvisation, his music ignited the jazz world.
By Jason Roeder
Berklee.edu Correspondent
January 29, 2004
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Michel Camilo |
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Photo by Bill Gallery |
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Michel Camilo wouldn't have been the first five-year-old to get an accordion for Christmas, and he wasn't the first little boy to perform "Happy Birthday" and "Silent Night" for his family and friends. But it wasn't long before Camilo's uniqueness showed itself. He was composing by ear, and his parents hired a musician to transcribe his latest songs. At the age of nine, Camilo, a native of the Dominican Republic, enrolled at that country's National Conservatory. By the age of 16, Camilo was playing in the National Symphony—but he had put down the accordion by then, of course.
"I had fallen in love with the piano," says Camilo, who recently established the Michel Camilo Scholarship at Berklee for instrumentalists of Dominican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, or Latin American heritage demonstrating outstanding talent and financial need.
Though Camilo remains an active and accomplished classical pianist and composer, some of his most impressive accolades, including a Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Instrumental Album and a Latin Grammy for Best Latin Jazz Album, have come from his work in jazz. Camilo says that when he was an adolescent, jazz in the Dominican Republic hadn't penetrated the mainstream and had an audience of in-crowd artists and writers. But it found its way on the radio every now and then, and Camilo, at the age of 14, was hooked.
"I heard the great Art Tatum playing 'Tea for Two,' solo piano," Camilo says. "I found out that was called jazz, and I fell in love with it. Then I found out that was improvisation, which for me is instant composition."
So, while Camilo continued his classical studies, on his own he uncovered the music of James P. Johnson, Oscar Peterson, and McCoy Tyner, among other jazz piano greats. A natural autodidact, he was soon teaching himself what he couldn't learn at the conservatory. And one day, someone noticed. A group of American musicians was invited to attend the festival inaugurating the opening of the National Symphony, and during one of the performance breaks, Camilo unveiled some of the music he had been working on in private.
"I just went to the piano and started playing a blues or something like that," Camilo says, "and they all came around. 'You're a jazz player?' 'Well,' I said, 'I play jazz.'"
One of the Americans, a percussionist, was so impressed that he invited Camilo to visit him in New York. Camilo gratefully accepted.
"He took me literally by the hand to all the jazz clubs," Camilo says. "He took me to record stores and made me pick the hottest guys, the hottest piano players at the time in New York...Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock."
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Michel Camilo
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Photo by Bill Gallery
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Other musicians visiting the Dominican Republic became contacts for Camilo and facilitated trips to New York that allowed him to sit in at clubs. He was being well received, but he had something working against him—his address.
"I was turning heads, and guys would try to get my card," Camilo says. "I said, 'I don't live here. I'm just visiting.' They'd say, 'Why are you just coming here? You should move here. You should live here, just stay.'"
The problem, says Camilo, was that he couldn't afford to attend school in the United States. So, he did what a number of musicians of the day considered the next best thing to being there and signed up for Berklee correspondence courses. At the time, he says, mail service was so slow in the Dominican Republic, that he didn't bother sending his homework in.
"I just kept all the lessons and studied them top to bottom," Camilo says. "I learned a lot from those."
But Camilo and his wife, Sandra, saved up, and in 1979 finally relocated to New York City, where Camilo took up private lessons. He was 24, and thanks to a connection he made in the Dominican Republic, landed an audition for his first big job in his new home. He got the gig and played in a Broadway musical called Dancin'.
"They needed someone who could play jazz, classical, and popular, and I fit right in," says Camilo. "The first act, I played a Bach toccata, and the third act, I used to play Benny Goodman's 'Sing, Sing, Sing,' a transcription of a Carnegie Hall concert note for note. I had the chops."
But Camilo soon realized that being good wasn't enough in a place like New York. You had to be distinctive, and to that end, Camilo looked toward the Caribbean.
"I realized one of the toughest things in jazz is to have your own voice, your own style, to be recognizable, not a clone," Camilo says. "The big leap is when you discover yourself, and somehow you have to figure out what it is you're going to contribute. I guess that Latin rhythms and Latin language was part of it for me."
Having found a voice, more and more people started listening. One of them was Janis Siegel, a vocalist for the multiple-Grammy-winning group Manhattan Transfer, who heard Camilo play an original called "Why Not?" at New York's 7th Avenue South jazz club. Her group did a vocal version of Camilo's composition, which won a Grammy in 1983. The lesson here?
"You always have to be at your best because you never know who's going to be in an audience," Camilo says.
While busy with international touring and composition projects—his Goodwill Games Theme earned him an Emmy in 1987—Camilo has in recent years also started teaching clinics. He knew he had knowledge to share, but he didn't realize how much he would be learning, too.
"The students force me to think about an answer," Camilo says. "Then I have to explain. I have to make unconscious, automatic things conscious."
Camilo will be teaching at Berklee, in fact, as the most recent participant in the Herb Alpert Visiting Professor Program, which has already brought pianist/composer Alan Broadbent '69; bassist Abraham Laboriel, Sr. '72; and guitarist/composer Pat Metheny to campus. The program was established through the support of the Herb Alpert Foundation, the philanthropic organization launched by A&M Records cofounder and seven-time Grammy-winning recording artist Herb Alpert. As an Alpert Professor, Camilo will teach at Berklee for several days at a time each academic year of a three-year commitment. As someone whose formal education in jazz began at Berklee, albeit via post, Camilo knows what Berklee has to offer.
"There was a time when people said jazz couldn't be taught," Camilo says. "This college has proven that it can."
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