Urban Classical Music with Jeff Scott

Since his band teacher went alphabetically by last name, Jeff Scott’s choices were limited when it came his turn to pick an instrument. The sixth grader pointed to the French horn—and the rest is history. Today, Scott is one of the nation’s premier French horn players and a Grammy-winning composer. Among other accomplishments, he’s played on Broadway, toured with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Ray Charles, and co-founded a world-renowned woodwind quintet. In this laughter-filled episode, Scott tells host Cory Nealon about his unlikely path to musical success, his experiences on the road with A-list artists, what it felt like to win a Grammy, and how his multicultural upbringing in Queens, N.Y., shaped the urban classical music he shares with the world today.

Credits:

Host: Cory Nealon
Guest: Jeff Scott
Writer/Producer: Laura Silverman
Production and editing by UB Video Production Group 

Coming April 8: Almost 10% of Americans are expected to be taking Ozempic, Wegovy or one of the other new weight-loss drugs by 2035. Pharmacy researcher Nicole Albanese, an expert on diabetes, weight loss and nutrition, has mixed feelings about these meds. She explains the pros and cons to host Laurie Kaiser in the next episode.

Transcript

Cory Nealon: Like most band kids, Jeff Scott loved music. But it took a special moment for him to realize music would be his life's work. Scott played French horn in a youth orchestra that was invited on stage with the New York Philharmonic. Jerome Ashby, the famed symphony orchestra's French hornist, began to warm up.

Jeff Scott: It just, it was, I didn't know a French horn could sound like that. I said at that moment, that's what I want to, that's what I want to do [laughs]. I want to sound like that.

Cory Nealon: Today, Scott is one of the nation's top French hornists and a Grammy Award-winning composer, renowned for his genre-bending compositions. His resume includes Broadway musicals, touring with the likes of Wayne Shorter and Barbra Streisand, and co-founding Imani Winds, widely described as America's premier woodwind quintet. Scott, who joined UB's faculty last fall, is also committed to teaching students the richness of American music.

Welcome to Driven to Discover, a University at Buffalo podcast that explores what inspires today's innovators. My name is Cory Nealon, and I will be your host for today's episode: Urban classical music.

Professor Jeff Scott, thank you for joining us.

Jeff Scott: Thank you for having me.

Cory Nealon: So what does urban classical music mean to you?

Jeff Scott: Ooh, boy, well it takes me back to my youth. When I was coming up in Queens, New York, I grew up with a bunch of kids from the neighborhood who happened to be from pretty much every walk of life. My best friend was Orthodox Jew. My other best friend was Puerto Rican, and the other one that made up the quartet of friends was from Haiti. We all played together. We played Nintendo and Atari together. We went to parties together. We, I went to Seder. Which also meant I was influenced by their culture. I was influenced by the music that they listened to, the way their parents treated them, all that stuff.

When I finally got into music, I couldn't help but be influenced by my experiences, where I grew up. And I say in my biography all the time that I write unapologetically with those influences in my music. Although I did study traditional European theory, it's always been informed by my upbringing in Queens.

Cory Nealon: How did you get started with the French horn?

Jeff Scott: Um, I was in the sixth grade, and in the sixth grade, at least in Queens, was where you went from playing recorder to choosing an instrument and being part of the band. As my last name is Scott, and my teacher at the time went in alphabetical order, so everybody with, you know, A's and B's for last names and C's and so on, they chose the instrument that their friends chose. So by the time they got to S, there was, like, you know, 10 flute players and 11 clarinet players, and no one had chosen the French horn. So I said, I'll play that instrument. They had a picture of it on the bulletin board. I had no idea what it was, but I said, I'll play that because no one chose it. So I chose the French horn.

So my school actually didn't have one. They had a mellophone, and an old one in that case, too. It was, it looked like somebody had taken a ball of aluminum foil, tried to crinkle it up and then spread it out again [laughs]. It had so many creases and dents in it. And of course, my friends laughed and laughed and laughed, but I think that was actually the inspiration for me to really get good at it. And once I showed I had some promise on the instrument, my band director went out and got a real horn, and so I had a horn to play on. And it was him that really sort of helped me get into the career. He really went out of his way to help me get into music.

Cory Nealon: And you started getting more serious when you attended Saturday schooling at Brooklyn College for Music, right?

Jeff Scott: Yeah, the program at Brooklyn College on Saturday is much like any other pre-college program, say, at Manhattan School of Music or Juilliard, where you go on Saturday, all day, you take theory classes, you take a private lesson on your instrument, and then you probably play in, like, the orchestra. I was asked by my band director to go and audition for this program. So I went and auditioned, got in, got a full scholarship, and came home and told my mom, ‘Ma, I got this great, this scholarship. I'm gonna go study horn, you know, ah, I got...’ I must have been thinking my audition had gone so well.

Come to find out, that band director had teamed up with an administrator at the school and paid anonymously for me to have four years of free lessons and theory classes, and they never told me. And the way I found out was that years later, when that administrator passed away, she was actually the one that really gave the bulk of the money, Brooklyn College contacted me and said, ‘You don't know this woman, but you would want to know who she was.’ And when they told me the story, I lost it. I just, and I know, it actually gets me now, because I really, I, the kindness of her heart. She didn't know me, you know, I was just some young kid in the neighborhood, you know, and she invested all that money in me. How do you pay that back? How do you pay it forward? You know, you know [laughs], you don't, you just try to live a good life, and, you know, be good to others.

Cory Nealon: So after high school, you receive an undergraduate degree from the Manhattan School of Music and a graduate degree from Stony Brook. You also have these mentors, like Scott Brubaker from the New York Met, Jerome Ashby at the New York Philharmonic. These are just top-level French horn players. You're in New York City, you're doing freelance work, and then you land a pretty coveted gig on Broadway, right? Can you tell us about that?

Jeff Scott: Well, I'll tell you about that, but I have to, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the, really, the heart and soul of everything, a woman by the name of Carolyn Clark, who was at that Brooklyn College program. And that scholarship ran out when I was in the 10th grade, and she continued to teach me for free, and made sure that I got into Manhattan School of Music. I am forever indebted to this woman.

But anyway, so I went ahead and I studied. And right, immediately after school, you know, I was in New York City, and there were opportunities, and I fell into an amazing opportunity. I started playing on Broadway. Broadway is a, it's an interesting networking of folks. There's no audition; it's who you know. And I was real fortunate because of the fact that I went to Manhattan School of Music and made those connections with students, that there were people on Broadway who knew me. And when an opportunity came up and they were asked who they might want to play along with in the horn section, they said, ‘Well, try Jeff Scott.’ So, again I'm indebted to wonderful people, you know [laughs].

Cory Nealon: And what were some of the musicals you played on?

Jeff Scott: The first show was a remake of the show ‘Show Boat.’ That was the very first show that I had. And then the very next one was ‘The Lion King,’ and that's the only other one that I ever played, because it started in 1997 and it's still going now. And I played that all the way until I left in 2005 for another ensemble. I guess we'll talk about that. But I played, you know, ‘Hakuna Matata’ for seven years [laughs].

Cory Nealon: At this time, are you also doing those tours and freelance gigs with, like, Barbra Streisand, Luther Vandross as well, and artists like that? Or is this a different time, after you left Broadway?

Jeff Scott: Yeah, no, it was concurrently. One of the good things about Broadway shows, the contract says that you're required to do 50% of the work. So you could literally leave the show for 50% of the time and have somebody cover your chair, and you can do other things. And so tours would come up. And again, because of the networking in New York City, you end up getting connections with folks that are doing a Barbra Streisand tour, Luther Vandross tour or something, and say, ‘Hey, do you want to go out for a couple of weeks and do this thing?’ So, yeah, I toured one of Barbra Streisand’s last tours, recorded with her, Luther Vandross before he passed away, Ray Charles. I mean, there were a ton of great, great acts that I was fortunate to tour with.

Cory Nealon: Wow, Ray Charles. That's…

Jeff Scott: Yeah [laughs], it's like, otherworldly. Definitely [laughs].

Cory Nealon: I once heard a story about him that, I don't know how true it was, if somebody actually worked with him, but that he could be quite the taskmaster when he wanted to, that he could be tough.

Jeff Scott: Oh, yeah. Well, he wasn't tough on the orchestra, because we were usually coming in, like, at the last minute, and you just, they were, everybody's pros so they could play the book. But his own band, his core band, and the singers? Oooooh, it's a whole different tone.

Cory Nealon: So around the same time that you start performing on Broadway, you co-found Imani Winds. Within this group, you're composing, you're arranging, you're touring, you're recording. You know, this quintet, whose success is no sure thing, at least compared to what you have on Broadway playing in ‘The Lion King,’ it becomes your primary focus. Were you at all hesitant to sort of strike out on your own with Imani and give up that steady gig of Broadway?

Jeff Scott: Yes [laughs]. Full stop. I was gainfully employed on Broadway. Imani Winds was an upstart ensemble. The woman who started the ensemble, her name is Valerie Coleman, she’s a famous composer now, wonderful flutist. She had a vision of everything that the group is doing now. She had that vision within the first year that she started the ensemble, you know, touring, being 100% self-sufficient, wouldn't have to freelance outside of the ensemble, winning Grammys, making recordings. To that point, we're talking 1997 when she started this ensemble, it had never happened for a wind quintet, and it had certainly never happened for an all African American and Latin chamber music ensemble. It just was unheard of. 

And so, I had a colleague who I used to play with at ‘The Lion King’ and I remember driving him to work one day, and we'd laugh about this conversation we had. I said, ‘Man, I just joined this group called Imani Winds, and the flute player’s just out of her mind. She thinks we're going to, like, tour and make a lot of money playing chamber music. Like, yeah, like I'm gonna quit my show.’ 

Wow [laughs]. Seven years later, I quit my show, and I can't, you know, to this day, it was still scary. I mean, you know, I won't say that it was, you know, a no-brainer in terms of financially anyway, but in terms of musical ambition and truly realizing yourself as an artist to the fullest and scariest limits that you want to push yourself, Imani Winds offered me that opportunity, and I wanted to see just how far I could go with music. And that gave me the strength to leave a Broadway show that was very, very consistent and very well paying.

Cory Nealon: One of the things we've touched on before is, you know, talking about the unlikeliness of a woodwind quintet, you know, taking this journey, that there wasn't a whole lot of music set aside specifically for woodwinds. It's more set aside for strings or other instruments in these chamber music ensembles. So this sort of led you and your colleagues to composing and arranging all new material.

Jeff Scott: Yeah, yeah. Like I said, there were very few ensembles, chamber music ensembles, in the woodwind or the wind instrument area, sort of making careers out of touring. You know, they might do, you know, there were usually quintets that were part of an orchestra or part of a university, and they might do three or four concerts a year. We were setting out to do a whole touring career. And so, yeah, you go out for two months, and all of that repertoire that, you know, that's available, is done. And then what are you going to do? And then what are you going to do the next year, and the next? And plus, the music that we wanted to play, that we wanted to provide for our audiences, hadn't been written. There was nothing written that had any sort of African or Latin influence, and then even with the core repertoire, there's nothing for wind quintet by Brahms, by Beethoven, by Bach, by Strauss, by Stravinsky, you name it. So even when you're talking about the greatest of the great European composers, that music wasn't there. And so, you know, what are you going to do? So we said, well, let's write it ourselves [laughs], you know. And until that point, I hadn’t really composed a whole lot, I had composed some. But I followed Valerie Coleman's lead.

Cory Nealon: And I mean, within, I don't want to say a short time, but you know, the touring, it picks up. You go on the road with the likes of Wayne Shorter. How awesome or intimidating was that?

Jeff Scott: It was purely awesome. There was no intimidation. If you know Wayne Shorter, of course, the idea of it is extremely intimidating. But if you know, if you come to know Wayne Shorter, you got to know that he is the sweetest, warmest and funniest, quirkiest person in the world. He's just, he was a big kid. All he wanted to do was talk about, he remembered, like, whole scenes of famous movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s. And he would just, like, repeat every character in front of you and change his face and everything. This would be like, you know, an hour before the show would start. You know, that was Wayne Shorter.

And he would say things, like if you asked him, like, how something went, he'd go, ‘Yeah, yeah, that's great. Just do it different tonight.’ That was it. That was the criticism. You know, he just wanted you to be free. He wanted you to just, you know, go places musically that you would dare to go. And the piece that he, he ended up writing a piece for the quintet that he called ‘Terra Incognita,’ unknown territory. And that's kind of how he, that's how he lived his life, that's how he did his music, and that's how he wanted his ensemble, and people that played with his ensemble, to conceive of music. And I tell you that is, that's like being on a magic carpet ride with that ensemble. That is, I'll never forget it. I can't tell you how many times I forgot to actually come in and play my part because I was just living in the moment and, like, lost myself, you know, like it's, ‘I can't believe this is happening,’ you know.

Cory Nealon: So this leads us to your Grammy-winning composition, ‘Passion for Bach and Coltrane.’ Where did you get the idea to merge the music of John Coltrane with Bach?

Jeff Scott: Purely from the reading of a set of poems by a poet and jazz critic by the name of A. B.  Spellman, who is very much still with us. He happens to be the father of the oboe player in Imani Winds, Toyin Spellman. In 2012, I think it was, A. B. gave everyone in the ensemble, as a gift, a book of new poems that he had written. And to that point, I wasn't a big reader in general, like books, you know. But about two years later, about a year and a half later, I had a pile of books and I said, you know this summer, I'm going to read some books. And I said, you know, I probably should read the doggone book that A. B. Spellman gave me—read his poetry, you know. And so I put that in my ‘to reads,’ you know, pile, and I got to reading his poetry.

A. B. Spellman: if I believed in heaven I would ask if you and bach ever swap infinite fours and jam the sound that light makes going…

Jeff Scott: And about three or four poems in, I just started hearing music. I started hearing sounds. I started hearing rhythms. And I just stopped, and I immediately contacted him. I said, ‘A. B., I'm reading your poems here, and I don't know, I don't know why, but it's calling music. I'm hearing music.’ I said, ‘We gotta do something.’ And it just turned into a project after that. I had no idea that I would conceive of that whole piece.

A. B. Spellman: i will die in havana in a hurricane it will be morning, i’ll be facing south west away from the gulf

Cory Nealon: So the music, it combines your own compositions with ‘A Love Supreme,’ which is, you know, widely considered just a masterpiece of 20th century jazz. There's Bach's ‘Goldberg Variations,’ which are just sort of part of the Western canon of classical music, and as you mentioned, the poetry of A. B. Spellman. You're combining this all into one coherent narrative. Did that come naturally, or was that a bit of a struggle to fit that all together?

Jeff Scott: It was, it seemed easy, and I don't want to sound flippant about it, but it goes back to what I was saying about my upbringing. I mean, these were the sounds that I heard coming up. You know, my mom listening to jazz and blues and, and, and soul and all that stuff. That all, that's what I grew up with. And to that point where I started writing this piece, I had missed so much having that in my music experience. Imani Winds dedicated itself to composers and musics that were underrepresented. But like we said before, there wasn't a whole lot of it there. So we had to do our own arrangements. We had to write our own music. We did some commissioning. But this was a chance to marry all those things. I love classical music, love Bach, I love, you know, all that, but I also love jazz and I love blues, and I love merengue, and I love salsa, and I love samba, and, yeah, I wanted to have an opportunity to put all of that into one big project. And this was the project.

Cory Nealon: So ‘Passion for Bach and Coltrane’ was awarded the 2024 Grammy for Best Classical Compendium.

Grammy presenter: And the Grammy goes to … ‘Passion for Bach and Coltrane,’ Alex Brown,…

Cory Nealon: What did it feel like to win that award?

Jeff Scott: Wow. Well I'll tell you one thing, we didn't expect to win. Our bassoon player, Monica Ellis, she had sort of a prepared thing on her phone, and she gives me her phone. She goes, ‘Jeff, do you want to read this?’ I said, ‘There is no way we're winning, first of all.’ I said, ‘Second of all, if we do win, I'm gonna be all gah gah shzshzshz [laughs]. I’m not gonna be able to say anything.’ And they said, ‘And the Grammy goes to … ‘Passion for Bach and—' Everything went absolutely white.

Monica Ellis: Oh my God! Oh my goodness! This is absolutely amazing! This is for Jeff Scott! Jeff Scott, who created this amazing work based on the amazing poetry of A. B. Spellman!

Jeff Scott: And like, you know, like white noise, you heard a hiss. I couldn't hear anything after that. I don't know how I got on stage [laughs]. You know, I look back at the video of us on stage, I don't remember any of that. I don't remember the laughing and the hugging and all that stuff. I just remember when it was all done, we were backstage, and the guy said, ‘All right, you got to give that Grammy back, because that was, that's the fake Grammy. That’s just for the [laughs], that’s for the cameras.’ I was like, ‘No, I want it.’ Oh, that's when it kind of started to hit.

But I tell you, it was numbing, numbing, because it just, it was such a culmination of so much hard work for an ensemble like ours. And for me as a composer, you know, just to have your music recognized in the highest, what I consider our highest platform, and to be able to do it with my friends and my colleagues, you know, and the folks that I was grinding it out with for 24 years, you know. So that was, it was really special.

Cory Nealon: I'd be remiss not to bring up that a fellow faculty member in the School of Music is also on that recording.

Jeff Scott: That’s right, that's right. Melissa White, we call her Missy, absolutely. She's, she's part of the string quartet, the Harlem Quartet, that's part of the ensemble, and that quartet was part of the ensemble from the very first time we played the piece. And I couldn't imagine playing this piece without them. They, they have that same sensibility that I talk about, of folks that really love classical music but also have a love for Latin and jazz music, and they can go back and forward between the two and sound authentic. That’s a special kind of musician.

Cory Nealon: That's great. So you win this Grammy, and then you almost immediately, or maybe right around the same time, you join the faculty here at UB, and you're about to be wrapping up your first full year here. What led you here? What attracted you to joining UB’s faculty?

Jeff Scott: Well, the trumpet faculty here. Jon Nelson is a dear friend. More than 20 years ago, I came here as part of ‘June in Buffalo,’ and we did a recording and made alliances and friendships that lasted many, many years. And so, three years ago now, Jon told me that there was going to be an opening, and that you might want to consider it. And I was pretty happy where I was, to tell you the truth. I was teaching horn at Oberlin College and Conservatory, but where I was, it was definitely a ‘roll up your sleeves and get to work’ kind of position. I was doing, easily, 30 to 40 hours a week and working on Saturdays and Sundays, because that's just what the job kind of required, and I wasn't afforded much time to compose. So when this opportunity came up, it was kind of a no-brainer.

Cory Nealon: Are you teaching composition as well as French horn?

Jeff Scott: Yeah, horn and composition. I have more composition students here, maybe it was the Grammy win, because the first semester I had, like, three. Now I've got eight [laughs]. It’s like ‘Ah, let’s see what that guy...’ [laughs] but I enjoy it, you know, because I think what it also shows, and this is so important, that all kinds of music can be appreciated. And you know, you just gotta find your niche, you know.

Cory Nealon: We need to mention that your collaborators will be performing ‘Passion for Bach and Coltrane’ at Slee Hall on April 25. How excited are you to bring that performance here to UB?

Jeff Scott: Oh, I'm extremely excited. You know, first of all, A. B. Spellman is 89 years old, and he tours with, they’re probably playing that piece probably six times this year, and he tours with them, and he doesn't miss a beat, you know. So I'm just, I just want to see him perform, you know, he's just a sight as he commands the stage, and his voice is just, you know, it's the voice of God. But more than that, you know, they get to see, you know, what I'm doing, and they get to come to my backyard. So it's gonna be good to see my family, you know, my Imani Winds family.

Cory Nealon: Professor Scott, thank you again for your time, and I hope you compose something beautiful here at UB and I hope you share it with the world.

Jeff Scott: I plan on it.