By DAN ARMONAITIS
During the heyday of big band jazz in the 1940s, one of the genre’s biggest stars was bandleader Woody Herman.
A three-time Grammy Award winner and a recipient of the prestigious Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, the clarinet-playing Herman toured the country with various ensembles dubbed The Herd for more than a half-century while exploring a wide array of music that was cutting edge and experimental for its time.
This week, a direct link to Herman will make a pair of appearances in the Upstate. Internationally-renowned trombonist John Fedchock, who was a member of Herman’s band from 1980 until the bandleader’s death in 1987, will perform a free big band concert with the Spartanburg Jazz Ensemble on Thursday, Feb. 24 at Leonard Auditorium in The Main Building at Wofford College along with an intimate quintet concert on Friday, Feb. 25 at The Wheel Sessions studio on Rutherford Road in Greenville. Tickets for the latter can be purchased here.
“By the time I joined (Herman’s band), which was the last seven years of his life, he was already close to leading his band for 50 years, so it was a great benefit to have access to his knowledge and his experience,” Fedchock said. “And to be able to perform nightly with that group for basically 40 to 46 weeks a year, traveling all over the country and the world, playing music both new and old at a wide variety of venues, was really great.”
Herman immediately took Fedchock, then in his 20s, under his wing and referred to him as “my right hand man.” Fedchock, who served as the band’s musical director and was a featured soloist, said he carries many of the lessons he learned from Herman to this day.
“I have my own big band here in New York,” said Fedchock, a resident of the city’s Queens borough. “The way he ran his band and treated his personnel and the way he had a vision for what he wanted to do in creating his own identity and his own sound for his band are some of the things that I draw upon with my own groups. And when I travel throughout the world as a guest artist or conductor performing my music, I try to take that with me to the groups I’m working with so that maybe a little of that will drip through (via) osmosis into their ensembles as well.”
An Ohio native, Fedchock started playing trombone as a 9-year-old elementary school student.
“It just happened to be the instrument that I chose,” Fedchock said. “My parents weren’t musicians, so it wasn’t like there was jazz in the house or anything like that. I didn’t discover any jazz until I was well into high school, and it was just something that I kind of discovered on my own. And because it was so expressive and unique and everybody had their own sound and did their own thing, it was attractive to me.”
Unlike today, the idea of a kid picking up trombone didn’t seem unique in that era.
“At that time, you could see a trombone on television, and you heard it all the time on the radio and on recordings,” Fedchock said. “We’re talking early ’60s, so it was still part of the fabric of the American music scene. …. It was only 20 years or so since people like Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller played the instrument, and those two were some of the biggest pop stars of their day.”
Once Fedchock started showing proficiency with his instrument of choice as a high school student, he became especially enamored by legendary trombonist Urbie Green.
“It was mainly just the fact that he could pretty much do anything,” Fedchock said of his admiration for Green. “He had a beautiful sound, he could play great ballads, he could play jazz, he was a lead player (and) he had amazing technique. He was everything all rolled into one, so it was a great place to start to hear someone be able to do all of that rather than if I were to have started out with a jazz player who was more on the creative side of things — not that Urbie wasn’t creative. But it might have changed the way I started practicing and preparing myself to play jazz.”
Once he became a professional musician, Fedchock got the opportunity to work with Green as well as such legendary trombonists as Carl Fontana, Bill Watrous, Slide Hampton and Al Grey. And during a distinguished career that’s spanned more than four decades, Fedchock has also gotten to perform with such jazz instrumentalists as Dizzy Gillespie and Zoot Sims as well as with such vocal icons as Rosemary Clooney, Nancy Wilson, Joe Williams and Tony Bennett.
“Playing with all those great folks who are no longer with us is something to look back on very fondly,” Fedchock said, noting that Bennett is, of course, still living but recently retired. “…It was just great to kind of soak in what you could whether it was through their playing or speaking with them or sitting next to them on an airplane or whatever. It’s a bit of history that you feel like you’re a part of.”
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