Bandleader, trumpeter and teacher: Clint Ashlock is KC jazz’s past, present and future

Harling’s Upstairs, the comfort-over-style dive bar overlooking the intersection of Westport Road and Main Street, doesn’t pack ’em in on Tuesday nights. On this frigid mid-February evening, plenty of bodies are present, yes, but most of them are attached to musical instruments and arrayed behind music stands — tonight’s talent, not tonight’s customers.

This is the New Jazz Order, the 16-piece big band organized by trumpeter Clint Ashlock. It’s a high-energy ensemble, and tonight it’s playing full tilt: for one guy at a table staring intently at the musicians as he nods his head more or less on the beat and sips a drink; for a trio of obvious art students in the pinball-machine corner, their heads knitted together in conversation; and for a group seated at a table in the middle of the room, laughing loudly, unperturbed by the loud music.

Sheet music flutters as the bandmates turn pages between songs, laughing at one another and enjoying long sips of their beers. Ashlock has booked his open rehearsals here at Harling’s every Tuesday night at 9 for the past eight years, ever since Michael McGraw’s Boulevard Big Band — which had held the Tuesday residency at Harling’s since 1989 — disbanded in 2007. Ashlock, just 26 then, formed his own collective and snatched up the suddenly available date.

The turnout tonight, he tells me, is about average. But there’s no cover charge, so it’s not about head count anyway. The New Jazz Order attracts regulars and near-regulars and it converts the odd accidental spectator, but these Tuesday nights aren’t about the audience. Instead, Ashlock is indulging an old tradition, that of the rehearsal band — a band that thrives on loose, collegial jams.

“It’s similar to the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra in New York or bands all over the country,” Ashlock says. “We play once a week and usually get paid very little — nothing or drinks. But the idea is that you get together with a bunch of musicians and read charts, and that once-a-week thing, you hope, leads to gigs. And it did, for us. We play often at the Blue Room or once in a while at jazz festivals. Individually, we’ve seen a lot of great players come through on their way to better-paying gigs.”

An hour into the New Jazz Order’s performance this night, the group has taken a break, and Ashlock is leaning against the bar. He’s sweater-vested and bespectacled, looking like a guy in transition between someone who makes dad jokes and someone who’s the butt of dad jokes.

“Every jazz musician that’s under 35 probably has been through here, so it’s kind of been a place where we all hang and can work on music,” he continues. “It’s kind of rough around the edges, but we get together and we play and we workshop, and eventually one of the guys will get a steady gig, and we’ll find somebody else to take their place.”

It’s at this moment when a young couple wanders into Harling’s. Ashlock checks his watch and smiles in their direction.

“I suppose we should get back to it and scare these guys off,” he says with genuine cheer. He calls his players back to their seats for a second set that’s looser than the first but no less powerful. (The audience is looser now, too.) Later, when Ashlock tells me that directing the New Jazz Order is like being “part baby sitter, part talent scout and part Zen master,” the start of this second set is what I’ll remember.

At the bar’s farthest reaches, where conversation inside the music remains possible, the newcomers have found seats. They order drinks. They stay.

“Being part of it was great on a number of levels,” trumpet player Hermon Mehari says of his NJO days.

Mehari, who leads the jazz trio Diverse and co-founded the R&B-meets-jazz group the Buhs, has known Ashlock since 2006, when the two were enrolled at the University of Missouri–Kansas City’s Conservatory of Music and Dance. Mehari was pursuing his bachelor’s degree in music, Ashlock his master’s.

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“I did that right up until I went to the Majestic [in 2012]. Just the fact that Clint’s established this tradition, that’s kind of incredible. It takes a lot of effort and love to do that, to get 16 or 17 guys together every Tuesday night to play, putting the music together and squeezing in the band. From a leader perspective, that was really inspiring to me. And people did that gig because of their respect for Clint — that’s how you can get that many people together every week to play.”

Saxophonist Michael Shults, another graduate of the New Jazz Order, recently joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire as an assistant professor. He, too, first met Ashlock at the conservatory, in 2005; he joined NJO in 2007.

“I would not have a career if not for Clint Ashlock,” Shults says. “I would probably be selling insurance right now. Clint was one of the first people that recognized that I had something to say, and one of the first people that thought I was worth being hired for gigs. When I applied for this job at Eau Claire and I was putting together my CV, I realized that probably over half of the accomplishments I was listing were related to Clint — something he had hired me for or something I had gotten as a result of playing in his bands.”

Those bands include Ashlock’s quintet, Forward, which he formed in early 2013, and the Kansas City Jazz Orchestra, which he has directed since the spring of 2013, following the resignation of longtime director Kerry Strayer, who died of cancer that summer.

“He wears a lot of different hats authentically,” Shults says. “He’s a great improviser on the trumpet. He plays lead trumpet in a section, which means he plays the high notes — and a lot of the time, those things are mutually exclusive. And on top of that, he’s a great composer. The quality and quantity of his writing with Forward is on par with anybody anywhere. And then he also writes for big band, which is a whole different set of challenges because you’re trying to make 16 voices fit together, as opposed to five or six.”

Shults adds, “And then, finally, he’s just a great band leader. That’s a really separate skill, and you have to get along with a wide range of personalities and deal with egos and organize rehearsals and book gigs, and he really excels at that.

“He doesn’t just dabble in four or five things. He’s really good at four or five things.”

The following Monday morning, Ashlock is standing behind a lectern in a drab classroom at Johnson County Community College. Eleven students have spread themselves over 15 tables, and only two of them look alert as Ashlock delivers a lesson on jazz godhead Louis Armstrong for the jazz-listening class he teaches here. It’s 8 a.m. It’s early.

Ashlock pulls down a screen in front of the chalkboard and cues up a YouTube clip of Armstrong’s version of “Dinah.” He turns the volume up high. When the video ends, he sings it back himself to the class. A few heads bop to life.

“Listen to the way he spins his phrasing,” Ashlock says, playing the clip again. “He takes all these songs and he changes the phrasing of it, so that it sounds more conversational, more natural, more human, as opposed to the uptight Western classical tradition of pop music.”

He lightly summarizes Armstrong’s history and genius, then sets up another clip.

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“Listen to this,” Ashlock tells his class. “He does this thing in the beginning that’s called a cadenza. It’s a solo that happens outside of everything else, to show off someone’s talent and to bring the music into a moment. Louis Armstrong plays this cadenza in 1928.”

That cadenza, of course, is the spine-tingling first seconds of “West End Blues.”

“OK, people,” Ashlock says, “I know that this sounds like some old shit to you — like some old-old-people music — but this is the past, the present and the future of music all in one 15-second snippet. It’s like if LeBron James got into a DeLorean and went back to 1891, when James Naismith was inventing basketball, and they’re all in tweed suits with a ball made out of intestines or whatever and a net made out of a peach basket, and LeBron appears like the freaking Terminator, and he takes the ball and starts dunking it, and the peach basket explodes. That’s what Louis Armstrong was like in 1928. No one had ever seen anything like this before, ever, ever, ever.”

Ashlock pauses. He has earned a few chuckles from his students.

“Does that make a difference?” Ashlock asks them. “Based on your zombie faces, I can’t tell. This is the history of the trumpet, you guys. I’m going to play it now, and I’m going to sound like crap.”

Ashlock retrieves his trumpet from its case and repeats the cadenza. It’s not as smooth as Armstrong’s, but it’s not a bad imitation.

His groggy audience shifts again. Ashlock spends a few more minutes on Armstrong’s process, then dismisses the class a few minutes early. He has borne the stoic disinterest of these 11 people with a rather inspiring resilience.

A young woman who was sitting in the back of the room — and had seemed wholly checked out for the duration of the lesson — saunters up with a few questions. She had, it turns out, been listening, and she reveals that she has just discovered Miles Davis, thanks to Ashlock. He raises his eyebrows and smiles at this news.

This class has been on Ashlock’s teaching schedule since he first joined JCCC as an adjunct assistant professor, in 2004. He has written curriculum for classes in jazz theory and jazz arranging as well, but has been able to teach jazz theory just twice. You need a certain number of enrolled students to go forward with a class, he explains, and there are rarely enough students interested in theory and arranging. In the fall, Ashlock is tentatively slated to take over as the school’s instrumental band director when Ron Stinson retires.

I ask him why he started teaching in the first place.

“Money,” he says, laughing. “I just wanted a job in music, you know? But I actually do like teaching, so that helps.”

He goes on: “Jazz can be a really hard concept to grasp, but I’ve learned, from this class that I teach, that people really respect integrity. And if you do something and you really pour everything you have into it, as long as you can get people to come through the door, I think they really respect that, even if they have no idea what notes you’re playing on a weird instrument.”

I point out to Ashlock that it sounds like he’s not talking about teaching anymore. We’re at a bar in Westport on a Wednesday afternoon, a neat whiskey in front of Ashlock as the topic turns to his own musical integrity.

“The people that I really respect, that have been in this craft for a really long time, always want to build their audience,” he says, “but they also know that if they do what they’re doing, eventually the truth of that will find people.”

Kelley Hunt met Ashlock when she sang with the Kansas City Jazz Orchestra during its 2012 Christmas performance. She invited him to record on her latest album, The Beautiful Bones, released last June. Since then, Ashlock has gigged with her when he’s available.

On a sunny Friday afternoon, at a farm on the outskirts of Lawrence, Ashlock and several other musicians are rehearsing with Hunt inside a soundproof garage, ahead of the singer-songwriter’s sold-out Valentine’s Day show at the Folly Theater. Ashlock huddles over a music stand, penciling notes on his sheet music.

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The band starts Hunt’s “This Time,” with Ashlock’s trumpet driving the funk. He adds more notations as the rehearsal evolves, then finally finds what he wants: a low note that provides the perfect canyon for Hunt’s burly voice to rise out of.

When Ashlock plays with her, Hunt tells me, “I don’t have to think twice about what’s happening with the horn section, and it helps me relax and do what I do. There are a lot of great players out there that I’d want to work with, but they don’t have the skill set that he does. He’s great to work with. He’s got a lot of fresh new energy and he’s really devoted to what he does, making music interesting and helping it grow. I think Kansas City is lucky to have him.”

Friday, February 27, the Kansas City Jazz Orchestra performs the third concert of its 2014–15 season, a gig titled “As Time Goes By.”

“The theme is, like, ‘KCJO goes to the movies,'” Ashlock tells me. “The songs we’re playing are all from movies: Academy Award music and popular tunes from movies. We’re doing the 20th Century Fox fanfare arranged for a big band, as well as the James Bond theme, ‘Mrs. Robinson,’ stuff from West Side Story, obviously ‘As Time Goes By’ from Casablanca.”

This is the second full season that Ashlock has directed the KCJO. It’s a job he wouldn’t have, he says, were it not for the New Jazz Order.

“Getting the KCJO gig came out of a friendship with Kerry [Strayer], who was the most venerable big-band leader in town,” Ashlock says. “He was one of the only guys over 35 who played in the New Jazz Order, and he did it just for fun.”

Strayer died in August 2013, and Ashlock says he’s determined to maintain the late leader’s high standards while adding his own vision.

“We have a subscription base — which we appreciate very much — that we sort of have to appease stylistically,” Ashlock says. “So you have to get a little more creative in order to balance the regular fans with the need to keep the orchestra moving forward and attract new audiences, and also to keep the musicians challenged.”

That integration of classic jazz and forward-looking ambition means projects like what’s next for the orchestra.

“Maybe the most interesting thing I’m doing right now is rearranging Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ which is a really iconic piece of 20th-century American music,” Ashlock says. “Originally it was for piano solo and orchestra, but I’m doing piano solo, jazz ensemble and some expanded instrumentation. We’re taking ‘Rhapsody’ and giving it a KC big-band twist.”

That performance is set for May, at the KCJO’s annual gala fundraiser.

“I don’t have a whole lot of years under my belt,” he says, “but I feel like I have a good artistic vision for what that ensemble is and what it could be. Hopefully, it comes together that way.”

On another Tuesday night at Harling’s, the room feels more or less the same. Again, I count fewer than 10 nonmusicians as the New Jazz Order gets under way. Three students are hanging out at a table in a corner, their faces bathed in the pale light of their MacBooks. A row of loudly inebriated man-children are at one end of the bar. A silver-haired gent sits far from them, on a stool at the opposite side of the room. He smiles as the New Jazz Order finds its notes.

“Oh, it’s hit-and-miss here,” Harling’s manager Brian Crilly tells me when I go over the roll with him. “Usually we can expect anywhere from 15 to 50 people, but winter is hard. Anywhere else you’d go to see a 16-piece jazz ensemble like this, you’d have to pay to get in — and you’d probably pay through the nose for your martinis or whatever you’re having.”

Crilly punctuates this home truth with a wink and a smile, and I lay down my cash for a drink. Ashlock gives some direction between songs, and soon the New Jazz Order is bounding through a lively, attention-grabbing number, the music bouncing warmly through the creaky bar. One of the laptop kids moves his head to the rhythm, and the dude-bros continue their night out. The soulful loner taps his foot against one of the rails of his stool.

I recall what Ashlock said to me a few days before, when he balked at the title “director of the New Jazz Order.”

“Ringleader, I think, would be better,” Ashlock had said with a laugh. “I mean, I put it together, and I’m just keeping it going.”