FRED BOUCHARD: Welcome once again to another session of the Berklee Oral History Project. Today in the hot seat is Mr. Ted Pease, who's had a distinguished forty-five-year career at Berklee College of Music, as a drummer, teacher, bandleader, arranger, a lot of other roles here, during the course of your career. Hi, Ted.

TED PEASE: Hi, Fred, nice to be here.

FRED BOUCHARD: Thanks for coming in. We warmed up talking about things that we had in common like Benny Goodman LPs when we were youngsters, and being English majors and cobbling together hasty outlines for classes. It sounds very familiar. Why don't you tell us how you first got banging on drums?

TED PEASE: Well, basically if I go back all the way to the beginning, I have to start sitting in front of my parents' old Victrola record player when I was about five or six years old and being fascinated alternately between Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, which I for some reason really loved and enjoyed, and Sousa marches. This would have been about 1944, and it was during the war, and I had an uncle that was in the service, and there was a great deal of sort of patriotic fervor going around in my family at the time. So Sousa marches on these little 78 records, they were the order of the day.

But from there I went to playing the piano. We were renting a house at the time, and the owner of the house had this beautiful grand piano that she had just left there. So, at the age of five, six years old I started plinking on the piano. And I finally took some lessons and began playing the usual classical repertoire all the way through elementary school; and then by the time I was a teenager I began to get interested in other things, notably sports, and practicing the piano three or four hours a day was not something that I wanted to do. I think that I had exhausted my abilities in that area anyways, so I stopped playing the piano. But I had this enormous interest in classical music all throughout that time, and I'd listen to records, and it'd seem like every waking moment I wasn't at school I was listening to music. And my mother was a great opera fan so there was music playing all the time one way or another in the house.

But as a teenager I got into--you were talking about Benny Goodman--I got interested in jazz because of some Benny Goodman records that my friend loaned to me. And they were on these old 78s, and three or four minutes of music. Listening to Benny Goodman trio, quartet records which were the ones that I really enjoyed because you could really hear what was going on by Teddy Wilson, the piano player, and Gene Krupa, the drummer. And I started just sort of fooling around with any implements I could get my hands on, whether it was table utensils or--I remember at one point I even used some candles, I started breaking candles using them on a desktop.

FRED BOUCHARD: "Fascinatin' Rhythm."

TED PEASE: And driving my mother crazy. "Why, why are all these broken candles lying around?" They got me some lessons with the local drum teacher, and I started playing the drums and joined the high school dance band, and just graduated, so to speak, very naturally from the piano to the drums. And I enjoyed dancing in those days. I can't dance very well anymore, but I was in a dancing school for young people in those days where they taught you ballroom dancing. And so I loved to do the jitterbug or the lindy-hop, and there was the accompanying music for that was such a natural thing, with those old swing bands that were popular there during the late forties and early fifties. So I became really interested in that kind of music, and when I went to play with the high school dance band, I just kinda knew what to do. And so one thing led to another, and I also began playing with a friend of mine in high school, Ed Xiques, my old friend, who is still having a very illustrious career in the music business, as we speak. He played [reeds] with Thad Jones, Mel Lewis band in the seventies and is currently touring all over the world with Liza Minnelli. But Ed and I, we had a sextet in high school and just had a great old time, and that was helpful. By the time I got to Boston, Ed was still here studying at BU [Boston University], and so we roomed together for a while. But that's a whole other story. Anyway, I spent four years in a liberal arts college out of Cornell and did some--I did a lot of playing in Cornell, there were some very good musicians who were, you know, pre-med students and engineers, and whatnot. But there was kind of an underground jazz community there and we played a lot of gigs and concerts; and that was in the late 1950s.

FRED BOUCHARD: As well as some GB [general business]?

TED PEASE: Some. Some dances, but mostly we were really hardcore beboppers back then. And we had a lot of fun. Some of those, one piano player in particular, Alan Steger, has had a notable career for himself out in the San Francisco area. And Steve Brown, a guitarist, spent many years at Ithaca College. I think he was the head of the jazz department there until he retired. And we had trios and quartets and did a lot of playing there and did our studies during the day. But it was after I graduated from Cornell that I didn't know what to do with myself. I think I mentioned to you that I didn't want to teach English, which was what I was majoring in. And so, Ed was here, Ed Xiques was here at BU, and he said "Why don't you come to Boston? They have a summer program over at Berklee." I knew about Berklee because I had visited Ed here a couple of times, and Herb Pomeroy had his big band down at The Stable, the old...

FRED BOUCHARD: I caught them as a freshman at BC [Boston College].

TED PEASE: So I had been there a few times, and I had gone and seen Herb's band and just been blown away, because somehow it was very different than the music that I had been listening to in New York. Basie's band, and some of the other big bands that were down in the New York area. There was a kind of, I don't know how to describe it really, but it was like a Boston sound that presumably had been generated out of Herb's own musical genius and the kinds of voicings and orchestrations that he was fond of and his students, Michael Gibbs was already here, writing for the band. And I heard this band and I said, "Man, this isI really want to see what's going on." So when I graduated from Cornell I came here for the summer, and that was in 1961, and I've been here ever since. I mean, I've been very lucky that way.

FRED BOUCHARD: How can we articulate the distinction of Herb's band? Were there any other local bands in the area that would have emulated the sound, or contributed to this, kind of like, Boston quality?

TED PEASE: Well, you know I was thinking about this last night, and I think what happened was, Herb took this kind of amalgamation of Duke's band. Herb loved Duke's music. So he kind of started from there, but he just did it in his own expression. But he had all these very gifted students that were studying with him here at Berklee, Michael Gibbs being a perfect example. There were others as well, there was a trombone player named Chris Swanson, that I remember who was very gifted, and Gary McFarland spent a little time here. They were all young and eager and getting into their own sounds and styles and whatnot, and I think some of that rubbed off on Herb, and he just let it happen, basically.

FRED BOUCHARD: Did he incorporate any of their charts into the band?

TED PEASE: Oh yeah, especially Michael--Michael Gibbs. I was extremely impressed with Michael's writing. And Michael was from Southern Rhodesia. So here's this guy, a trombone player with an English accent, coming from Africa, and kind of a marching band tradition over there, and then absorbing American jazz sounds, notably Gil Evans' music, especially, coming up with his own sound. And Michael was a composer--Gil being more of an arranger. Gil would take Gershwin's music and take Porgy and Bess and do something with it maybe, but Michael was composing. So he was writing these really interesting compositions with very unique voicings and combinations of instruments that he may have borrowed from Gil and just transforming them into these wonderful soundscapes.

FRED BOUCHARD: Gary McFarland also had a very unique way of putting an orchestra together and interweaving sections. He had some really really wonderful albums on Verve and other labels.

TED PEASE: Yeah, I loved Gary's writing because it was so contrapuntal. If you came out of the Basie tradition, it was the sax solos, and the brass writing was based on a vertical concept, which I loved, and we all did.

FRED BOUCHARD: Yep, echoed now more recently by Bill Holman.

TED PEASE: Gary came--his music was lighter, it had a more the texture was lighter, he wrote almost like a small group concept.

FRED BOUCHARD: Conversation between the sections, crisp but smooth-flowing.

TED PEASE: Yeah, so, all of that: Herb just let that happen. And I think it all kind of creeped into the music that was part of the Boston scene. I really credit the Berklee atmosphere for creating what I thought of then as "the Boston sound." So, and then there, of course, were some marvelous musicians coming out of here: Charlie Mariano, Toshiko Akiyoshi, and the players that were teaching at school here. Alan Dawson, and Herb, of course, that sent this music out, cast it upon the waters, so to speak. I just found as I came here that summer 1961, I said, "Man, I feel like I'm home." I went from this very sort of stern Ivy League education to this wonderful open scene that was here over at 284 Newbury Street.

FRED BOUCHARD: How did you infiltrate yourself into this? Did you come in as a freshman all over again?

TED PEASE: Yeah, I basically started from scratch, I came here as a nobody. I was kind of testing the waters, so to speak, but...

FRED BOUCHARD: But you had a couple years on the other guys. You were probably twenty-one?

TED PEASE: Yeah I was twenty-one, twenty-two years old.

FRED BOUCHARD: I always like to have older freshmen in my class because they always bring another level of sophistication and awareness into the classroom.

TED PEASE: And I had a considerable amount of playing experience at Cornell, which was separate from my education there. I'd done a lot of playing out there, so I guess what happened was the very first day, they auditioned incoming students. So I got there early, and I was one of the first drummers to audition. And first it was a gentleman named George [A.] Brambilla who was teaching here, a pianist. He heard me play and he said, "Hey, would you mind auditioning, staying here, playing the drums while we have all these horn players and piano players come in and play?" So, I sat there...

FRED BOUCHARD: You were the house drummer.

TED PEASE: There I was--brand new on the first day of school--and I was part of this auditioning band for these horn players and whatnot. So right away, they kind of felt like, "Well, he's got good time," and I started getting some recommendations for some of the better ensembles. Right from the beginning. So between that and the fact that my friend Ed that I spoke about was already playing in a local dance band led by a gentleman named Dick Wright, Ed got me the chair, the drum chair with Dick's band that summer. I started playing right away--that was one of the main reasons I was able to stay here, not only because I loved the music but because I was making a little bit of money, doing these gigs and whatnot. It wasn't a lot, but it sure helped.

FRED BOUCHARD: It defrayed the tuition costs, etcetera.

TED PEASE: Yeah.

FRED BOUCHARD: I'm curious how you made the transition from classical piano to drums and what the effect might have been of the piano playing on your concept of drumming, or how it fit into your, maybe, sense of composing and arranging.

TED PEASE: Well, okay, that's probably a long answer, but let me see if I can boil it down. When I was--I quit playing the piano at fifteen, but I never lost interest in the keyboard, and what it could do, and what I could do with it. And so, when I started listening to jazz, I really enjoyed the big band. Benny Goodman first, and then I started sort of moving forward in the continuum and fell in love with Basie's band, Count Basie's band, at first. And I began to listen for what the brass section and the sax section were doing, and the kind of juxtaposition, and the call and response patterns. And I could hear in a general way the kinds of voices that he was using because they were fairly simple. Close position voicings that, you know, they weren't clusters, they weren't polychords, they weren't anything that I couldn't just kinda scope out...

FRED BOUCHARD: And they let Jo Jones and Freddie Green just keep sailing right on.

TED PEASE: Yeah, and of course that groove underneath it all was just so inviting. But my knowledge of the keyboard and the sounds and all the ear training that I had done as a child really helped me out, really helped me to leap-frog some of the initial ear training challenges that I might otherwise have struggled with. And when I got here and started studying here's how you actually write this stuff down, it came to me very quickly. Basically I knew the sounds, but I didn't know the nomenclature. I didn't know, that's "four-way close" and that's a "drop-two voicing." You know, I had to learn all that terminology, but that was helpful when I started teaching later on, because it helped me codify all that material.

FRED BOUCHARD: Let's talk about some of the classes you found yourself in '62, '63. You were studying with Herb, surely, and who were some of the other profs?

TED PEASE: Well you know what, I made a list, because last night I was thinking I'm gonna leave somebody out. And I thought if anybody watches this tape and can remember that far back, I thought I'd just run through very quickly some of the teachers who were here. When I first came to Berklee. Herb of course was here, he was sort of the Oracle of Delphi, you might say. He was the sine qua non.

FRED BOUCHARD: The go-to guy.

TED PEASE: Of faculty. But you didn't get to Herb until you were in your third year, unless you played in one of his ensembles, which I was lucky enough to do. But, just quickly: George Brambilla taught Arranging and piano; Jim Progris taught Harmony; Bill [William] Maloof had just started teaching Composition here; Alfred E. Lee was a wonderful pianist who taught Solfege; Paul Schmeling was already teaching piano and Ear Training here; Alan Dawson was the drum teacher; Ray Santisi was teaching Harmony and piano; Ray Kotwica was teaching trumpet; Joe Viola, the woodwinds; Bill [William] Curtis taught bass; John LaPorta had just gotten here, so he was teaching some improvisation but mostly he taught a Melody and Improv class. And Arif Mardin was here: I think he was here for a cup of coffee, basically, on the faculty, and I think he taught a Melody class as well, and then he went off to New York and became the famous record producer that he became; Dean Earl was here as a pianist.

FRED BOUCHARD: Just been inducted into the Boston Jazz Hall of Fame.

TED PEASE: Yeah, yeah. Dean was great. I was lucky enough to work with him a number of times over the years. Dean was, he would, if you were doing a GB gig, it was just sort of a run-of-the-mill dance or something like that, Dean knew how to get the crowd involved. He would play a standard tune, in a very sort of normal way for a first chorus or two, then he would start building on the material. And by the third or fourth chorus, he was a big band all to himself, and people would start looking at this guy--little guy, Dean was. And he'd be over there stomping and wailing and the people would gather 'round the piano and just... He was wonderful, I enjoyed playing with him so much, and just a wonderful guy with a positive attitude.

FRED BOUCHARD: Yeah, I see some of that more recently in people like Jackie Beard, who is on the faculty here now, and Cyrus Chestnut.

TED PEASE: Yeah, that kind of...

FRED BOUCHARD: Showmanship. But very, very calculated and knowledgeable.

TED PEASE: Yeah, and wonderful musicianship and all that history in his mind.

FRED BOUCHARD: Do you want to talk about any of the other people you met in that list, you know, Ray, or Joe Viola, or Alan Dawson, or anybody that you had a connection with in class?

TED PEASE: I studied with Alan, and Alan was, boy, he was a real gem that Boston had back in those days. And I know people talk about him in a kind of aas a legendary player, but boy, that's only the half of it. I knew a lot about other drummers in those days, and aspired to do what they could do, whether it was Roy Haynes or Mel Lewis or Buddy Rich, all the usual household names. But Alan, he was a dancer on the drums. He had such incredible facility, both with his hands and his feet. He could do things I don't think I have ever seen replicated anywhere, by anybody. With such dexterity, and musicianship, he was a wonderful wonderful player. And also, a very, very good vibraphone player. A lot of people don't remember that Alan played very good vibraphone.

FRED BOUCHARD: I remember how difficult it was to get him to pack the vibes and bring them on a gig. But he would do it if the situation was right, he would love to be able to play vibes in front of another drummer so he could get off the drums and just work on the vibes.

TED PEASE: Yeah, that's right. And Joe Viola was here, of course. Joe was legendary as a saxophone teacher worldwide; he had people coming from all over the world to study with him. And I remember not being a saxophone player but I would ask about Joe because Joe was.he was very reticent. He wasn't, you know, he didn't go down there and sell himself. He was just, "I'm just content to stay in the office and play all the reeds and teach and then go play golf on weekends." He was a great golfer. But what I found out about Joe--people would tell me this a lot--that he was a real expert in getting his students to get a good sound on the instrument. And he would work with his students to open up the sound. The saxophone--again, I'm not a saxophone player--but it's a tough instrument to get a sound out of, and you can observe this, if you go to a junior high school or stage band concert, and listen to the saxophone players and listen to this kind ofI don't know, I call it almost a bovine sound that they get on the saxophone. It's not particularly pleasant. It's usually overblown, and alto players play sharp in the upper register, and tenor players play flat if they're playing too loud. But Joe could take that raw sound from a player that he saw some promise in, and work with that. He had some way of doing it that apparently was magical, so he could get a real jazz sound out of a saxophone player.

FRED BOUCHARD: One of the most distinctive practitioners of soprano sax, Jane Ira Bloom, worships at Joe's shrine.

TED PEASE: Yeah. I bet Jane would probably give you chapter and verse about what he used to do. He would work with the anatomy of the mouth from what Larry Monroe used to tell me, Larry's one of the faculty here, he's an alto player, saxophone player. And he would tell me stories about what Joe would physically do to his students to help them feel what the tongue was supposed to do and articulate against the reed and whatnot. It was fascinating.

FRED BOUCHARD: Really rudiments. The basics. Swell.

FRED BOUCHARD: Moving to administration. Bob Share, he was aboard, right around when you were a student there. He came in around that time.

TED PEASE: Bob had been here quite awhile by the time I arrived here. He was Larry Berk's right-hand man, and he was in that office right there inside the door in 284 Newbury Street, right when you walked in. Their office was right there. And Bob was a very interesting guy, a very, very bright man. I don't think he ever went to college or if he did, I don't think he ever graduated, but he was--he had an amazing intuitive intelligence. And he was a very good musician and an excellent teacher. And a great guy. And he looked the part; he was very handsome, always well dressed, spoke well. Charming guy. And I owe him in very large measure my job here, because I was a student just doing my thing, going to classes, and I had some contact with Bob through those offices. And one day he called me into his office, and he said, "We're a little short-handed here, we need somebody to do a little theory and a little harmony." And I said, "Sounds good to me. Can I finish up my schooling while I'm doing it?" He says "Sure. Just, why don't you split your senior year in two? Just, do your senior year over a two-year period." So I did that, and in 1964 I started teaching, and it was Bob who got me to do it. So I will be forever grateful to him, for that reason.

FRED BOUCHARD: What were the classes and what form did they take? How did you gather the material and impart it?

TED PEASE: Well, having been a student, I had a good set of notes, and there were no outlines, other than just a brief one or two page topical outline that was handed to you by somebody the first day of class. "Okay, go teach Arranging 1." So that was something I knew how to do: I was writing a lot, and I would just go in and use the blackboard, and we didn't have all the fancy stuff that they do now, it was all chalkboard, and at first I didn't even have a record player to play examples on, let alone a tape deck or any audiovisual stuff. That came along later, but in those days you taught at the blackboard and the piano. So you put up an example of four measures of a sax solo or something like that, and then you'd walk over to the piano, and you'd plunk it out on the piano, so that the students could hear basically what they were looking at sounded like. And then you could also further review, refer them to, alright, go home and listen to "Li'l Darling" by Neil Hefti, and you'll hear that kind of voicing as you're listening to "Li'l Darling." They, being fairly knowledgeable students, would say, "Oh, okay," and they would find "Li'l Darling."

FRED BOUCHARD: That was the last track on the Basie Roulette album with the bomb on the cover.

TED PEASE: Yeah, E=MC2. It was that great album.

FRED BOUCHARD: [Thad] Jones' solo, yeah, sweet. That was one class, that was Arranging 1?

TED PEASE: Arranging, yeah. Then Harmony, I taught that first year I taught Arranging, Harmony, Counterpoint, Ear Training, and Bob Share made me teach an English class, which I hated, because the reason I came to Boston after Cornell was I didn't want to teach English. But he found out I had majored in English at Cornell, and he said, "Okay, we need some preparatory English classes for kids that didn't get a high school diploma."

FRED BOUCHARD: Were you doing sentences on the blackboard?

TED PEASE: It was pretty much grammar and syntax. And that didn't last very long, so what I did was, I had them write record reviews. So I said, "Okay, write me a one page record review on the latest album that you're listening to. I want to know who are the writers, who are the players."

FRED BOUCHARD: So--you're the spiritual godfather of my class!

TED PEASE: Well, maybe. I guess I am!

FRED BOUCHARD: Yeah, that's what we do, record reviews and music journalism. Great...

TED PEASE: Well, it seemed like a good idea and they do it well, and of course there was some very uneven talent in the writing area. These very fine musicians who came here, but were not very literary, I guess you would say. Wrote poorly and spelled poorly. But I think by the end of the year, I had noticed some improvement at least. But I only had to do that for a year, because thankfully Bob hired somebody else to come in, 'cause this was right on the edge of when they were trying to get college accreditation. And I was, I didn't even have a masters degree in English. I just had the undergraduate degree, so I was not qualified for a loftier position on the faculty on that point in academics. Music, that was fine, no problem.

FRED BOUCHARD: So you were teaching classes, taking classes, and gigging with Dick Wright and Ed at night.

TED PEASE: At night. And also, by that time I was starting to play with a lot of the dance bands around Boston. There were several of the old big band style.

FRED BOUCHARD: The Totem Pole, Bob Bachelor?

TED PEASE: Bob Bachelor, I played with Bob Bachelor's band for awhile. Herb was instrumental in getting me a lot of these gigs, bless him for that. There was Bob Bachelor, there was Ted Herbert's band out of Manchester, New Hampshire. Fred Satirial had a band, Dick Madison had a band out of South Dartmouth, down in southern Massachusetts. So I did some ballroom circuit work with those bands during the 1960s.

FRED BOUCHARD: What did they use for stock charts?

TED PEASE: They had published stock arrangements that were...who was the guy back then? Johnny Warrington was. Published arrangements on these little folios about this big that had "In the Mood" and "String of Pearls."

FRED BOUCHARD: Right out of Glenn Miller's book.

TED PEASE: Exactly. So you know, you would go and you would be sort of the Glenn Miller clone band at some ballroom at Revere Beach or...

FRED BOUCHARD: And they all had the same chart.

TED PEASE: Yep, they all had the same chart. But then, in addition to that, people started writing for these bands, and I know Herb wrote some charts for Bob Bachelor's band. And in the case of Dick Wright, his band was six horns and a rhythm section. And I did a lot of writing for his band, as did Dick, who was a very gifted arranger, and some other people that were playing in the band also wrote, so we had a lot of so-called specials, as far as stock arrangements, and we faked a lot of charts, too. Somebody would request "Satin Doll," let's say, and if there wasn't an arrangement in the book, the band would fake it.

FRED BOUCHARD: And riff behind the soloists, or whatever.

TED PEASE: Yeah.

FRED BOUCHARD: You mentioned that Dick Wright's band had LaPorta, John LaPorta, Jack Petersen or Mick Goodrick, Tony Teixiera on bass, Jerry Seeco on trumpet, Roger Newman, Jimmy Mosher, Jimmy Derba, great reed players. This is a full sized, fourteen, fifteen-piece band?

TED PEASE: No, actually no. It was a nine-piece band, some of those names overlap. In other words, they weren't in the band at the same time. But over the years, that five-year period or whatever it was before Dick left town, went to Vegas where he still is, the players would come and go to a certain extent. But I remember Jimmy Derba, for instance, was the tenor player, and he played in the band for a long time. And then when John LaPorta couldn't do gigs sometimes, Jimmy Mosher would come and play alto.

And the original version of Dick's band--this is kind of funny, I like to tell this story, about Dick's band. When I was still a student, and it was that first year that I was here, in Dick's band, Michael Gibbs was playing trombone, and Gary Burton was playing piano. So we had this gig over on the other side of Somerville, in a place called the Inman Club, and Gary and Mike were already close friends. They were collaborating on projects and whatnot, and both of them were near as I could tell, geniuses. But the funny thing about the two of them was that--and they were both in school like I was, we were studying during the day and playing these gigs at night, and on the gigs Gary and Michael would bring their homework assignments, and they would have their homework assignments on the stand. And I can distinctly remember, I can picture it in my mind, Gary sitting there, and he's playing, just, sort of jungle business piano, standard tunes and whatnot, whatever the arrangement called for. And at the same time he's playing the piano, he's reading Cicero, or you know, his history text or something, and flipping pages, and just playing away. And Michael was over here, you know, if the tune ended, Michael would sketch a few sentences on some paper he was writing and go back to playing. So that was a...

FRED BOUCHARD: Brilliant multi-tasking.

TED PEASE: That was an image that I will never forget.

FRED BOUCHARD: Rest of the guys are going for a smoke and these guys are like doing everything else. Great. Maybe you could talk about the Berks a little bit. What Larry was like, you know...

TED PEASE: Larry was a real character. He loved musicians and he loved to hang out and tell stories. And of course he had a long history in his musical background in Boston, in addition to the fact that he was at MIT, I know, for a while. And then he was in New York, working for, I think it was CBS, as an arranger, before he came back to Boston and started Schillinger House. Wonderful guy, you know, he just put his arm around you, "How's the family?" and all this kind of stuff. And just very friendly and knew how to deal with people. He was very adept at that. Alma I knew less well but she was his companion and aide de camp and actually worked here for quite a number of years in the publicity department.

FRED BOUCHARD: Which she basically founded, I guess.

TED PEASE: Yeah. And tried to get other family members involved with the school. I think I mentioned the Berklee Wives Association that she established way, way back there in the sixties, and used to have receptions for the spouses of teachers, who still in those days, primarily the faculty was, I believe, virtually all men. And so, she wanted to get the wives involved and was very generous in that regard. Lee Berk came along later, as I remember he was in law school until the late sixties, and then when he finished law school, he came, and Larry put him into an administrative position right away, and it wasn't long before Lee had substantial responsibilities around here. It was clear to all of us then that Larry was grooming him to take his place when he retired.

Larry, he was great. He was a great personality, and it seemed to me he was always hustling in a good sense, in that he saw the potential for the school and how it could expand and become world class in music education. But that involved buying more properties. So he would have to look around for hotels to buy, like the Bostonian, which is now 1140, and the old Sherry Biltmore, which is now 150 Mass Ave, and god knows what he did behind the scenes, and whose, you know, hands he had to shake in the process, but...

FRED BOUCHARD: Building up the trustees, making friends in the industry.

TED PEASE: He knew how to do this. He knew the bankers, he knew the lawyers, he knew the movers and the shakers in the Boston community, many of whom were great music lovers. I think that was his secret. He found these people and made them trustees. They weren't professional people. They also loved music. I think that was one of his secrets to his success, that he could get these people to wheel and deal maybe if there was a councilman that wasn't really comfortable with having 500 more students walking down Boylston Street, "Well, we'll figure out something." And somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody, and they would actually get it done. I know for instance when they bought the Sherry Biltmore Hotel, the church behind 150, St. Cecilia's, they were very concerned at St. Cecilia's that there was gonna be loud music playing outside windows at night, and all this kind of stuff. But somehow Larry was able to smooth that out, I think, as far as I know, we've been good neighbors ever since.

FRED BOUCHARD: We're renting space from them.

TED PEASE: Yeah, I taught in one of those rooms for a while. That would have been about twenty years ago, I guess...

FRED BOUCHARD: Back to your teaching career here. You started off as a student-teacher, and you evolved into teaching a lot of other things and becoming an able administrator eventually. How do you perceive the composition department evolving since you were here in '63, '64 timeframe?

TED PEASE: Well, basically it was out of necessity that--well, as I think I mentioned before I first came here, there were maybe three arranging teachers, as I remember. Everett Longstreth, George Brambilla, and Herb, and I may be leaving somebody out, and if I did, I'm sorry. But there were three people, and that was fine, for a student body of 150 students, but in the late sixties, the school seemed to double in size every year. With the new properties or whatever, and Larry was trying to pump up the student body, and my, I guess fortunate or unfortunately, the Vietnam War was heating up. And there were a lot of students who were coming here, who didn't want to go in the army, and be sent overseas. So we had this huge influx of musicians, of students in the late sixties, and so that necessitated more and more classes and more and more teachers. Herb was content to do just what he had always done, which was handle the advanced students, and so he wasn't comfortable with doing anything administratively with his role. And Everett Longstreth left, I think at that time he went over to the Boston Conservatory to teach, and...

FRED BOUCHARD: Later he had involvement with MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]? Was it him?

TED PEASE: Not to my knowledge. He did teach at the Boston Conservatory, and for all I know, he's still there. Everett's a great guy, by the way. I worked a lot with his band, but that's another story. Anyway, there was a kind of a state of flux there, people were leaving. As I mentioned, Dick Wright left, he went to Vegas; he was teaching Arranging. Phil Wilson had been hired, so Phil was here, and Michael Rendish was here, but we had to jump through hoops because there were so many students coming in. And when we got over to the Bostonian Hotel we started having to teach basic Arranging and Harmony in lectures of 100 to 150 kids in the recital hall, which was a whole different kettle of fish than when we were in these smaller classes at 284 Newbury Street. So, out of necessity, I had to come up with these more elaborate lesson plans for teachers who were being hired right and left. Mostly at first, at least, from the student body, much as I had been. In other words, you'd spot a kid who was a real good writer as a senior, you say, "Hey man, we need you to come in and teach some of the basic kids some basic theory or harmony." So we'd hire those people, many of whom are still here, by the way. If you look at any of the faculty members who are in their late fifties and beyond, you'll find some of these same people there.

FRED BOUCHARD: Ken Pullig...

TED PEASE: Ken. Charlie Cassara, Bill Scism, Michael Scott, lots of these people. And there were some other people that had been former students that were coming in off the road. They'd been with Woody Herman's band, or Buddy Rich's band.

FRED BOUCHARD: Absolutely. Greg Hopkins...

TED PEASE: Greg was here, Jeff Stout and George Zonce and...

FRED BOUCHARD: Wes Henzel?

TED PEASE: Wes, well yeah, he came from Vegas. He was doing the Folies Bergère in Vegas. And then he, out of the blue, here was Wes Henzel, and sure he came in. But we had to do these lectures, at the beginning of the week, and the students would fan out into smaller classes at the end of the week, and do their drill exercises or play four bars of a sax solo they'd written, or whatever it was they had to do. But the lectures were, you know, it was something we had to do out of necessity. It wasn't something we wanted to do, but there were so many students coming in so quickly.

FRED BOUCHARD: Did formulated textbooks evolve from the original one-liner bulleted notes that you guys had started with?

TED PEASE: Ultimately, yeah, but that took a long time. For whatever reason, Larry and Bob Share were reticent about putting Berklee stuff out there for broad consumption. Whether it would be detrimental to prospective students coming in and not needing to be here, or whether it would compete with what was called the Correspondence Course, which Bob was running...

FRED BOUCHARD: And now is done online.

TED PEASE: Or, whether it would somehow compromise the Berklee mystique. We never really knew what it was, but it took a long time for me and Michael and some of the other guys to say, "Bob, we have to get some textbooks in here. I'll write one, and Michael." We were perfectly capable of doing it. At first it was a little bit tough to get approval on it.

FRED BOUCHARD: Berklee Press took a long time to come to pass.

TED PEASE: Yes. Berklee Press was essentially putting out a Joe Viola saxophone exercise book, and John LaPorta had some stage band method books, and Alan Dawson had a drum manual, and I guess they were oriented toward players, not writers. There were no theory texts, let's put it that way.

FRED BOUCHARD: Similarly, they avoided getting into the recording business. There were just a handful of Berklee label releases. Again, Herb's band, Joe Viola's saxophone quartet things, which were like chamber music, and there were a handful of things. And student showcases, periodically. But not very many.

TED PEASE: Not very many at all, there was once-a-year Jazz in the Classroom LP that came out. And at first they did it sort of a tribute to a particular writer, whether it was Duke, or Oliver Nelson, or Charlie Mariano, or whoever. And it was all student music, so yeah, the Berklee outreach aspect of things like that was very primitive at that point. But finally by about 1980 or so, some of us just went in and said "Bob, come on, we've got to get this curriculum organized, and we can't teach 2,000 students without some texts." So they finally said, "Yeah, okay, let's do it," and the textbooks started rolling out. So...

FRED BOUCHARD: Maybe a few of them got to Singapore and Capetown, and the student didn't show up here, but probably not too many.

TED PEASE: Well, not too many, because Berklee Press again, they weren't--I don't know, maybe they were, but not the way they do now, now it's gone the other way. Now they're very interested in the outreach to worldwide parts of the world where the Berklee name has become much more well known.

FRED BOUCHARD: Well the BIN schools were sort of like graduates from here who went off to their native Paris, London, Dusseldorf, wherever. And there are scenes now where, sort of, Berklee spawned. Barcelona, Tel Aviv, Valencia, all over the place.

TED PEASE: Israel, Perugia, did they go to Finland? All over the place. Spain: Barcelona? There's some big project out in...

FRED BOUCHARD: Valencia.

TED PEASE: Valencia.

FRED BOUCHARD: Very big.

TED PEASE: It's gonna be quite something.

FRED BOUCHARD: Larry Monroe is deeply involved in that.

TED PEASE: Yeah. I've heard that, that's great.

FRED BOUCHARD: How did, during your stay here--the needs of the music business: what people were doing with their compositions and arranging, evolved a lot, in the bands that would come off the road? People were writing jingles, for TV and other kinds of things and they--did part of the pedagogy evolve to accommodate shifts in what was being called for out in the marketplace?

TED PEASE: You know that's a very interesting story in itself. Because, at most colleges, and even Berklee now, for you to start a course and say, "Okay, I'd like to teach a course in let's say, jingle writing," it would have to go through a year-long vetting process, or even longer, to see okay: Who's gonna teach it? Is the teacher qualified? Can we get a room? Do you have the facilities? Let me see the outline we have to send out before our committee that's gonna look at the whole course, and so forth and so on. Back in the seventies when we were going through this transition, and all these rock guitar players were coming here, and the music business, as you say, was evolving, it was clear Berklee could no longer just be a jazz school exclusively. It became clear that we needed to broaden the curriculum into areas, in the general business of music. But the interesting thing was, the way we did it in those days was, somebody would be in a faculty meeting somewhere and say, "Man, we need this course in jingle writing, and Tony Teixiera does a lot of jingles down at Ace Recordings. He can do this jingle writing course, what do you say?" "Okay!" And that was it. Tony would just come up with a jingle writing course.

FRED BOUCHARD: And it would go from concept to storyboard to classroom in six or eight weeks.

TED PEASE: Exactly right. And all they needed to was make sure they could get the students who wanted the class into the class, at that time in their schedule. And the scheduling office would deal with the logistical part of that.

FRED BOUCHARD: Well, when you're four or five hundred people, you can turn on a dime. Now we're a multi-layered institution of four thousand, plus a big admin, and everything has to be filtered.

TED PEASE: So yeah, it was very interesting, and speaking of Tony, he and his student Jon Aldrich, the next thing they did was, "Why don't we do a songwriting course?" Some of these guitar players are also singer-songwriters. We said, "Yeah, go for it." And that was the beginnings of what has now become one of the most well-known songwriting majors in the country. It's well-established and there's great interest in that from not only vocalists, but guitar players who sing, and whatnot. The Aimee Manns of the world, and what's her name?--oh jeez, there I go with my names again!--but several singer-songwriters who are now quite famous. John Mayer was here for a while, and they were able to, as far as I know, to partake in what essentially is the descendant curriculum of what John and Tony started back in the early 1970s.

FRED BOUCHARD: And you've never regretted going back to literature and odes and poetry from your Cornell years and bringing them into the classroom, in teaching lyric writing, or anything?

TED PEASE: Ah, the thing I brought with me, I guess, that stuck with me after studying literature and prose writing at school, was the importance of form, and, not to mention, syntax and grammar. I've always felt there's a very strong connection between music and language, because there is, particularly if you're dealing with styles. If you're dealing with jazz styles, or any style of music, rap or pop or you name it. Even classical music. The style involves a certain use of syntax and grammar and language that is musical in nature, but the building blocks of music are there. The notes are the molecules and you have to organize them in a certain way, so there's a beginning, a middle, and an end.

FRED BOUCHARD: So from quatrains to four-bar phrases.

TED PEASE: Exactly. I mean the blues is a good example. How do they describe, somebody described that once. There's three strains of iambic pentameter or something like that. And okay, fine, but that gets a little bit into the weeds, I suppose for most people. But there is clearly a link between language and musical expression. So that helped me a lot, and needless to say when I started writing outlines and then later textbooks, I felt like I was on very firm footing, to be able to delve into something that would end up being 250 or 300 pages long. So starting with an outline and where I wanted to go and how I wanted to emphasize it and lay it out...

FRED BOUCHARD: What were the forms that you inherited writing for, as a player of big band music, then as an arranger of it? I mean, you know, a thirty-two-bar AABA Tin Pan Alley song or two sixteen-bar things, I mean... what did you inherit and how did you deal with that as a composer and then as a teacher? I know that's a really big question, but I don't know how to formulate it differently.

TED PEASE: Well, let's see, let's start over. You mean, in my own writing?

FRED BOUCHARD: Okay, let's start there.

TED PEASE: In my own writing, I started out pretty much--I was an arranger at first, so I was using other people's music, and writing arrangements for Dick Wright, mostly, in the sixties, and Dick was very open to that. So my initial--the skeletal structure of the pieces that I wrote back in those days, the skeletal structure was already there. It was Cole Porter or George Gershwin or whatever. And I would try to make some, hopefully, hip-sounding arrangement that could be played by Dick's band. But then all the while I was doing that, I was doing a lot of listening to the stuff that was coming on. I loved, for instance, the Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band; that had some great arrangements.

FRED BOUCHARD: Bob Brookmeyer.

TED PEASE: Brookmeyer and Gerry Mulligan and Bill Holman.

FRED BOUCHARD: Gary MacFarland?

TED PEASE: And Gary MacFarland, and then Thad Jones/Mel Lewis' band came along in the mid-sixties and everybody--as a matter of fact, as an arranging teacher I had to do some heavy transcribing because none of Thad's music was available at first. So we had to sit down and take stuff off records and figure out how he was writing for his saxophone section. It was a really interesting time. But anyway, during the sixties I was evolving technically, my writing got to be more, I guess you would say, sophisticated. In that sense because Thad was such a big influence on me, and Bill Holman too. And then when Larry Monroe and I started this faculty band, we had a fourteen-piece band that consisted of all the faculty members that were here and were itching to play and didn't really have an outlet for it, so I did a lot of composing for that band. Not just arranging other people's music, but writing original pieces, so that was fortunate. So my writing evolved along more compositional lines in the 1970s. Started stretching the form, getting away from thirty-two bars, and strict twelve-bar blues and things like that, and trying to...

FRED BOUCHARD: New harmonic sequences...

TED PEASE: Yeah, writing interludes and extensions and development sections and relying more on motivic development, for example, than just a song, writing arrangement, theme and variations of a song. So that was a very exciting time for me because, for one thing I had this outlet, I had this band to write for; they'd play anything. Any experiments that I did, I ran by the other guys were writing, they'd play it; and if it worked, it worked, and if it didn't, we'd go back to the drawing board and try to clean it up, figure out what to do to make it okay.

FRED BOUCHARD: Or scrap it and start afresh.

TED PEASE: That's right...

FRED BOUCHARD: How did you bring your experiments to the classroom? How did you make the transition of something that's rough cut to something which is polished, codified, and given to students, that's always a mystery to me.

TED PEASE: Back in those days, our audiovisual stuff was fairly primitive. We had overhead projectors, we still had the blackboard, and Xeroxing came in somewhere in here in the seventies. So it was fairly customary, we'd write out eight bars of a Thad Jones sax solo or here's Gil Evans, eight bars of a Gil Evans arrangement of "Summertime," write it out long hand on music paper...

FRED BOUCHARD: Those rising French horns...

TED PEASE: Yeah, and then we could make a transparency of that--you know, that film paper--and show it on an overhead projector and play the music, and the students would, "Wow, yeah okay."

FRED BOUCHARD: Wow, yeah, boing! the light bulbs go off.

TED PEASE: Right. Because again, back then there were no textbooks to show you how to do that stuff. So we had to essentially pull it off the recordings and try and make sense of it in the classroom.

FRED BOUCHARD: Let's see, where can we go from here? Maybe talk a little bit about your legacy among some of your former students who have come to a good end. That's an interesting thing.

TED PEASE: Well, I got--so I wouldn't forget some of the names--I wrote a few of them down, but some of the more noticeable students that I had contact with over the years: Makoto Ozone, I'll tell you a funny story about Makoto. Harvey Mason, a great drummer on the West Coast, he's on the Headhunters album with Herbie Hancock.

FRED BOUCHARD: He's still active with Bill Summers, and they keep The Headhunters going.

TED PEASE: Yeah. Abraham Laboriel, I had Abraham as a student.

FRED BOUCHARD: But not his son?

TED PEASE: Not his son. I remember when his son was here, Abe Jr., and his other son was here for a while, too, saxophone player, I believe. Alf Clausen was someone; and Neils Lan Doky, a piano player from Europe.

FRED BOUCHARD: Germany? Or Switzerland?

TED PEASE: Yeah

FRED BOUCHARD: Terrific player.

TED PEASE: Tiger Okoshi, Gary Anderson, those were some of the notable people I remember as students. But a good story about Makoto, and probably everybody who watches this, if anybody watches this video, you know who Makoto is, a marvelous player, a piano player from Japan...

FRED BOUCHARD: He was a real wunderkind, I mean, Phil Wilson got him in the band and did the duo album with him when he was still a student.

TED PEASE: He ended up playing with Gary Burton's quartet and so on, but the great story about Makoto was when he first arrived in this country, spoke little or no English, and we had auditions for entering students back then. You know, show me what you can play, we'll try to fit you in a particular ensemble or a class that's at the level where you are in your development. And Makoto comes in, and they didn't know what to do with Makoto, because he didn't speak English well. So, somehow he ended up at my door, at my office, and "Hello, how are you?"Very polite Japanese gentleman.

FRED BOUCHARD: They figured since you brought Toru Okoshi along, you could deal with another Japanese kid who's talented.

TED PEASE: Well, whatever, there he was. Because, again, like I said before, I was teaching some of these big classes and I handled a lot of freshman, so they sent him to me. So we did a little hand signaling and gestures and whatnot, and finally I realized this was a complete waste of time for both of us. So I said, "Sit down and play something. I pointed at the piano that was there in my office: "Play something." So he sits down and he sits there and he thinks for a minute. And he starts playing. [imitates playing piano] And I realize what he's playing is "Tea for Two" in a stride piano style...

FRED BOUCHARD: [Art] Tatum?

TED PEASE: Yeah, stride piano style and he's playing in the key of C, he's going through the thing, and he sounds pretty good, and he gets through one chorus and he modulates up a half step, and he starts developing his ideas, more and more, improvisation in his right hand...

FRED BOUCHARD: A little more Oscar [Peterson] now...

TED PEASE: Yep. Then he gets through that chorus; up to D major, he's playing, and to make a long story short, by the time he---he played "Tea for Two" in all twelve keys, and with this increasing avalanche of stylistic material--and by the time he got through, I looked over, my office door was open, and it was ten-deep with people, craning their necks trying to figure out who. "I know that's not Ted playing that, who's playing "Tea for Two" in there?" And that was Makoto, he was so great, a wonderful story about him.

FRED BOUCHARD: Charming and unaffected, just brimming with talent.

TED PEASE: Just blew everybody away, and was so smart that, I think, probably by the third or fourth week of school he was already speaking good English, and the rest is history.

FRED BOUCHARD: Picking up that thread again of how scoring has developed and changed, what do you think about--maybe this is inappropriate--what do you think about directions in what people are doing in film scoring, and even writing for video games now? How do you see that as a follow up on your legacy, as a composition teacher here?

TED PEASE: Well, I think what's always impressed me about the best jazz musicians, and this is true throughout history, is how stylistically they're knowledgeable outside of jazz. They're not just interested in their two-fives and their chord scales and stuff like that. They also do a lot of listening to all kinds of music, whether it's classical or world music or whatever it may be. Because I had also had a classical background as a piano player, as a kid. I loved classical music when I was growing up, and still did once I got to Berklee. And I was actually--I was relieved to find out, as a student, that Berklee was not just a jazz school, they had regular composition courses there. Bill Malouf is the man that I remember most, and it was straight traditional composition; man, you went in there with your Bach chorales, and studying counterpoint and the inventions and fugues and whatnot. And it was just a broadening of horizons that everybody could pick up on.

And I've always felt that the guys that had made a success in the movie business in L.A. that we know--Alan Silvestri, Alf Clausen, I'm sure there are others that I am forgetting or leaving out--these guys have a huge background, not just in jazz, but in all these other areas, and that's why they're able to do what they do. And I think our film-scoring department here still reflects that. And to whatever extent those people are also technology-oriented and get into writing for videogames and whatnot, that's just one more area where music has its tentacles out into the business. And Berklee has and always will be a school where you can study contemporary music, at the end of which come out and instead of being a concert violinist or something, you can go somewhere into a studio or a movie production house or something and make a living. Because you know the technology, you know the music, you can put them together, and you might be the only one or two people in a given spot at a given moment that could do that. So you're eminently hireable by a prospective employer.

FRED BOUCHARD: Good. You're still actively writing charts for Daniel Ian Smith? And other outlets?

TED PEASE: Yeah, a few. Daniel, bless his heart, is a very gifted musician, saxophone player, woodwind player, and has many projects going on simultaneously--one of which is a big band, another is which has been more recently active, is an octet that we put out a CD a couple of years ago. A couple of things of mine are on there along with some music by Bob Pilkington and Jeff Friedman. So yeah. Daniel's been an outlet for me, and so that's been good. I also spent, you might say, pretty much two years out of my life writing my jazz composition book. Which involves--there's seventy minutes of music on a CD that I had to compose and organize and get recorded. That was a lengthy project that involved a considerable amount of time.

FRED BOUCHARD: And that's been in the bookstore for quite awhile now.

TED PEASE: Jazz Composition, Theory, and Practice published by Berklee Press--there's a shameless promotion.

FRED BOUCHARD: And it's still in the curriculum. People are still using it as a go-to bible. How do you keep your ears clean? What are you listening to these days, in the classical world, let's say. Who are your contemporary composers that still pique your interest?

TED PEASE: That's a good question. As far as in the classical area, I'm trying to catch up to where--when I stopped taking piano lessons I kind of left that in the dust a little bit, particularly modern classical composers, whom I did not study that much on the piano. But when I was here at Berklee as a student, we got more into Bartók and Stravinsky and some of the more modern composers. And since those days I've tried, when I can, to involve myself with contemporary composers like Ligeti and Messaien, and I find I don't have enough time; for some reason my attention span may be shortening or something. It's gotten harder for me to sit and listen to an entire CD, so sometimes I will listen to one movement and then take a break or whatever.

FRED BOUCHARD: Being a birdwatcher, I'm a big Messaien fan, and John Weaver was sitting where you are about a year ago, the trumpet player with Herb's band, he gave me a recording of Ozawa and the BSO doing the Turangalila [Symphony]. Wow, what an earful that is!

TED PEASE: Yes, it is. It's very dense. And all kinds of religious overtones in his music, very spiritual element.

FRED BOUCHARD: Not to mention birdsong, with the birds flying through as we speak. Yes, there's an awful lot of good music out there that we have to try to keep up with, and it's insightful and it keeps us being creative at whatever we do.

TED PEASE: I ran across a piano for four hands concert the other night I was up in Burlington Vermont, seeing my granddaughter perform in a Vermont Youth Orchestra up there, her chorus. And the next night, my wife and I went to a church there and heard some French piano music for four hands. Some Debussy, Poulenc, and Ravel and it was just lovely.

FRED BOUCHARD: The Impressionists still kill me.

TED PEASE: Fauré, there was some Fauré, so I tried to keep my head and I try to get to hear live music whenever I can. I find I don't know whether it's age-related or what, but I don't like the fact that I'm bombarded with music all the time on the street, in the elevator, in the car, on television. There's a glut of music now, much of it is a waste of time.

FRED BOUCHARD: We just have to help people pick through it.

TED PEASE: We do and we...

FRED BOUCHARD: Cherry-pick the good stuff.

TED PEASE: Pick our spots and go hear the good stuff, live if possible.

FRED BOUCHARD: Thanks so much Ted, it's been a real pleasure talking with you about music and Berklee.

TED PEASE: Thank you.