Arrangers' Workshop was city's first jazz showcase

Before the Xerox Rochester International Jazz Festival brought some of jazz's biggest names to the East End, they came for the annual Arrangers' Workshop at the Eastman School of Music.

The annual workshop and concert ran from 1959 until the early 1990s. It helped launch the music school's jazz department, ushered a stream of jazz legends to Rochester and gave valuable experience to dozens of professional composers and arrangers.

The workshop, created by former Radio City Music Hall arranger Ray Wright, was meant to address a common dilemma. Up until the late 1950s, a composer or arranger had little opportunity to hear his work performed the way he wrote it. Convening a full orchestra was, and is, an expensive proposition, and there was no good electronic substitute.

The Arrangers' Workshop solved the problem. A band of mostly Eastman students was on call to play the composers' music as they wrote it. Wright and the other faculty provided instant feedback.

"It was actual doing, and it was under the same time pressure you'd have on the job," said Donald Hunsberger, who worked alongside Wright for decades and wrote a short biography of him. "It's scary to write an arrangement knowing that it's going to be played tomorrow afternoon. Then you can hear it and say, 'Oh, that worked,' or 'Oops, that one didn't.' "

As attendance grew, the organizers decided to add on a public concert — the Arrangers' Holiday — at the end of the workshop. Over the decades, some of the biggest names in jazz history came through Rochester to play: Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Dave Brubeck, J.J. Johnson, Oscar Peterson.

"Working with some of these jazz legends to make music with them — it's not something that happens every day," said Bill Dobbins. He is an Eastman faculty member and played piano in the Arrangers' Workshop band beginning in 1974.

The workshops lost steam in the late 1980s as costs rose for participants and competitors began to offer similar events.

Wright died in 1990 and the last event came soon after. Its legacy carries on in unexpected corners of the entertainment world.

Music composers and arrangers are not big names, by the nature of their job. But the men and women who attended the Arrangers' Workshops over the years have made an impressive contribution to classical, jazz and popular composing and arranging as well as film and television scoring.

Dave Slonaker attended in the early 1980s. The experience he got there led him to a career studded with prominent commissions: the movies Air Force One, Alice in Wonderland, Spider-Man and Night at the Museum and the TV shows Murder, She Wrote and JAG, among them.

The most valuable part of the workshop, in his opinion, was writing for the end-of-summer skit, where students had to come up with, say, a Sousa-style march in the style of a hip-hop tune.

"He really put students in a pressure situation, writing music they may not necessarily know anything about or would not think to write," he said. "And that's really what we do in the real world. We get put in situations and we have to make something work."

As Dobbins put it: "It was a little different than anything that was going on in the world."

JMURPHY7@DemocratandChronicle.com