Just about every major jazz institution in the Bay Area has undergone a generational shift in leadership this year, from SFJAZZ and the Monterey Jazz Festival to the Stanford Jazz Workshop and Oakland-based Living Jazz.
In Berkeley, pianist Susan Muscarella, the founder and guiding spirit of the California Jazz Conservatory, relinquished the title and duties of CJC president last month. A national search led back to the East Bay and Nick Phillips, a veteran producer, trumpeter and educator who’s been a major presence on the Berkeley jazz scene since the 1980s.
Which isn’t to say that Muscarella is swinging off into the sunset. “I made the decision to not retire,” she said. “I just don’t feel like it. People say, ‘Oh you’re retired now.’ I hate that! What I really wanted was to go back to teaching full time, and I’m writing a book on the foundational principles of jazz piano based on the many years I’ve been teaching and what’s been successful with my students.”
She’s not only teaching at the CJC. Muscarella found a studio above the ACCI Gallery and has set out her shingle there, teaching individual students. And she’s working closely with Phillips to ensure a smooth transition at the institution she launched in 1997 as the Jazzschool. Originally located above La Note, which hosted concerts during off hours as pedestrians and cars streamed by on Shattuck Avenue, the school quickly outgrew the space.
By the fall of 2001, the Jazzschool had relocated to the Downtown Arts District in a basement space on Addison below Half Price Books. Accreditation came next. Newly rechristened as the CJC, it became the only stand-alone school in the U.S. dedicated to jazz, offering three degrees in jazz studies, from the two-year Associate of Arts program to the graduate Master of Music. After outgrowing the space on the north side of Addison the campus expanded to the south side with the Fiddler Annex, which includes the 100-seat Rendon Hall.
Though he’s never played a gig with Muscarella, the 50-year-old Phillips has performed at all three spaces as a co-leader over the years with pianist Cava Menzies, pianist Jennifer Maybee, and bassist Ariane Cap. One of his most memorable Jazzschool gigs was playing with Jimmy and Jeannie Cheatham’s Sweet Baby Blues Band in December 2006 just weeks before the death of Jimmy, a bass trombonist who’d played with Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, and the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra.
Phillips had forged a close relationship with the Cheathams years earlier while working for Concord Records and producing several of their albums, which turned out to be a formative experience. “I learned so much from being in those sessions,” he said. “I was producing, but they were mentoring me.”
Now in the process of relocating from the Sacramento area to the East Bay, Phillips became indelibly linked to Berkeley in the early 1990s via his responsibilities at Concord, the East Bay jazz label that turned Maybeck Recital Hall in the Berkeley Hills into an internationally known mecca for state-of-the-art jazz piano. Released between 1990 and 1996, the Live At Maybeck Recital Hall series came to include 42 albums documenting solo performances (and 10 duo sessions) by a glorious array of players, including Jaki Byard, Gerald Wiggins, Jessica Williams and George Cables.
The series started when Joanne Brackeen called the label the day before a gig booked by the owner of the Maybeck House on Euclid, jazz pianist Dick Whittington (who had been a BUSD kindergarten teacher). She called founder and owner of Concord Records, Carl Jefferson, “and said, ‘This space is amazing, you have to record me,’” Phillips recalled. “Carl Jefferson sent me and after that I spent many a Sunday at Maybeck Recital Hall for Concord.”
He moved to Berkeley in the late ’90s, and in 2000, when Concord bought Fantasy, which had acquired a portfolio of crucial jazz, folk and funk labels, he worked in the Fantasy Building at 10th and Parker. In recent years, Phillips has been working as an independent producer overseeing archival and reissue projects for Craft Recordings.
His most recent project is The Complete Full House Recordings by guitar legend Wes Montgomery, a live session recorded by Orrin Keepnews’s Riverside label in Berkeley in 1962 at the short-lived club Tsubo at Telegraph and Russell (the venue was rechristened The Jabberwock the following year).
Phillips isn’t giving up his work with Craft, but he’s definitely got his hands full at the CJC, which is still rebuilding enrollment after the worst of the pandemic. Thrilled when she saw he’d applied for the gig, Muscarella feels she’s left her legacy in ideal hands.
“Nick and I are a lot alike,” she said. “The biggest way is that we both live and breathe jazz. Our whole life is devoted to the music. He has an appreciation not only for the art form, but for those who created it and nurtured it. And of the three key areas you need experience in, performance, education and administration, he’s got skills in all three.”
