Nashville Jazz Connections at Blair

While most people associate Nashville with country music, jazz has a long history in Music City. As long as Nashville has been a center for recording and education, it has drawn musicians of all types who found places to play-as well as to teach. Many have connections to Vanderbilt Blair School of Music.

From 2009, a Blair School of Music student teaching piano to a child at the W.O. Smith Music School (Vanderbilt University)

In the early 1950s, W.O. Smith, whose name graces the W.O. Smith Music School, came to Nashville to join the music faculty of Tennessee State University. Smith was the second Black member of the Nashville Symphony, playing double bass in the orchestra for 17 years. He grew up in the same Philadelphia neighborhood as Dizzy Gillespie and was a sideman in New York City for Gillespie, Charlie Parker and many other great jazz musicians of the 1930s and 1940s. He played bass on Coleman Hawkins' well-known 1939 recording of "Body and Soul." For many years, Smith and Del Sawyer, the first dean of Blair School of Music, were members of an informal social circle called the Wednesday Night Club. Sawyer was instrumental in helping Smith start the W.O. Smith Music School in 1984, and Blair students have served there as volunteer teachers since its inception.

From 2009, the portrait unveiling in Turner Hall for the first dean of the Blair School, Del Sawyer (Vanderbilt University)

Billy Adair and Beegie Adair were Peabody alumni who stayed in Nashville, married and worked nonstop as session musicians, composers and arrangers. They also taught jazz at Blair. Billy Adair was music director and arranger for The Establishment, a nonprofit jazz orchestra whose founding director was Blair Dean Del Sawyer and which included many Vanderbilt faculty, staff and alumni at one time or another. Billy Adair began teaching at Blair in 2002 and directed the Blair Big Band until his death in 2014. Beegie Adair was a longtime session musician and jazz pianist. With the Beegie Adair Trio (whose bassist was Roger Spencer, also formerly on the jazz faculty at Blair), she recorded many albums and sold out New York's Carnegie Hall. She taught at Blair from the early 1990s through the mid-2000s.

WATCH the Beegie Adair Trio, with Adair on piano, Roger Spencer on bass and Chris Brown on drums, in a performance of "Three Little Words" at the 2010 Nashville Jazz Workshop Jazz Cave, with tenor saxophonist Denis Solee.

Roger Spencer was adjunct artist teacher of jazz ensemble at Blair for 21 years. He and his wife, pianist Lori Mechem, co-founded the Nashville Jazz Workshop in 1998, where Spencer served as artistic director for 27 years. Nashville Jazz Workshop is still a hub of jazz activity in Nashville.

David Rodgers, BMus'17, current artistic and executive director of Nashville Jazz Workshop (Will Noblit)

The current artistic and executive director of NJW is David Rodgers, BMus'17, who embarked on the life of a professional musician as soon as he graduated from Blair-setting out as keyboardist and music director for blues musicians Keb' Mo' and Taj Mahal on the 2017 tour to promote their album TajMo. Rodgers is looking for more ways to support an active relationship between NJW and Blair.

"We regularly offer tickets to all students with a valid student ID," Rodgers says. "Seeing world-class performances up close and having the opportunity to interface with artists are undeniable educational resources for students. I am also working to develop a program that lets students and seasoned professionals work more closely together through ensemble collaboration, coaching and conversations. I think that the unique educational opportunities we can offer at the NJW have the potential to really help current [Blair] students in their development."