Arranger, conductor, educator, and vocal jazz legend Phil Mattson passed last week at the age of eighty.
I didn’t know Phil Mattson as well as his closest students, but I knew him pretty well, thanks to attending his week-long boot camp four times (known officially as the Phil Mattson Vocal Jazz/Choral Workshop). We also crossed paths a number of other times in the last twenty years – at conferences, over several meals during my one visit to Creston, his longtime home, and again in a beautiful coda that continued right to the end of his remarkable life.
I didn’t know him deeply, but I knew him, and his approach and mindset profoundly affected me as a writer, listener, and director. Here are some of Phil’s lessons I carry with me.
- Always serve the music. Phil talked about the rehearsal as sacred space, serving the music. I have no doubt in my mind that he viewed music as a sacred thing, particularly vocal music.
- Be unwavering in your standards. From the first downbeat to the final applause, Phil demanded more. More heart, more listening, more swing, more music. Even in an educational camp culture, Phil’s bar was exceptionally high, and his demands were intense.
- Disregard genre. Phil was a vocal jazz guru, but he also was a student of Christiansen at Concordia College, and his albums almost always featured choral repertoire as well as jazz. I have imprinted on my heart a performance of Stanford’s The Blue Bird at one of Phil’s workshops, sung in the round with Phil’s passionate conducting in the center. (Note the official title of his workshop…)
- Write tenderly. Phil was a man of contradictions – he rode Harleys thousands upon thousands of miles cross-country and beyond, including I think one transit from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. He lived life with gusto. But his writing, always, exhibited such tenderness. Some of my (many) favorites are his settings of “I’ll Be Seeing You,” “Why Did I Choose You?” and “If I Loved You.” Each exhibits such great care for the voice, for harmony, and for the act of singing. Certainly not all his arrangements are so tender, but I don’t know of a writer who wrote as tenderly as he.
- Think deeply. Phil was a philosopher as well as a musician, and his conversations could be peppered with philosophical references and evidence of a deeply well-read man. But forget the references: what I remember, and what I try to emulate in my own teaching, is a reaching for more knowledge. The curriculum Phil designed for the SWCC School for Musical Vocations included a required “Psychology of Success” course, focusing on looking past the details of the music to the bigger issues affecting us as musicians and humans. More personally, I can’t remember an interaction with Phil when I didn’t feel him reaching for the greater knowledge, the deeper thought, beyond the edge of his grasp.
I said that my interactions with him ended with a beautiful coda, and of course that is the recent arrangement I was able to commission from him. Thanks to generous donation from my parents, who saw early on what an effect this man had on me, and thanks to my position as director of GRCC Shades of Blue, I was able to commission what I think was his final work. “Speak to Me of Love” is a stunning arrangement, and I think it’s a nutshell representation of the five lessons I covered above. Of course it displays his tender writing and his high standards for the music (and demands of the singers). My singers responded to it immediately, and I think that’s because he’s written something you want to do justice to – music you want to serve. And most of all, I’m struck by his deep thinking and his disregard for genre. It’s definitely a vocal jazz piece, but it also has a beautiful French verse – a duet that sounds more French chanson than vocal jazz. Most of all, his writing throughout has made me feel that Phil was grappling deeply with finding a way to look at vocal jazz through the lens of Bach, or conversely to write a Bach chorale in the language of vocal jazz.
Thank you, Phil, for your monumental contributions to the art form I love. Thank you for changing my life and the lives of countless others. And thank you for being receptive to my proposed collaboration. It has been my distinct blessing to learn from you.
