Young players jazzed by visit

Teresa Hinds

Monday, Oct. 7, 1996 | 11:59 a.m.

"He's here!" shouted someone from the back of the room.

Seventeen-year-old Victor Ri-vera offered his seat to students jockeying for position along the perimeter of the room.

"I'll be over there worshipping and bowing," Rivera said. "I don't need the seat."

A hush fell over the hundred-or-so audience members. Valley High School band members fidgeted in their seats, audience members craned their necks for the first glimpse. A faculty member sent a student who carried a note for an audience member away.

"There's no way you'll find her in here. We've got a really famous person here, just come back later."

Suddenly, a man dressed in black entered the music room through the back door and the crowd erupted into spontaneous applause.

Arturo Sandoval had arrived.

Sandoval, a Cuban-born jazz trumpeter, spent the next 1 1/2 hours Friday instructing Valley band students on the finer points of jazz.

A multiple-Grammy Award winner, Sandoval is perhaps best known for his Afro-Cuban sound and such releases as "Danzon" and "Flight to Freedom." He also did a stint in London with Dizzy Gillespie's United Nations Orchestra.

The trumpeter's straight-ahead offerings have also garnered him critical acclaim, including the 1992 Grammy-nominated release "I Remember Clifford," a tribute to trumpeter Clifford Brown, who was killed in a car crash in 1956.

In addition to his jazz work, Sandoval wrote and recorded a trumpet concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra, as well as music for a ballet, the film score for "The Perez Family," and several trumpet method books.

Sandoval stood by and smiled widely as the Valley marching band played a medley of the Dizzy Gillespie tunes "Penssativo" and "Tin Tin Deo," arranged by Valley band instructor Nate McClendon.

Sandoval, no doubt, was remembering his long recording career with Gillespie, which began in 1981. Perhaps Sandoval recalled how his fellow trumpeter and dear friend helped him defect to the United States in 1990 while the two were on tour in Europe.

Shouts of "You can do it, Willie" echoed from the audience as Sandoval patiently demonstrated an intricate pattern on the cowbell to percussionist Willie Endsley.

Hermillio Robles got a personal lesson in tuning his congas from Sandoval, along with his own mini rhythm clinic.

"He came up to me later and said 'Wow, that was really nice of him to do that for me,'" McClendon said of Robles.

But doing it just to be nice isn't Sandoval's motivation.

"It's my obligation to pass the information on. You have to give it from one person to someone else, that's the way it has always been in this music. It's not a big secret," Sandoval said of the rich oral tradition of jazz.

Sandoval worked with the school's jazz band, listening closely to the trumpet line and offering young B.J. Greiner advice on how to improve her improvisational skills.

She admitted to being "a little nervous" when Sandoval stood beside her focusing his attention on her solo. "It really opened my eyes and made me realize I've got a lot to learn," the 15-year-old sophomore said about the pointers Sandoval gave her.

Being nervous is exactly what McClendon expected. "Hey, if I had my instrument out and he was standing next to me, I would be nervous, too," the saxophonist said.

Drummer Henry Soriano took Sandoval's urging to "play with conviction" and "make the band swing" to heart following Sandoval's demonstration behind the drum kit.

And before he resumed his duties behind the drums, 16-year-old Soriano picked up the drumsticks Sandoval had just used, grinned and held the sticks out before him like a trophy.

Sandoval unexpectedly sat in with the band on a few tunes, a treat for both the band and the audience, who showed their appreciation with thunderous applause and whistles after each Sandoval solo.

Following the clinic, McClendon presented Sandoval with a pencil drawing 17-year-old trumpeter Ray Figueredo had done of Sandoval and Gillespie.

It was a drawing that Figueredo devoted his two daily art class periods to for an entire week. Even then, the senior said he was afraid he wouldn't finish the drawing in time.

Sandoval was impressed with the drawing, and was almost left speechless by the presentation.

"He was particularly taken with it, he was just amazed" at the beauty of the work, McClendon said. "We wanted to give him something really special, to show him how we felt about him coming out to do the clinic."

McClendon said Sandoval was especially touched because Figueredo is also Cuban. "The fact that they're both Cuban, Sandoval is a little bit of a sentimentalist, and that mean a lot to him."

Figueredo said Sandoval's visit was "just unbelievable. I didn't think he was going to play, that was really great."

McClendon, who arranged Sandoval's visit through the Boulder Station, where Sandoval was performing that evening, said the day was "one of the greatest days of my life. It was a dream come true for someone like me."

The band teacher is a former lounge musician who abandoned his own dream of becoming a famous performer, but he hopes Friday's clinic with Sandoval will go a long way in making that dream a reality for his students.

He also hopes it's the beginning of a partnership with the Boulder Station in bringing to his students famous jazz musicians who play the hotel-casino.

"I want to be able to produce the next Arturo Sandoval," McClendon said. "My dream in life now is to have students that go on, particularly in jazz."

Many of the jazz band students said they had aspirations of becoming a professional jazz musician. For them, Sandoval had some important advice:

"Being a professional musician is a wonderful career, but it takes discipline and you have to really practice a lot. If you want to become a musician, that's beautiful, but you must be in love with the music. It's a gift from God."