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Chip McNeill: Doing What It Takes
Chip McNeill: Doing What It Takes
Date Posted: January 08 2009
Written By: Ben Dockery
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Read any jazz bio, and you are likely to find the artist described as being an in-demand musician. For many this phrase is a slight exaggeration. For saxophonist and educator Chip McNeill it is an understatement. His illustrious career has been spent playing with two of the most popular big bands of all time, writing music for Grammy-award-winning recordings and starting one the few jazz DMA programs in the country.
McNeill, the son of a saxophonist father and vocalist mother, grew up in the small town of Kewanee, Illinois. He was classically trained at the piano starting at age seven. Three years later he began studying clarinet. Saxophone lessons did not come until he was fifteen.
He was turned on to jazz through his father’s records, specifically those by Coltrane, Bird, and Wayne Shorter. "I just really got caught up in that music. I loved it, so I taught myself a little bit about harmony at the piano… and learned solos on the saxophone."
After graduating high school a year early, seventeen-year-old McNeill went to the University of North Texas majoring in Business Law. He was able to develop his writing skills by using the one o'clock lab band to try out ideas. After getting through all but one semester of classes, McNeill took an offer to attend the University of Miami on scholarship. While visiting friends in Miami over winter break, McNeill was overheard playing in a session.
He was invited to attend the University of Miami but returned to Texas not thinking much of it. To his surprise the chair of the jazz program called to ask if he would seriously consider coming. McNeill asked about tuition costs, which turned out to be over $10,000 per semester. "And I remember laughing at him on the phone. I had, like, six hundred dollars to my name. And he said, 'Oh no, no, no! You won't have to pay for anything. We’ll pay for everything.’ So I said, 'Okay, I'll be there next week.'" After graduating from Miami in 1985, he moved around living in Boston and then New York.
He came back to Florida for a six-night-per-week jazz gig in Tampa. His wife at the time was accepted into the jazz vocalist program at Miami. After talking to the chair of the program again, McNeill was offered another scholarship to work on a master's degree in Studio Jazz Writing.
Chip remembers, "The day I was taking my oral exams for my master's, I got a call from Mike Brignola, a friend of mine who was on Woody's band. He said, 'Hey, can you be in Dallas tonight? We need somebody.' And I said, 'Sure!' So I did my oral exams, and I said, 'I've got to go. I have to get to the airport.'" His first gig with Woody Herman’s band was a live performance broadcast on the radio. There was no rehearsal and half the charts were missing. "You just have to listen and learn on the stand, basically." After a couple of years with Herman's Herd, McNeill got off the road and went back to Miami.
After a month home, he got a call from another friend he had met on Woody’s band inviting him to go on tour with Maynard Ferguson for a few months in Europe. A few months turned into seven years as musical director for the band. While still touring, McNeill began running the jazz department at Virginia Tech. After quitting Maynard’s band he taught full time for about one semester before Arturo Sandoval called. He continued teaching while playing over 220 days per year on the road with Sandoval. "I would fly out on a Thursday, come back on Tuesday, teach for three more days, and fly out again." For the third time in a row, McNeill found himself in the same band as pianist Chip Stephens, currently on faculty at UIUC. "That's why I keep telling students that half of the people you’re going to play with the rest of your lives, you're playing with right now."
In 2001 McNeill took a teaching position as head of jazz studies at Florida International University during his last year playing full-time with Sandoval. At the end of the school year McNeil was approached about his current position, Department Head of Jazz Studies at the University of Illinois, Cham-paign-Urbana. One of the reasons he came to the U of I was because they had no jazz degree. He started the undergraduate, master's, and DMA jazz degrees all at the same time, which is unheard of.
"It was a lot of work. I carried it on my back basically for the first two or three years. I taught everything and did it all myself." His skills as a writer, pianist, and saxophonist combined with his road experience and studies at two of the biggest jazz programs uniquely qualified him for the position. McNeill feels that there must be a personal commitment made by the faculty. "I've spent a lot of time with students, and tried to impart what I know and what I can help them with. And that's what it takes. You have to vest in the students." Because of this desire to make the professors more available, there are no adjunct jazz professors at UIUC.They are all either full-time or half-time employees.
McNeill believes he is part of the last generation that was able to more easily gain "road experience." Gone are many of the bands that gave young jazz musicians real-world experience. McNeill says, "Jazz is living more and more in the institution. And I don’t mean to say it's not on the street. Yeah, it has to be on the street to be vital. That's true, but the analyzing of jazz and looking at it to… get some experiences... a lot of that is being transferred into the institution." These initial experiences are what McNeill aims to provide students through hands-on, tactile learning. He continues, "The teaching of music really hasn't changed that much in two or three thousand years. It's an apprenticeship. It's about a mentor and an apprentice."
McNeill continues to develop his own musical voice in addition to teaching. He has a new CD out on Capri Records called Four Steps Three, which features musicians well known to Chicago audiences, such as Chip Stephens, Joan Hickey, Joel Spencer, Jeff Helgesen, and Dennis Carroll. To learn more or to contact McNeill go to the UIUC School of Music website at music.uiuc.edu.
nCJM
Ben Dockery is a jazz pianist living in the Chicagoland area since 2005. He is currently a DMA candidate at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Contact Dockery via email at bdocker2@illinois.edu.
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