As the first day of August turns to dusk on Friday this week, a remarkable ensemble blending some of the city’s most revered musical veterans with some of its youngest players will appear at The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. The former category will be well-represented by the bandleader, Johnny Yancey, who’s led his Power to the People Orchestra for 20-odd years now, but the youngest players get top billing as well, represented by featured artist Gabby Cain, a junior at White Station High School.
As with the champion Central High School Jazz Band, who claimed the title of best high school band in the world at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington contest this spring, the factor uniting both young and old is jazz. Not to mention Duke Ellington, as his towering presence loomed over the very creation of Yancey’s group, originally called the Sanctuary Jazz Orchestra.
“Over 20 years ago,” says Yancey, “there was a Duke Ellington tribute at the [National] Civil Rights Museum, and we had to form a Memphis Ellington band for the ceremony. A friend of mine, Tim Turner, rest his soul, said, ‘Johnny, man, you ought to start a band and keep this going!’ So a year later, probably like 2001, we started the orchestra, trying to piece together everything. And I had a lot of older musicians at that time.”
Yancey, with a half-century of experience in the Memphis music scene, was the perfect choice to lead a 17-piece combo modeled on the somewhat endangered form of the big band orchestra, as he confidently straddles the worlds of modern jazz and its predecessors.
It all started with his older brother. “My brother was an alto saxophone player, back in the ’60s. He was five years older than me, and I looked up to him. He played at Porter Junior High, and one of his friends also played alto, but his brother played trumpet. I was a little boy. They stayed on our street, and I would pass by their house, where they had the front door open, practicing on the trumpet. I didn’t know what it was at that time, but I said, ‘That is what I want to play!’ So when I got to junior high school, it was trumpet, and I’ve been playing it ever since.”
Once he’d made it to Southside High School, he played in the marching band but also began learning about something he’d never heard before: jazz. “Our band director was James Keys, and he kind of introduced us to jazz,” says Yancey. “He was playing this Miles Davis album called Kind of Blue, and I said, ‘Who’s the trumpet player? It sounds like he’s playing the wrong notes.’ [laughs] I didn’t know anything about jazz, or that Miles was one of the greatest players in history.”
Mr. Keys’ record collection aside, the school had no jazz program for most of Yancey’s time there, but the music was in the air, and irrepressible. “I remember we couldn’t play any jazz! It’s interesting, the high school director let us listen to jazz, but he wouldn’t let us play any tunes in the practice room.”
Yet there was an upper classman there who would open up the jazz world to the young Yancey: legendary Memphis pianist Donald Brown. “We spent two years together there at Southside. And just to know him in high school, he was a genius level because he would write a whole band chart based on popular hits at that time, like Isaac Hayes. We won the marching band contest three years straight, though by the last year he had gone on to the University of Memphis. So that was a really great experience.”
Brown and Yancey stayed close even when Brown attended U of M. “He went to Memphis State [as it was then known] and met James Williams and Mulgrew Miller, and those are some great guys. So I told Donald, ‘Teach me.’ So we got together, and, you know, I was kind of slow, but I caught on. I’m still trying to. It’s never-ending, learning music.”
“If you want to learn something, teach it,” goes the aphorism, and nothing reveals Yancey’s commitment to learning more than his commitment to music education, which he’s done plenty of with the Memphis Jazz Workshop (MJW). Since it was founded in 2017 by Stephen M. Lee, the MJW has become a tremendous force for good in training the city’s next generation of jazz players. As Central’s band director, Ollie Liddell, noted at the New Daisy Theatre when the city gathered to celebrate his band’s win at Lincoln Center, the MJW has “been with these kids every step of the way.”
And so Yancey took a special pride when Central’s lead trumpet, Kingston Grandberry, won recognition at Lincoln Center as an “Outstanding Soloist.” Yancey himself had helped teach Grandberry, but through the MJW, Yancey’s also tuned into to other students. And that brings us to Gabby Cain, who sings and plays piano with the MJW.
“Gabby is great!” enthuses Yancey. “We just had a rehearsal yesterday, and she’s singing on seven or eight tunes. We’re trying to feature her on stuff like ‘Bye Bye Blackbird,’ ‘How Sweet It Is,’ and ‘Lonely Woman’ by the great Ornette Coleman.”
That’s not your typical high school fare, and, as Yancey describes working with her, it’s clear Cain is more devoted to jazz than most in her age cohort. And, Yancey says, they’re well-rehearsed, thanks to home improvements that better accommodate larger band gatherings. “My wife actually converted the garage into a music room, and that’s been really nice,” he says, adding with a grin, “You could call us a garage band, actually.”
