By Victor Greto
Don Glanden has the world on a string.
Riffing on the 1932 Harold Arlen melody one evening from a burnished black piano bench near the bar in Sullivan’s Steakhouse on Route 202, his thin face is bent over the dim black and white keys, like his salt-and-peppered hair and mustache, spicily mellowed by the muted lights.
His left hand taps at the familiar chords, while the fingers of his right hand tickle the chord progression like a teasing sibling on a righteous mission.
If Delaware jazz has an image, it’s that of Glanden darkly cornered in that bar, infusing familiar melodies with quixotic variations that lead you up and down cobblestoned alleyways and back home again.
His sole accompaniment, bass player Bob Culligan, hunches over his shapely instrument. His face glows, its aura willing his fingers to life. As Culligan tugs at each thick string, Glanden’s head turns to catch each phrase of notes in his ear, followed by a shake of the head to release it, only so his ear can be filled once again.
“It’s impossible to play a bad note in jazz,” Glanden, 53, says days later to a handful of high school students at The University of the Arts in downtown Philadelphia. That is, if you know tertian harmony, know the four different types of chord triads like the back of your music-making hands.
“Jazz seems complicated,” he says. “But it’s a series of small things mastered.”
Glanden, a professor at the school, is on sabbatical as Chair of the piano department and of jazz graduate studies. But he was there to teach a “clinic” to a handful of high school kids.
He shows them that right-handed riffing on those traditional left-handed Euro-classical chords turns the black and white world of the 88 keys of the piano into a rainbow of varying rhythms and sliding blues notes.
He plays them Bach, then gospel, then the Duke of Ellington’s magical mix of Europe and Africa and America, as if the history of world music stretched through the tendons of his hands, and the piano resonated as witness to that evolution.
After hearing jazz’s knotty, byzantine notes, the relative simplicity of a Bach chorale, marching through the air with counterpointing notes and voices, seems a relief.
But it’s not. Bach is as deceptive as Ellington or Arlen or Coltrane, and Glanden knows it: All great music is an intricate counterpoint to all other music, incestuous, adoring, personal, universal, from classical to Romantic to Modern, from ragtime to swing to be-bop, the last of which worked to thin out the classical influence till it became an echo.
But the echo of that miscegenic heritage never fades. It can’t. No matter how hard you may foolishly try.
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You can’t play jazz without knowing everything, Glanden says, just like you can’t judge a person in court without dispassionately knowing all the facts, or you can’t love someone else without digging yourself. It’s that basic chord to which we all return, played repeatedly in all facets of a life shaped by art.
Jazz, as a distinct form of music, contain multitudes. “If a vocabulary is vast or more complicated,” Glanden says, “it can be infused with more emotion.” The thorny range of that emotion can’t help but make the fat lady blush.
When he plays and becomes lost in the music, Glanden has the world on a string because jazz has the history of music on a string.
Glanden first turned on to jazz at the age of 10, when a man by the name of Charlie Freeman came to his suburban north Wilmington home and tuned the family piano.
Freeman, a jazz musician who tuned pianos to help make a living, played bluesy jazz, Glanden says, “like Wynton Kelly who played with Miles Davis,” and whose CDs pile high in Glanden’s music room at his home.
Glanden lives in the same home where he first heard Freeman play, that he bought from his mom, and where he mostly raised his two children and lives with his wife, Jody.
His music room is cluttered and stacked with jazz festival posters and record albums and cassette tapes and compact discs and a piano and a keyboard and a drum kit and milk crates filled with his working manuscripts, some more than three decades old, yellowing pages filled with fragments of ideas for melodies.
“I come back to them and flesh them out,” he says. He writes traditionally, at the piano, with paper and pencil.
Glanden also writes essays on interpreting music. His latest work in progress dissects Vernon Duke’s “Autumn in New York.” He has recorded and released several CDs on the Cadence Jazz Records label, plays at festivals, and occasionally plays backup at major concerts for visiting singers.
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And he teaches at the school.
“Teaching is an integral part of my career,” he says. He gets to talk and teach jazz and classical music to painfully shy students longing for their own hands to resonate with the history of music.
“He’s a god in the department here,” says one of his students, Hakeem Reid, of Camden, N.J.
One of many, because there are several fine musicians there, like Tom Giacabetti, head of the guitar department, who has played on Glanden’s CDs, and who has played for the likes of Petula Clark and Don Rickles in Atlantic City.
Three blocks south of Philadelphia’s City Hall and Billy Penn’s unblinking eyes sits the “hub of jazz activity in the area,” Giacabetti says.
Believe it.
In front of the school on Broad Street, students unceremoniously play to a lunchtime crowd, which stops, walks, stops and then cheers as the kids be-bop their way into maturity.
Glanden just started investing in and learning the technology of recording for himself. He bought music software with which he can layer different tracks until he pinpoints an interpretation he likes. In his music room, he can play his Roland F-90 keyboard into a Kurzweil Sound Module, which can create any possible instrumental sound.
At 2 a.m. one morning, he wrote a Bachian “Chorale in G.”
He recorded it from the keyboard, and when he plays it from a burned compact disc, the tones of the strings sound like a rich and sinuous orchestral shrug, straining to find a place in the world.
That world that Glanden has quivering expectantly on the end of a string, whenever and wherever he sits at a piano and plays.