Clark Terry discusses his influence

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Clark Terry talks about communicating with students

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Clark Terry talks repetoire

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Q: “You probably, more than anybody because you’re around a lot of young students, still do a lot of teaching would recognize that some people are naturally going to produce – let’s say with the trumpet – some kids are going to just be somebody with a great tone. Somebody else is going to have a fabulous high range, somebody else is going to be a gifted improviser. How do you go about putting all that together? If you run across a kid who can play but maybe he doesn’t have the tone and all that, how do you convince him that he has to produce the right sound?”

A: “Well, there's a certain few little things that you have to just break down to basic logic to them. Most of them, if they're very young, they like to play baseball, so you tell him, "Hey, man, you hit a good long ball. You can knock the ball out of the park." But you've got to make him realize that the minute you bring this point to him, in front of him, he realizes that you can't get an opportunity to get on the field and knock that ball out of the park unless you can put a glove on that ball somewhere defensively, you know. So you have to be able to get the point across to them that all the facets of indulgence is for a stronger player to consider equally is important, one is as important as the other, so you can't bat if you don't field the gloves, field the ball somewhere. And we also tell them like going to the bank, you can't go to bank and draw out $100 and the teller tells you, "You were overdrawn three weeks ago." You know, and if you go there and you have put enough in, you will even get dividends. So with some little simple things like this and we find that the basic things sometimes we don't get too high faluted with the kids and go too far above their heads, which creates the knowledge gap. You know, if we can conceal that knowledge gap and just communicate with them on as common a level as possible, they'll create their own, you know, heights that they will reach as far as knowledge is concerned.”