A popular misconception at Rutgers University’s New Brunswick campus, encompassing 40,000 students, faculty and staff — a small city – is that people who go to Mason Gross School of the Arts are on the easy street for their B.A. degree. In fact, quite the reverse is true. Alumnus Mike Noordzy can assure you of this.
Noordzy, 44, has spent most of the last two decades living in Highland Park. He is known for his bass playing and broadening the audience for jazz, but he is more than competent as a clarinetist, guitarist, and sousaphone player.
At Mason Gross, undergraduates studying visual arts, performing arts, theater, and classical and jazz studies must work their butts off. They have to produce, whether it’s hundreds of paintings and sketches or hundreds of original jazz compositions.
Noordzy was raised in Staten Island, New York, and Jackson Township in Ocean County before coming to study at Rutgers in 2002. He earned his undergraduate degree in jazz studies in 2007 and came back for graduate school in the same field for his master’s between 2012 and 2014, all at Mason Gross School of the Arts.
“Mason Gross is a very serious place, and that’s what I love about it,” Noordzy explained from his Highland Park home recently, “not only did I get to attend school there as an undergrad and a grad student, but now I get to work there.”
He also gets to perform along side other Mason Gross alumni at the Middlesex County Jazz Festival, which features performances from Wednesday through Sunday, September 24 through 28, at venues in Woodbridge, Carteret, Metuchen, and New Brunswick. Noordzy’s show is at 1 p.m. Sunday in New Brunswick’s Monument Square. All performances are free.
Noordzy teaches at Rutgers on Mondays and Wednesdays in addition to teaching an independent online class for jazz improvisation for the past dozen years. At Mason Gross they teach the jazz students how to be resourceful in every way, including promoting themselves and their gigs and finding markets for their music. Many students are involved in four or five different bands, and doing things like playing weddings is never out of the equation, as that’s usually very good money.
“It may be something we don’t spend enough time with. How to promote yourself and how to market your music, and it’s something I’m still working on in a lot of ways.”
Asked about his earliest awareness of jazz, blues and rock, he said he was playing electric bass for years in high school before coming to Mason Gross to study jazz bass playing. He said a concert at the Paramount Theater, attached to Madison Square Garden in New York, when he was 12 was a revelation. He saw Dr. John, B.B. King, and Little Feat on the same “blues revue” night. He began playing bass and guitar.
“You can’t play country music or rock or jazz without knowing how to play blues,” Noordzy argued. “It’s the foundation of all American music, and when I say American music, I include the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd, all those British bands, that’s American music even if you’re originally from England.”
“That concert was a turning point for me, and it really made me think, I want to play music for a living if I can do it,” he said, recalling that the first “Blues Brothers” movie with Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi also made a huge impact on him as a young teen. The 1980 comedy was so popular it put a well-deserved spotlight on sometimes-forgotten classic American blues and R&B singers like James Brown, Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, and John Lee Hooker.
“That movie was a big one for me. I didn’t want to be Elwood or Jake, I wanted to be the bass player in that movie, Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn. He is still one of my idols, and he’s just in the background, doesn’t say anything, just looks cool throughout the film.”
“I began learning guitar around the same time I was learning bass, but I was never super serious about guitar. I do find occasion to play it in public once in a while. I don’t know if I’m a good jazz guitarist, but I can hang in and get by. I can have some fun, but no one’s going to hire me to be a jazz guitar player.”
He said his clarinet and sousaphone playing is relegated mostly to experimental and avant-garde jazz groups he is involved with informally.
“Sousaphone is essentially a tuba that you can wear, and that’s what I often play with New Brunswick Brass, a New Orleans-styled brass band we formed a number of years back,” he explained. His New Brunswick Brass Band played at the New Jersey Folk Festival on August 23 on the grounds of the Middlesex County Earth Center in North Brunswick.
Aside from savvy, influential professors like Ralph Bowen, Conrad Herwig, and the late Dr. Bill Fielder he got to know as friends at Rutgers, Noordzy said his other early mentors were in and around Asbury Park, not far from where he grew up in Jackson. Raised with rock ‘n’ roll, he loved classic rock acts like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, but also enjoyed bands that broke out in the early 1990s like Soundgarden, Alice in Chains, and Nirvana.
“In my later teens and early 20s I started hanging out at the Brighton Bar in Long Branch and Jack-O Monaghan used to book the bands there,” he recalled. “He was a big local mentor to me, in a way maybe not so much musically but artistically, he really is a very special person to me as was [the late Asbury Park musician/producer] Mr. Joe Harvard. They both became very dear friends and they both had a similar approach to creating music and how they handle their art: everyone’s invited, it’s all-inclusive, and let’s just make something out of nothing let’s make our own fun; they were very open to anything that would happen and there was no concern about how much money was going to be made or who was playing what instruments or who’s going to like it or who was going to hate it. It was just: come over here and make your art and figure it out.”
Like so many other Mason Gross alumni who were taught to be resourceful, Noordzy plays in several different bands including a Black Sabbath tribute band, and some of his groups offer up jazz-flavored takes of familiar classic rock staples. He gets the word out via Instagram, his Facebook page, and his own website.
“I do have an official website, but I don’t update it very often. It’s way too much work, and it’s much easier to just maintain the Facebook page,” he said, admitting, “I would love to be able to just shut it all off forever, yet, it’s a way to promote your gigs. At some of the places you’re performing at, they want to know how many people are following you on Facebook and how often do you post, so it’s a responsibility you have to advertise yourself through social media.”
On Sunday, September 28, at 1 p.m., bassist Noordzy will be accompanied by other alumni he hand-picked for their debut at the Middlesex County Jazz Festival. He calls his new ensemble the Rutgers Alumni Jazz Orchestra.
“I’ve assembled a heck of a band. I’m so excited to be able to play with everybody,” he said. The Alumni Orchestra includes Anthony Ware on alto saxophone; Mike Bond, piano; Gusten Rudolph, drums; Charlie Barber on trumpet and the elder statesman, tenor saxophone titan Jerry Weldon. Weldon was one of the first graduates of the Mason Gross Jazz Studies program back in the early 1980s. Weldon spent many years accompanying Jimmy McGriff and other blues-based jazz people in hundreds of gigs on the road.
“I can’t say enough good things about Jerry Weldon and what an honor it is to be on stage with that guy,” Noordzy said of the soulful, blues-oriented saxophonist, composer and bandleader.
“We’re going to be playing [the often blues-based] jazz standards by Ellington, Count Basie, some Charlie Parker and some Thelonious Monk,” Noordzy explained.
“We’re going to make sure everybody really enjoys it; we have an incredible band and we’ll be playing classic jazz and having a blast.”
Middlesex County Jazz Festival, Wednesday through Sunday, September 24 through 28, in Woodbridge, Carteret, Metuchen, and New Brunswick. Mike Noordzy and Rutgers Alumni Jazz Orchestra performs Sunday, 1 p.m., in Monument Square, Livingston Avenue, New Brunswick. Also performing are Antoinette Montague, 2:15 p.m.; and Conrad Herwig’s Latin Side All Stars, 4 p.m. Free. www.middlesexcountyjazzfestival.org.
