By Pam Victor
[“Geeking Out with…” is a series of interviews with well-known, highly experienced improvisers. It’s a chance to talk about stuff that might interest hardcore, improv dorkwads like Pam. The series can be found in full frontal geek out version on My Nephew is a Poodle and in pithier version on the Women in Comedy Festival blog. For behind-the-scenes action, ‘like’ the “Geeking Out with…” Facebook page.]
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The deeper I dig into the history of legendary
improvisers through my Geeking
Out with… series, the more the name Jazz Freddy crops up. In the last
year, I’ve had the enormous pleasure of interviewing Jimmy
Carrane, Rachel
Dratch, and most recently Brian Stack, who supplied the final push in my
impetus to dig even deeper into the story behind the still lauded and
respected improvisation team Jazz Freddy.
I used a variety of sources for my little exploration
into Jazz Freddy, all of them noted below, though I’ll give a few special
shout-outs. Thanks to Kevin Mullaney
who runs the IRC
Message Board, a living, evolving time capsule for improvisation, and
thanks as well to Craig
Cackowski from whose IRC post I liberally quote because he’s so fucking smart and
astute in his assessment of Jazz
Freddy and pretty much all things
improvisation. Thank you to Rachel Dratch and Brian Stack for sharing their
fondest memories with me. Thanks again to Brian Stack and to Michael Golding
for passing along the photos in this article. Most of all, I owe great gobs of gratitude
to Pete Gardner, founder of Jazz Freddy,
who generously made time on a busy work day to allow me to probe his mind and memories. You
taught me a lot that day, Pete. Most of all, rather than snottily judge
different improvisers’ approach to pacing, you helped me to think of
improvisation as music. You encouraged me to appreciate that some play it fast,
like rock music, while others approach it more like classical music. But it’s
all good and just and in keeping with Del’s vision. Thank you, Mr. Gardner.
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| Jazz Freddy back in the day |
From
what I can tell, there would be no Jazz
Freddy if there hadn’t been Ed. In
1990, a show called Ed came along,
directed by Jim Dennen and credited as the first longform show to be performed
in a real theater as opposed to a bar or cabaret. (This was before iO had a
permanent theater.) Of Dennen’s vision, Del Close is quoted as saying, "I
see what his ambition is. It is to basically rescue improvisation from improv.
To rescue improvisation from the notion that it has to be funny in a cabaret
sort of way." (The quote comes from the important review, “The ‘How’ of
Funny: Chicago’s New Wave of Improvisation Aspires to More than a Punchline,” by Tony Adler published in American Theatre in December, 1993, as
found here).
And
by many accounts, Ed did just that. In
our interview together, Pete Gardner (a.k.a. Pete Zahradnick) remembered his
experiences working with the group, “Ed
was something different. It was in a theater, which made people listen.” So
often before, improv was presented in a space where performers had to
compete
with boisterous patrons, drink-procuring noises, and other visual distractions that
may have had the effect of pushing the performers towards a “faster, louder,
funnier” approach to improvisation in an effort to maintain audience’s
attention. Pete Gardner continues, “Maybe that’s what [other groups] were
reacting to – working in bars to audiences who weren’t listening or just
listening for the joke. Just placing improv in a different environment, a
theater, made people take it more seriously.” As improviser and teacher extraordinaire Craig Cackowski remembered
in a thread
on the Improv Resource Center board, “When I think of those Ed shows and the performers in them, I
think of all things that good IO improvisers can do, but with the acting raised
a notch.”
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| Pete Gardner today |
Ed
expanded the idea of longform beyond The Harold, which had begun to feel
restrictive to Pete Gardner. “It was hard to break out of what Del taught,”
Gardner told me. “We were acolytes.” But Ed
interpreted Del’s instructions and took things “to the next level,” which
Gardner later found out was what Del hoped all along. “And all of it was right.
Del said, ‘Take it and run with it.’”
Indeed
Gardner sought to take what he learned in Ed
to his friend at iO and see how far they could run with it. So he began a
series of workshops combining folks from Ed
and iO. From those workshops, Jazz Freddy
was born in the summer of 1992 with the original cast of Pete Gardner (who
directed as well,) Dave Koechner, Brian Stack, Noah Gregoropoulos, Kevin Dorff,
Jimmy Carrane, Pat Finn, Chris Reed, Miriam Tolan, Stephanie Howard, Rachel
Dratch, Susan McLaughlin and Meredith Zinner. Carlos Jacott and Theresa
Mulligan were guests in the first run and later joined in the second run, which
was directed by Jim Dennen, and Molly Allen was added to the mix as well.
In the IRC thread, Cackowski reflected, “The Ed style was very grounded in acting and physicality, which I think was a positive influence on the IO guys, who were all brilliant to begin with, but, I suspect, took their scenework to a new level.” As Jazz Freddy director Pete Gardner relates in our interview, “There was a feeling of bringing your A-game,
which established a lot of trust.” As a director, he felt like he had full
support of the actors, which lead to amazing rehearsals. “People let go and
experimented with formats and structures. Everyone understood that they were
playing it straight – truth in comedy
– like Del taught. They weren’t playing for jokes. These people were all so
funny that it would always be funny anyway. You never had to put the kibosh on
funny.” Rachel
Dratch remembers one of the very funny moments born from this process, “Jazz
Freddy gave birth to one of my favorite Koechner characters - Gerald (who
he ended up basing a whole show around called Naked
Trucker and T-Bones Show). It was this character that just came up in
rehearsal, and everyone was tagging in because they wanted to do a scene with
Gerald!” According to Gardner, the focus was to “take your time, play it
straight, and listen.” As always in the best improvisation, that approach often
leads to great, multi-dimensional comedy. Brian Stack relayed to me, “We always hoped the shows would be funny, but we tried to play the emotional reality of the scenes, and hoped that the laughs would come out of that.”
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| Comedy Central's Naked Truck and T-Bones Show |
Again,
like Ed, Jazz Freddy was a forerunner in the gender-equalization of
improvisation. Previous to the early ‘90s, the typical ratio was more like
seven, eight, or even nine men to one woman, which could lead to “lots of
testosterone and one upsmenship,” as Gardner reflected. Ed was four women to four men. Likewise, Jazz Freddy sought to maintain as close to equal gender ratio as
possible.
It is widely believed the fair balance of the women and men in Jazz Freddy further expanded their
improvisation in pacing and dynamic. As Craig Cackowski remarked in that
absolutely delicious IRC thread,
Jazz Freddy became known for its, “good,
slow, relationship-based scenework.”
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| Jazz Freddy comedy royalty |
Although
patient improvisation existed before, it seems that Jazz Freddy is noted most often for its groundbreaking pacing. Gardner
told me, “The pacing was based on the trust. There was no fear on how do you’d
get it done because someone was going to edit the scene. We knew the more we
let people roll, the more information we’d have to pull details out and have
more to play off of. It wasn’t slow all the time. There would be fast and slow
scenes, with the slow scenes being the source scenes. Plus the tag-outs picked
up the pace, which was about taking someone people backwards and forwards in
time.” (Jazz Freddy sometimes is
credited as the originator, or at least the main popularizer, of the tag-out.) As Brian Stack told me in our Geeking Out with… interview, “We were basically just trying to do the best scene work we could do. Luckily, we had such a great mix of people in the group. The chemistry was special because were all pretty different from one another.” Environment, pace, temporal
play, emotional reality, chemistry – these all became hallmarks for
Jazz Freddy’s work.
And
the press took notice. With the dawning of this new age in the art form, improvisation
finally began to be reviewed in the newspapers as legitimate comedic theater
rather than a series of guffaws and gags. Cackowski
wrote that Jazz Freddy “demanded
that critics look at it as a piece of theatre…I can't tell you how important
that was...it's taken a while, but I think Chicago critics finally give improv
the respect it deserves when they review it, without using words like skits,’
‘send-ups,’ ‘yuks,’ and, god forbid, ‘spoofmeisters.’" And indeed in a Chicago
Reader article from April 1, 1993 simply titled Jazz Freddy, Jack Helbig wrote, “Jazz
Freddy premiered last summer at the Live Bait Theater and blew me away. The
young 14-member group worked together with egoless ease, creating intelligent,
nicely structured two-act pieces out of thin air.
In its 1993 incarnation, Jazz Freddy has slimmed down to 10 members and taken
on Ed
and Filmdome director Jim Dennen as a pair of ‘outside eyes.’ Otherwise
the group remains essentially the same, as sharp, witty, and eager as ever. But
not so eager that they won't hold back when a scene demands patience. This
restraint was clear on opening night when Theresa Mulligan began performing a
simply killing imitation of a goldfish, right down to its black, fish-eyed
stare. Lesser improvisers would have leapt in, trying to yuck up the scene with
awful jokes and worse shtick. Mulligan's fellow players gave her the space and
time to fully develop her marvelous silent scene. I can't think of any other
group currently performing in Chicago with the esprit de corps to let a fellow
performer shine like that.”
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| Stephanie Howard and Chris Reed before a Jazz Freddy show |
The
atmosphere of The Live Bait Theatre and the pairing of the show with elegant jazz
music further elevated the status of their improvisation. “Everything about it
exuded class, from the Ray Charles music that played as the house lights faded
to the fact that they were playing on actual sets of regular Live Bait
productions,” related Craig Cackowski. In our conversation, Rachel Dratch touched upon the impact of The Live Bait Theatre atmosphere upon the quality of the improvisation, “I never even thought it at the time, but being in a theater made it more about the truth of the scene than the pressure to get laughs instantly or come in with a big crazy character.”
Perhaps due to their remarkable chemistry and the environment of trust, Jazz Freddy performers always seemed to be having so much fun playing together. Some
scenes live on in people’s memories. Brian Stack will never forget one
Halloween night. “We were all in costume, but we made a rule to not play any
characters that one would associate with those costumes. For example,
Carlos was dressed up as a cartoonish Mexican bandito, with a bug bushy
mustache, eye-patch, cigar, bullets draped across his chest, and an enormous sombrero,
but in one scene he was playing an ordinary little American boy who had just
gotten home from Little League practice. Jimmy [Carrane], who was playing his dad, said,
‘Take off that hat at the dinner table, young man.’ Rather than taking off the
sombrero he was actually wearing, Carlos reached up and pretended to take off a
little boy's baseball cap. It brought the house down.”
Jazz Freddy
became the show to see. Cackowski
continued, “…it was often tough
to get into the tiny Live Bait Theatre. I think it did a lot toward bringing
the improv community together, because so many people from the different
theatres around town would come to see it and socialize afterwards.” In the same IRC thread, Michael Jeffrey Cohen effused, “I believe Jazz Freddy was the best improv show and best improv ensemble I have ever seen, ever, ever, ever…The scenes were just fucking incredible. Slow, intelligent, hip.”Perhaps as
a result of the universal attraction, Jazz
Freddy often drew from the “upper classmen” of improvisation for its
special guests, such as David Pasquesi. As Gardner says, “Each show had a
special guest to bring in new flavors and voices. It was the first time they started
to play with the generations.” This cross-pollination of generations continued
into the audience. Craig
Cackowski again: “As a young improviser, I looked up to these players not
only as performers, but as social role models as well. They were the cool kids
and I a nerdy freshman. So I watched the show, but I also studied them...how
much fun they were having, how much they supported each other's work, how much
joy they brought to one another.” Another young upstart named Peter Gwinn (Baby Wants Candy, The Colbert Report) lucked into interning with Jazz Freddy, "Shannon [Cummings], Wendy [West] and I were all in the ACM Chicago Semester in the Arts program. (ACM stood for Associated Colleges of the Midwest). I had taken some IO classes a couple years earlier, and was doing improv at Carleton College, so when the program got a call that 'some improv show' was looking for people to do lights, they offered it to me. A bunch of us went to check out the show, and I will never forget my jaw dropping when the lights came up and literally every improviser I had idolized from my time at IO two years earlier was standing on stage together. So naturally I took the gig." No doubt this melding of ages, genders,
levels of experiences, actor-improvisers and improviser-actors lead to the success of Jazz Freddy. A success Second City was soon
to notice.
Pete Gardner recalls, “All the people in the show were heavy
hitters who hadn’t gone on to Second City yet. Everyone was at their prime,
playing with other
respected people. There was an amazing energy of everyone
giving it their best. The environment was perfect with trust and working
together.” Soon enough, Second City directly plucked many of the players from Jazz Freddy and initiated them in their grand
comedy institution.
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| Chris Reed, Brian Stack, and Jimmy Carrane on stage in Jazz Freddy |
But
the legend and influences of Jazz Freddy
lives on in the hearts and minds of many. Brian Stack fondly told me about another unforgettable scene, “One of my favorite memories of Jazz Freddy involved a recurring scene in which two old men were playing chess in a park, and another unrelated recurring scene that took place in a medieval castle. At some point late in the show, a reference was made during the ‘castle’ scene to the ‘strange, checkered landscape’ outside. It became clear that the action in the castle was taking place in the rook on the old men's chessboard. It was one of those totally organic on-stage discoveries that I'll never forget, and it still reminds me of why I love improv so much.” That these highly experienced improvisers like Rachel Dratch and Brian Stack, who no doubt have done hundreds and hundreds of scenes since their time together, still maintain detailed and cherished memories of Jazz Freddy scenes is true testament to the place this group holds in their hearts.
I’ll tip the hat one last time to
Craig Cackowski, from that IRC thread
I know you’re just dying to read at this point, because he says it so well. “Jazz
Freddy was the paradigm for [JTS Brown], for the show I'm directing now, and
for any others I might do. They set the bar impossibly high and reached it, and
have inspired me and countless others to do the same.” And the final word goes
to Ms. Rachel Dratch, “I remember standing backstage and hearing the One Mint Julep music come up before
every show and just feeling so lucky to be a part of it. If I had to watch from
the audience, I don't know what I would have done! But thinking of Jazz Freddy reminds me of all the joy
and fun and art of improv…”
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| Jazz Freddy, Fall '92 (with the light crew and stage manager): Peter Gwinn, Brian Stack, Kevin Dorff, Chris Reed, Shannon Cummings, Miriam Tolan, Dave Koechner, Pete Garner, Stephanie Howard, Noah Gregoropoulos, Susan McLaughlin, Jimmy Carrane, Nathan "Peanut" Gumley, Pat Finn, Rachel Dratch, Wendy West Thanks to former Jazz Freddy intern Peter Gwinn for this photo! |
* * *
Read Geeking Out with...Brian Stack
in which he says,
"...once before a writers' meeting, I pretended to shoot Brian McCann in the leg. He sang a happy little song on the spot about having 'bullet-proof legs,' so I shot him in the chest and he fell off his chair, dead. Apparently, only his legs were bulletproof."
*
Catch up on past improv geek-a-thons:
Geeking Out with…Dave Pasquesi of TJ and Dave
...David Razowsky of iO West
…with Joe Bill of BASSPROV
...Charna Halpern, co-founder of iO Theatre
...Jimmy Carrane of The Improv Nerd podcast
and many more!
And "like" the "Geeking Out with..." FACEBOOK PAGE please.
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