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CEA 2001

Guitar Greatness
Late area guitarist Cal Collins was a true treasure to both the local and national Jazz scenes

TRIBUTE BY MIKE BREEN • ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN NOVEMBER 2001

When one talks about the all-time greats of Cincinnati's storied Jazz history, Cal Collins must be right at the top of the list. This year, Cincinnati and the entire Jazz world lost a giant when Collins died of liver failure on Aug. 27.

Cal Collins Photo By Jon Hughes

Collins was born on May 5, 1933, in Medora, Ind., a small farming community. His family were farmers, but music was always a part of their lives, as they pulled out the fiddles and banjos and jammed on Bluegrass tunes in their spare time. Collins picked up on music at a young age, initially playing the mandolin.

Collins eventually moved to guitar and began to emulate the piano styles of popular Jazz artists he heard on the radio. Family members would bring back recordings from their big city travels, which led to his discovery of Jazz guitar legends like Django Reinhardt. His early Bluegrass influence taught him about improvisation, which helped Collins -- who was self-taught and never learned to read music -- segue easily into the rich, chordal Jazz stylings he would come to master.

As a teen, Collins played dances and roadhouse gigs before enlisting in the military at 16, serving as a helicopter pilot. (Collins was said to have briefly considered a piloting career over music.) After serving his time in the military, he relocated to Cincinnati and became a fixture in the local Jazz scene, performing regularly on radio shows and in numerous local clubs.

In the mid-'70s, Collins got his big break when Benny Goodman, looking to form a small group for touring, asked him to come to an area show and play with him as a way to audition.

"You're hired," Goodman reportedly said upon hearing Collins play, leading to an extended run with the Big Band legend. Collins toured extensively with Goodman for three years.

The Goodman connection put Collins on the international Jazz stage and led to several albums for the esteemed Concord Jazz label (where he became house guitarist). Concord released the Collins' albums Cincinnati to L.A. ('78), In San Francisco ('78), Blues on My Mind ('79), By Myself ('79), Interplay ('80), Cross Country ('81) and, in 1990, his Concord swan song, Ohio Style, credited to the Cal Collins Quartet. As a sideman, Collins provided guitar work for artists including Al Cohn, John Bunch, Herb Ellis, Ray Brown, Jake Hanna, Scott Hamilton, Buddy Tate, Dave McKenna and, most notably, fellow local icon Rosemary Clooney. Collins appeared on Clooney's Here's to My Lady ('78), With Love ('80) and Songbook Collection (2000) albums, among others.

In the '90s, Collins remained extremely active, appearing on John Barnard's New York Notes album in 1996 and releasing S'Us Four in 1998, one of the first releases from the acclaimed local Jazz label, J Curve Records. In 1993, Collins got back to his roots, traveling as a member of the Masters of the Steel String Guitar Tour, with Folk hero Doc Watson, dobro player Jerry Douglas and Blues duo Cephas & Wiggins. Collins also appeared on the all-star tribute album A Tribute to Wes Montgomery in 1994.

Collins gave the world a wealth of Jazz guitar music, but he also gave back to the musical community that helped foster him. Proving that notation and theory aren't everything there is to music, the untrained Collins was asked to put on Jazz clinics (which mainly consisted of Q&A sessions) in conjunction with Jazz studies programs at several major universities, including Bellarmine College in Louisville, North Texas State University, Southwestern University and the University of Cincinnati.

Collins' influence, especially on local musicians, continues to this day. The Blue Wisp Big Band, featuring members with whom Collins often played, performs every Wednesday at the venerable downtown club. From the ages of 8 to 14, CEA Blues nominee Sonny Moorman was personally taught by Collins, while you can hear the Roots/Jazz fusion of Collins' music in the playing of fellow nominee Scotty Anderson.

Clearly, Collins' rare, irrefutable talents will live on.

INTERVIEW BY RICK PENDER • ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN NOVEMBER 2001

For a man whose life is about images, Paul Shortt is full of words. Over lunch, he chuckles that his wife scolds him for talking too much.

Paul Shortt Photo By: Jymi Bolden

But his words are carefully chosen, and he constantly interrupts himself to add another phrase that improves the thought. That deliberate refinement of a concept has made the CCM scenic designer both an outstanding theatrical artist and a master teacher.

A career in the theater was not what the young Paul Shortt imagined when he enrolled at the University of Michigan in the early 1960s. He and his older brother grew up in their grandparents' home in Michigan. His divorced mother worked, and his grandparents were quiet people, so the boys were often left to their own devices.

"I was basically on my own in a world of imagination," he says. "I would pore through magazines and picture books."

Shortt recalls how he and his brother played: "We did all kinds of make-believe stuff in the neighborhood, building things and making things. My brother wanted to make things that stood up, so he went into engineering. I wanted to control how things looked."

That fascination with appearances drew him to architecture. "I was in high school when I saw an exhibit of models at the University of Michigan's School of Architecture. That piqued my interest."

In the ninth grade, he wrote a paper about architecture and designed a building.

But at Michigan, he was quickly distracted by an even more imaginative pursuit: One day on his way to a class he saw a display of theater set models.

"I became very intrigued by them," he says. "This was very early in my freshman year."

He mentioned the display to an instructor in industrial engineering (the discipline he'd chosen when the math needed for architecture scared him off), who happened to have a teaching assistant who was painting scenery at the theater. Shortt was invited to help. Once his skill was recognized, there was no turning back.

During his sophomore year Shortt helped to design the class musical, a production of Bye Bye Birdie.

"I did a few of the scenes, cut up some shirt cardboards and made little models," he says. "But I didn't participate in getting it ready for stage or building or painting. I saw the product onstage and I thought it was OK, but I knew I could do better."

He decided to learn more. "I was always a good 'picture-looker-atter'," he says. He went to the university library and found books with pictures of theater sets around the world.

"I gleaned from these photos styles that I was interested in and, from there, styles that I thought were appropriate for set design techniques."

His skill was quickly recognized, and he took courses in stagecraft to enhance his abilities. As a sophomore he was invited to design a campus-wide musical, and suddenly he was in the big leagues. By the time he graduated in 1965, he’d designed 13 major productions.

He'd also worked with Jack Rouse, an upperclassman who designed lighting for the campus-wide musical. After graduation Rouse went on to teach, eventually landing at the University of Cincinnati to launch a new program in musical theater. He remembered the bright designer he'd known at the University of Michigan. Shortt, meanwhile, earned a master's degree in scenic design at the Yale Drama School, one of America's best programs.

"Jack wanted to start a program, and he wanted me to come and work with him," Shortt says, thinking back to his arrival in Cincinnati in 1969. "I discovered teaching, and I loved it."

He also married a Yale classmate, Marsha, a graphic designer, and they began a family in Cincinnati.

"We thought we'd stay in Cincinnati for five years," he says, smiling.

Then he thought he'd like to pursue professional design opportunities. But his reputation spread quickly to several local arts organizations, and before long he was designing productions for the Cincinnati Opera and the Cincinnati Playhouse.

He loved the outside work because of the challenge and because it fed his teaching. But CCM responsibilities limited the time he had to design for others: There were only three professionals handling the technical side of the musical theater and opera program.

Some of Shortt's Yale colleagues shied away from the rigors of a new program, but he was in his element. "Here we got to build the program from scratch. We had to carry it on our shoulders. We were young. People who don't have that appetite for work wouldn't be happy here. But we thrived on it."

His collaborations with Rouse's successor, CCM musical theater director Worth Gardner, were increasingly noticed, and when Gardner became artistic director at the Cincinnati Playhouse in 1985, Shortt's outside work got more exposure, including two productions of one of his most inventive designs, a suspended double helix that conjured up both the tornado and the yellow brick road for Gardner's memorable staging of The Wizard of Oz.

The Playhouse's Marx Theatre presents a design challenge, Shortt says. "It's an unconventional theater without a stage house or wing space. How do you make things appear?"

Gardner assigned Shortt several big, multi-scene musicals there -- challenges that caused Shortt to grow as a designer.

"I didn't like treating the Marx as a flat proscenium that's stuck upstage," he says. Working at the Playhouse resulted in a rethinking of how he designed for other kinds of stages. "It made my proscenium design much more exciting," he says, and that helped him better teach such issues to his CCM students.

Shortt's design genius could easily have led to a career in New York. (He's done steady work for the Philadelphia Opera in recent years.) But the balance of design, teaching and family has kept him at CCM and in Cincinnati for more than three decades. His family has been his ongoing source of satisfaction, and he's enjoyed the chance to work with topnotch arts that are just 10 minutes from his base at CCM.

"The professional world of freelance theater design in New York is so demanding," Shortt observes. "They have to work so many hours to do so many shows. Anybody who can keep a marriage and a family together under those circumstances is really a rare person. I would choose family and teaching over being a successful single Broadway designer."

In his first years out of Yale, he'd get twinges of jealousy when a classmate would be recognized in a national story. "But you visit them and see they have no life," at least not the life of family and teaching that's meant so much to Shortt.

He has an approach to design for the stage: "It has a finite amount of space. But I can feel the space. I work to perceive the emotion of the piece and its dramatic thrust, turning that into an image, whether it's a picture, a construction, an enclosure or an envelope."

As someone who works in images and scenes, Shortt easily conjures up pictures. He thinks back to a 1989 Cincinnati Playhouse production of Treasure Island.

"It's a small story at times, with Jim and where he comes from in the English countryside," he says. "But when he gets to the seaport of Bristol and the docks suddenly come to life, well, you have all that hidden life unfold in all of its bustling busyness. To me that's just so exciting. I just get so high thinking about it. And passing it on to students, getting them to indulge the way I got to indulge."

Paul Shortt's balanced indulgence has created extraordinary theatrical experiences for Cincinnati audiences for three decades.