AADL Talks To: Paul Vornhagen, Jazz Saxophonist, Flutist, and Vocalist

Wed, 04/02/2025 - 1:06pm

When: November 21, 2024

Paul is an award-winning jazz saxophonist, flutist, and vocalist who got his start in Ann Arbor in 1972 as an accompanist at the University of Michigan Dance Department. Over the past four decades, Paul has played in numerous configurations and venues worldwide. He talks with us about the jazz scene in Ann Arbor in the early years, some of his favorite local venues -- past and present, reminisces about some of the many musicians he's played with, and the many changes he's witnessed in Ann Arbor over the years.

Listen to a historical recording by Paul Vornhagen and Friends captured live at the former Del Rio restaurant

Transcript

• [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: Hi, this is Amy.
• [00:00:10] KATRINA ANBENDER: This is Katrina. In this episode, AADL Talks to Paul Vornhagen. Paul is an award winning jazz saxophonist, flutist, and vocalist who got his start in Ann Arbor in 1972 as an accompanist at the University of Michigan Dance Department. Over the past four decades, he's played in numerous configurations and in venues all over the world. Paul talks with us about the jazz scene in Ann Arbor in the early years, some of his favorite local venues past and present. He also reminisces about musicians he's played with and the changes he's witnessed in the city over the years. Thank you so much for joining us today. We usually start by asking, where did you grow up and what brought you to Ann Arbor?
• [00:00:54] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Well, I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and was there for about a year or so, and then we moved to Dayton close by. Then when I was around 11, we moved to New Jersey, and we lived in a small town called Sparta, New Jersey, on a lake, Lake Mohawk. We were there for a year, and then we moved to Bernardsville, New Jersey, which was a wonderful place to live. I was into sports at that time. I played all the sports, basketball being my favorite. Bernardsville is a wonderful town to grow up in. I went to high school with Meryl Streep, as a matter of fact.
• [00:01:35] AMY CANTU: No! Wow.
• [00:01:36] PAUL VORNHAGEN: She was one year ahead of me. Then what happened is I went to Ohio University on a track scholarship. I decided to get the academic scholarship instead. Then after two years, they cut out the out-of-state scholarships because they have money problems. My parents had just moved to Livonia, so I just went up there, enrolled at University of Michigan to get in-state fees and found that I love. I came into Ann Arbor and I went, Wow, this is my kind of place. It was love at first sight.
• [00:02:18] KATRINA ANBENDER: What year was this that you moved here?
• [00:02:21] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Let me see. I would have to say that was about 1972-ish, to Ann Arbor.
• [00:02:27] AMY CANTU: So what sparked your interest in music? Did the saxophone and flute happen at the same time?
• [00:02:34] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Well, that's an interesting story because I came to Ann Arbor not a musician. While I was here, I discovered that there was music everywhere in Ann Arbor, and I lived in a house where everybody was playing music. One day, when I came home from work, I was living on Hillcrest Street in Ann Arbor taking classes. I think it was beginning in my sophomore year at U of M, majoring in psychology. No, that was my junior year, excuse me. One day I come home from work, and there's this pickup truck parked in front of the house I was living in with a woman playing a flute, accompanied by apparently her boyfriend on guitar. I just stood there, and I thought, Wow, I just love the sound of that flute. Then she handed me her flute, showed me how to blow on it, and I got notes out of it right away. It was like, Whoa. It's like an epiphany in a way, so that happened. Then, like a week later, I went to Colorado hitchhiking around. I was out by Aspen, I heard this flute echoing down from the hills and I went, Okay, I get it.
• [00:03:59] AMY CANTU: A message.
• [00:03:59] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Hopped on a bus, went straight back to Ann Arbor, went to Nally Music and bought a flute.
• [00:04:06] AMY CANTU: Wow. You never had lessons prior to that?
• [00:04:08] PAUL VORNHAGEN: No.
• [00:04:09] AMY CANTU: Oh, my gosh, that's pretty rare, isn't it?
• [00:04:11] PAUL VORNHAGEN: It is. What I did was I discovered that the woman, she lived down the street from the house. She was staying there, and I went down and got a few beginning lessons, fingerings and stuff, and got a book and just went off on my own, memorized everything. I couldn't read very well. I learned all my scales, every key, and then just jammed with people.
• [00:04:37] AMY CANTU: Wow. When did you pick up the saxophone then?
• [00:04:40] PAUL VORNHAGEN: I picked up the saxophone about four years later. Actually, I went from flute to clarinet, and all the while not being able to really read that great. I would just memorize everything. One of the first groups I played with on the Diag on Sundays. They would have Conga drummers playing. I heard that, and it was like, Whoa. It was like the same thing -- take me to your leader. I went over, and I said -- I was mesmerized by the polyrhythms -- I said, Can I join you guys? They said, Okay. I was jamming already so I just started jamming along with the Conga drummers. One of them was Congo Phil, who was a well-known character in town and musician. They invited me into the dance classes at the University of Michigan for Afro-American and jazz. I played flutes and clarinets and just completely improvised, and the teacher loved what I was doing, and she said, Put him on the payroll.
• [00:05:57] KATRINA ANBENDER: Were you still studying psychology at this point then, or did you change your major after this?
• [00:06:02] PAUL VORNHAGEN: What happened is when I found the flute, I said, I'm going to take a break from college and then just went on my own from there and did whatever I needed to do to make a living. I painted a lot of houses in Ann Arbor, just on my own. I'll go through town these days and go, I painted that house. I was out of school at that time and just concentrating on playing the flute and the clarinet at that point.
• [00:06:33] AMY CANTU: You're on the payroll at the School of Dance. How long did you work there?
• [00:06:38] PAUL VORNHAGEN: I think I worked there for about three years for Vera Embree's class and for Jazz Class 2. I played all their concerts at the Power Center, and then we went down to Toledo and we opened up for Violette Verdy and Edward Villella from the New York Repertory Dance and playing my flutes and stuff. Then when I got done, I went back into the green room, and there was the Toledo Symphony getting ready to play for them. One guy said to me, "Hey, nice chart." Of course, it was completely memorized and made up by myself.
• [00:07:16] AMY CANTU: That must have felt pretty good.
• [00:07:17] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Yeah.
• [00:07:19] KATRINA ANBENDER: Can you talk a bit about the jazz music scene in Ann Arbor in the 70s?
• [00:07:23] PAUL VORNHAGEN: I found that I was drawn towards jazz right from the beginning. A friend of mine suggested that I listen to Thelonious Monk and Herbie Mann and Yusef Lateef. I just became really mesmerized by the music, especially of Yusef Lateef from Detroit, who played flutes and saxophones. He made me think that I want to try sax, too. That's how I got started moving over to the sax by that influence. Then I found out where the jazz was. I would go down after work. I had a job at the U of M building services department, and I would work the night shift, like, from 4 to something like that. What was it? Then afterwards, I would just walk down to the Blind Pig, go down into the basement there and listen to jazz and blues. That's where it all got started with me thinking about, Hey, and that eventually, I would say, "Can I play a song with you?" One thing led to another. Shortly after that, I met the Shobey Brothers and Rick Burgess at the Del Rio, and they invited me to play with them. So then that started really my musical jazz career -- was at the Del Rio and Ann Arbor playing tunes, and starting to learn how to read better.
• [00:08:55] AMY CANTU: That brings me to some of the other venues. We know about, of course, the great jazz venues -- we know about the Bird of Paradise and the Firefly. But there were dinner clubs, there was Weber's, there was the Golden Falcon. Can you talk about some of these other venues in town?
• [00:09:16] PAUL VORNHAGEN: My earliest experience was the Del Rio, of course. But at that time, there was also the Golden Falcon that had music. There was the Apartment Lounge that had music. There was a lot of music going on there at some point. At that point, I was getting better at reading because I had gone to San Francisco for a year, and I studied at City College of San Francisco and really learned how to read. Then I came back and I got more gigs. That really helped me. But what stands out is the Golden Falcon and the Apartment Lounge for me.
• [00:09:52] AMY CANTU: What were they like? Talk about the atmosphere there.
• [00:09:54] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Well, the Apartment Lounge was interesting because it was owned by this guy who... he loved jazz. He was supportive of jazz. What they did is they would have a sit-in night. I started playing with bands that would play there on weekends and so forth. One of them was early was Harvey Reed, who was in the psychology department at U of M, a piano player, and others, Mark Anderson on guitar. We started forming groups and playing. I remember, this is crazy, but one day we show up, and there's the great Freddie Hubbard, he was playing a concert in town, and he came down and we played with him. That was the scene there. At one point, I was put in charge of having people sit in on Thursday nights, and choosing, "Ok, come on up. What do you play?" Sometimes someone would get up there and they couldn't play so good. But then we tried to, "That sounded good." Just encouraging people. Some people play better than others, but it was a real scene there, the Apartment Lounge, for me.
• [00:11:16] AMY CANTU: That sounds great. What about the Golden Falcon? What was it like there?
• [00:11:18] PAUL VORNHAGEN: The Golden Falcon. I don't know if I ever played there, maybe once or twice, but I would go in there and they'd have the top players in town playing there, including the Shobey Brothers and Larry Mandeville and other folks that I could mention. Rick Burgess, of course, on the keyboard. I would just go there mostly and sit and listen because I was a young player and also would go over to a place called the Loma Linda, which is on the north side of town, that would have this wonderful sax player Larry Nozero. The Loma Linda. They had jazz there, I think, every Sunday, and it was great. Really top-level: Ron Brooks on bass and other players that people would know in town. Max Wood on bass. I ended up playing. I would just sit there at the Loma Linda and listen to the players and go, "That's what I want to do." Then also, there was a place called Windows on the top of the Ann Arbor Inn. They had jazz. That was a cool place with a group called the Mixed Bag, which was run by Ron Brooks on bass. The keyboard player -- I'm trying to think of his name -- but that was a real top-level group. I spent a lot of time just listening to those groups and going, "I want to do that."
• [00:12:47] AMY CANTU: It sounds like you were pretty confident just joining in and asking to join in. You said you formed a couple of groups early on. What were some of the names of your earliest groups?
• [00:12:59] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Well, I played with Congo Phil on congas. He had a group that included him on congas. I forget another conga player. Sidney Bayless on timbales and it was just drums. Then I would just play flute on top of it, or sax, but a lot of flute. Anyway, I convinced the Ann Arbor Art Fair to let us play on one of their stages. I called it the Wind Percussion Ensemble.
• [00:13:31] AMY CANTU: There you go.
• [00:13:32] PAUL VORNHAGEN: It was all made-up stuff, completely improvised, and it was quite good, really. Because I just found I had a knack for that. Then at the Del Rio, when I got invited in there, that was the Rick Burgess group, and then also group that he formed called Changes with the Shobey Brothers on congas -- Norm Shobey on congas and Armando Shobey on either timbales or drum kit. We would play the Del Rio. After a while, I said, "Hey, can we do one of the Sundays and we'll call it the Paul Vornhagen and friends?" Because I just wanted to get my name out there, because that's what it's all about in the music industry. I was pretty much calling tunes and so forth. But Rick Burgess at the Del Rio was really a musical father for me. I would go over to his house on Newport Road on Sunday mornings and he'd fix this great coffee and we would just listen to jazz, and we would learn songs together. Rick really helped me. That was wonderful. Then we play those songs at the Del Rio later.
• [00:14:56] KATRINA ANBENDER: So you mentioned the Shobey brothers, and we talked to the ex-wife and son of Armando Shobey. What do you recall of them?
• [00:15:05] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Yeah, so when I started playing with Norman and Armando, they saw in me some real talent, I think, that other people maybe weren't seeing because I wasn't quite there yet. They were very encouraging to me and I think it was basically Norman Shobey and Armando that convinced Rick Burgess to bring me into the Del Rio. They set a path for me. They also showed me, among others, how to play congas, which I still play to today and perform on with all the patterns of the mambo, the Tumbao, the Cha-cha-cha, the Guaguanco, and the others Calypso, etc. I started playing conga drums, too, because when I wasn't playing the flute with the drummers, I would sit down and play patterns, polyrhythms with them so they could do their thing on the solos and so forth. The Shobey Brothers were huge for me. Huge.
• [00:16:18] AMY CANTU: Can you talk a little bit about how the jazz music scene and the club scene has changed over time? You've worked internationally. You've worked across the country, and you've seen all the great clubs, and you've seen the ones here in Ann Arbor come and go, the Bird of Paradise and such. Is it hard to maintain a jazz club? What are your thoughts on the state of that?
• [00:16:41] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Yeah, I think it is difficult to make a jazz club work because you have a certain audience you're trying to appeal to. You have to pay the rent for the room that you're trying to do your jazz in. You want to get the food together. There's a lot of factors that go into it. A lot of jazz clubs go down. But Ron Brooks was amazing. He kept his jazz club going, the Bird of Paradise, for years. I don't know how many years. I'd have to think about that, 20 years or more? Then, so he mostly would play at the Bird of Paradise and the Firefly Club and do the bookings there. I can remember as a young player asking Ron, "Hey, Ron, do you think I could play with you?" He's one of the guys that would say, Okay. He would give me a chance I just would get better, then he'd give me a gig with my own band at his clubs. At one time, there was just a thriving jazz scene in Ann Arbor early in the '80s or so. There was a Firefly Club. Well, I should say, there was the Bird of Paradise. There was a Del Rio. There was the Falcon. There was Windows. There was Loma Linda. We'd have like four different, five different real jazz clubs in town. It was amazing. I was lucky to be a part of that. But what happened after a while, these jazz clubs, for whatever reason, they would go out of business. Susan Chastain had a good place called the Firefly Club, and she kept that going for I don't know, maybe 10 years or so. For whatever reason it was all about financing, I'm sure, with Ron, too, with the Bird of Paradise, we did not have a jazz club starting like, I don't know, the late '90s or early 2000s for like 15 years, like a real jazz club. Now suddenly, after all this wait, we have this wonderful jazz club. It's a world-class location because it's called the Blue Llama, of course. It's world-class because the guy that started this whole thing, Don Hicks, he bought the building. He had this company called LIama Soft. He had the money. He completely gutted it, and he designed the room for music, specifically jazz -- intimate, a beautiful design, lights, sound system. There's a booth for the sound engineer. It's like... For us, it was a dream come true. So we went from all these jazz clubs to just one full-time now. But it's as good as any place I've ever played. I don't know if people realize that. The Blue Llama.
• [00:19:55] AMY CANTU: Do you think that the audiences have changed?
• [00:20:00] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Yeah, I don't know if the audiences have changed, necessarily. I see a lot of young college students coming into the clubs when I played there last night. A lot of young people. They're very interested in it. Sometimes I'm done with a set, and they'll all come over to me, young people, asking me questions. Maybe they're in the music department or... So, I think there's still a real interest in jazz, and it's just nice to have a venue for that. The music program being led by my good friend and colleague, Dave Sharp. We worked at the Ann Arbor Music Center together for years and did jazz camps with the young people for about eight or nine years in a row. It's nice to be working with all these people that I know and have a history with. I'm just very grateful. There's a few other places too in town. Now there's a new place called The Venue that has jazz. I play there once a month, and -- beautiful spacious room. The owners there just love jazz. That's good. That's encouraging. I think they have jazz two or three times a week. Then there's the Raven Club. But of course, the Blue Llama is the one that is... They've got a beautiful piano on stage. It's all built for jazz. Things are looking up.
• [00:21:26] AMY CANTU: There you go.
• [00:21:27] KATRINA ANBENDER: Can you tell us about some of your favorite recordings that you have made? If somebody hadn't heard anything that you had done before, what would you recommend they listen to?
• [00:21:37] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Yeah, there I did self-produce all my recordings in jazz and would put them up on Paul Keller's label called PKO Records, Paul Keller being a wonderful jazz bassist here in town for many years. He has played with me, too. So I'd have to think, you know when I'm thinking about the recordings that I've made, I would say those that are on PKO records are some of my favorites. I'm trying to think of some that I've done. I did one called "In Our Own Way" with Gary Schunk on piano and Kurt Krahnke on bass and Randy Marsh on drum kit. That's a good representation of my quartet. Then others, I'm trying to think of the names of them. It's like, you might... Can you go to a website and refresh my memory? [LAUGHTER]
• [00:22:35] AMY CANTU: Yeah, we could.
• [00:22:36] PAUL VORNHAGEN: "Parisian Protocol." That's right. That was on PKO. Came out with that in 1998, and I wrote a song in Paris when I was there visiting and playing called "Parisian Protocol." I use that as a title cut. That would be a good example, Parisian Protocol. A lot of my own original compositions.
• [00:22:57] AMY CANTU: Yeah, how many songs have you written? Do you estimate?
• [00:23:02] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Fifty. I don't write a whole lot. I put a lot of thought into each one of those.
• [00:23:09] AMY CANTU: We haven't talked about your singing. You sing, too.
• [00:23:13] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Yeah, so it's interesting. Like, one of my first, I guess, gateways or portals to music was through singing because in New Jersey, I went to this church called Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and I was in the choir. Every morning, we'd have to sing in Latin. Gregorian chants. That was my first introduction really into music, other than taking piano lessons when I was eight for about a year. But that was a real good development of an ear for music for me. I would be chosen to play in some of the smaller boys' choirs, and so forth. That's where it all started. Then, as I got into jazz, I liked to sing the jazz tunes. Rick Burgess, again, I have to mention him. Also a musician and guitar player early in my life, Hal Davis encouraged me to sing these Jazz tunes. Rick Burgess says, "Paul, did you know that you sound a lot like Chuck Baker?" At that point, I thought, Chuck Baker? I've heard him. So on one of the Sundays, we would go over to his house, and he would play it for me. I was like, I get it. I think it's just because we're both horn players, and we approach the songs as a horn player. We sing the songs straight, we don't mess around with the melody, we sing it in the key it was written in. He has a very similar type of tonal quality to his voice. So I was like, Okay, I get it. I just started singing more and more because people encouraged me to do it. That was very hard for me at first because I was shy about it. That's a very personal thing to do.
• [00:25:21] KATRINA ANBENDER: You said you worked at the Ann Arbor Music Center for years. Was that something then... Were you teaching, and have you done other teaching besides just the performing?
• [00:25:33] PAUL VORNHAGEN: I've had a long history of teaching private lessons. I started doing it at my house in Ann Arbor on Miller Street. Then at some point, I got approached to be a music teacher at this place in Northville called the Gitfiddler. Good friend and musical colleague of mine Paul Sihon invited me in to do that. I thought, Well, can I do that? Okay. I showed up, and they said, Okay, oh, man, we need sax and flute. They had a bunch of students for me. They said, Now, we want you to teach piano too. I said, Well, I'm not that great on piano. He said, Oh, you can do it. He just handed me this beginner's book, and I went, Oh, this is easy. I can do this. That's how all got started at the Gitfiddler in Northville. Then later on, I would work at various places, Milford Music, and other places. But about 20 years ago or so, I decided I wanted to teach at this place called the Ann Arbor Music Center. It looked pretty cool with Alex Johnson, the guitar player, leading it up. I've had a long history of teaching at the Ann Arbor Music Center and that was really good for me. That's where I met Dave Sharp, from the Blue Llama, and others. I find myself teaching lots of piano. I use the piano to compose on and teach basic... I'm really good with young kids like six-year-olds and seven. I have a reputation for that because I have a playful approach to music. I make it fun. When you have young students like that, it has to be fun, or they're not going to be interested in it. They're going to lose interest. I actually realize more and more how important it is -- a music teacher, especially a private music teacher. That's where you can really get to know each other and help them individually with whatever they want to do. For me, it's all about the student. It's not about what I want to do. It's what do you want to do? I'm very flexible with that. I feel at this point that I'm a very good teacher because of that. Right now, I have a student brother and sister. He's seven, and she's five. That can be a real challenge at times because of attention -- attention span. But if you make it fun, work with the book for a while, put the book down. Let's go over to the conga drums or whatever, let's have some fun now, or just sit down at the piano, get that Position C, and just let your fingers dance, see what happens. I've learned a lot about being a teacher, and I'm more committed to it than ever. It's a good living doing something that you feel is meaningful, and that I enjoy.
• [00:28:47] AMY CANTU: Well, that's great. So you've seen a lot of changes in Ann Arbor. You've lived here for a long time. I know you had a couple of periods of time when you weren't here, but what stands out in terms of how the city has changed over time? Good or bad?
• [00:29:04] PAUL VORNHAGEN: I think what's happened to Ann Arbor, it's become a destination more than ever for people coming here. That can be a good thing. There's more restaurants, there's more coffeehouses. It's become more cosmopolitan, I would say, People coming here from all over the world. They're building more housing. They're keeping the green around the city somewhat. I do like this mayor. I see those changes a lot, more of the high-rise living situations for students, and I would hope for people that can have some low-cost housing, too. I'm not sure how that's going. It could be better. When I came here, the rents were cheap. My rent was $60 a month to rent a room in the house, so things have really changed on that. It's harder to get an apartment, probably because of that, here. That's a big change that I see, just because it's become more popular for people to come here to Ann Arbor. That can be good and bad, of course. There's more stores and there's more people that just come in for the Art Fair and so forth. But what I see is that it makes it harder for some people coming here that are young just to afford to live here.
• [00:30:27] AMY CANTU: What are you most proud of?
• [00:30:30] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Well, when I think about it, I just had somebody -- Hal Davis -- come to one of my gigs last month with my Latin jazz group called Tumbao Bravo, where we play all the rhythms of Cuba, mambo chacha... It all comes from those conga drummers so early in my life. And Hal Davis came and he listened and he said, "Paul, you must be so proud."
• [00:31:00] AMY CANTU: That's wonderful, actually -- to know that about yourself. And to know that other people recognize it. That's pretty great.
• [00:31:09] PAUL VORNHAGEN: It's meaningful for people to say that. I don't know if I would have ever found music if I hadn't come to Ann Arbor. Really. Because I didn't know that about myself. Ann Arbor was a portal.
• [00:31:26] AMY CANTU: Thank you, Paul.
• [00:31:27] KATRINA ANBENDER: Thank you so much.
• [00:31:29] PAUL VORNHAGEN: Thank you.
• [00:31:33] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.