The Last of the Mohicans

Today marks the end of the Portland Jazz Festival. I was lucky to catch three separate shows. I feel especially lucky to have seen some of jazz's elder statesmen: McCoy Tyner, Lou Donaldson, and Bobby Hutcherson. All three of these men played during the height of jazz in the post-bebop era. And all three of them are still playing, whether they want to be or not.

I was impressed by how much chops each of these men still had. Tyner still had his feather-like touch on the keys. Lou Donaldson still had a sweet, sweet sound on the alto-sax, probably sweeter than it was in the 1950s and 60s. I am always amazed when I see someone use their mallets on the vibes to pound out lines of eighteenth notes. Watching Hutcherson do this at his age of 67 was impressive.

As impressive as they were, it struck me in the end that maybe they don't want to be playing still. Lou Donaldson is 82 years old (the same age as my father). He made several jokes about buying his albums because he needs the money. But I think he was serious. I think he probably does really need the money. He probably wished he could stay home in the Bronx and enjoy his retirement. He probably doesn't want to be flying across the country and sleeping in strange hotel rooms any more. But he can't afford not to.

I think I realized this when Hutcherson was playing. He was obviously out of breath the whole time he played. He would sit down behind the vibes between his bouts of playing and even from where I sat I could see that he labored to get his breath. And after his set, he didn't come out for an encore, even though we were all at our feet. He was probably all worn out and needed to rest. Before he finished playing, Donaldson told the audience that after him and Bobby Hutcherson are gone, there won't be anyone left, that they were the "last of the Mohicans" in his words.

Donaldson also mentioned that he was a protege' of Charlie Parker. Indeed, jazz has a strong tradition of mentoring. That's how the music was taught, passed down from one generation to the next. A leader would pass down his knowledge to the members of his band. You learned by hearing, by imitating your elders, by taking what you heard and making it your own.

Jazz is alive today through mentoring. And it seems to be working across all cultural bounds. The highlight for me of the Bobby Hutcherson / Lou Donaldson concert was hearing Donaldson's organist, a woman named Akiko Tsuruga. She's from Japan and hardly speaks English. But she understands the blues like someone from the Mississippi Delta. And she can swing on the Hammond organ with such confidence that if you would think she grew up in a gospel church. During intermission, she was signing albums and I asked her how she learned to swing like that. She pointed to Donaldson and said she had a "good teacher."

"The question isn't whether or not mentoring works. Mentoring has to work," said my mentor Tom Keller last Friday. My mind is still working on these profound words. There have been people who doubt whether or not mentoring works. But as Tom points out, young people have always learned from their elders, just likee Akiko is learning from Lou Donaldson. As complex mammals, we need a lot of instruction from a lot of different adults during our lifetime. If mentoring doesn't work, then our whole world breaks down. Without transfer of knowledge and social support from our elders to our youth, nothing works. Not even jazz.

But yes, we can make it better. And when you formalize something like mentoring, which has occurred naturally in the world for millenia, you have to be careful. You have to realize that you can mess it up. Like a pharmacologist who finds a cure to a rare disease out in the wilderness, you have to be careful with how you bottle the remedy. Your dose might not work they way you intend if it's administered the wrong way, or in the wrong intensity, or to the wrong person. When you package "natural mentoring" up and build a product around it and call it "Big Brothers Big Sisters," you can't just set that product up on the shelf and call it good. You have to keep testing it, keep trying to make it better, keep making sure it's having it's intended impact.

And from what I am gathering, we still have a lot to learn, and a lot to test. In our reading group Friday, we read some of the literature from the other mentoring fields - workplace and academic mentoring. Even in those areas, who have a lot more studies to describe them, we don't know how mentor and mentee personality types affect mentoring relationships. The few studies that we could find on personality effects had very little to say about the matter.

I think there must be something that happens at the personality level between a mentor and a mentee. There is something that happens when two people meet. Some kind of spark set off by how their personalities interact. I think that those matches that have more of the spark when they get started might just have enough strength to weather the hard parts of a relationship better. When the first six or eight months is up and the exciting "get to know you" phase is over, maybe the matches who have sparked more will have enough strength to make it through the tough times. But it seems that no one has studied personality types in youth mentoring relationships. Most of the literature points to mentor characteristics as the most important to predict success. But I still want to know if there's something there.

I'll be getting my chance soon to look at some data. Tom and I made a plan this week for how we're going to start looking at his school mentoring study data. And we've made a new plan to collect some additional data on the Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring. Instead of sending out questionnaires to the participants on last years institute, I'm going to pick five random participants from each of the two years and try to interview them over the phone. This week, I'll be working on an interview protocol and running the change in question format by the IRB. Tomorrow begins a new week in academia and I'm looking forward to getting deeper into these research projects.