{"id":306,"date":"2011-08-29T12:40:15","date_gmt":"2011-08-29T16:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/?p=306"},"modified":"2013-05-15T08:57:10","modified_gmt":"2013-05-15T12:57:10","slug":"jazz-man","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/jazz-man\/","title":{"rendered":"Jazz Man"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bill<\/a>

Above: Nye, spring 2011. Featured photo: Nye playing saxophone for the Barnstormers in the mid-1960s.<\/p><\/div>\n

It turned out to be a good thing that William P. \u201cBill\u201d Nye couldn\u2019t stand hospitals. Medicine\u2019s loss was Hollins\u2019 gain.<\/p>\n

The longtime sociology professor, who retired in June after thirty-six years at Hollins, started out as an undergraduate major in biology, with the plan to become a doctor. His aversion to hospitals inspired him to switch to dental school, an education that lasted exactly a day. \u201cI decided I didn\u2019t want to look into people\u2019s mouths the rest of my life,\u201d he said, so he started to investigate what else would keep him interested professionally\u2014and that led to studying and then teaching sociological theory.<\/p>\n

But before the sociology Ph.D., before plans to attend medical and then dental school, before the biology degree, came jazz\u2014which trained Nye to be comfortable with improvisation, in his life and in his career.<\/p>\n

Nye\u2019s musical education began in high school. \u201cI had a really good teacher,\u201d he said, \u201cthe best in the state [Conn.] at clarinet and saxophone. I got the rudiments of that down. And I started learning songs and how to improvise.\u201d When Nye was an undergraduate at Tufts (he graduated in 1965), he played saxophone for the Barnstormers, one of the most popular college rock bands at that time in the Northeast. And for many years he has played in his own jazz combo, the Bill Nye Jazz Quartet, performing during Hollins reunions and other events on campus and around the region.<\/p>\n

Nye\u2019s interest in jazz persisted past graduate school and began to take shape in the classes he taught. In the early 1980s he studied jazz great Charlie Parker during a yearlong post-doctoral fellowship with the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s Folklife Program. He has taught numerous courses centered on or containing jazz themes, including Jazz through Film. \u201cIf you look at the history of the twentieth century,\u201d he said, \u201cthe history of jazz and history of movies coincide beautifully.\u201d (By the way, Nye is lukewarm about Clint Eastwood\u2019s Charlie Parker biopic, Bird<\/em>, and enthusiastic about \u2019Round Midnight<\/em> starring Dexter Gordon.)<\/p>\n

As a professor, Nye said, \u201cI do a lot of improvising. That\u2019s what I love about jazz. It still takes a lot of preparation. What you do is prepare yourself so well that when you go into the classroom it\u2019s like turning on a faucet. It just comes out. It sounds spontaneous, and it is, except that I have this reservoir.\u201d<\/p>\n

The kind of spontaneity Nye responded to so well in jazz drew him to the study of sociology, which was undergoing fundamental changes in the late 1960s, when Nye entered graduate school. It \u201chad to do with catching up with [other] changes in society,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the 1950s, Talcott Parsons, a sociologist at Harvard, established a perspective called structural functionalism: society is made up of parts, and every part serves a function. Starting in the \u201960s it became much more complicated. [UCLA sociologist] Harold Garfinkel looked at how we go about constructing everyday reality as active participants and not as judgmental dopes. It was a reaction to behaviorists.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nye himself was interested in George Herbert Mead\u2019s theory of the development of the self. Mead (1863-1931) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and sociologist who believed that \u201cthe self is a pure process,\u201d said Nye. \u201cIt changes from moment to moment, but we have this notion of a permanent self, which is a creation of our minds. A student goes out and gets drunk on Saturday night and says, \u2018I wasn\u2019t myself.\u2019 Who were you, then?\u201d Still, says, Nye, it\u2019s easy to believe that we stay the same, regardless of circumstances. Our family and friends \u201cconspire to that. In most families you have rules: so-and-so is the smart one, so-and-so is the funny one. And they expect you to be that person when you go back home. It\u2019s hard to resist.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a sense, then, you could say the self is improvised, made up as you go along. And as Nye progressed from undergraduate to graduate school, like many others he had to think on his feet as America went through various upheavals in the late 1960s. He was in New York City during the Newark riots of 1967. Looking for a dissertation topic, he decided to combine his interests in the self and race relations to write about Self, Color and the American Dilemma.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>Nye\u2019s interest in race relations\u2014he has taught courses on the topic since his first teaching position\u2014led to his being chosen to train for and lead diversity seminars at Hollins. He was certified to facilitate diversity training at the Healing the Heart of Diversity program at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan (2000-01), designed by former Hollins trustee Pat Harbour.<\/p>\n

One of the most memorable people Nye met during his training at Fetzer was a member of the Ojibwa tribe, \u201ca healer with an incredible presence. In the work I did with him in diversity, he gave me the name Wigwaasimitig<\/em>. It stood for \u2018white birch man.\u2019 He said the white birch is a very important tree in his culture. I\u2019m like the tree because I\u2019m white on the outside but a true friend to Native Americans. It was quite an honor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nye taught diversity seminars at Hollins for two years to groups of about a dozen campus members at a time, who met weekly each semester to discuss \u201cthe major dimensions: race, class, gender, and sexual orientation.\u201d Training came to an end in 2001, however, not only at Hollins but at Fetzer as well. \u201cSomehow, companies stopped giving money to employees for these things after 9\/11. Right now, people don\u2019t talk about diversity,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re talking about terror or airports.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nye\u2019s thirty-six years at Hollins have been good ones. He has seen the school change \u201cfrom when the traditional student was white and middle to upper middle class\u201d to a school with greater diversity. \u201cFor a sociologist it\u2019s much better to have a variety of students,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019ve been very fortunate to find something I like to do in a place I like to do it. I was meant to be a teacher, and I flourished at it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jean Holzinger is editor of Hollins<\/em> magazine.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Music, especially jazz, has been a recurring theme throughout Bill Nye\u2019s life and career. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":312,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured","tag-summer-2011"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=306"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3687,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/306\/revisions\/3687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.hollins.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}