Memories of Maggio: The Enduring Legacy of Miami Jazz Piano Professor Vince Lawrence Maggio

Influential Pedagogue Passed on Knowledge from Legends Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans

It was August 2001, and I couldn’t have been more excited to enter the jazz piano studio of Vince Maggio at the University of Miami Frost School of Music as a graduate student. Professor Maggio had a reputation as a strict and intimidating teacher, but I came with an open mind to learn from the master, and was mesmerized by his complete control over touch and balance in every finger upon his first demonstration of the piano’s orchestral depth using Bill Evans’ My Bells as a pedagogical vehicle. It was the first time I had heard a jazz pianist clearly and beautifully play foreground, middleground, and background melodies with the touch of a classical pianist, and it awoke in me the desire to make the piano sing like that. At the time, I was blissfully unaware that Vince had the unbelievable luck to have been Bill Evans’ roommate for a time, where the two spoke about the rigors of solo jazz piano compared to the trio setting, among other conversations unfortunately lost to jazz history.

The piano is your orchestra, and your fingers are the musicians.

This would be the first of many lessons where Vince encouraged me to “bring out the melody” through subtle changes in balance between the hands and fingers. “The piano is your orchestra,” he preached, “and your fingers are the musicians.” Using an open palm gesture in both hands, he explained how the pinky and ring fingers of the right hand were largely responsible for melody, the corresponding fingers on the left hand in charge of bass function, while the remaining fingers and thumbs in between carried out the accompaniment role. The right hand could be pivoted to the pinky side to help shift the weight of the hand away from its natural fulcrum in the thumb and aid in bringing out the melody when playing cantabile, or “singing” melodic phrases. Playing Blue in Green, the pinky became Miles Davis’ harmon-muted trumpet, while the remaining fingers accompanied as the embodiment of Bill Evans, or perhaps a sultry string section with inner-voices snaking across the keys.

Just imagine a jazz school where your professors are the world-famous Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen—all three members of Oscar’s hard-swinging and world-touring trio.

Maggio often hit home the fact that at the end of the day, melody reigns supreme; the recorded solos of classic jazz pianists from Art Tatum and Fats Waller to Bill Evans and Oscar Peterson stand testament to this jazz commandment. According to Maggio, it didn’t matter how hip and sophisticated your voicings were if the melody was lost on the way. He gave the example of Art Tatum, who often revisited the melody in the form of a short quote during his virtuosic stride piano romps so as not to lose his audience.

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Born November 21, 1937, Vince Lawrence Maggio played piano from the age of three, and at the age of thirteen began sneaking out of his parents’ house in Chicago to play with black musicians in jazz clubs. Shortly thereafter, Maggio formed his own jazz trio, the Vince Lawrence Trio, with whom he would tour the Midwest by the time he was only twenty years old.

In the early 1960s, Vince became a student of Oscar Peterson at Oscar and Ray Brown’s Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto. Just imagine a jazz school where your professors are the world-famous Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown and Ed Thigpen—all three members of Oscar’s hard-swinging and world-touring trio. Oscar selflessly shared advice and techniques learned from both Art Tatum and Nadia Boulanger during these lessons—advice that Maggio would later pass on to his hundreds of jazz piano students at the University of Miami.

Oscar Peterson’s Advanced School of Contemporary Music in Toronto, Canada

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Vince Lawrence Trio Headlining at the Seacomber Show-Lounge in Rock Island, Illinois in 1960, The Rock Island Argus

In 1960 Vince completed a tour of the East coast with his Vince Lawrence trio, drawing “great crowds.” The Rock Island Argus stated that the trio was “beyond doubt, the greatest to play the quad-cities in years.” Vince would go on to perform with jazz luminaries as diverse as Cannonball Adderley, Stan Getz, Sonny Stitt, Chet Baker, Kenny Dorham, Mel Torme, and Lena Horne.

Vince was good friends with composer and fellow jazz pianist Tadd Dameron, and according to the Oneonta Star in New York, in 1965 Vince “helped to put down the notes and acted as ‘Tadd’s hands’” during Dameron’s last days (Jan 27, 1965).

Vince’s two jazz pedagogical tenets were melodic development and rhythmic agreement, concepts he would pass on to generation after generation of jazz musicians.

After playing and teaching in New York City for a number of years, Maggio moved to Miami, where he backed many visiting artists and played at local clubs. He soon met jazz educator Jerry Coker, who established the jazz program at the University of Miami. When Coker witnessed Maggio interacting with a young blind pianist named Mike Gerber, he thought him a natural teacher and asked him to join his nascent jazz program as jazz piano professor. Gerber would become Vince’s first jazz piano student in 1970. Vince’s two jazz pedagogical tenets were melodic development and rhythmic agreement, concepts he would pass on to generation after generation of jazz musicians.

Maggio would teach as jazz faculty at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado for years, where he also concertized.

During his 34-year tenure at Miami, Maggio also taught several classes, including Beginning and Advanced Jazz Improvisation, Jazz Accompanying, and Jazz Vocal Styles. Maggio developed and directed the Studio Jazz Orchestra, The BeBop Ensemble, the Fundamentals of Swing Ensemble, and the Small Group Lab. According to current Dean of the University of Miami Frost School of Music Shelly Berg, Maggio “pioneered the studio orchestra in higher education.” Among Maggio’s hundreds of students are notable pianists and entertainers like Bruce Hornsby and Jeff Babko (of Jimmy Kimmel Live).

Maggio’s Jazz Accompanying class proved to be particularly helpful for my future collaborations with vocalists, as most of the class was comprised of pianists and vocalists negotiating rubato and in-time sections of jazz standards in the key of the vocalist’s choice. Pianists were advised to learn the lyrics, follow the vocalist instead of bogging them down with unnecessarily complicated harmonies, avoid “stepping on the singer’s toes” when playing the verse, use “text painting” in lyric interpretations, and clearly establish and maintain the tempo once it starts to swing.

In the video below, Vince compares his two loves of jazz and fly fishing: “the relationship to jazz is that as an improviser, you’ll start with a theme, and then you will proceed to develop that theme with ideas of your own, and all of a sudden it becomes your own composition; but, it has its origins in a basic design.”

“The Maggio method boils down to ‘don’t do it if you don’t mean it, and if you are going to do it, you have to do it really well.’”

On September 25, 1980 Maggio was interviewed by The Miami Herald to speak on the death of jazz legend Bill Evans:

“I don’t think there’s a pianist alive who heard him who hasn’t been permanently influenced by his sound,” says Vince Maggio, a fine pianist himself who teaches at the University of Miami School of Music and who knew Evans well. They even roomed together once in New York, where Evans died earlier this month, age 51. “I’m angry that he did this to himself and to all of us,” Maggio says of Evans, who fought drug addiction much of his adult life. “He was a difficult person, a profoundly introspective and fundamentally unhappy person and an absolutely brilliant pianist.”

One of the most valuable lessons Vince passed on to me and his students was the “weight-transfer method,” as demonstrated back in the early 60s by Oscar himself. This method of playing harnesses the power of gravity and arm weight, transferring that weight from finger to finger when playing anything from a simple scale to a jazz solo. It allows the player to harness the power of gravity to create a connected singing touch on the instrument and simultaneously increases endurance by removing stress often encountered by self-taught jazz pianists who play with the fingers and forgo using natural arm weight.

Influenced by his time rooming with Bill Evans (who according to Maggio kept a foot-high stack of original sheet music to popular songs of the day on the piano), Vince advocated learning standards through their original source material or recordings. Many jazz standards originally had more sophisticated harmony and better voice leading, he pointed out, and over the years jazz musicians simplified these harmonies into the most common jazz chord progression called ii-V7-I. As an example, the first chord of Stella by Starlight was originally a diminished suspension over the tonic, not a half-diminished chord from the flat-fifth. Maggio also pointed out that most of the standards we play today in the jazz repertoire were originally written and recorded as ballads; logically, he suggested exploring jazz standards out of time (rubato) in lyric ballad form when first learning a song, a practice that has served me well to this day when getting to the “heart” of a song.

One of the older generation of teachers who rarely gave a compliment, instead focusing on fixing playing deficiencies, Vince Maggio earned his tough reputation at the school. Nevertheless, Maggio’s influence on the worlds of jazz piano and jazz education have been as impactful and far-reaching as the ringing bell tones of those first chords of My Bells.