Founder Dick Grove Draws on Local Talent : Trade School Hits Responsive Chord in Musicians

Eric Schugren was experiencing a big moment in the life of an aspiring music arranger. For the first time, the 22-year-old was hearing performers make music out of notes he had written.

It sounded like the real thing, this version of the 1928 tune “Sweet Sue (Just You)” that Schugren had arranged using the brassy big-band sounds of the 1940s. Neat jabs of sound from the trumpets led nicely into a saxophone solo that Schugren had composed. Then the brief piece was over. “That was thrilling,” the lanky young man said after stepping off the conductor’s podium.

This musical rite of passage might have been special to Schugren, but it is commonplace at the Dick Grove School of Music. The school is considered by many to be Los Angeles’ leading all-around trade school for musicians training to work in Hollywood studios or as nightclub jazz musicians.

‘A Kind of Hub’

“I think that if you are talking about studio and jazz music, that the school is a kind of hub in the musical community,” said Bernie Fleischer, president of the Hollywood local of the American Federation of Musicians.

“I think it’s the closest thing on the West Coast to the Berklee College of Music,” said Times jazz critic Leonard Feather, referring to the prominent jazz and commercial music school in Boston.

However, unlike Dick Grove, Berklee College is academically accredited and offers college degrees. It is also much larger, with 2,700 students, in contrast to the Studio City school’s student body of 350. Unlike Berklee, Dick Grove has no dormitories, no cafeteria and very little room to spare in the cramped pair of nondescript, utilitarian buildings it occupies on Ventura Boulevard. The school is looking for larger quarters.

School 13 Years Old

Although some students attend the 13-year-old school part time, many take a full load of courses in their specialties, with most of the full-time students attending between one and two years. Tuition is between $4,000 and $5,000 a year.

Students come from all over Los Angeles and elsewhere. Dick Grove has courses in voice and in most instruments but seems best known for its programs in arrangement and composition. It also prepares students to become studio technicians.

Dick Grove, the school’s founder and guiding light, has had a 35-year career as an arranger and composer as well as a pianist and conductor of jazz and commercial music. He administers the school and teaches composition and arrangement. “Some people see a line between the performer and composer, the performer and the arranger,” Grove said. “We try to break down that line. Today, a guy needs to do everything. If he just plays the trumpet, he won’t survive.”

Calls Teachers, Students ‘Cats’

Grove is a gray-bearded, paternal man who chain-smokes and speaks of students and teachers as “cats” and the best ones as “hip.” He says he started the school both as a business and to take advantage of the resource he perceives in the army of highly trained musicians who come to Los Angeles to play in Hollywood studios. “The amount of talent out there is tremendous,” he said. “Not everyone who plays an instrument can teach it, but we look for those who can do both.”

He reels off the names of arrangers, composers and performers who have taught or lectured at the school. Some, like the late arranger and conductor Nelson Riddle, would be known to the public. But many of the names are well known only within the business. An example is Jack Feierman, who helped Schugren to guide a band of Dick Grove students through the student’s arrangement of “Sweet Sue.” Most people have not heard of Feierman, yet the Dick Grove catalogue says he conducted music for Johnny Mathis, Sergio Mendes and Jose Feliciano.

Another example is Joel di Bartolo, the electric bass player in the “Tonight Show” band for the past 10 years.

“I’ve had good teachers,” Di Bartolo said recently as he hurried out of the school on his way to a recording session for the NBC show. “And I want to pass on what I’ve learned. I will bring in charts that we get on the “Tonight Show” to show them what I have to do. If you’re on the show and they hand you those sheets and they say they want a jazz style or a rock style or a big-band style, you have to do it--right away. That’s what I want my students to learn.”

His students, who he teaches in groups of about five, range from novices to the advanced. One of his more advanced students, Mark Walters, 30, watched Di Bartolo jog from his classroom on his way to the “Tonight Show” session and said, “We just went over ‘Autumn Leaves’ for two hours and Joel kept showing us new things to do with it. He shows us how any chart is a road map and tells us about the less obvious things you can do with it.”

Working Musicians

The Dick Grove catalogue lists faculty members like Grant Geissman, who has worked as composer and fluegelhornist Chuck Mangione’s guitarist; Ricky Katz, whose guitar work on television has included “Laverne and Shirley” and “Happy Days,” and Jack Smally, a composer and arranger whose television credits are listed in the catalogue as including “Police Story” and “Love Boat.”

It was for such teachers that Shugren, the fledgling arranger, dropped out of UCLA after a year of studying music there. “They were classically oriented at UCLA. I want to be a working musician, and these teachers have what I need,” he said.

Aside from just having a chance to hear his own music, what had he learned from his first effort at arranging?

“I learned that it took me a day to know what I wanted to write and two days just to copy out 18 parts. I got a blister just from holding the pen.”