All About That Bass
Graduating senior, already a stage veteran, on the road to completing a master’s in jazz studies at Rutgers-University Newark
'I want to continue with jazz studies 100 percent. I don’t think there’s anything better than teaching; talking about things you love and sharing them with people who have the same passion.'– Lee Caplan
Lee Caplan wanted to wow his fellow fifth-graders.
So he asked his bass player father to perform a Jimi Hendrix song during his class presentation on the legendary guitarist.
“He said, ‘Yeah, I’ll play guitar. But you’ll have to play bass,’ ” Caplan, 24, said of his introduction to the instrument. “I remember my dad telling me it was wimpy to use a pick. I didn’t want them to think I was lame, so I really worked on my finger technique.”
That duet with his dad put him on the path to becoming a musician and music scholar. Caplan, who earned his undergraduate degree in music and journalism, is one year away from completing the five-year master’s program in jazz history and research from Rutgers University-Newark. After that, he hopes to work toward a doctorate in the subject.
“I want to continue with jazz studies 100 percent,” said Caplan, who is co-teaching an online “Introduction to Music” course for the university this summer and plans to become a professor. “I don’t think there’s anything better than teaching; talking about things you love and sharing them with people who have the same passion.”
The thought of reaching for academia’s upper echelons would have seemed implausible to Caplan when he was a student at Metuchen High School. Back then, he barely skated by and had to catch up with remedial classes at Middlesex County Community College for a year before advancing to college courses.
“It’s not that I didn’t have the capacity,” he said. “I just didn’t have the desire.”
That spark was ignited in Rutgers-Newark professor Henry Martin’s “Jazz Appreciation,” where Caplan discovered he could turn his hobby into a profession.
“I really enjoyed music, but didn’t realize there was so much academic integrity in those fields,” he said. “There were so many options that weren’t presented to me.”
Though he’d just begun to explore his academic options, Caplan already was a stage veteran by the time he arrived at Rutgers. He got his start playing fretless electric bass in pop punk bands before falling in love with jazz in 10th grade.
“My private musical instructor during high school told me to blast Jaco Pastorius’ version of ‘The Chicken,’ and it opened up an entirely new world to me,” he said. “It was the joy that I heard in it, the authentic human quality.”
These days Caplan plays double bass with NJIT Jazz ensemble, Rutgers Mosaic Jazz ensemble and the Lee Caplan Trio. He also backs other professional musicians on stage and in the studio, playing drums, keyboard and guitar.
The ever-versatile Caplan also has experience behind the mic – as a stand-up comic. While at Rutgers, he tested out his wry material during open-mic nights at the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, performed paying gigs at Manhattan’s Gotham Comedy Club and even published a book of one-liners, Wise Words and Other Exaggerations, many of which appeared in The Observer student newspaper. But he bowed out of the funny business last year because he felt he never found his comfort zone.
“Everyone can relate to a piece of music, but not everyone can relate to a joke or a story,” he said. “My audiences were always so different in their responses to my material. I was just really nervous on stage.”
According to his music professor Lewis Porter, those jitters don’t plague Caplan in the classroom, where he is the youngest member of his master’s program.
“He is unafraid to speak up and has joined in as an equal in our challenging class discussions,” said Porter, the director of Rutgers-Newark’s Master’s in Jazz History and Research. “He's the kind of person who will do extra reading on related topics just because they're interesting to him.”
Even when he’s on vacation – in Israel. That’s where Caplan decided to trace the Middle Eastern country’s jazz roots for his master’s thesis after happening upon a jazz club and joining the band on stage for a cover of “How High The Moon.”
“I was in Israel, playing a jazz song written in America in the 1940s, and they played it perfectly,” he said. “Mind blown.”
For more information, please contact Lisa Intrabartola at lintrabartola@ucm.rutgers.edu.