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Alumni Spotlight Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate
GUIDE DOWN A NEW PATH: JEROD TATE CREDITS CIM FOR NURTURING A DISTINGUISHED ALUMNI
By Zachary Lewis
Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate (photo by Shevaun Williams)
One of several people to whom Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate (MM ’00, Erb/Pastor) gives credit for receiving CIM’s 2022 Distinguished Alumni Award is an audience member at a recital of his in Washington, DC. It was she, after all, who directed him to CIM in the first place.
Had she not encouraged him, he knows, the citizen of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma wouldn’t have thought of CIM, let alone have applied, enrolled or graduated with a double major. He certainly wouldn’t have won the school’s highest honor, and even more importantly, he wouldn’t have found the musical home that forged him into the accomplished pianist, composer and teacher he is today.
“My relationship with CIM runs deep,” says Tate, who now lives in Oklahoma City. “I’m very proud of CIM and of being a graduate of the school. I feel like I’m standing on the shoulders of many. It’s like I’m in a big group hug.”
Two other important figures in that spiritual embrace are Tate’s teachers at CIM, pianist Elizabeth Pastor and composer Donald Erb, both now deceased. Tate brags on his school-mates and is grateful for the many substantial scores they’ve commissioned from him, but it’s his two mentors, he says, who had the profoundest effect.
Tate’s father, Charles, was a classically trained baritone, but it was Pastor, he says, who truly attuned his ear to the singing line in everything, an ability that now permeates both his playing and his own music.
Erb, meanwhile, after hesitating to allow Tate to pursue composition as a double major at the graduate level, proved to be just the nurturing presence he needed. Tate may have been the only American Indian in Erb’s studio, but in that space, the budding composer felt anything but isolated or foreign. Rather, he was valued and taken seriously. CIM, to him, felt less like a conservatory than it did an academy.
“I had two teachers who were sent from God,” Tate explains. “The support they gave me was just phenomenal. They cared deeply about who I was. It wasn’t a single school of thought. There was a strong diversity of spirits and I was constantly learning from my colleagues.”
Whatever Pastor and Erb gave Tate, it was a lot. Since his graduation from CIM in 2000, Tate has gone on to a career that would be the envy of just about anyone in music.
Thanks in part to the CIM alumni network, Tate has composed for a veritable who’s who of musical America including the National and Detroit symphony orchestras, American Composers Forum and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. With him as their guide, the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus performed and recorded its first work in an American Indian language, lengthening an already long paper trail with even more positive coverage.
He’s also traveled uncommonly far in the world of recording. After being drawn into the medium by CIM recording faculty Alan Bise (BM ’94, Knab) and the late Bruce Egre, whose standards he said were “unmatched” in the field, Tate maintained his relationship with the audio department, immortalizing much of his own music as well as that of his students at the Chickasaw Summer Arts Academy, on the Cleveland-based label Azica Records.
For all this, too, Tate is inclined to share credit. He’s proud of how hard he works and how seriously he takes his craft, but when it comes to his artistic identity, he can’t help but acknowledge others, especially his mother, Patricia Tate.
A groundbreaking dancer and choreographer, she instilled in her son the creative drive and bold, probing spirit that has separated him from the musical crowd. She, too, was his first patron, commissioning the ballet score Winter Moons, in which Tate first gave voice in classical form to his Chickasaw roots.
For all that Tate recognizes and treasures his forebears, those who came before him, he’s just as passionate about those further down the line, the young artists he said are “accelerating” after him. Simply put, few are doing more than Tate to build up Native musical youth. At Oklahoma City University, where he’s an adjunct instructor, he’s taking all that he gleaned from Erb, Pastor and his parents and applying it to the creation and development of a new generation of Native performers and composers.
One thing he’s not doing: forcing anyone to imitate him, to the extent imitation is even possible. Not only are young American Indian composers “all over the map, literally…so far from each other,” Tate said. They’re also far apart culturally and stylistically, representing different tribes, traditions and musical languages in ways that cannot be treated alike. His job, he said, is to be a “walking encyclopedia of knowledge” and encourage students to be the best versions of themselves, just as Erb encouraged him.
“They’re free to do anything they want, but I tell them nobody’s going to care that they’re Indian if it’s not any good,” Tate said. “That observation has had a great impact on our Native youth. I love spreading that message.”
A different message appears to be spreading among the public. More rapidly than Tate could have imagined, the world is catching on to the allure of music by American Indian composers. In response, those composers are displaying the same sense of adventure their counterparts in visual art have been evincing for years.
Tate, for his part, couldn’t be happier. He won’t take credit for the rise itself, but he can’t deny that he’s observed and been a part of it. He knows he’s channeling something that speaks to people everywhere.
