Phil Reavis, the 83-year-old saxophonist of The Bridge, of the Jazz Club of Macau, is a man of many facets. Arriving in Macau almost 50 years ago, he started the English department at Saint Joseph’s Catholic College, and later, by chance, came across an opportunity to join the only Jazz band in Macau at the time
Before you became a teacher and a musician, your first passion was track and field. Can you tell us about this chapter of your life?
I was at junior high school and they had a very rich playground programme every summer, so the kids at the various neighbourhoods used to have competitions between all the playgrounds at the end of the summer – track and field and baseball. I had to babysit my younger brother so I couldn’t play any of the sports because I couldn’t be away from him, so I used to sit at this high jump pit, like a huge sandbox. I started learning to jump and of course it was the old scissor kick. I went to highschool and got into the track team so my high jump got better and better. In my last year in highschool they had this big competition with all the schools in Boston, and I jumped the highest I ever did in my life, 6 feet, 6 and a half inches. That set a schoolboy record – at that time it was the world record. I got a scholarship to go to Villanova University so I was in the track team there and thats when I changed my technique to jump in the Olympic trials two years later in Los Angeles. I made the Olympic team in 1956 with a jump 6 feet 9 and a half inches.
You were even on the cover of the Sports Illustrated magazine in 1957. Can you share how that came to happen?
It happened when my track and field colleagues and I, in our college days, had a visit from a journalist who spent three months with us, watching us train. At that time, our track team was winning a lot of competitions, and so he decided to come and see what was going on and talk to us. I remember he interviewed us and we were all very curious about what he would write about us. I was about 19 years old at the time, and that picture was taken at one of our sporting events at Madison Square Garden in New York.
How did you end up coming to Macau?
I had always wanted to go overseas so I wrote letters to different organisations in Africa. A friend of mine at the time was working in Cambodia, Vietnam, and different places as an athletics coach. Eventually, in 1963, I also went to Cambodia as a coach, to train the national team of track and field, so I spent four years there coaching. Then I ended up going to Vietnam and then Laos, all just coaching teams. After Laos, my wife and I came back to the States in around 1969 and we worked for about 10 years there… At that time there was a lot of political issues going on. We went to a lot of these conferences for English as a Second Language, and one time in 1982, we saw a paper on a bulletin board saying “Teachers for Macau” with a phone number. I ripped the paper off the wall and said to my wife “Let’s go!” We both ended up having interviews and were accepted almost immediately, as there were almost no applicants at the time. A month later, we were back at an airport, but this time heading to Macau.
What were your first impressions of Macau?
We liked it because it was so quiet. At the time you could catch a rickshaw and get around and there was hardly anybody around. There was a floating casino on the river and the food was delicious and they had a band that played music and you could dance. We were tired of the States, so Macau was a quiet nirvana for us at the time.
And how did you come to start working at St. Joseph’s?
The headmaster of St Joseph’s Catholic School would come by in the evenings with a couple bottles of wine and we would sit around and talk. He was Chinese and a priest, and he said that he and the bishop had been thinking about starting an English section. Charlotte my wife hit my leg under the table and we winked at each other. It would mean a six-year period in order to start this programme… and he said we could renovate the house and work with them more closely… and so she hit me again… We figured this was fantastic, so we accepted a 5-year contract to start an English section because that’s a dream come true for a teacher.
How did you get involved in the jazz scene in Macau?
I saw an announcement that a jazz band was going to have a concert at the Macau Forum. We went, but we were a bit hesitant because we couldn’t believe it. I told the lady at the ticketing desk that I played sax and that’s when I first made contact with the old jazz club. Basically the club at that time was for the Portuguese to have a place to go and to socialize amongst themselves. It was in a nice narrow street, where nothing started until 11or 12 o’clock. There were always a lot of people there, but the Portuguese woman who owned the club always complained that people didn’t spend money. She always used to tell me that everyone would just buy a bottle of beer and hang on to it all night. At that time you didn’t need to buy a ticket to go in because, according to that lady, if they dared charge for tickets, nobody would come.
We had several musicians playing in the club in the beginning, including Paulo Martins, Jorge Campena, and Armando on piano, alternating on drums, Zé Chen on bass, who sometimes alternated with a Filipino, and me on the saxophone. Later, when we had an invitation to play at the Hyatt Hotel, in the late 80’s, we formed a trio, me on saxophone, Campena on drums, and Zé Chen on bass.
Was the Macao Jazz Club open to everyone?
Oh yes, it was like a big social club. But at the time the Chinese community didn’t know much about jazz and had a misconception of what jazz and a jazz club was. It was very difficult to convince my teacher colleagues to come with me to the jazz club because they still had this narrow idea that the place was bad. But the glass house venue in Nape was perfect because if you walked along the bay you could see everything. That did attract a lot of the young Chinese kids that wanted to play music. And we kind of opened it up in terms of swing, jazz, blues, whatever…
What is the dynamic between the band members today?
Well, we grew in terms of the number of people that wanted to play the kind of music we played. We picked up Humphrey Cheong and different Chinese kids, and those kids would pick up other kids, so we’ve got this network that just goes out. When one of our members can’t make it, we have a list of people that can replace whoever’s missing. I was playing every night in Senado Square, but then my doctor decided that I should slow down. So I am only playing twice a week now, just Tuesdays and Sundays. We accept anybody that can play music and likes the kind of music we play.
The president of the Jazz Club of Macau, José Sales Marques, recently said that one of the priorities for the club was to find a permanent venue.
What we really need is a studio. A permanent place where the guys can work out deals and come together, and where we can really work at our music and seriously learn the new tunes. I realise we get some criticism that we are always playing the same tunes, but thats the reason. Because all of us are working. We don’t just live off music.
Do you feel that the government helps in this sense?
They help very little, at least in terms of us finding and keeping a venue. It’s been very hard to even organise a jazz festival. The way it works with the government grants is that you have to come up with the money yourself and if the government is going help, they will only pay you afterwards. It’s hard to come up with these kind of funds for big events. A lot of musicians that we wanted to bring in, they wanted a lot that money up front because they were afraid of getting ripped off. I almost got Stan Getz to come here to play but because of the way that they wanted to pay, it just wasn’t possible.