"This is Count Basie," Lecturer Michael Ullman said, pointing to a large photograph hanging on the wall above his desk. "I took it in complete darkness, overexposed and overdeveloped it."
The finely crafted portrait is only one of many in Ullman's personal collection. As a lecturer in both the music and English departments at Tufts, Ullman pursues his diverse interests in both his professional and personal life.
One such interest is photography. After teaching himself the subtle facets of the art, Ullman combined his new skill with his love of music, capturing one art form with another by filming a series of jazz musicians.
The project reflects the natural passions for music, literature and art that Ullman discovered at an early age.
Ullman said he still remembers the first time he heard Louis Armstrong.
"It just blew me away," Ullman said. "Immediately I wanted to hear more of this stuff ... He was God to me. It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. I couldn't imagine anything more beautiful. I didn't know girls then, you know. It blew me away."
Besides jazz, other passions of Ullman's include classical music, literature, journalism, photography and long-distance running. In pursuing such a range of interests, Ullman has established himself as a chameleon of sorts, never settling in just one field.
"I don't like to be put in a box," Ullman said. "I always like the sense of having two different worlds. Being in music and being in English is fun."
Growing up in Belmont, Mass., Ullman proactively sought out opportunities to expose himself to music. Even at a very young age, he found his way to live jazz shows and accompanied his father to Boston Symphony concerts.
"I remember saving money from my paper route to finally buy a Louis Armstrong record. It was called 'Louis Armstrong plays W.C. Handy' [and it was] $3.95. And that meant 395 papers that I delivered for that one record," he said, laughing. "To me, the music was kind of a discovery."
While Ullman entertained ideas of becoming a jazz musician himself, he eventually realized that his clarinet musicianship would not satisfy his dreams.
"When I was in high school, there was a kid who could play anything. He could play anything by ear and I couldn't. And I cared about it and he didn't. And I said, 'That's the real thing and I don't have it,'" Ullman said.
"I could have been a really low-level professional musician, but that's not what I wanted," he continued. "I wanted to be a genius, you know? I wanted to be Sonny Rollins, and I wasn't, and I knew that."
Instead, Ullman focused on his love for writing and literature, eventually combining it with his affinity toward jazz music. "I also was reading an awful lot," he said. "We used to spend our summers up until I was 13 or 14 [years old] on a very small farm in New Hampshire ... There was nothing there, so you read a lot. Reading was another escape."
Ullman's love of reading translated into an even greater love of writing. "I always kind of wanted to be a writer ... so I ended up writing about music, putting two things together," Ullman said, explaining that he ended up writing for Boston Magazine and The New Boston Review. He eventually gained his own column in The New Republic magazine, entitled "Michael Ullman on Jazz."
Ullman's decision to write about jazz in particular stemmed from dissatisfaction with the field of academic writing.
"I wrote about Dickens, who I love, but when I finished I said, 'No one's ever going to read this. I just spent two years on a 400-page manuscript and no one's going to read it,' and that really bothered me," he said. "Academics just seemed to me at that point quite uptight and disturbingly protective of their own turf. In a way, [writing about jazz] was a way of being in two different worlds."
Ullman's ability to combine his different passions also allowed him to develop a unique teaching position at Tufts. First hired as a writing teacher, Ullman later applied for an open position in the music department, where he would go on to teach both a jazz and a blues class.
"I like it very much ... I like keeping them both in play. It's hard, but it's also kind of stimulating," he said. "[Music and English] can connect in odd ways. I was teaching a writing class today and I used a story that Miles Davis told. Sometimes it works."
Yet even two such consuming passions were not enough to satisfy Ullman's interests.
"About 20 years ago my sister ran the New York Marathon and she called me up ... I got all excited," he said. "I went out that June and ran two miles and I was exhausted. I think I had to walk home. And in that fall, I did the New York Marathon." Ullman has since run 19 marathons, seven of them in Boston.
"I always try to find something else to do," he said. "I've always been kind of energetic, I guess."
