Has Played With ...

My wife and I recently saw an engaging movie called “The Wrecking Crew.” It chronicled the history of a select group of studio musicians in Los Angeles who seemingly played on every record that came out of L.A. studios in the 60s and 70s. Their list of credits is astounding; both albums and one-hit-wonders succeeded because of their musical input.

When preparing for an interview for the Fillius Jazz Archive, I try to do as much research as possible, and have read numerous resumes and bios in this process. A common phrase is: John Q. Musician has played or recorded with … This all-inclusive resume bullet covers a lot of ground and can include the following sub-categories:

            • Has shared the stage with …

            • Has been hired by a contractor to play with …

            • Has paid these musicians to play with him

            • Has been hired for a recording session with …

            • Has jammed with …

My own musical resume includes entries in almost all of these categories.

The most common occurrence for shared the stage with is being a member of a warm-up band for a big name act. I recall the excitement of warming up for Herbie Hancock in the mid-1970s. Herbie’s group was enjoying a surge of popularity on the heels of his groundbreaking record “Chameleon.” I was a member of an Oswego, NY-based band called Coalition and we fit the genre of jazz-fusion. The band members and I fantasized about the possibilities. All warm-up bands do. Maybe he’ll hear us, like us, and invite us on his tour to be his regular warm-up act. Maybe he knows somebody in the record business and will provide a recommendation. Of course none of that happened. My strongest memory is being required to be on stage five hours before the concert for a perfunctory sound check. Herbie’s saxophonist, Benny Maupin, stood where I did after our set. So I guess I can say that I shared the stage with Herbie Hancock and his Head Hunters.

Years later I was a member of a group called Mr. Edd. We warmed up for the guitar phenom Rick Derringer. Different band, same excitement, same result.

Much of my experience with pop and rock personalities has been under the hired by a contractor category. Utica, Syracuse and Rochester provide performing sites on the convenient New York State Thruway circuit, and many artists who require back-up bands have passed through over the years. I will never forget my experience with rock & roll singer Bobby Lewis, who was best known for his hit “Tossin’ & Turnin.’” Bobby augmented his 30 minute set with other hits from the era, and in our brief and harried rehearsal we ran through the doo wop song “Who Put the Bomp.” Bobby, who was legally blind, became agitated during the intro, when my attempts to accompany him on piano didn’t jive with his singing. His gesticulations became more and more animated as he exclaimed, “No! No! Not like that!” I became extremely frustrated as I stared at the music and struggled to connect with Bobby’s words, “I’d like to thank the guy who wrote the song...” Finally, after what seemed to be an interminable amount of time, I took a close look at both pages of the music and discovered that some unnamed pianist before me had taped the two pages backwards. I was actually trying to start the song at the beginning of page two. I beat myself up pretty good after this particular gig, but it makes for a good story.

My memories with Sam the Sham, of “Wooly Bully” fame are more upbeat. Sam came with his own guitar accompanist and a contracted bassist and drummer was all he needed to add, except for the song “Wooly Bully,” which required a prominent tenor sax solo. I got the assignment and before we walked out on stage Sam came to me with a serious demeanor, and said, “are you my sax player tonight?” I replied, “yes, I am.” He said, “are you good?” Now this is a question that you get asked on occasion and there’s always an internal debate. The knee-jerk response is, “well yes, I’m a decent player.” Boring. In this case I decided to play his game, hoping it was indeed a game. I said, “yes, I’m good.” He says, “are you really good?” I said, “yes, I’m really good.” “Are you great?” “I’m a great player.” His last move: “well then you can’t play with me.” But I did. A memorable moment.

By far the most intense gig via contractor was the Hamilton College concert with Aretha Franklin. In this case I was the contractor for the horn section. So I hired myself. The run-through in the afternoon couldn’t even be called a rehearsal. One chart after the other, play the beginning, play the end, move on.

Aretha Franklin at Hamilton College, in 2008

Afterwards people asked me, “how was Aretha?” And I can’t even tell them. She was not at the rehearsal, and during the concert the horn players had to do their best to tune her out, knowing that as soon as we started paying attention to what she was doing we would lose our place as the music flew by. But I can tell you that the moniker “Queen of Soul” is apropos.

I was contracted to play three dates with rock & roller Del Shannon and initially thought I would be playing the iconic keyboard solo on “Runaway.” It is technically challenging, and is a hook in and of itself. I put considerable practice time into it, only to have Del say, “don’t play that, play something raunchy.”

Other artists that I could include in this “contracted for” category include Bob Newhart, Connie Francis and Joan Rivers. You can read about my experience with Ms. Rivers in my blog entry Joan Saves the Day.

On to the has paid these musicians to play with category. I can cite a lengthy list of jazz artists that I have been in the enviable position to hire. In 1975 I engaged in my first booking of a well-known jazz personality. I brought Marian McPartland to the high school where I taught and staged a concert with her and my jazz band. In a quartet segment I was able to perform with this artist who was so full of class and talent. We were acquaintances for the rest of her life, and one of my songs on my 1999 release of “Jazz Life” was dedicated to her. It’s entitled “Queen’s Waltz.”

Every fall I book a group of veteran jazz players for Hamilton’s Fallcoming concert. It was on stage during one of the 2002 events that I received a nice compliment, in the form of a question. The band partially consisted of woodwind artists Kenny Davern and Bob Wilber. I was invited on stage to play “Apex Blues.” During my soprano sax solo I engaged in what I call “tongue wagging,” an effect rather like double tonguing on the trumpet. Bob Wilber, who was standing to my left, asked me while I was playing, “hey, how do you do that?”

(L-R) Kenny Davern, Monk Rowe, Bob Wilber

My engagements with these musicians over the years, also included Clark Terry, Joe Wilder, and Claude “Fiddler” Williams. These comprise some of my most memorable musical moments. There are advantages to playing with people you have hired. You are very likely to receive glowing praise, especially while you still have their pay in your possession.

Another category would be hired to play on a record. In the early 1980s a band came to town to record at UCA Studios where I worked. Like all bands, they were doing demos in hopes of obtaining a record deal. Unlike most bands, they landed one, and a healthy one at that. A couple of months later I found myself in a Memphis, Tennessee recording studio, engaged as an arranger and keyboardist. At one point I was overdubbing a keyboard part, basically beating up on a Wurlitzer electric piano that had been passed through a fuzz box and Marshall amp. The harder I played, the more they liked it. I’m not sure that I would include this particular song on a compilation of musical moments to tout. Actually the best recollection I have of the trip was being able to run my fingers over the B3 organ that Booker T used on “Green Onions.”

As for the last category, has jammed with, I never have been much of a “jammer,” but I do my best to prepare my students for moments when they will jam with others. One of my former students, Sam Kininger, jammed regularly with The Dave Mathews Band, proving once again that all cream eventually does rise.

Road Travails

One reality of the music business is that you have to go where the gigs are. Bands eventually have to venture out from their hometown to play in other venues. Traveling has changed dramatically for musicians in the past five decades and nowadays artists are most likely to have complaints about delayed flights, expensive taxis, and problems with airlines and valuable instruments.

During my rock and roll period with Mr. Edd in the 1980’s, my bandmates and I shared more travel nightmares than I can remember. A Ford Econoline van with next to no heat and a finicky carburator played a major part in most of our road stories. It’s a young man’s game and not something I would choose to do again, but my experiences pale in comparison to the stories I heard while gathering interviews for the Fillius Jazz Archive.

During the era of the big bands, the following ordeals were commonplace.

In this short excerpt from trombonist Eddie Bert, we learn about a common practice among road musicians, “ghosting”:

Eddie Bert

EB:    When I went with Benny Goodman, he was going out, but he was going to stay out there [in California] for six months he told us. He stayed for six weeks and then started coming back. So that was kind of a drag.

MR:    What was it like to be on the road at that time? Was it a tough life?

EB:    Yeah. I mean you don’t eat right and all that. Because you’re traveling by bus mostly. And when you stop you stop. You’re liable to stop in some place that don’t have that good food and stuff like that. So it’s kind of a scuffle.

MR:    And a typical day, would the bus leave after you’re done playing?

EB:    It depends how far the trip is. If it’s 300 miles or 500 miles, you’ve got to leave after the gig. And you had to pay for your own hotel in those days. So a lot of guys ghosted. In other words, you had two in a room instead of one. Or three. Whatever you can get away with.

MR:    And what was the [weekly] salary like?

EB:    Yeah. From a bill and a half to two bills [$150 to $200]. But your expenses had to come out of that. So it wasn’t like today. Today they put you up. It’s different.

In our Mr. Edd travels, we did a lot of ghosting. But even with three or four to a room, sleeping in the van was often the better choice.

There were positive things that occurred on the road, but the unpleasant incidents stick with us. Drummer Sonny Igoe related one such memory from the Woody Herman band bus:

Sonny Igoe

SI:    I was always a Boy Scout. I could have more fun with the guys — they were smoking a joint or something like that they’d say “come on, Sonny, you never tried it.” I said “all right I’ll try it.” So I tried it. Nothing happened. I said “I can have more fun on a bottle of beer. I don’t need that.” And so anyway I never got involved with that. And a lot of the fellas got involved with that pretty heavily and then they went into some other things pretty heavily, like heroin, cocaine and stuff like that. And several guys actually, lives ruined completely with that stuff, because they could never kick it. And I won’t mention any names, but some very good friends of mine, guys I admired as players, got screwed up badly with that stuff, really bad — are you ready for another story?

MR:    Sure.

SI:    We were on one nighters with Woody Herman’s band when I joined. In 1950 he was fighting big debts, you know IRS and GMAC, his booking agency, I think he was in to them for about $90,000 or something like that. And he owed over $100,000 to the IRS, that’s from the manager who screwed him up. And he had this guy Abe Turchin as manager, who got him out of debt and then he screwed him up. He died broke because of him. But anyway we were on the bus and this dear friend of mine, marvelous trumpet player — I won’t mention his name — could play anything on the trumpet, played high screeching, beautiful soft ballads, fast bebop, any style, Dixieland, swing, bebop, anything. World class. And he was a junkie. And when they would run out of junk they’d drink whiskey like it was coming out of a water faucet, to try to help get over it. Well we were in an un-air conditioned bus, we were down in Kentucky or South Carolina, someplace, I don’t know, Georgia, in that kind of country. All rural, all hot. And we each had a double seat because there was a lot of seats on the bus and there was 15 guys or whatever. So right across from me is this guy who is a dear friend. And I’m finally falling asleep and I said “go to sleep, go to sleep.” I almost said his name but I don’t want to say his name. So anyway I’m falling asleep [sniffs]. I smell burning flesh, okay? And I look over and here’s this guy, he had a cigarette with his hand — he was unconscious practically. He has a cigarette and it had burned down between his two fingers and was burning his flesh and smoking. It was actually smoking. So I go like this across the aisle, knock it off, naturally wake him up. And he started in on me like — I can’t mention the words he used and how dumb I was and what’s the idea and blah-blah-blah. And I tried to explain to him. The next day he saw it, it didn’t bother him at all. He played like it never happened. But that’s how, unfortunately, some of those guys ruined their lives with that stuff. I was a square. It was good enough for me.

MR:    Yeah. Stick with being a Boy Scout.

Sonny bequeathed his musical genes to his son, Tommy, who now leads the high-powered Birdland Big Band from his drum stool.

Pianist Jay McShann spoke of the relationship between dance halls and traveling bands. His recollections offered a fascinating look into the day-to-day life of a musician in the forties.

Jay McShann

MR:    You had some pretty good records with Walter Brown.

JM:    Yes, yes, yes. We were lucky to have Walter Brown.

MR:    And you toured around the country?

JM:    Sure did.

MR:    What kind of places were you playing at the time. They were dance halls?

JM:    Well we were just playing dances. A lot of parts of states at that time were hungering for dance, hungry for music, hungry for hearing something different, and so quite naturally a lot of bands, road bands, were traveling. And you could get into Texas for two weeks, because you had all those towns and all those dance towns. See what I mean? Start at Dallas, Fort Worth Sunday night, Austin Wednesday, Houston Thursday, Galveston Friday. And just town after town like that. And that’s the way they could book ‘em.

MR:    Were you playing for segregated audiences at that time?

JM:    Yes. In some places we played I mean whites on this side and blacks on that side.

MR:    How did they keep them apart?

JM:    Well they might have a rope coming down.

MR:    No kidding. I bet you played some bad pianos over the years.

JM:    Oh, we’ve had some awful pianos. I know I used to — sometimes we’d get pianos and the pianos would be so bad I’d get drunk. Yeah I’d get in front of that mess you know, and say “well now we ain’t going to have no piano tonight.” I says “Brown, there ain’t going to be no piano tonight, you’ll have to sing with the horns.” And some of the pianos you know you’d have to tune, like we used to tune up with A. Sometimes you might be tuning up with C above A. Or maybe F below A you know. Now that’s how far they were out of tune some of them. And a lot of times if the band was playing in A flat I’d probably be playing in B flat or B natural. That made us have to go get drunk on that night. I had my excuse already made out. I’d get in front of that mess, cut out and go back to the hotel about 11:00.

In their youth, reedmen Lanny Morgan and Kenny Davern had their big band road experience when the call for those ensembles was diminishing from its swing era peak. They learned about long hauls, hotels, and road cuisine.

Lanny Morgan

MR:    What was the travel situation like, the road [with Maynard Ferguson]? Was it a tough grind in those days?

LM:    Yes. Looking back at it you forget all those things. It was a wonderful experience but I wouldn’t want to do it again. Yeah, because we didn’t have a bus, we had station wagons. And starting salary on that band was a $120 a week. I made $135 because I was not only the lead alto player but played a lot of jazz too and because he’d known me. And so $135 a week and he had two station wagons and then he drove himself. I wound up driving one of the station wagons. And well you can imagine, if you have a one-nighter in Chicago, I just found a pay receipt for this the other night, it was for $23.65, a one-nighter in Chicago. Now out of that tax was taken, so you get about $19.00. Out of that you have to pay for your own lodging and for food, so we used to stay at the Croyden Hotel in Chicago, that was like $2.50 a night, another fifty cents if you wanted a black & white T.V. And say another $6 for food maybe. So in other words you’re coming home with $11.00, $11.50. So I took the driving job because we got one cent a mile. Well now Chicago is 960 miles, so I would come home with an extra 18, or a little over 19 dollars, plus my 11, would be 30 bucks I would have see?

MR:    Yeah. Gee that was like an extra night of work.

LM:    That’s right. When I joined that band we rehearsed that day, the day I got back there, and the next day we opened at Birdland. It seems like we played there for three weeks. A good band. And then we had one day off and we went to the Brooklyn Paramount and we played there opposite the Jazztet, the newly formed Jazztet. That was for ten days. And then we had about four gigs on the road — Pennsylvania, around Philly, in that area. And then, and I thought, this is wonderful. What is that, like 135 times 5 almost. I’m rolling. I was paying $155 a week for a place at 85^th and Broadway in Manhattan and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. Then we didn’t work for a month and a half see, and nobody was on retainer.  Everything was pro-rated when we did work. So the reality set in there. Because then I really went from wealthy to poor in about five weeks. But the driving was terrible. I’d set out like at 8:00 at night from Junior’s or Charlie’s Tavern at 52^nd and Broadway, to go to Chicago or even Pittsburgh or some place, and it would be snowing so hard you couldn’t see somebody standing as close to me as you are, and have to drive all that way, and usually we’d leave late so we could catch the day sheet, which meant you’d check in about 6 in the morning and you’d grab a few hours’ sleep, and then you’d leave right after the gig and come back to New York to save money.

MR:    The day sheet?

LM:    Well the day sheet begins usually at 6 or 7:00 in the morning. In other words that’s that day.

MR:    Are you talking about a hotel?

LM:    A hotel.

MR:    Okay.

LM:    It’s like this hotel ends, and they don’t want you to leave until 11 or noon maybe. But their sheet for new people checking in begins at probably 7 or 8:00 in the morning, if they have any rooms available then. So we would try and catch that and get a good day’s sleep and then leave after the job and drive all the way back to New York which was difficult.

MR:    You mean you drove to Chicago [from New York] for a one-nighter?

LM:    Oh yeah. Several times.

MR:    Boy, I thought the rock and roll business was something.

LM:    No we did that quite a few times.

MR:    And probably the Thruway system, the roads were a long way from where they are now.

LM:    The thruways and the turnpikes were finished, but the interstates were not. And of course although we got reimbursed for tolls, it took time to stop and go through the toll booths all the time. And when you’re on a roll, you know I couldn’t drink during that period. I had to stay sober. Because driving through a blizzard with these guys — but you just get on a roll and you want to go. It’s kind of hypnotic, and I really shouldn’t have done that. But we would try these new interstates and they were a drag because you’d take an interstate for a hundred miles and you’d think oh this is wonderful, and they were brand new roads and so forth. And then it would say “END” End of interstate. Merge into one lane. So you’d come into one lane and then it would take you probably an hour and a half to get back to a decent road. So that part of it was a drag, and there were some places like Cincinnati that it was almost impossible to get to. There were a lot of two lane highways, back woods gas stations where you were almost afraid to stop. We had a couple of carloads of kids follow us into a gas station in West Virginia once and they had chains. You know they were going to get us good. Fortunately our car was newer and we got out of there fast. But there was a lot of that really. It was not completely safe to be traveling, even with six guys in the car.

On March 16, 2001, Kenny Davern, in his inimitable style, gave us a wonderful picture of his reality check on what was then a young musician’s dream. His brief tenure with the Ralph Flanagan Big Band helped him decide on one thing he wouldn’t do for the rest of his career:

Kenny Davern

KD:    We did 60 one-nighters in 90 days. We made the most amount of money any band had ever made on the road, I think it was — whatever it was, I don’t want to quote any figure I’m not sure of. And all the guys came up to me and said “oooh, wow, you’re the big time.” “Big time my ass” I said. Horrible. It was awful out there. You know, shaving on the bandstand before the gig. I mean it just wasn’t —

MR:    Why it was awful?

KD:    Well first, maybe you’re driving through Keokuk, Iowa, on the way to Ames. Or maybe it was Ames on the way to Keokuk. Anyway, the most you might see was a Stewart Drive Inn, a root beer and hot dogs. You know you’d have that and an ice cream. Back in the car, some more traveling. You get to this place, you’re in your jeans and sort of like a man dressed in hell. Well it was hot. The cars didn’t even have air conditioners in 1953. Some did but ours never did. And you’d get there at maybe 5, 6:00 and you’re right at the gig, at the ballroom. And there’s the ballroom. The ballroom is like on Highway 483 midway between, you know, Chicago and Detroit. And to shave you had to plug in, there was one outlet by the bandstand. You’d plug that in, each guy would take a turn with his electric shaver shaving. Next. And then there was like one sink in back of the bandstand with cold water only and a naked light bulb hanging down, and a cracked piece of a mirror. And that’s where you washed up. And you put on a shirt. Nylon shirts had just come out. Short sleeve nylon shirts. And it was the summertime. Because you needed something you could wash out right away and hang up and dry and cotton shirts just weren’t in then. I mean you could do that but it wasn’t really practical. And so you know these shirts were hot, I’m telling you, you closed up that collar and you put on a black bow tie, which you had to make yourself in those days. And then you put a wool jacket on over you, and your tuxedo pants. You were roasting. And you did four sets, four hour sets, and then you packed up the horn and folded up the book and put it on the pile and packed up your horns and they put them on the truck and you got in the car and you rode, let’s say maybe 350 more miles, and you’d go through the towns at that time, obeying the speed limit because they were all speed traps, and if you’d go one mile over they grabbed you and you had to pay off. So all the drivers were aware of this. And a lot of times you almost got killed speeding on — on a three lane, the middle lane was for passing in either direction going through.

MR:    So it wasn’t like thruways and all that.

KD:    No there were no thruways, um um. So I’ll finish with this road travail. And what the hell, you ever doze and try to fall asleep in the back seat of a 1953 Buick? What do they call it, where the hump is?

MR:    The driveshaft?

KD:    The driveshaft. Well the drive shaft was like two feet up, so you had your knees in your chin. And two guys on each side of you. And two guys up front. Well I mean you’re zooming along and all of a sudden you hear “hold on to your hats,  fellas,” and you look up and you see two 18-wheelers, one on each side of you, one going this way and the other one going that way, and you’re in the center of the two of these guys. Very frightening. And a lot of guys got killed in those kind of precarious road driving things at the end. And then you get into the town where you’re going to go, you know you left at about 11:30, 12 let’s say. Maybe about 6:30, 7:00  in the morning you’ve rolled into the other great town which boasted of a Milner Hotel at $3.75 or $2.75 a night, I forget which, and you couldn’t check in you see. So you’d have to put your luggage, the bell captain would take your luggage. And these were very cheap hotels. And then you’d walk around town. You’d have breakfast in one of those Dew Drop Inn places, maybe visit the local music store to see what kind of instruments they have, because good horns were still relatively easy to find, premium horns. Of course none of us had any money, but if we needed it we would borrow or whatever. And then when you checked in maybe at 11, 12 or 1, you may have gotten a haircut, whatever. Anything to kill some time. And you slept ‘till about 5:00, and that’s when you had your wake-up call, you got dressed, you shaved and showered and you went down to the local buffet, cafeteria style. And you had spaghetti or whatever, depending on what part of the world you’re in. And then you went to the gig and that night you were able to stay over but you left at 9:00 the next day because again, you had 350 miles to go. So you know you do that —

MR:    Day after day.

KD:    Yeah. It was really quite hard. But you know as a kid you don’t care about that. I think I made I think it was $125 a week, and I cleared $117.50. You could save money, believe it or not, in 1953.

MR:    Because the rooms and the meals weren’t that expensive.

KD:    Right. Every other night it was $2.75 or maybe $3.00.

MR:    Well that experience may have put some perspective on things for you.

KD:    I expected much more. From then on I just got very — like I said when I came home I said — oh boy they all said, you know, starry eyed, and thought I’d be stage struck. “How was it?” “It was the f---ing worst” I said. Plain and simple. Ohhhh, they all wanted to do that. And I had done it. So I didn’t see any romance to that whatsoever.

Kenny spent the rest of his career playing with small groups, where he was less likely to be stuck with the driveshaft. Even if the big band era was still healthy and vital, these music/life experiences would not be taught in jazz schools. They are part of learning on the job and paying your dues.

As Phil Woods remarked in our interview concerning the challenges of traveling, “The playing is easy. [The difficulty is] all the nonsense you go through to bring your horn up to the bandstand. That’s the altar. That’s the safe place.” Phil’s traveling story can be read in a previous blog entry here: Gig Reality Check.

Jazz Code

If jazz musicians’ conversations are often practical in nature, as posited in my last blog entry, what are those practical chats like? I have been fortunate to witness numerous ad hoc groups of musicians before a performance. The designated leader typically creates an hour long set by suggesting songs and waiting for a veto by a sideman (it rarely happens). Once they hit the stage, most of the conversation becomes nonverbal. For lack of a better term, I will call this jazz code.

The most frequently asked question non-musicians ask of jazz artists is how do they know what to play when they improvise. I think the second-most-asked question is how do they know where they are in the song and how do they all come out together at the end. It’s not really such a mysterious thing, but there are messages being sent between band members that audience members might not realize.

The question boils down to how musicians function as a band. How do they know when to stop? How do they know who’s turn it is in the improvisation spotlight? A lot of this negotiation is done nonverbally. Occasionally you hear a verbal command: “take it out,” or counting off the tempo. More often than not, bandstand etiquette for creating a spontaneous performance or an arrangement is done with eye contact and hand signals.

If there are music stands on stage and the musicians are getting up charts to read, you are less likely to see physical gesturing, hand signals, motioning, and spontaneity with instruments. Because the band members are reading charts, order and length of solos will be more scripted. But it’s not unheard of for jazz musicians to literally meet on the bandstand. Typically in today’s market a jazz musician lands a gig and then assembles a band for the date. Some players they may know well, some they may not. The latter is a situation when bandstand signals are more likely to come into play.

Some information we could call defaults: things that are understood unless indicated otherwise. For instance, there’s a collection of standard songs most jazz musicians know. In those songs, standard keys are expected. When someone calls “Misty” or “There Will Never Be Another You,” the musicians expect to play them in the standard key of E flat (the leader may hold up three fingers to indicate three flats). The exception might be if you have a singer on the bandstand, especially a female singer, as most standards were not written in friendly keys for women. So unless you say different, i.e. “let’s do ‘Misty’ in G” (which will get you some raised eyebrows, scrambling for music or some other reaction), you’re going to play in the standard key.

It’s rare that the feel of a song is changed. If you call “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be,” it’s expected you’re going to play it as a swing/shuffle with a medium tempo groove. In the case of “A Day in the Life of a Fool” or “Girl from Ipanema,” bossa novas is the understood groove. If you want to play “Girl from Ipanema” as a swing tune, you’d better be sure you announce it to the band. (Actually I’m not sure whether that’s ever been done before in music history.)

Other defaults depend on the band’s make-up, but if you have a quartet of piano, bass, drums and a horn, the roles are pretty well defined. The horn (saxophone or trumpet), in addition to usually leading the group, is going to take care of the melody. If the sax player wants the piano player to take the melody at the bridge, he probably will mention it beforehand. After the melody is stated, usually once, it’s time for people to solo over the form, and again it’s expected that the leader, or the wind player, is going to solo first. There’s no particular reason for this, it’s just the way things are normally done. The first soloist is free to play around the form as many times as he wants, and the audience members well might ask how do the other players know how long this is going to be? In fact they usually don’t. But the soloists have a number of things they can do. Most obvious is when they get to the last couple of measures of the form, they play something that indicates they’re done with their statement — perhaps a downward melodic line or a decrease in intensity. It’s hard to describe what this is, but it’s obvious when you hear it. That’s an example of an audio cue. In addition, there’s the physical cue: typically pointing your horn or nodding at the next soloist. It could be something subtle, such as making direct eye contact with the next soloist, or turning towards that person. It’s a handing off of the baton. This is something that experienced band members anticipate.

As a particular solo is coming to an end and the form is ready to loop again, hip rhythm section players are attuned for a change, and they adjust their playing accordingly. A good drummer will probably move his basic cymbal beat somewhere else, to give the music a different flavor as the next soloist starts out. For a piano or bass solo, the rhythm section may come down in volume so as to match that particular instrument. It behooves all the musicians on stage to be aware when this is happening.

Not every tune on a jazz gig will include a bass and/or drum solo, depending on the bassist or drummer of course. (It may be their gig, and if so they may be determined they are going to get solo spots on every tune.) Ordinarily, an extra hand signal/gesture to the drummer is required for a drum solo. After getting the attention of the rest of the musicians, the leader might hold up four fingers and point to the drummer. The translation is: drum solo, but we’re going to trade four measures back and forth. The wind instrument and/or piano gets the first four measures of the form then the drummer gets the next four. It’s a back and forth pattern and the form remains intact. It usually works out because most often you’re playing a 12-measure form. If you go around twice, you’re back at the top where the melody comes back in. If you’re playing 32-bars, something different may happen. Sometimes you trade fours with the drums, and then the drummer may get the whole eight bars of the bridge. That’s another hand signal to the band. It’s similar with the bass although the bass may solo over the whole form.

After everybody’s had their say, the leader may point to his head, indicating to all a return to the head (the melody). They might also point to their head and hold up one finger: we’re going to play the melody one time. If you get to the end of that one time and the band leader then decides it should be extended, you may see a circular motion with his hand — let’s go around again.

And then there’s the tag. A tag is usually the last four bars played three times. The tag can be cued by simply lifting the horn up, or by altering the melody notes, something to indicate we’re adding the tag. There’s a specific chord pattern the rhythm section plays during this tag that musicians call a turnaround.

Most of these things are just ingrained. You don’t go to a book to learn this, you learn it on the bandstand after a couple of times of fumbling — what the heck did that mean — you’re expected to absorb it.

There are some words and signals that are almost becoming a lost art, that I’ve only seen a couple of times from an older generation of musicians. One that really caught my ear on the bandstand is when the then-89-year-old violinist Claude “Fiddler” Williams decided to tweak the form of an A-A-B-A song. It’s typical way to shorten the whole length of the performance. After going through the form a couple of times, instead of going back to the A, you can take a shortcut back to the bridge. So you’d play the form A-A-B-A; B-A. But you have to let the band members know that this is going to happen. So as we were approaching the end of the third A, he said “channel.” I was caught off guard, what is a channel? It didn’t take me long to figure out that “channel” was Claude’s preferred word for “bridge.” Architecturally a channel is not a bridge, but I understood what he meant. If you were lucky enough to have played with Lester Young, you would have heard “George Washington.” That was his preferred word for “bridge.” It’s tweaking the form on the fly.

The more guys on the bandstand, and the more loose the session, the more nonverbal communication you’re likely to see if you look closely. One of the things I was lucky enough to witness over the years with the jazz archive were jazz parties. Veteran musicians are grouped together by promoters to play sets. There is a designated leader, but it’s still a loose organization of guys who may or may not have shared the bandstand before. Here is when nonverbal signals really come in handy.

This writer and Kenny Davern on October 13, 2006

I saw clarinetist Kenny Davern make a gesture in a jam session with three or four wind players — something I only saw once. When one of the horn players was soloing and the bridge was coming, Kenny, as leader, subtly lifted his right hand, looked at the other horn players, and made what looked to be an “okay” sign with his thumb and forefinger. Three or four measures later the bridge arrived, and all the horn players lifted their horns and started playing long sustained tones — beautiful harmony — as if they were reading music that some hip arranger had written out for them. It then became clear to me what he had signaled. He was telling his fellow wind players to choose appropriate notes from the chord and play long tones softly behind the soloist. As a wind player, if you land on a note that someone else is on, one of you has to make the decision to go somewhere else. If you hit the note that the leader is on, it would be etiquette for you to be the one to move. When the bridge came to the end you would stop and the soloist goes on. Afterwards I told Kenny that I’d never seen that before. He said “oh you mean footballs.” So not only was it a nonverbal communication to play whole notes, it even had its own non-musical phraseology, “footballs.” They were whole notes, but who wants to call them whole notes? “Footballs” was far more hip. I have yet to see anybody else do that, and it’s probably a fossil of a hand signal and if used nowadays on the bandstand, your fellow band members would probably think you were just giving them encouragement (i.e. you guys are doing fine).

Footballs could be called a riff, although a riff is usually a little melodic phrase that’s going to be played behind a soloist. There are two ways to do this. Sometimes you’ll see one of the horn players, while someone else is playing they’ll whisper something in their bandmate’s ear. You might wonder what is being said. It’s possible the musician is singing a phrase (a riff) in the other guy’s ear, indicating that everyone will play this riff behind the soloist when the next section arrives. A decent musician will be able to play it the first time, because they hear it within the context of the song and the chord structure. Or, the leader can play it softly one time to their bandmates, and it is expected that everybody is going to get it, hopefully the first time. That riff then becomes a background figure, almost like an arranger had written it for them, but it happens spontaneously on the bandstand. I had the luck of doing this with Clark Terry on a gig one time. He just turned to us and played the absolute coolest riff you could imagine, expecting us to get it. I remember I didn’t get it the first time, it took two attempts. It was a perfect riff, but not all that simple, because I was playing with a guy who’d been doing this for about sixty years.

Though well known by jazz players, jazz code is not a common vernacular for musicians of all genres. By its very nature, much of jazz music is unscripted. Jazz code enables a professional and polished performance.

Jazz Chat

Imagine you are watching a table full of animated jazz musicians having a conversation. All these musicians are household names for the well informed: Milt Hinton, Frank Wess, Nat Adderley and Joe Williams. They seem to be enjoying each other’s company. What are they talking about? I would imagine they were discussing which band swung more, Basie or Ellington. Or perhaps they were having a debate about whether tenor sax player Lester Young really deserved the title “Prez” or did it rightfully belong to Coleman Hawkins.

Exactly this situation happened to me early in the interview process, on a jazz cruise on which dozens of well known musicians were sailing. I had a reason to approach the table as I had an urgent question for Joe Williams, who was helping to coordinate the interview process. To my delight I was invited to join them around the table. Wow, I thought — now I’m really going to hear jazz insights from the masters in an informal setting.

Frank Wess had the floor as I sat down, and he was discussing, in full animation, a National Geographic special he had seen on TV which had filmed copulating camels. Usually mild-mannered Frank, with his nasal tone of voice, was mimicking the sound they were making and saying “you never saw something so uuugleee in your whole life.” The others chimed in about other weird copulating animal pictures they had seen, and they were having a good old time laughing and trying to top each other’s stories.

This was a eureka moment for me. I would have fully expected these old friends to be talking shop and trading stories about the good old days. But for the entire time I sat with them, the subject of music never arose.

I know now that discussions about music, for them, are more often of a practical nature. Maybe they’ll suggest you check your calendar to see if you’re available for a gig next month. Most discussion occurs just prior to hitting the stage, such as deciding which songs to play and who will be featured where.

It’s like this in jazz, just as it’s like this in nursing for example. When nurses sit around the table at lunch time, they’re not talking about the last wound they dressed or what medication regimen some patient is on. They’re not talking shop. That talk is reserved for conversation in the operating room or on the unit. In mixed company, where there are nurses and non-nurses present (spouses for example), talking shop would probably be considered rude and unnecessary because it excludes others from the conversation. Who wants to talk shop off the job, or in the case of the jazz musicians, off the bandstand?

Obviously there are jazz stories to be traded, and jazz musicians love to do this too. It is likely to be heard upon announcement of a fellow musician who recently passed, or who is sick. At that time will flow forth funny or poignant first-hand memories about their fallen comrade, or reminisces about what things were like on the bandstand with that person.

I love to hear those stories too, but they are best passed on a one-on-one basis. In the last few years of Kenny Davern’s life, I was fortunate to be what I consider his close friend. From New Mexico, Kenny frequently telephoned me just to “shoot the shit,” and in those conversations he talked about minutia of note choices or funny stories, not one of which I had ever heard or seen before in print. I always felt fortunate to have had that experience with Kenny, as he was an extraordinarily well-read man with a sarcastic and caustic wit which flowed from him easily and often caught me off-guard. On the last weekend he visited our area, a couple of months before his abrupt passing, my wife, Kenny and I went out to lunch. During that conversation, we both enjoyed Kenny’s company, but he certainly didn’t talk shop. The conversation was broadened for the more inclusive audience.

Kenny was an eminent conversationalist and clearly one of the best clarinetists of his day. Recently I was called by someone writing a biography about Kenny and the biographer told me something I didn’t know, that Kenny practiced excessively every day. Now that I think about it, it makes sense because of the facility he maintained on the clarinet. But as well as I knew him, Kenny never mentioned his practice regimen to me. Maybe he just assumed this is a practice that all musicians of quality pursue, and so there was never a reason to discuss that daily habit. Thus I propose the following unwritten law: the higher in the jazz hierarchy one rises to, the less likely that person is to have incessant discussions about the craft. Nurses do their job. They don’t need to talk about what they do, because all other nurses know simple nursing truths.

It's Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup

This month marks the second anniversary of the abrupt passing of Kenny Davern, at age 72 at home of a heart attack. Kenny had only returned to his home in New Mexico two months prior, after attending his annual trek to Hamilton for our Fallcoming concert.

From before the jazz archive even existed, archive benefactor Milt Fillius hand-picked musicians to come to Hamilton for a special concert for the Hamilton community. Kenny always came, usually as leader, but in addition, Milt chose the best of the best. We were treated to the finest free jazz concerts, and Milt brought them to us! They always were, and still are, remarkable annual events. Kenny played the clarinet, and he maintained his amazing chops right until the end. Once Monk made an offhand comment to Kenny saying “I’ve read you’re considered one of best clarinetists alive,” to which Kenny directly replied, “Who’s the best?” I loved Kenny. It wasn’t just about his “sweet” jazz playing, though there was that. He was a realist and never sugar coated things, at least not with us. He also had the most caustic wit, on the bandstand and off, and said exactly what was on his mind. One time a Hamilton trustee rose to leave the event mid-set. Kenny addressed him by saying “got to go to bed? Got to go watch ‘The Tonight Show’?” The trustee returned to his seat. Kenny had no idea that the elderly person was a Hamilton VIP. Of course Kenny knew Milt and Monk and I, but for him, his yearly treks to Clinton, (via a minimum getting on three planes to make the connections) were simply a great gig.

I once told Kenny that the musicians Milt picked were Milt’s absolute favorites and Milt got such a kick out of choosing all the musicians he wanted to hear play together, never-minding the dynamics of what such combinations meant to the musicians. It was amazing to see Milt, year after year, sitting plumb in the front row of in the building known as the Fillius Events Barn and grinning ear to ear, watching his friends perform. He used the college as the venue, and he would have probably done it from his home in San Diego if he could have, but Milt liked to share his passion with others. When I told this to Kenny, that Milt was hand-selecting his own band and footing the entire bill for the weekend, it seemed to make more sense to Kenny. Of course Milt never consulted the musicians about who they would like to play with. Milt assumed that the musicians would happily come together as professionals do.

There are two videos of Kenny at Hamilton. Part 2 is a sit down he did at the college with Monk in 2001. We have found that many times interviewees either don’t watch the videos, or squirrel them away somewhere and never share them with their families. Bereaved families, however, are usually thrilled to discover them after the musician passes.

During interviews, very few musicians spoke their mind on tape as clearly as Kenny did. Usually once the camera went on there was a huge reluctance to say anything negative about anybody, especially fellow musicians. It’s after the lights are turned off and the camera is shut down that the musician’s true feelings are revealed. The musicians are usually uptight on camera for about the first 15 minutes of any interview. They are nervous, being that this is being conducted by a college, that they will be intimidated by professorial questions. Monk speaks as a bachelor’s-level-educated musician first, and as an improviser and composer. It only takes a short time before the interviewee warms up. The interviews themselves are directed by the conversation, not by a list of prepared questions Monk researches beforehand. In preparation for interviews, Monk buys recent CD’s of interviewees’ recent work and often consults The New Grove Encyclopedia of Jazz tomes before the session, so he sits down fully prepared about personal style and past relationships.

From the first moment Kenny sat down with his friend Monk, the wit was revealed and the stories are all there. We are sad that Part 2 was only an hour in length.

I will never forget the first conversation I had with Kenny, it was a personal coup. Kenny was on a break at the Hamilton concert, and went outside to smoke. This was around 1997. I asked Kenny about set list decisions, the implication being because all six musicians didn’t ordinarily play together, and finding common ground seemed so effortless. He said there was usually some kind of sit down where they’d decide before the set. I said to him “Oh so on stage, you don’t just get up there and call ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ in E, right?” He stared at me for a minute, then turned to Monk and said “I like this girl.” Once I had heard Monk mention that he was afraid because he was backing up Joe Williams for a few tunes on piano when he was at the college, and he was apprehensive because Joe was nonchalant about telling Monk in advance what tunes he wanted to sing and in which keys. Monk said to me “I’m afraid he’s going to say ‘Honeysuckle Rose’ in E.” Thus I filed away Monk’s comment, then later used the same comment with Kenny, and from that moment on Kenny and I had a warm relationship.

Kenny always invited Monk to come to the stage for one song at every Fallcoming, and Monk got to choose the tune. Once Monk said “how about ‘Summertime’” and Kenny said “no way, I own that tune.” That was Kenny’s signature song and he didn’t want to share it. So Monk decided instead on “Wabash Blues,” from a recent album Kenny had released. Nearing the end of the first set Kenny would point to Monk in the audience with his clarinet and say “get your horn out, boy,” and Monk would pull out his old Conn silver soprano sax and saunter to the stage. Monk never had to fumble with opening his case, putting his horn together or preparing his reed. To me, it looked like he belonged with the group. I always took pictures, as did the college.

Monk, Kenny, and James Chirillo on guitar, Fallcoming 2005

Chuck Riggs, the drummer on Kenny’s last gig at Hamilton, called after he passed and wanted Monk to know that he thought we had videotaped the last concert Kenny ever played. We aren’t sure if this is true or not, but when he returned home to New Mexico, Kenny did call and I could hear Monk on the phone talking to him about the final performance. Kenny seemed unhappy about his own performance, after receiving the videotape in the mail, and I heard Monk saying that the micing process wasn’t all that great as it was done from a camera in the balcony of the Fillius Events Barn. Kenny and Monk reviewed the concert song by song. I think Kenny was his own worst critic. He never failed to amaze me with his facility and how strongly he was able to maintain it and not compromise his playing due to his age as so many musicians do who develop physical problems. Kenny told Monk that he was unhappy with the final note Monk played on, “Wabash Blues,” and how he kept wanting Monk to get off that note. Monk told me after he hung up the phone that he knew at the time that the note he should have been on was a physical impossibility on the soprano sax, and that Monk knew at the time it was wrong, but Kenny called it to his attention later on. Jeez, these musicians sure can be picayune about things, can’t they? It’s doubtful anyone in the audience noticed it, but Kenny and Monk both did, enough so that it was a topic for later conversational dissection.

When Kenny did a clinic at the college at that same last visit in October, 2006, Monk went to the small class with him so that he could accompany Kenny on piano. Monk considers himself an adequate pianist, not a top-flight soloist. When he came home he beamed as he told me that Kenny had given him the supreme compliment after the clinic, that he really knew what he was doing in the art of accompaniment (presumably not playing too much or too little but just right). Since piano isn’t Monk’s first instrument, it really meant a lot, coming from Kenny.

We went out to a restaurant for lunch before the concert that day of Fallcoming, just the three of us. I was unable to attend that final concert, as one of my daughters needed me to be in Rochester for that weekend. Anyway, I was looking at the menu and Monk and I brought up something we have often discussed between us. Pasta is usually described as “al dente,” but what’s the opposite of that? It isn’t like when you order your steak rare or well done. So we posed the question to Kenny, what is the opposite of al dente? Without missing a beat, Kenny said “it’s Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup.” We both cracked up at the instantaneousness of his response, thus forever putting this question to bed for both Monk and myself.

I’m not sure if Kenny ever knew what an unlikely place Hamilton is for the jazz archive to be located. Hamilton is a northeastern liberal arts college with a small music department. Milt Fillius, ’44, being the huge swing era supporter that he was, provided the initiative for the creation of the jazz archive starting around 1992. This project went around and around for three years, much to Milt’s dismay, before Mary Kopcza from the Communications & Development department at college finally called Monk in 1995 and asked if he’d be interested in coordinating the project. At that time Monk was reluctant to get involved because although he was an adjunct instructor on saxophone, he was Artistic Director for the Arts in Education Institute at the Stanley Center for the Arts. Monk agreed to stick his big toe in the water in 1995 to see what this would all be about. Monk was not interested in “coordinating” the project (providing all the research, questions and contacts for someone else to use to conduct the actual interviews). In March of 1995, Milt Fillius attended the first interview trip to Scottsdale, AZ, and he said he wanted Monk to become the Director of the Jazz Archive. So since nearly the beginning, it’s been Monk who conducted the interviews.

And through this position, Monk travels to do presentations on jazz history — at SU, and Rutgers — and makes presentations before groups, such as the Society of American Archivists in New Orleans, and, before the International Association of Jazz Educators went down last year, Monk made biannual presentations or we wrote papers for IAJE conferences. He’s often invited to give presentations which include interview clips with commentary.

When Kenny passed Monk dedicated his next radio show to Kenny. He usually transfers these to CD, and he sent the CD to Kenny’s lovely widow, Elsa. Monk did the same thing when Bob Rosengarden passed recently, and sent it to Bob’s widow, Sharon, a longtime friend of ours. Bob, or “Rosie” as he was nicknamed, was a longtime friend of Milt and was his Fallcoming drummer of choice. Bob let us know in no uncertain terms when we first met him that he preferred being referred to as Bob, not Bobby, as he was often identified on album covers. He came to the college many times. Bob used to be the music director of the “Dick Cavett Show,” and provided all the ta-ta-booms after the jokes Dick Cavett delivered. Bob was incapacitated by Alzheimer’s for the last several years of his life, and Sharon often called either myself or Monk to share stories about Bob and his use of the minimal drumset. Sharon attended Fallcoming with Bob when he attended his final public performance also, and at that time Sharon told Monk and I “this will be the last concert Bob ever plays in public,” as she saw Bob’s early Alzheimer symptoms. When Monk sent Sharon the CD of his radio show after Bob passed, she called us and said “it was lovely to hear Bob’s voice again, it had been so long since I heard his voice.” The “voice” of course, were the clips Monk had selected to augment the radio show.

It was fortunate that Milt Fillius and Monk had seven years of active interviewing gathering, enough time to get this archive to where it is, for which we are very proud. And in the process, the education that has come as a fortunate byproduct of doing the interviews, for Monk, has been an invaluable resource for Monk’s personal development.

Here’s one final funny story about Kenny which to mind as I recall his trips here. In 2005, Kenny had a new cell phone. He was never one for gadgets or computers or email. That year, one of Kenny’s flights was delayed. He called our home phone and got our answering machine and started ranting and raving about how he couldn’t figure out how to “work the phone” and swearing about the flight being delayed, and then finally leaving the message about when his flight would arrive in Syracuse. We got the message and Monk adjusted his schedule for the later pick-up. Monk too tends to be quite challenged when it comes to all things cellular, and when Kenny finally arrived at the Syracuse airport at 11 PM, the airport was dark and effectively “closed.” The two of them wandered around the airport apparently just missing each other, for about 45 minutes before they finally connected. Monk knew the flight had landed. Anyway, they couldn’t find each other. Apparently it never occurred to the two of them until the next day, well after the crisis was resolved, that they simply could have called each other on their cell phones to connect with each other. My daughters were laughing hysterically when they were told about the scenario, as us old fogies never seem to think of using technology first, to solve problems. Later Kenny profusely apologized to me for having heard his rant on our machine. He was sincere in his apology, but I thought it was the funniest message I ever heard on our telephone. We miss Kenny and we mourn his passing at such a young age. We take solace in the fact that he maintained his finest form right up until the end. And he left such a remarkable body of work, including his album “My Inspiration,” Kenny’s personal favorite. Click on the link of the title of this article, “It’s Campbell’s Chicken Soup Noodles” and you will be transported to the Hamilton website where there is a clip of Kenny and Monk’s interview from 2001. Coincidentally on that site, just below Kenny’s clip is also one of Bob Rosengarden, so you will get double the fun.

Romy