RECORDS SHOPS & OLD MASTERS

JAMES LEIGH

With "Record Shops & Old Masters," we present the first in a series of five articles by trombonist, author and teacher James Leigh, who reminisces on more than 55 years in the Traditional Jazz Scene in the SF Bay Area and beyond...

I was born and raised in Southern California. For Christmas, 1942, I was given a copy of "American Jazz Music" by Wilder Hobson. As a result, I began collecting jazz records before I turned 13. That meant patronizing the Jazz Man Record Shop, then on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood.

A dark, beautiful, unsmiling, formidably knowledgeable young woman ran the place. This was Marili Stuart, née Morden. There, in the smoky after-noon light, the shade on the glass front door half-drawn and the 78 rpm collector's items sleeping in their stiff tan sleeves, the religion of the place was impossible to miss: framed blow-ups of Kid Ory, Papa Mutt Carey, Buster Wilson (and a young Turk Murphy) lined the walls. On these premises the New Orleans masters, living or dead, were the gods; everybody else was just a musician.

"Tell Ory I Sent You..."

Even before he had come all the way back from Post Office work and chicken farming in East L.A., Marili told me one afternoon that I "ought to go hear Ory." With huge excitement I had listened to his all-star band on Orson Welles' radio program, but that band was still nowhere else to be heard, and had it been I would have been much too young to get in. I made this excuse to Marili, who shook it off: "Go on, they won't care. Tell Ory I sent you."

I took the long streetcar ride out to Watts and the Tiptoe Inn, where Ory had a quartet gig on weekends. I sneaked in fast past the cop at the door, feeling thin, white, scared, and foolishly underage. The place seemed vast, the large crowd half-black, half-Latino.

On the bandstand in the middle of the dance floor, Ory and the pianist, L.Z. Cooper, were eating a little intermission supper out of a blackened saucepan, New Orleans style, just as described in the book "Jazzmen," my new bible.

Told I was a friend of Marili's, Ory gave me an avuncular smile and promised the cop, who'd pursued me, that he wouldn't let me "make any trouble." The cop vanished, and I gaped at this lively little yellow man who had given Louis Armstrong his first job as a musician, had recorded with the Hot Five and with Jelly Roll Morton's very best Red Hot Peppers. Fifty years hence, who can recall all the details of an encounter with a historical figure? Not I. I stayed for a set. The dance floor was packed. Ory doubled on alto saxophone. The only tune I'm positive I heard was "My Gal Sal."

The drummer was Alton Redd, the bass player a big strong kid just out of his teens — Charles Mingus, barely old enough to vote, and still a couple of years shy of meeting Charlie Parker. Styles differ, but any working musician will tell you that a gig is a gig. Riding the streetcar home that night, I felt as if I had just celebrated a rite of passage — my first live jazz. The music had its hooks in me for keeps.

Exploring Jazz Clubs Around LA

That night nerved me to try the same trick elsewhere. Jimmie Noone was at the Streets of Paris on Hollywood Boulevard, sounding very much as he had with the Apex Club Orchestra in 1928, which is to say breath-taking. But the Streets were mean and impenetrable: the basilisk-eyed doorman was the first person who ever unmistakably sneered at me.

Then one night he was gone; an indifferent waitress let me in and served me an overpriced Coke. It lasted almost a set, until another bouncer struck. By comparison, the Swanee Inn on La Brea almost had the welcome mat out. Zutty Singleton had a trio gig there. Noone was much too imposing to approach, but Zutty was affable and more than willing to answer my questions. I'm just as glad that I can't remember what I asked him.

Working at a supermarket in the summer of '43, I made enough money to invest in a $25 set of drums. Of course I couldn't play a lick, other than timidly accompanying records with my wire brushes. When I confessed this to Zutty, he actually said that if I would come in early some night he would "show me a few things." The impingement of reality on my fantasy life scared me to death. I never went back to the Swanee Inn, and soon unloaded my drums, at a $5 loss, to another fantasist.

At the Jazz Man Record Shop I met Bill Colburn, a somewhat furtive man but a thoroughgoing and well-connected New Orleans fanatic. He took me with him a number of times to hear the full Ory band in its glory at the Jade Café on Hollywood Boulevard, where Bill hypnotized doormen and waitresses with the claim that I was his nephew. I've never heard a better band; still, the truth is that I hardly knew how to listen yet.

"New Orleans Brass Men Knew How to Blow..."

Bill told me that New Orleans brass men knew how to blow so that you could hear them a block away; yet you could stand a foot from the bells of their horns without discomfort. I tested the claim. It was true.

I'd become a sort of insider, junior grade. But high school and puberty were distracting my attention, and I took a holiday from jazz for a few years. I think I knew it would be waiting.

By the late '40s I was working full-time as a reporter for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, and with some brand-new money in my pocket I checked out the Record Shack in West L. A., a new operation closer to my Santa Monica home than the Jazz Man. The fever hit me again, immediately and hard.

I was playing city league basketball on Friday nights when the Ory band began playing dances at the ballroom on Santa Monica Pier. Still wet from my shower, I would rush the few blocks from gym to pier, hoping not to miss too much. It was 1948. Papa Mutt had died earlier that year, and Andy Blakeney was playing trumpet, but the band was storming; in the 50 years since, I've never heard a better rhythm section than Buster Wilson, Bud Scott, Ed Garland and Minor Hall. Ory kept the dance floor full, and placated the listeners by filling requests for "Do What Ory Say" almost every set.

I started buying records again, and hanging out at the Record Shack. In the back room, the proprietor, Ellen Hertel, had installed a piano which she herself played in a two-fisted, bare-bones manner, and over the months a kid band formed around her. (Using the ukulele chords I'd learned at the beach, I whanged away at a four-string guitar.)

The rankest of amateurs, we still attracted a couple of inspiring, if irregular, guests: one was Russ Gilman, a semi-mythical barrelhouse pianist with a penchant for working in mines. Even more mysterious was a dazzling clarinetist named Rowland Working (or Dr. R. W. Working, as he sometimes gave himself out). An enigma with a well-trimmed mustache, he would now and then join the boys in the back room. We found him aloof, but his play soothed any irritation, with its traces of Dodds, Bechet and Bob Helm but a sound all his own. He and Russ were much too good for us, but we forgave them.

Turk Murphy and Good Times Jazz

Being in a band improved my listening. At the time I was listening hardest to the San Francisco contingent. By then Hambone Kelly's was on its last legs, but even before it closed, Turk Murphy was leading, and recording with, his own band. His first LP for Good Time Jazz, with Bob Scobey and Burt Bales adding considerable swing, was the first LP I ever literally wore out. It is still my favorite Turk record.

A habitué of the Record Shack named Jim Harwood owned a red-gold Olds trombone, which no one had ever heard him play. When Jim was drafted he left the horn with Ellen. He could have been no more than a few hours into Basic Training before I grabbed it, justified by nothing but my own yearning. I kept puffing at it until l could play, in a fashion, the little Jim Robinson solo from Sam Morgan's "Short Dress Gal." When no one actually protested, I became the de facto trombonist in the back room band.

Other changes followed all too quickly. Rowland was drafted, the Record Shack went out of business; I quit my newspaper job and began driving a Yellow Cab. We went on rehearsing at another store, Ray Avery's Record Roundup; we even found a replacement for Rowland in 16-year-old Bill Carter, fresh from the California All-Youth Symphony and armed with his own transcriptions of Johnny Dodds' solos.

Practice, if it doesn't make perfect, usually generates progress. Most of our little gigs around Southern California are lost to failing memory, but I can't forget Coot Grant and Kid Wesley Wilson, whom Ellen found living in L. A. Headliners in black vaudeville, they had recorded famously with a septet which included Louis Armstrong. We rented a hall, spread what publicity we could, and presented Grant and Wilson. Knowing better than to try to back them, we settled for warming up the crowd — 40 people tops. Then Coot and Wesley took over and knocked everybody out.

I was excited and restless. When the Turk Murphy band came to the Beverly Cavern for six weeks I hardly missed a set, thus getting to know Turk and Bob Helm, who told me one night after the gig, bless his heart, that "you learn to play jazz by playing jazz."

By then my imagination was already living in San Francisco. In September, 1952 my body followed. It was perhaps the only time in my life when I have believed that destiny was calling me.

Becoming Turk Murphy

The first week of 1952 I caught a Pacific Southwest shuttle from Los Angeles to San Francisco with Turk Murphy. He was 36 and in his musical prime, I was 21. On Sunday, January 6, Turk and a band reassembled with difficulty for the occasion would play a concert christening the basement of the Italian Village nightclub on Columbus Avenue, and I couldn't miss it. It was my first plane ride, the roughest I've ever had, but that was a small price to pay for the glimpse I would get of Turk's life, which was the life I craved: grey skies, damp weather, and, inside a snug flat, an affectionate wife (named Grace) All that, and to be Turk Murphy, too!

For the truth is that since listening to Turk's band nightly for six weeks the previous year in LA, I had wanted to become Turk Murphy. This amiable dementia would last me pretty well through the 1950s, which were my 20s. Though he never stammered when singing or announcing, Turk fought all his life against that speech impediment, and before the mid-50s I would develop a stammer myself, causing a close friend to say, "You're just lucky Turk isn't blind or one-legged."

Within a few weeks of that concert Turk would be leading a quintet in the Village basement five nights a week, with Bob Helm, Wally Rose, Dick Lammi on banjo and Bob Short doubling tuba and cornet. This project was initiated by jazz enthusiasts Bill Mulhern and Charles Campbell (presently the owner of a San Francisco art gallery and an SFTJF board member). I had returned to my job in Southern California after the January 6 concert, and for me that cellar on the North Beach had taken on the magnetism of Mecca for a Muslim. Nine months later I finally made the move north.

When I arrived, Turk as good as adopted me. He found me a place to stay — the kitchen of Charles Campbell's flat on Chestnut Avenue (Lammi already had the spare bedroom). He found me a job, warehousing for a record distributor on Sixth Street. He even wrote me a trombone exercise, a sort of arabesque through the twelve keys which I still play today.

Doing Duty as Turk Murphy's Social Secretary

After a couple of weeks on the Campbell kitchen floor, I began sharing Turk's flat, one building north of Charles'. Turk and Grace had come to a parting of the ways. For half the $50 rent I got the back bedroom and the privileges of the house. Responsibilities, too: not merely my share of cleaning and tidying — Turk ran a tight ship — but what would soon become a demanding sideline as Turk's social secretary.

In the old phrase, Turk was candy to women, and the feeling was mutual. Ex-girlfriends frequently called — his name was in the book — as well as women not yet on his string. Perhaps most problematically, there were the current girlfriends. Except for grumbling at odd moments about one or another, and not always by name, Turk did not keep me posted. When the phone rang I was on my own:

May I speak with Turk? This is Jeanie (or Mary Ann, or Catherine, or Polly, Yolanda, Betty, Pam or Kate or Renee or Sue).

Sorry, he's not here right now.

Well, where is he?

Don't know. Sorry. You want to leave your number?

When are you going to see him?

I don't know. He's in and out.

Well. it's important. I mean, I've got to talk to him.

Leave your number.

Who is this?

This is Jim.

Do I know you?

I don't think so.

Well, what are you doing there?

I live here. Look, I'll leave your number where he'll see it.

No. No. Listen, when you see him, you tell him, first thing, say "Call Jeanie, it's urgent!" Jeanie! Skyline 13226. You got that?

Got it.

And tell him I'll be home the rest of the day. And tonight.

That version is very much abbreviated, and the names have been changed to protect the innocent: not many days passed on which I didn't have to field two or three such calls. So I was that much gladder to have a home away from home, around the comer in the village basement. It seemed to provide me with everything I needed, even a wife-to-be, Carol, later to cut a considerable swath as a singer. When I first laid eyes on her, that autumn of '52, she was dancing a solo Charleston in front of the bandstand. Afterward, Charles sat her down at the table I was sharing with the artist Lom Le Goullon, and told us, "Don't let her drink anything alcoholic." She was 18, it turned out. Until then I hadn't even known I was looking for a jazz girl. Carol certainly filled the bill; forty-five years later she is still a jazz girl. Still, it would be months before we finally shared a roof.

I was still getting used to sharing a roof with my idol. Turk acknowledged having been impressed with Jack Teagarden before converting to the earlier music, after which he credited Kid Ory as an influence (Turk labeled his album of the Crescent 78s "FATHER ORY"). He actually preferred Roy Palmer. Except for traces, he sounded like neither: for a traditional musician he was, like Bob Helm, very much a stylistic original.

Lessons Learned from a Jazz Master

It is next to impossible to say precisely what I learned from Turk musically as a result of my close friendship with him, except that I was in what might be called a Total Imitation mode. He was a success as a band leader, but none of that rubbed off on me when I tried to lead a band. The truth was rather that he was a son of three-ring circus as a man, and I was a spellbound spectator.

He loved all forms of parade and circus music. Once I heard him debate a friend about the most desirable bedroom music. The friend said, "Segovia." Brandishing a large fist, Turk said, "Wrong. J-J-John Philip Sousa!" His Spike Jones collection was complete, and he revered the great film comedians past and present. (He was the first person who pointed out to me Buster Keaton's superiority to Chaplin, and my first week in town he took me to see Jacques Tati's Fête du Jour, which he had already seen twice. When Turk laughed, it was hard not to laugh with him; he laughed a lot, so it seemed fair enough to be expected in share his daily grief.

That was his word, as in, "So-and-so's giving me a lot of grief." Grounds for complaint were as necessary in Turk's life as fiber in a healthy diet. Complaint needs two things: a cause, real or imagined, and a sympathetic ear. Women and his band — not necessarily in that order — were his causes. His perfectionism guaranteed that some member of the band had to be a source of grief at any given moment. The only person who came away blameless, as long as I knew Turk, was Wally Rose. (Later, when I played gigs for Wally — a perfectionist himself — I understood why; Wally was professionally punctilious; he was also good-natured and very kind.)

The Most Successful Composers in San Francisco

Then as now it seemed to me that Turk and Lu Watters were the most successful composers in San Francisco jazz, and I find Turk's tunes more varied and adventuresome than Lu's. Turk wanted at least three strains, and a degree of harmonic intricacy. I still think that his best-known composition, the challenging Trombone Rag, in five flats, is also his best. He told me once that he had written it during the war, when Bill Bardin, then 17, was doing a creditable imitation of Turk in the band replacing the Watters crew at the Dawn Club. Turk was not so busy serving his hitch in the Navy that he didn't find time to put Bardin in his place: "I said, 'Let him try to play that!'"

Among earlier jazz composers, Turk most admired Jelly Roll Morton; he wanted his own tunes, like Morton's, to have a recognizable stamp. Once, when I was foolish enough to mention a harmonic similarity between Turk's Five Aces and Benny Goodman's theme song, Let's Dance, Turk shot me a dirty look and said nothing.

That first time in San Francisco I would stay less than a year, but my life seemed very full and exciting, though not without its frustrations. As a fledgling musician I needed people to play with, but I wasn't good enough, and all the chairs were taken. When Freddie Crewes, a raggy pianist from Seattle, moved into the Entella Hotel, next door to the Italian Village, I had some company in my misery. Freddie was blind, but asked no favors, and swore he hated seeing-eye dogs because they smelled bad.

On occasion, clarinetist Bob Helm would take us with him after the gig to the virtually soundproof flat of a friend out on Clay Street. There until morning we would drink and play records, and sometimes even try a few tunes — Bob and Freddie and my timid self. I recall one particular morning shortly after Thanksgiving. Helm was in the kitchen, judiciously adding white wine to his turkey soup. Mellowed out from a few drinks, I was stretched on the living room carpet, eyes closed, listening to Louis accompany Bessie's St. Louis Blues. This was at least part of the life I'd come north to find. In the process I had learned a lot about how to listen to jazz, and about how ensemble play worked; without that understanding, my hopes of ever playing it would have been nil.

But then I lucked into meeting some young co-religionists in the San Jose area, and clarinetist Rowland Working, with whom I'd played in Southern California, came home from Korea and settled in Berkeley. I thought I could discern the makings of a band. Carol lived down that way, too, in Menlo Park — a powerful added incentive. Turk sold me one of his discarded Conn 32H trombones for $50 (it would last me many years). For another $50 Helm sold me a topless but runnable 1941 Plymouth convertible. I attached a do-it-yourself black ragtop from Sears, and felt myself fairly well kitted-out for whatever life might offer now. I was even secretly considering college. So, in the spring of 1953 I loaded up the Plymouth — it didn't take long — and headed for the Bayshore Highway. I had no troubles that I didn't trust Doctor Jazz to fix.

Mister Leader Man

With "Mister Leader Man," we present the third in a series of five articles by trombonist, author and teacher James Leigh, who reminisces on more than 55 years in the Traditional Jazz Scene in the SF Bay Area and beyond...

I had still been sharing Turk Murphy’s flat on Chestnut Street when my search for like-minded and unaffiliated musicians took me to the greeny orchards of the Santa Clara Valley.

There, at a garage session in Campbell, I heard an astonishingly energetic skiffle band anchored by a powerful twelve-string guitarist named Danny Ruedger, who also sang Leadbelly tunes with great conviction in a big hot voice.

There was as well an impassioned homegrown piano player named Robert Emmett (Pete) Fay: his line was chiefly blues and Southside Chicago boogie woogie. They sounded to me like more than enough of a rhythm section to build a band on, and they were willing. Sure he could play banjo, Danny said. It had only four strings.

In the spring of 1953 I moved into Pete Fay’s comfortable house in San Jose, and at the upright piano in the back room began putting together a "book," not of arrangements, or even lead sheets, but of chords: Pete had no trouble reading them, and Danny could hear them, which was all he needed. Clarinetist Rowland Working, with whom I’d played in Southern California, came down from Berkeley as often as he could, which left us only a trumpet player short of the instrumentation of the Louis Armstrong Hot Five. The lack didn’t keep us from rehearsing.

In Search of a New Trumpet Player

We tried out a trumpet player. His heart was in the right place, but we were underwhelmed, mainly because he generated so little in the rhythm department. When we heard Jim Borkenhagen we had our trumpet player. Not only did he play well and unselfishly, in a hot, swingy, compact style, but busy as he was, with a full-time job and a big family getting bigger, he was willing to take records home with him and learn the tunes — hard ones like "Mabel‘s Dream" and "Steamboat Stomp."

Carol and I had married two months previously, and I was halfway through my first year at San Jose State as a music major — though that would change. We both had part-time jobs, but our real lives focused on the band, of which Carol was the women’s auxiliary and fan-in-chief (as well as playing a mean washboard whenever given the chance). Her dreams of becoming a singer were already gestating.

I was taking lessons from Allyn Ferguson, a modern jazz trumpeter/pianist who later in the ‘50s would lead the Chamber Jazz Sextet which accompanied poet Kenneth Rexroth at the Blackhawk. I had so many bad habits, Allyn said, that I must quit trying to play in a band for six months to a year, while I started from scratch. I promised to obey, but of course I did not. San Jose State got rid of Allyn at the end of the school year: he cared too much about music. I went ahead along the Turk Murphy Trail with all my bad habits, and for 40-odd years I’ve been trying to cure them.

At Last... The Hot Breath of the Big Time

As self-elected leader, I took it upon myself to name the group. The El Dorado Jazz Band: perhaps I was thinking of us as a treasure waiting to be discovered. We gigged as often as possible up and down the San Francisco Peninsula, at joints like Smitty’s and college beer gardens like the Oasis in Palo Alto. Luck came our way only in November 1954, when Turk’s band went East for a month. Charles Campbell and Bill Mulhern hired us for two weekends in the Italian Village basement, and an early version of the Bay City Jazz Band for the other two. We felt the hot breath of the big time and began rehearsing feverishly.

There are tapes which survive from a couple of those nights, and four decades later they are not too embarrassing. Wherever he happened to be playing, Danny was Danny: naturals are like that. Rowland sounded beautiful, all flowing rhythm in the ensembles and impressive in his rare solos. Bork’s lead was intense, warm and relaxed. Pete’s right hand hardly blundered at all, and his left hand gave us all the bottom we required. As for Mr. Leader Man, if there was raw material in the band he was it. Raw but sincere.

Our two weekends at the Village did not bring a storm of offers, and I was next to worthless at hustling bar owners for work. Still bachelors, Danny and Pete were not averse to bar-trotting, luckily for us. In the spring of 1955 they found the Kerosene Club, on San Jose’s Cannery Row.

The El Dorado band tried out there, and was hired for Friday and Saturday nights. There was so little night life in San Jose that before the worst heat of summer we had become a minor rage. Despite the lack of a dance floor, and the rumors that the place was named for the substandard liquor poured at the bar, the place was packed. Despite my increasing skill at accumulating griefs, I was having the time of my life.

Nothing tones up a band like a regular gig. Our "book" grew steadily until we had some two hundred tunes, including as many as possible played by no other band in the area, ranging from Ade Monsborough’s "The Dormouse" to Washboard Sam’s "Life is Like a Book." Then our luck got even better: the jazz gods sent us a bass player, and not just any old bass player, either.

Make Way for the Squire

Eino William (Squire) Girsback, widely known as Squire Gersh, had been a professional musician for more than 20 years, and played with Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz band before the war, and after it with Turk’s band, and that of Bob Scobey, they being the first two Watters alumni to go out on their own. During the last years of the war, when Bunk Johnson was leading a band in the Bay Area, Squire had been his bassist of choice. Nor was Bunk the last New Orleans trumpet great who would hire him. More important to us was that he thought us worth playing with.

Before joining us officially, Squire rented a hall one Saturday afternoon, to give us the most memorable single lesson — of my lifetime, at least — in how to play jazz in the manner of the New Orleans masters.

At his direction we played one simple tune, "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," over and over, but never the same way twice. Employing the full-body gestures of which he had such expressive command, his unique way with words, and his string bass, Squire proved to us that rhythmic variety was not, as we’d imagined, merely a matter of tempo; that you could make half a dozen different "motions" at a single metronome setting. In a given tempo he would "go after it" almost wildly, or "just open it up," or "lay back on it — broadly," or "let it lie down flat," or any of several other unverbalized ways of "addressing the circumstance." There was no room for doubt, because he showed us.

When Squire joined us at the Kerosene Club, the band took off. With a new family and a new mortgage, how could he afford to play with us for $11 a night? He was a gifted, imaginative, subtle man, and one who enjoyed life. He must have enjoyed playing with us. Certainly he was one gift horse into whose mouth none of us wanted to look. Amazingly, another one was headed our way.

Through that summer and into the autumn, the Kerosene Club was roaring. Ecstatic with the business we were doing, our boss, Russian George, proposed that we expand the schedule with Sunday sessions from 4 to 8 pm.

More Trials and Tribulations

Rowland was already pushed to the limit with his weekend commutes: his course load at UC wouldn’t let him play Sundays. We were in despair until Squire prompted Bob Helm to "cover Sundays for Rowland," and those Sundays, from the moment Jim Borkenhagen and I shed our misgivings about sharing the front line with someone of Bob’s stature, were unadulterated pleasure. Those were some great moments.

They passed, naturally. Russian George fell into the habit of cleaning out the till and heading for Las Vegas with one of the available nightbirds who had begun decorating the place; at length a lean cocquette named Suzy got her scarlet hooks into him and he began coming up short on the band’s money. Because they were the real musicians in the band, we went on paying Bob and Squire for as long as we could, but after a few weeks even that was beyond us.

In the spring of 1956 Squire went to Vegas with the Delta Rhythm Boys. We stopped playing on Sundays. The U. S. Labor commissioner’s office helped us get the back money George owed us, but the Kerosene Club closed, and the band had nowhere to play.

Louis Armstrong heard Squire in Vegas, liked what he heard, and hired him for the All Stars, who at that point included Edmond Hall, Trummy Young, and Billy Kyle. Fast company, but not too fast for Squire, we thought proudly. I tried it on for size, the preposterous idea that Louis Armstrong had hired away my bass player. I could only focus on it in functional form.

"Hey, man, how’s it going?"

"Not bad. You know, Louis Armstrong hired away my bass player."

Even in that form it wouldn’t fly. The truth was that Louis Armstrong — or, to be precise, Louis’ manager, Joe Glaser — had hired the Delta Rhythm Boys’ bass player, who had once played for most of a year with something called the El Dorado Jazz Band. That way I could absorb it.

Some months later, the All Stars came to the Bay Area, and Squire threw a barbecue at his house in Cupertino, to which we were all invited for major league chicken and ribs and red beans. The great man himself, with a big plate of food, made himself comfortable in the lotus position and talked cheerfully with all comers, very much at ease and one-of-the-boys. He used the word "shit" constantly, and it crossed my mind that he made it sound wonderful. And why not? It was a little trick he had with music, too.

For all this hobnobbing with jazz royalty, the El Dorado band seemed to be at the end of its rope. However, it would stay alive through two or three more incarnations, thanks mainly to the energies of Danny Ruedger.

Jumping Through Hoops: Musical and Academic

Not sufficiently deluded to think I could earn a living with the trombone, I had to give some thought, if unwillingly, to staying alive once I had cleared academia. In the spring of 1957, I won a graduate fellowship at Stanford — tuition plus walk-around money — and jumped at it. Carol and I moved north to a tiny house near the campus on the last functioning farm in nearby Menlo Park.

I also jumped at a musical job offer in San Francisco. The trumpeter Robin Hodes, then called Bob, had been one of a number of visiting firemen at the Kerosene Club. A fairly recent immigrant from Ohio, where he had played with the Red Onion Jazz Band, Robin at that time was very much in a Lu Watters bag, playing in a somewhat perpendicular manner, but with a bristling hot tone. The band he assembled that spring included Helm and the great Don Ewell on piano. Their presence gave me the feeling that I was about to arrive, as well as a great unease, knowing that I was not remotely in a class of those two heroes. Bill Dart of the Watters band would be on drums, and Charles Odin, who had played bass with Kid Ory, would complete the sextet.

With that and much else happening in the City’s jazz netherworld in the late ‘50s, it wouldn’t be long before Carol and I were irresistibly drawn back to living, once again, in San Francisco.

Open That Golden Gate

The school year of 1957-58, doing graduate work at Stanford, I was happy to be offered a place in trumpeter Robin Hodes' new band in San Francisco. On piano would be Don Ewell, on clarinet Bob Helm; Bill Dart would play drums, and, from the Kid Ory band, Charles Odin on string bass. After warm-up gigs in a couple of small clubs, Robin hustled us a stand at Peggy Tolk-Watkins’ Tin Angel on the Embarcadero, where I had often gone to hear bands led by Turk or Kid Ory: six nights a week, 9 to 2, union scale. For me this was the big time, for sure, with none of the grief of being leader.

Hodes favored black suits, so that was our uniform: ties and jackets at all times. My only black suit would have served me well above the Arctic Circle. I began coming home from the gig three or four pounds lighter than at supper time, and had to start having the suit rush-cleaned every second or third day. Never mind, I was living the life, even if it left me comatose in morning classes. As an undergraduate I had learned to look wide-awake while brain-dead.

The Tin Angel attracted a fairly sporty crowd, including one local manager of available young ladies: he carried one on each arm whenever he went out in public. One night at the Angel he ordered a pair of his Rent-a-Girls onto the bandstand, where, in plain view and brightly lit, they subjected Helm and me to a rapid-fire series of unsolicited intimacies — groping, probing, fondling — to the vast amusement of everyone there, except for Bob’s wife, my wife, Bob and me. Apart from this brief humiliation, the Tin Angel was surely the high point of my tenure with Robin’s band. As well as I can recollect, the band usually smoked.

After-Hours Clubs in the Tenderloin

If there was a low point — and with such talent in the band there were few — it must have been our run at an after-hours club at Pat Kelly’s 181 Eddy Street. It was one of several such joints in the Tenderloin in those years, across the street from Bop City, which had long been the late spot for modern jazz players. Such operations opened shortly before 2 a.m. and ran until 6, ostensibly obeying the liquor laws by serving only coffee cups full of ice cubes. But I never saw anyone bring in a bottle, maybe because the place was so dark.

Dark enough, at least, to render uncertain the gender of the working girls and boys trolling for customers there. The tables which ringed the permanently deserted dance floor were just big enough to accommodate two coffee cups and a candle in a wine bottle. The professionally lonely would sit with a candle lit until company arrived: then the flame would go out, and it would be almost dark enough to turn tricks there, while the band played on. On a slow night, of which there were many, candles would burn at every table, with single occupants at perhaps three-quarters of them: an indelibly desolate scene.

If someone had told me before the 181 that I would ever find a night of play in the company of such as Don Ewell and Bob Helm to be tedious, I would have scoffed. But some gigs are so bleak that even the energy of great players can’t always redeem them entirely. But I realized that I was experiencing the ennui of the professional musician: that gave it a certain value of its own. You’re never too old for a rite of passage, and they’re all precious.

After the end of my year at Stanford, and the breakup of that Hodes band — there would be others later — the music scene slowed for me. Still, any musical future I might have seemed to lie in San Francisco. We were moving back there, anyway, since by then I had my M.A. and had lucked into an entry-level teaching position at San Francisco State.

Clarinetist Bill Napier and his wife Marilyn had taken over Bob and Kay Helm’s old apartment at 1335 Grant Avenue, across from The Place (one of the most celebrated venues of the Beat Generation). The Napiers had two cats, named Scobey and Jim Leigh. It was only when I got drunk there one night and fell into a staring match with the latter that I saw the startling resemblance. I was as much flattered as I was spooked. When Bill and Marilyn could no longer stand the day-and-night racket of the Beats and Beat-watchers in full cry outside, they left the place to Carol and me. We lasted only a month there before giving up and moving to Water Street, a quiet alley a few blocks away.

Then Ev Farey hired Helm and me for his Bay City Jazz Band. Before long Helm rejoined Turk (once again!) and was replaced by Rowland Working, by then a graduate student in architecture at Berkeley. Ev’s gig was at the Sail N (at the corner of Broadway and Front Street) on Friday and Saturday nights only, but it was a fine place to play, with good acoustics, a big dance floor, and an enthusiastic crowd, many of them ex-followers of the Lu Watters band at Hambone Kelly’s in El Cerrito. I was soon locked into a serious struggle with the Watters book, which formed the major part of the Bay City repertoire. I got away with a good deal, thanks to a fairly good ear, and a speaking acquaintance with most of the 200 or so tunes the band played. Gradually, my reading improved a bit, and I still know many of those parts by heart.

A Tangled Web of Memories

The autumn of that year was darkened by the accidental death of Rowland Working, who drowned while he and Bay City pianist Art Nortier were swimming with their wives near Tracy. Since we had become the closest of friends, in or out of music, it remains for me an extremely painful memory: not one I can deal with here, even after 40 years.

But the Sail N gig went on, first with Bill Carter on clarinet, then with Ellis Horne, both of them excellent. As someone hard at work in the world of words, I was especially grateful for my two nights a week of non-verbal relaxation with the Bay City band.

In attempting to sort out the next few years, which were unusually busy and more than a little tangled in my memory, I’m indebted to Carol, then freshly embarked on a singing career which would lead to many recordings, tours of Europe and Asia, a Grammy nomination, and most recently a victory in the Jazzology poll. Her jazz diary, beginning in 1959, has been an invaluable corrective to my faulty memory.

I mean neither ingratitude nor disrespect when I say that to imitate a single player for too long is to paint yourself into a very tight corner. There is a Sail N tape from winter 1958–9, with Carter, Farey, Nortier, Walt Yost on tuba and Lee Valencia on banjo. By its own lights the band was relaxed and energetic, but if I listen to it today I’m dumfounded by how Turk-like I’d come to sound. There are missed high notes which Turk wouldn’t have missed, and the tone is not quite his, but the similarity is overwhelming. I was a Turk Murphy imitator, period.

Haunted by Turk Murphy's Ghost

The Sail N changed hands, became Mr. Z’s, and the gig ended in April 1959. With no steady gig, I began getting around town more on weekends, and even weeknights (when I had no early-morning class the next day). I often heard Burt Bales and anyone who might be sitting in with him at Pier 23 (across the Embarcadero from the Tin Angel). Bob Mielke had a good band at a deadfall on Broadway called Burp Hollow, whose terrible-tempered proprietor, Emilio, armed with a leather-covered blackjack, tended bar in a wheelchair. Even closer to home was a club called Easy Street, where Turk’s band was holding forth. One night Turk let me sit in — not on washboard as I had done many times before, but on trombone. Did this mean I had arrived? I stood behind him, playing Bay City as he did his good-nights, after which he turned and said, "Sounds like a ghost, Jim."

I was flattered, God knows, but I was even more unnerved. I had always meant to become Turk Murphy, but not Turk Murphy’s ghost, following him insubstantially around without a soul to call my own. I had given up my imitative stuttering, but this awakening had me talking to myself, and I didn’t like what I heard myself saying.

During the academic year of 1958-59 I had begun getting acquainted with the exotic colony of players in Berkeley and Oakland. Pianist/trumpeter Bill Erickson, trombonist Bob Mielke, and banjoist Dick Oxtot were the band leaders among them (all three hired and played for one another), along with Peter Thomas (P.T.) Stanton on trumpet, bassist Peter Allen, clarinetist Bunky Colman, and, most importantly to me, trombonist Bill Bardin, who would be my next musical role model. They headed a cast of dozens.

Hearing Bardin for the first time live, several months earlier, with the Marty Marsala band, I had gotten a hint on how much ground he had covered since the recordings made while filling in for Turk at the Dawn Club, and into what an elegantly spare and rhythmic style he had compacted it. Now I heard him again, on Dick Oxtot’s gig at the Bagatelle, a beer joint on Polk north of Broadway, and this time he blew me away entirely. That band included, besides P.T. Stanton and Peter Allen, another new face to me: Frank (Big Boy) Goudie, whose name I knew from the records he had made in Europe during the 30s, with the likes of Django Reinhardt and Bill Coleman. Had I known that afternoon at the Bagatelle how many gigs I would get to play with Goudie in the next few years, I would have been happier, but for the moment I was riveted on Bardin, which is to say on how the band was swinging. Joe Dodge, who had been one of Dave Brubeck’s first drummers, was whaling away to good effect; Oxtot and Allen were in solid with him; Stanton, Goudie and Bardin blazed away in the front line: it was the most ordinary little gig in the world, and probably paid $10 a man — if they were lucky — but its effect on me was catalytic.

An Ocean of New Music Pouring In

Bardin and I went out for a cup of coffee at the first break, and I recall that we hit it off from the word go, comparing various youthful foolishnesses and talking trombone players. It turned out that his first idol had been not Turk, but Dicky Wells. Curiouser and curiouser. What I heard that Sunday afternoon excited me intensely: it was a way out of my corner. According to Carol’s diary, it was April 12, 1959, one day after our gig at the Sail N/Mr. Z’s had closed. Each of us gets lucky every once in a while.

The way I played didn’t change dramatically. Such chops as I had were formed over ten years of not quite becoming Turk Murphy, and they were surely insufficient to becoming Bill Bardin. Besides, I had had enough of becoming someone else. It struck me with the force of revelation that I would have to be myself, or nobody. The thought that I could be both of those at the same time was too frightening to contemplate. But the following Sunday I got to sit in at the Bagatelle. So did one of my very favorite San Francisco musicians, the beautiful trumpeter Jack Minger. I had my nerve, to presume to stand in for Bardin, and next to Minger. But within a year I would be in a great deal further over my head, and loving it.

I think that may have been the first time I ever got to play with any of the Berkeley contingent. They were not a snobbish lot, but they did have their standards. I must have just squeaked by, because I went on to play quite often with them (always with the understanding that I was third in line behind Bardin and Mielke, or Mielke and Bardin, depending on who was doing the ranking. Mielke got a lot of work as leader of his own band, the Bearcats, and in those days Bardin worked long hours at a cannery in Alameda, so I did get the occasional call).

But there was more going on. That winter I had begun listening to previously-taboo sounds. Carol’s diary reminds me that the Friday after the first visit to the Bagatelle I went to the Jazz Workshop on Broadway to hear Sonny Rollins. I went there a lot that year, catching Thelonious Monk’s quartet twice, and the quintet of J.J. Johnson (whom a witty jazz critic friend of mine described aptly as "playing like an electric typewriter"). Ellis Horne took me there one night to hear the great Chicago tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin. The band I enjoyed the most, along with Monk’s, was the Cannonball Adderley Quintet. Their LP, Live at the Jazz Workshop, was one of the first modern records I played until I knew it by heart. Do I really have to explain myself to traditional jazz lovers? In the words of the great country singer Waylon Jennings (Yes! That too!) "The Devil made me do it the first time, the second time I done it on my own."

I had quit saying No, and it was if someone had opened up the Golden Gate: a whole world of music was pouring in on me like an ocean. My only regret is that it took me so long to get the mental cotton out of my ears—out of my brain, really. I never stopped being a true believer in jazz, but my field of audition expanded in what amounted to a quantum leap. Amid the welter of new stimuli, my own playing would take a lot of testing and sorting out in the next half-dozen years. Luckily for me, there was a bar on the waterfront where I would get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do that. It was called Pier 23.

Playing at the Pier 

By early 1959 I was dropping by Pier 23 regularly. Havelock Jerome, the boss there, was said to have been a bookie in a previous life: he certainly gave off powerful intimations of what used to be called "the sporting world."

I don’t know when he began operating the Pier, or when Burt Bales started playing solo piano there. Before long I was among those being asked to sit in. A fine band pianist, Burt loved to play with other musicians. He drank a lot, but in the years when I knew him it rarely seemed to harm his playing much. He had a drinker’s temperament: morose one minute, cheery the next, bitingly critical the one after that.

You learned to take Burt all-in-all, but he wasn’t someone you could stay mad at. "Shut up and play," was his basic philosophy.

It was during Burt’s tenure at the Pier that I learned Havelock’s repertoire as a bar singer, consisting of two songs: "Many Happy Returns of the Day" and "I Had Someone Else Before I Had You (And I’ll Have Someone After You’re Gone)." Every night around midnight, he would step up to the piano and hold forth, in a quite professional manner, with a few utterly traditional hand gestures, the right arm swinging halfway open at waist height, and the song delivered with many dramatic pauses to underline lyrical points.

He always reminded me of George Jessel as an entertainer; he even resembled Jessel. I once asked him if he sang Jessel’s anthem, "My Mother’s Eyes." When he’d shaken his head and returned to the bar, Burt snapped at me, "For Christ‘s sake don‘t encourage him!"

Burt’s life could be somewhat disheveled, but he rarely lost a certain astringent humor. He didn’t drive, and when I got to know him better, I often gave him a lift to and from the Pier. One night he opened the front door of his flat on Lily Street in the Haight perfectly naked. Even more strikingly, his cheeks, lips, jaws and neck were covered with tiny cuts, bleeding through little bits of toilet paper. "Whatever you do, don’t ever borrow a razor blade from your wife," he said. "I think Jeanie must have got this one from her dad."

One night early in 1960 Burt was knocked down by a car and seriously injured. Havelock hired Bill Erickson, Frank Goudie and Dick Oxtot so that the show could go on at the Pier. But Burt had no insurance, and on March 22, reedman/jazz critic Richard Hadlock organized a benefit at four clubs. Nearly a hundred musicians played for Burt that night. The benefit, referred to by some as ‘bailing out Bales," raised more than $2000 -- not a trivial sum in those days. That was what his colleagues in the Bay Area thought of Burt. By September he was back at work.

But he and Havelock came to a parting of the ways in 1961. I don’t know the exact reason, but I have a strong hunch that Burt failed to show up for work a few times, and Havelock wouldn’t put up with it. In any case, Erickson came back in with a trio: Goudie again, and a fine drummer from New Orleans, James Carter. That would be the basic group there for the next few years, during which the Pier would become my home away from home.

Across the Embarcadero, Kid Ory had taken over the Tin Angel, re-naming it On the Levee. Even during Bales’ days at the Pier, the regular sit-ins had provided competition which Ory didn’t care for, to put it mildly. He protested to the union, but even when there might be a full band at the Pier (with only Burt getting paid), Business Agent Eddie Burns of AFM Local 6, the equivalent of the cop on the beat, could never seem to catch anyone in the act. When Erickson took over the gig, with a good drummer and clarinetist in place, the Pier became even more of a magnet for musicians looking for a place to work out.

Of those regulars whose appearance was hoped for nightly, two stand out in my memory: the trumpeter Ernie Figueroa and the tenor saxophonist Dave Clarkson. Though perhaps as different as any two men could be, they loved playing together. Fig had played with the Charlie Barnet and Stan Kenton big bands, and he was a great fan of Clifford Brown (to whose music he introduced me), but he was quite at home in more traditional groups, and played marvelously with small bands led by Earl Hines and Ralph Sutton, among others.

Clarkson was an amateur, but of the very highest order. He played tenor in the classic Hawkins-Webster-Young vein, out of which he had synthesized his own ferociously swinging way of playing by the time I heard him. For me, playing with the two of them was an honor, an education, and -- even when I was teetering dangerously at the far edge of my ability -- an enormous pleasure.

Erickson was particularly fond of string bassists, and the list of those who played at the Pier, if the big names were included, would impress all but the terminally blasé. The two who showed up most often at the Pier were Squire Girsback, of whom I have already spoken at length, and a skillful, if saturnine, escapee from Southern California named Harry Leland.

As far as I could tell, Harry still had the sort of chops which had allowed him to play in L.A. with such as Kenny Drew and Hampton Hawes. Once he accepted the fact that the Pier band was not going to play "Night in Tunisia" or "Anthropology," he seemed pleased enough to go along with the program.

Whenever he was in town, Squire would drop by, early or late, once or twice a week, and he always came to play. But if another bassist was in place he was happy to sit at the bar and listen. That other bassist might have been Bob Marchessi, or Ray Durand or Jim Cumming.

If there was a resident jazz aristocracy in San Francisco during the early 60’s it would have to have been the Earl Hines All-Stars, who had a long stand at the Club Hangover on Bush Street. Hines himself never came in, but the great New Orleans bassist George (Pops) Foster showed up several times, was always invited to sit in (usually by whoever was playing bass at the time), and never said no.

He might play only half a set, and never more than a whole set, but he made his presence instantly felt: playing with him was like catching a ride on a hurricane -- a hurricane with perfect time. (He also wrote – dictated, really, to Tom Stoddard -- his autobiography, one of the great jazz books of all time. Pops doesn’t mention the Pier in the book, but, trust me, he was there.)

A scarcely less memorable guest was another great New Orleans bassist, Wellman Braud, for many years a mainstay of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. In 1961 he showed up at Sugar Hill, Berkeley blues singer Barbara Dane’s new club on Broadway, in the company of a formidable pianist/trumpeter named Kenny Whitson. Back in the 1950’s Paul Lingle had brought word of a blues pianist in Honolulu -- the name slipped his mind -- who played the trumpet simultaneously. We imagined some sort of vaudeville freak.

It had been Whitson, and we were dead wrong. He was one of the best blues pianists I ever heard in my life, black or white. (Whitson was the latter.) The trumpet playing was plenty good enough, but still it seemed a sideline. And when we heard Whitson sing, we all thought it was a crying shame that Mose Allison had made it big while he hadn’t.

Still, when he was healthy, he and Braud made up no doubt the finest two-man trio any of us had heard. To my knowledge he never showed up at the Pier; perhaps -- like all the other pianists in town -- he knew better than to trespass on Erickson’s turf. For it had become his turf without anyone ever having to say so.

Erickson never showed off, had no dazzling specialties; he always played very, very well, and always served the band in all respects. As a soloist he was neither greedy nor shy, and he rarely if ever repeated himself. If he had a single model it must have been Teddy Wilson, but he admired pianists ranging from Jelly Roll Morton to Horace Silver. (The record of Bob Mielke’s band at the Sail ‘N, on Chris Strachwitz’s Arhoolie label, shows Erickson in his Mortonesque mode.)

Over several years at the Pier, Erickson’s philosophy of how to play such a gig had gradually become the unspoken code which we all tried to obey.

Rule No. 1: If someone knows the melody and someone knows the chords, we can play any tune we decide to play.

Rule 2: With regard to tunes or keys we do our best to accommodate guest vocalists, and we never try to make things difficult for guest musicians. ("This isn’t some kind of fraternity initiation," Erickson said -- though in fact for me it was just that, of the most benign sort.)

There really were no other firm rules. The rest was up to Erickson, whom everyone trusted. Now and then, without hesitation, he would quietly but firmly corral someone who had gotten momentarily lost in space. One night, after listening to the Miles Davis record of "But Not For Me," I had been foolhardy enough to start my solo on the same A-natural as Miles, a flatted fifth. Erickson turned around instantly, looked at me, said, "No," and went on playing. He was right. In our context the note was a pretentious disaster. I didn’t even think of arguing with him.

Erickson was one of the best leaders I have ever played for (another is Clint Baker). He led by example, he led by temperament. He never tried to embarrass, let alone humiliate, anyone. He wanted to play music in a relaxed and congenial environment. He enjoyed pleasing listeners regardless of their level of jazz expertise. Theories and critical judgments were for after the gig, if, indeed, they were necessary at all. What’s more, he believed that almost any tune could be made fun to play and a pleasure to listen to. If he had any passionate beliefs about the history of jazz, I never heard them. Another one of the blessed "shut up and play" breed.

We didn’t play ragtime at the Pier, and we didn’t play bebop, but anything in between was considered fair game. Most important for me was the tacit expectation that anyone playing there would be trying his best at all times to get with and reinforce whatever sort of "motion" was on the table.

This meant a great deal of learning-by-playing; it meant that one set you might be playing Bunk Johnson tunes with Jerry Blumberg, who had taken lessons from Bunk, and could demonstrate any trumpet style from Bunk to Miles; the next set, if the wonderful rhythm guitarist Edd Dickerman showed up, you would be on a steady diet of Basie and Ellington tunes.

The set after that, if Erickson was feeling frolicsome, you might be doing all Shirley Temple tunes, or half a dozen selections written in honor of Charles Lindbergh’s Transatlantic solo flight. It was all fun, even if in the course of the evening, pardon the expression, I got my ass kicked by Jimmy Archey or Bob Mielke or Jerry Butzen, or someone else with more chops than I possessed.

If, over the years, I developed a firm notion of what a professional was, I think I learned the first half from Squire Girsback and the second half from Bill Erickson. A good friend once told me: "Musicians have quite a lot in common with real people." So I also learned a good deal about how to be a halfway-decent human being, from too many people to name here, though I dare not leave out Jim Borkenhagen, Squire Girsback, Bob Helm, Ellis Horne, Wally Rose, Norma Teagarden, or Rowland Working.

And there are the stories, but hardly room to tell them. Like the night that Ernie Figueroa lent his car to someone, who brought it back, parked it, left the keys with Fig, and vanished. At 2 a.m. several of us spent more than an hour looking for it in vain. We finally gave up, and decided to wait for daylight to resume the search. Fig and I both lived in the Mission district, so I drove him home. The next morning we found his car parked on the Embarcadero almost in front of Pier 23. "I thought I saw it there last night, you know," Fig said. "I just liked seeing all you guys out there looking for it. To me, that’s real friends, man."

The Pier was really a kind of dive, albeit a colorful, atmospheric and non-violent one. (In maybe 250 nights there I never saw a blow struck in anger, though once or twice I did watch Havelock, though an aging welterweight, giving someone the bum’s rush -- expertly.) He doubtless made some money from the place, but nobody else did, certainly not Erickson, who seemed contented enough living hand-to-mouth.

It was never a case of the money not mattering: Erickson lived from it, Goudie and Carter relied on it, and when I occasionally got paid for a night or two I never turned it down. But the music, and the mostly pleasant company of those gathered to play it and listen to it, were the point, and that’s all there was to it. Pianist Pete Fay, my old friend from the El Dorado band, had put it best: "Oh, we don’t make very much money but we have a lot of fun." (He would do a fast vaudeville soft-shoe routine as he sang it.)

I left the Pier scene in 1965 and went to Europe. I haven’t lived in San Francisco for quite a while, but I never miss a chance to visit, and if the reason is playing music -- as it almost always is -- it always feels like a kind of homecoming.