Memoirs
How History Almost Happened At The Page Three
Around the time I first came to New York, during the late fifties, I got a call from a piano player named Johnny Knapp. He asked if I would be interested in replacing him with the band at The Page Three. It was a two piece band--piano and drums. "You have to play a continuous show," he told me, "the hours are 9pm to 4am, and the pay is seventy-five a week." I told him I would be interested.
The Page Three was a cabaret on Seventh Avenue a block south of the Village Vanguard and, situated there, it was an ideal gig for me. I was living right across the street on Waverly Place, and I could dash out of my apartment five minutes before we hit, and even dash back and forth during intermissions. I took the gig.
I thought I was hip, but I wasn't ready for The Page Three. When I first walked in it took me a while to realize that most of the staff and many of the customers were dressed as the opposite sex. It was like a museum of sexual lifestyles. I knew nothing of this.
The musical part was equally intimidating. The policy was continuous entertainment, and although we must have been provided with intermissions, my memory is that the drummer Jimmy Olin and I were never off the stage. Six entertainers did three shows a night. They rotated out of a stable of ten so that each entertainer worked four or five nights a week. This was a hell of a lot of music and paper to deal with, since everybody needed rehearsals, and some of the performers came with thick books of arrangements.
Kiki Hall was the MC. After the first rehearsal I had to take Kiki's music home and work on it. He did risque patter and naughty lyrics, and there was a lot of ad lib accompaniment and stops and starts, and it all went by very fast. Kiki did Noel Coward material like Mad Dogs and Englishmen and Don't Put Your Daughter on the Stage, Mrs. Worthington, and some Dwight Fiske material, and other stuff I had never heard of. He was ruthless about the piano part, tolerated no mistakes, and demanded extra rehearsals during the week. He was a pain in the ass.
The hostess, Jackie Howe, was a solidly built woman with a big friendly smile who always dressed in a tweed business suit. She liked jazz musicians, and she sang obscure songs like Mississippi Dreamboat and Like a Ship in the Night. I was learning a lot of unfamiliar and interesting material.
The rest of the cast was a jumble of characters, talented and untalented: There was Kerri April, who dressed in a tuxedo and made up his face to look like a woman, and Laurel Watson who was a terrific rhythm and blues singer, and Bubbles Kent, a female body-builder who did a strip dance to Top Hat, White Tie and Tails. Tiny Tim, who was just beginning to do his act, was from time to time a member of the cast, although during the months I worked there he appeared only a couple of nights, subbing for one of the other acts. I remember the occasions chiefly because of the fact that Jimmy Olin and I were able to get off the stage for a cigarette or two while Tiny accompanied himself on the ukelele or whatever it was. Jimmy and I would listen from the front bar, and we had some good laughs, but the fact was that in the context of The Page Three staff, enter-tainers, and clientele, Tiny Tim didn't seem all that bizarre.
The Unique Monique was especially unrewarding to play for. She was a beautiful blonde Viking who was apparently buffaloed by the prospect of singing a song, and seemed to have borrowed someone else's hands and feet for the ordeal. She sang Guess Who I Saw Today, and at the end she would jab a finger toward some poor guy sitting at a front table and give him the "I saw YOOOOO" on the major seventh, dismally out of tune.
What Jimmy and I looked forward to each night was Sheila Jordan. Sheila was magic. The customers would stop gabbing and all the entertainers would turn their attention to Sheila and the whole place would be under her spell. She was doing If You Could See Me Now and Baltimore Oriole and some of the other material that she subsequently put on record.
During my time at The Page Three I began to grasp the fundamentals of how to be a helpful accompanist and by the time I was ready to move on even Kiki Hall was pleased and confident with the way I played for him. In fact when I told him I was leaving ( to join Sol Yaged at the Metropole) Kiki threw a tantrum. "Oh, no! Who's going to play my Noel Coward material?" "I got just the guy," I told him.
About a week earlier I had met the pianist Herbie Nichols, who was a unique jazz stylist, very advanced and adventurous and as unorthodox and original as Thelonious Monk. But I heard Nichols play in a conventional situation, and I immediately understood that this guy could be musical and appropriate in all kinds of contexts. I sounded him about the Page Three. He was interested.
Sure enough, Herbie was a hit with the cast, and became the new pianist. I stopped in one night to dig him, and Jackie Howe gave me the big smile and the OK sign. Herbie sounded like a million bucks and everybody was happy.
A few weeks later I dropped by The Page Three after my gig. When Kiki Hall saw me he began hissing "It's your fault!", and Jackie Howe had to restrain him from going for my throat. The Unique Monique was on stage, and she seemed even more lost than usual. "I saw YOOO.." she sang on that dismal major seventh, and the pianist resolved the chord a half step down so Monique's note became the tonic. It was shocking and unearthly, and the customers began to laugh. . Monique stumbled off the stage in tears. I looked at the pianist and I didn't recognize him. Herbie Nichols had sent a sub. The other singers were sitting in a booth, all very upset, and they were refusing to go on. Kiki was climbing the walls, and Bubbles Kent had gone home.
Sheila Jordan greeted me with a big smile. "You really missed something tonight," she said. "You should have heard Kiki's show. You should have heard Mad Dogs and Englishmen. It was really out there! You know who that is on piano, don't you? You don't? That's Cecil Taylor," she told me. "Herbie sent him to sub. He's been here all night, played for everyone. You've never heard a show like this in your life."
I thought that over for a moment, wishing I had it on tape. Then a thought hit me. "Sheila," I said. "Dare I ask? Could it be true? Did Tiny Tim perform tonight?"
"No, damn it," she said. “Wouldn't that have been priceless.”
"Well, Tiny Tim doesn't use piano anyway," I said, "so it wouldn't have happened."
Sheila said, "Oh yes it would have happened. Cecil would have played. Cecil would have insisted on playing.”
Herbie Nichols came back the next night and I assume all was forgiven. Herbie died not long after this took place.. My path and Sheila's path still cross once in a while, and naturally I go into my Page Three routines. I can still get a laugh with my Monique imitation, but the Page Three survivors list is dwindling, and there are few of us left to share the memories, real and imagined.. But I keep the stories going, and I have been known in weak moments to announce that I once saw Cecil Taylor play for Tiny Tim. So let the word go forth now that it never happened. I only wish it had.happened. Of course, I'm assuming that they never got together privately.
Hipster, Jr. Grade
In St. Paul during the years of World War Two I was attending grade school, and my brother Mort, seven years my senior, was finishing high school. Our older brother Arnold was on a tanker in the South Pacific. If I had a question about music or anything else I naturally went to Mort who was my adviser and authority about everything. He guided my reading towards Ellery Queen, Dorothy Sayers, Robert Benchley, and James Thurber., and focused my attention on the best movies, magazines, and radio shows. We listened to Vic and Sade every day. We would listen to music carefully and somewhat analytically. Mort would quiz me about the instruments. I could name them all, --accordion, guitar, clarinet, trumpet--but I was perplexed by one sound I could never identify. "There!" I said, "What's that sound? " Mort listened, puzzled, and then laughed and explained, "That's all of the instruments, four saxes, three trumpets, maybe a couple of trombones, everybody's playing together . That's what a band sounds like." The thought of that stunned me, and I thought about it for days.In what we called the sunroom was a big Philco console that contained a record changer. Alone, I would sample the record collection for hours, sorting through the heavy albums filled with single 10 and 12 inch 78s and staring at the labels: Decca, Bluebird, Vocalion, Okeh. My brother Arnold's collection was big-band oriented with Goodman, Shaw, Calloway and Basie heavily represented. But Frankie Carle was in there, too, along with Kay Kyser and Raymond Scott and Horace Heidt. There were many titles by Bing Crosby, and several by Ella Fitzgerald and Mildred Bailey. I could sing along with all of them. My specialty was singing along with the entire score of The Mikado. I read along with the libretto. but most of it I could do from memory.
By the time Mort was at the University he had become a blues and jazz aficionado and undertook to guide me about the music and the players. He collected piano records, especially blues and boogie woogie. Ammons, Johnson, and Lewis of course, but also the more obscure players like Yancey and Pine Top Smith. Mort was crazy about Art Tatum and Teddy Wilson and Jess Stacy, and those were the piano players I listened to
carefully as a young boy. Count Basie's playing charmed me, as did Jelly Roll Morton's special touch and deep time feel.
Mort was also deep into folk music and played for me the records of Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, and Josh White. He could strum a guitar well enough to perform this stuff in a fairly authentic way, and together we could sing an odd eclectic repertoire learned from records and radio, including Rock Island Line, Goodnight Irene, some cowboy songs like Old Shep, and Red River Valley, and religious songs like Dust on The Bible, and I've Got My One Way Ticket to the Sky.
Mort had lost interest in piano lessons, but he could play by ear. His repertoire was pretty well limited to the blues, which he learned off the records. He knew how to make the blues moves, keeping a strong rhythm and slurring off the black keys. He showed me how the blues was structured--twelve measures divided into three groups of four bars each. I understood quickly, and I began to play the blues, copying Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson. They each had their characteristic bass figures, and I worked hard to get them under my left hand, striving for strength and steadiness of beat. I tried to get that skipping bouyancy that those players had, but that was the hard part, where they showed their real finesse. I learned the recordings chorus by chorus and tried to copy as exactly as I could. That was very important to me as a young player--to try and duplicate what I heard, and make it as accurate as possible.
I was beginning high school by this time, Mort had entered the Navy, and I divided my home time between three main activities: making pencil drawings of athletes in action (I copied these from photographs), pitching a tennis ball against the front steps, and playing boogie-woogie on the piano. My social life at Central High was stretching out too, because I was meeting a lot of new people from different neighborhoods, and among these new aquaintances were some kids who played instruments and actually knew about jazz musicians like Charlie Ventura and Dizzy Gillespie. Instead of Baseball Digest and The Sporting News I was now buying copies of Downbeat and Metronome and wondering who these new musicians were and how their music sounded.
When I got hold of Mezz Mezzrow's book Really The Blues , which had recently been published, my musical imagination was fired, and I began to search through the household record collection for specimens by Mezz's friends and colleagues. At Louise's Record Store in downtown St. Paul, I made my first record purchase-- a Brunswick album of 1928 Chicago jazz by Teschemacher, McPartland, Bud Freeman and the others.
Mezzrow's book made such a strong impression on me that I bought everything he had to say without question, and therefore considered his music and his opinions to be the Gospel of real jazz, and everything else to be "commercial" , hence shallow and unworthy of serious attention. My friends at school suffered my disdainful comments about the music they listened to: "Stan Kenton! That's commercial crap! You ought to be listening to Sidney Bechet and Muggsy Spanier." At age fifteen I was an insufferable purist, following the Gospel of Mezz, which led to the smug and comfortable notion that "modern" or "progressive" music , or "sounds" as they called it, was not jazz at all, because, not being related to New Orleans jazz, it was not authentic.
Leo Adelman worked one Christmas season at my dad's clothing store. He was a few years older than I and had a reputation around town as a hot trumpet player. We chatted one day about music. I was raving about my favorite trumpet players, Muggsy Spanier and Wild Bill Davison, and Adelman fixed me with a puzzled eye. “I dig Red Rodney,” he said. I had never heard of Red Rodney, and before I knew it Adelman was explaining how modern musicians played extensions off the chords—“changes” as he called them. I told him I had heard the Dial record of Ornithology by Bird and was puzzled because I didn’t understand the song. “Why it’s nothing but How High The Moon ,” he explained. That evening I played the record and as if the sun had broken out of the clouds I understood in a stroke what Adelman was talking about. It was a deciding moment because I comprehended for the first time the infrastructure embodied in composed music, and how the jazz improvisers were honoring it in their own highly styled way. Unlike Mezz, they weren’t interested in keeping the tradition pure. They wanted to put their individual personal touches on the songs and comment on the music by tampering with the harmony. The audience they were playing to were mainly other musicians, and it was like an inside joke, plus a chance to demonstrate their jazz credentials, show how musically adroit and sophisticated they were.. I was fascinated, and I wanted to learn all about Parker and Gillespie and the musical game plan that they and the other young players had embarked on.
Mort was working at the Roycraft Company in Minneapolis, administering the Columbia Records distributorship. During the Christmas rush one year I worked a few days in the Roycraft shipping room, filling orders for Columbia albums and singles, fetching the stock from the shelves and stuffing the packages for shipment. Also working part time as a shipping clerk was Jimmy Mulcrone, a sallow guy in his mid twenties who was active as a bebop pianist in local nightclubs. We talked about music, and I played him the boogie woogie records I had made at Schmitt's music store. "You can play," Mulcrone said. "But I can show you some things."
For the next few months I travelled for my music lesson each Saturday morning by bus and two streetcars to where Jimmy was living in northeast Minneapolis. It wasn't really piano lessons, because I wasn't learning exercises and classical technique. What Jimmy offered to show me was how to use the piano to deal with music-- music theory essentially, or keyboard harmony. Since the blues was the only song form I had ever dealt with at the piano, I knew how to build seventh chords on the degrees of the scale I recognized as one, four and five. Jimmy quickly showed me how to incorporate a new chord --what he termed the two chord-- into the blues framework. "It's called a minor seventh chord," Jimmy said. And as Jimmy demonstrated the voicings of the minor seventh chord and how it behaved as an auxiliary to the related five chord, my mind was stunned by sudden insights and revelations that would shape the rest of my life. The systematic magic and mathematics of music was being revealed to me and I was blown away by the power and logic of it all.
I recognized notes on the staff but I couldn't read them and execute them quickly. Struggling through piano notation was such an unrewarding process that I lost patience with it. The music died when I tried to read it. Mulcrone saw that I was a natural player, and he didn't try to teach me songs with sheet music. Instead he made lead sheets—just the melody with chord symbols-- and I could quickly make sense out of that. The early songs he assigned me were: Just You, Just Me; Lover Come Back To Me; Body and Soul; and What Is This Thing Called Love, including its currently popular bebop treatment called Hothouse. Body and Soul was a challenge because of the five flats in the key signature. He showed me how to play Robbin's Nest, and I recognized the minor sevenths and understood how they worked. He wrote out Elevation so I could see how the beboppers treated the blues form. It all made perfect sense to me, and I began to listen voraciously to the new music. I was under the spell of bebop.
What Mulcrone showed me during those dozen or so Saturday mornings was enough to keep me subsequently occupied for years, sitting at the keyboard discovering how to navigate music by using music theory as an expressive tool. Essentially, how to speak the language of music, how to fake-- "fake" being a non-opprobrious term meaning to play solo or in an ensemble without written music. The ability to fake on your instrument was essential to getting employment at nearly any level of the music business, especially in the world of swing and dance bands. Jazz musicians were among the best fakers of course, and some raised extemporaneous playing to artistic heights. But faking was no big deal for a professional sideman, and neither was improvising; there was nothing remarkable about using these rudimentary musical skills. By showing me how to deal with music analytically, Mulcrone gave me my first glimpse into the secret world of jazz musicians, magic people who could casually play songs in any key, talked about "chord changes", and whose repertoire was seemingly limitless. Jazz musicans were hip, they were funny, they were sensitive, they were clannish, and they seemed to have the best girlfriends. I like being around jazz players, and I wanted to be one of them.
It's important to remember that this jazz musician dream-life had nothing remotely to do with money or fame. That's because the music business--they didn't call it "industry" then--held little promise for that kind of success. There was no career path to a jackpot in the music business. There seemed to be a goal. The goal was to play the good music in the big leagues, with the good musicians. The path to that goal was to get good enough on your instrument, and then to learn the professional skills, including faking, reading and writing music, transposing, stylistics, improvising, and repertoire. Then you would begin to get gigs. The process would lead you to play better and better, and it followed that you would get better gigs, and "better gigs" didn't always pay better money. "Better gigs" meant that you were playing with better musicians. If that involved better remuneration, then that was just luck. Sure you might get lucky, but that's another story. As the saying went, you're more likely to make a killing than make a living. To have all this pleasure plus make a living would be nothing short of a miracle. What's the alternative? Trying to sell something? No thanks. What are the pitfalls? You might have to play bad music, but probably not forever. Alcohol, drugs, night-life, women? Hey, I can handle that. I want to play with Stan Getz, I want to hang with Peggy Lee, I want to be in Woody's band, I want to sound like Jimmie Rowles. I want to sound like Horace Silver. I want to play in the big leagues. It was a clear trade-off: You choose music, you say goodbye to financial security and a predictable future. The same kind of alternatives you'd face if you were deciding to become a professional ballplayer--another career that didn't pay off in cash in those days. My parents listened to my pianistics with puzzled disapproval, and I once overheard my dad telling his friends that I wanted to be a "klezmer." I could hear him shrugging with disappointment.. In his mind, a dance band musician was a "klezmer"--a low class performer, a clown, maybe a step above organ grinder.
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Howard's Steakhouse was a nightclub on Olson Highway in north Minneapolis, in what we called a "colored neighborhood." On Sunday afternoons there was always a jam session at Howard's, featuring the two tenor saxists Chet Christopher and Oscar Frazier. My ex-mentor Jimmy Mulcrone was the piano player and he invited me to drop by any Sunday, and play. My pal Myles Spicer borrowed his dad's Studebaker one Sunday and the two of us showed up at Howard's at three o'clock, right on time for the music. This must have been 1950 and would make me seventeen. I looked even younger, obviously too young to be in a bar. Mulcrone came to our assistance and assured the boss that we were there to hear the music, and we got a ringside table and sipped cokes.
Here's what I remember about the band at Howard's. Rhythm section was Norman "Fats" Nelson, bass; Jimmy Mulcrone , piano; Pat Fitzgerald, drums; Frazier and Christopher on tenors, and Ira Pettiford on trumpet. Among the sitters-in were Maurice Talley, conga; Don Specht on piano and trumpet, Jerry Trestman , Bob Crea, Ray Komischke on tenors and Sheldon Rockler (of the Minneapolis Symphony) on trumpet. Mulcrone beckoned me to play, and for the first time I got to play with professional musicians. Chet Christopher asked me if I knew Red Top, a blues in F, and I was happy to answer yes. I don't remember much about the experience except that I loved it, and wanted to go back to Howard's every week. I returned once or twice, but I soon got the message that youngsters were not really welcome.
At Central High I met Harold Gillman who played clarinet and saxophone and listened to Charlie Parker records. We got together with Dick Kohn and Leon Katz, both drummers, and Bob Shadur on trumpet, and had a session at Shirley Kaplan's house on Goodrich Ave. Jerry Paymar, Myles Spicer, Ted Birnberg and Adrian Warren were there too, as listeners. Shirley's house became headquarters for after school hanging out, and I played a lot of songs at the big upright piano. Shirley used to sing I 've Got News For You and June Comes Around Every Year which she had learned from Woody Herman records.
Harold Gillman came up with my first paid job. Harold put together a band to play a dance at the gym at Marshall High School in St Paul. Harold played clarinet and alto, Charles Meyerding played trumpet, Tom Tjornhom played trombone, Conway Villars was the drummer and Sumner Benson was the bass player. The singer was Chuck Williams. I think we faked most of the tunes, but there was some reading involved-- stock arrangements and lead sheets. Chuck Williams sang with a Billy Eckstine style, and I remember he sang Don't Blame Me and Without a Song among other songs. Harold handed me twelve dollars after the job. I loved every minute of it.
Tom Tjornhom recommended me for the piano chair in Bob Ochs' combo, a much more polished group than Harold's pick-up band. Ochs' band played parties and school dances and worked several times a month. Bob was a senior at St Thomas Academy, played trumpet and wrote the arrangements. King Jobson from the U of M was usually the drummer, Bob Jensen from Minneapolis Roosevelt High played bass, Tjornhom attended Northwest Chiropractic College and played trombone, Paul Finley, a med student at the U, played tenor sax. The piano chair had been covered by a phenomenal pianist named Tom Coller who was off to Catholic Seminary to study for the priesthood. Coller played serious classical piano at a very high artistic level, performing Rachmaninoff Concertos and impossible Liszt and Busoni pieces in concert.
I auditioned by faking September In The Rain in E flat. Bob Ochs said, "You got the job.” "I'm a very slow reader," I warned him. Bob said, "Take the piano parts home and learn them.” "I can't do what Coller does," I said. Bob assured me that it wouldn't be necessary. I couldn't wait to get home and dive into the piano book.
The piano parts were laboriously copied two staff piano accompaniments with no melody cues. This meant that I had no clue what the lead melody sounded like or what the band was playing. Since most of the pieces were original compositions by Bob or jazz tunes I had never heard of, the Bob Ochs piano book was a total mystery to me. So I got busy and began to decipher every measure. To my horror, many of the parts were without chord symbols. Bob apparently wasn't a fan of repeat signs or ditto marks, so each part folded out into eight or ten pages. The Peanut Vendor was twelve pages long, and consisted of the same figure repeated again and again for twelve pages. I read each measure carefully to make sure that all the measures were identical in every respect. I called Ochs and said, "The Peanut Vendor is the same figure one hundred and thirty six times. Why not just once with a repeat sign?" "Tom Coller wrote that part", Bob explained. I told him, "Tom's going to make a great monk.." Ochs and I became good friends and the Combo had quite a few gigs.
During that summer, the Bob Ochs Combo drove up to northern Minnesota and camped in tents in a trailer park near the Ochs family summer vacation home in Park Rapids. Bob had actually booked a couple of afternoon gigs for us--one in a small restaurant in Nevis, and another in Walker, where we played in a giant tent that was used for big revival meetings . We set up on the dirt floor and began to play our bebop songs. Admission was twenty-five cents, and we had only one customer all day. He was from the nearby Indian reservation, dressed in feathered regalia with bells on his ankles. He wore moccasins and stepped quietly around in the dirt , doing a shuffling jangling dance. He danced on and on while we played Elevation, Hothouse, Over The Rainbow, and our theme song , Charlie Ventura's High On an Open Mike. Whatever tempo we struck , he just kept on shuffling and jangling at his own pace. Our drummer, Conway Villars, shouted out , “He's marching to a different tom-tom!”, and we all broke up.Today when I hear Elevation, the classic Gerry Mulligan piece for the 1948 Elliot Lawrence band, I still think of that Indian in Walker, Minnesota
Being in a band was as exciting and rewarding as I imagined it to be. Word got around that I could play and I began to meet a whole new cast of characters and discovered that I needed to be versatile and quick so I could fit in any kind of band and, as often as not, play piano parts that I had never seen in situations I had never considered.
I joined the Musicians Union. One of my first gigs with real professional players was subbing one night at The Midway Gardens on University Avenue in St Paul. The drummer, Elliot Fine, was the leader and we had to play for a roller skating act. The drummer yelled “Temptation!”, the bass player yelled “C!” and we were off with the sax playing lead. I loved it. At the bridge I had the melody. Talk about faking. Later the drummer yelled “Offenbach!” and everybody began to play the Barcarolle from Gaiety Parisienne. The male skater clamped his jaws around a leather belt and began to spin his partner, who was hanging on by her teeth on the other end, in giant circles parallel to the floor. They came nearer and nearer the piano until her skates were whistling WHIFF WHIFF WHIFF so close to my face I began cringing down around the bass notes. Later I told the drummer I better buy an insurance policy to do this work, and he said to be sure and get the roller skate rider.
One night I went to play the first set at the Jolly Miller Room at the Nicollet Hotel in Minneapolis. The piano player was going to be a half hour late. The leader was Cecil Golly, (“Music By Golly”) and he was not pleased to see me. Nor was I pleased to confront the stack of piano parts that loomed before me. Reading was not my bag. Sight reading stock arrangements without chord symbols was for me a matter of listening to what everybody was doing and trying to do something appropriate while counting the measures. The bass notes were often helpful. On this occasion there were brass, woodwinds and strings in the band, so I wasn't carrying the lead and was able to lurk and listen. The theme song was Linger Awhile, which I had heard on radio broadcasts from the Jolly Miller Room. So I knew about the bell tone between the notes “ling” and “-er”, and as the set began and we played the theme I rang it out precisely each time . Mr. Golly, as I probably called him, said “Very nice.” After that I could do no wrong.
But mostly the gigs were jazz jobs because that was the popular music of the time, and at nightclubs or dances or wedding parties, or in movies or on the radio, it was likely you were hearing music generated by dance band instruments: saxes, trombones, and trumpets and acoustic basses, lots of piano, and singers (I don't remember calling them vocalists) who were most often not the headliners. Strings were still important, but beginning to vanish from the landscape. Amplified guitars had not yet overwhelmed the industry and transformed our culture, and pianos were practically everywhere. Even the cowboy band on the WDGY Barn Dance had a piano.
When I got to the University of Minnesota in the spring of 1951 (after a couple of quarters at Stanford University), I began to play jam session concerts at the student union with other young jazz players I had met on campus. Among them were bassists Dick Thompson and Ted Hughart, drummers Jack Cottrell and Shelly Goldfus, trumpeters Dick Zemlin, Jack Coan and Glenn Baxter, and the saxophonist Dave Karr, who turned everyone around with his brilliant playing and musicanship.
The first time I played with Dave Karr a big smile came over my face. So this is what it's all about--how it feels to play with a really good musician who is far more accomplished and experienced than you and who plays with feeling and sensitivity. This was worth waiting for, and now that I know how this feels, I must make sure that this happens more often. Karr's presence in the ensemble made all of us sound and play better.
Dave had recently arrived from New York City and enrolled at the University. He was a year or two older than us , maybe twenty-two or twenty-three, and he had some professional experience with name bands, and he knew a lot of the big league cats and had played with them in New York. Along with Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Alan Broadbent, Bob Dorough, and a handful of others, Dave Karr must be included in my list of the most gifted musicians I ever ran across. Among them both Al Cohn and Dave Karr were profoundly influential on my life and music, and I felt privileged to know them and count them as friends.
Because I was under twenty-one, I really couldn't spend too much time in nightclubs, which is what I was itching to do. When jazz acts would come to town and play at the Club Carnival or Vic's in Minneapolis or the Flame in St. Paul, my friends and I would sometimes just hang around outside, digging the music that leaked out , and sometimes catching a glimpse of the musicians, maybe even having a chat. When Louis Armstrong played the Carnival, we lurked around by the parking lot and got to chat with Earl Hines and Barney Bigard. I can't remember what was said, but I know we were trying to be as hip and cool as we could be. We were hipsters after all. We knew about tag endings and coda signs.
Bob Crea and Bob Kunin, two excellent saxophonists, were working all the time in jazz clubs, and through them we met some bigtime players who would hit town for a week or two, long enough to shake everybody up. We met and got to play with Conte Candoli, Serge Chaloff, Charlie Ventura and Lou Levy. Our friend Don Specht was playing piano with the house quartet at the Flame. We'd hang around to say hello to him on intermissions, and we got to hear and see some of the big acts that played the Flame: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Charlie Ventura's band with Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, and Johnny Hodges' band with Lawrence Brown and Sonny Greer.
It was through Specht that I played my first nightclub jazz job. He asked me to sub for him at the Flame for two or three nights when he had to miss the first set. I was especially thrilled to get this call, because Art Tatum was the headliner that week..Tatum had John Collins on guitar and Slam Stewart on bass. One thing I noticed while watching Tatum for a few sets was that he could play the same piano arrangement in different keys if he wanted to, and the two sidemen were cracking up trying to outguess where Tatum might go next. I went home fairly early each night because I had school the next morning and homework to do.
When I closed my eyes I would see a piano keyboard, and I’d drift off to sleep that way, not hearing the music, but visualizing the voicings on the keyboard. I knew this is what I wanted to be involved with for the rest of my life.
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