Rediscovering a Genuine Jazz Genius

Lately I’ve been in a funk--the white meaning of funk, if you have to choose. Things are not going so well for me. The folks who used to call me for gigs aren’t doing it any more. (To be fair, our band is one of the few in town that seems to be working, 3-4 times a month.) I was fragging my sorry ass around the house tonight as Jan packs to go to Milwaukee for a week. I’ll be alone, responsible for the pills that keep me going but deprive me of adrenaline, the real enemy of someone like me with heart disease. By the time she gets back I’ll have played a couple gigs and managed to talk to a few people about a business idea I have. In between, I’ll nap and think increasingly about the friends that have been claimed by the Grim Reaper.

From Wedding: Austin Club 7/18/09

But, for better or worse, I am a jazz musician. The first music I heard coming into this world was Count Basie, Joe Williams, Bird, Duke, Lester Young. Like a baseball player, a jazz musician starts young and stretches it as far as she or he can. When it’s done, it’s done. But there are ways of staying in the game--either game, baseball or jazz--like coaching, like playing in increasingly compromised (“square”) bands. Generally lowering the expectations accompanies the onset of middle age, and that’s more of a burden for me than driving a cab in New York City was in 1977. At least then I could park in front of Stryker’s and drive friends downtown after their gigs ended.

I never quite made it to the bigs, what baseball players call the Big Show. I played on road bands at the very end of road bands, when the busses were old and the hops between gigs were long, when the quality of the bands had slipped to the point that the professional touring bands that I played in were dwarfed in power and swing by the college band I was in (Cabrillo College, in Aptos, California) and certainly by the LA Jazz Workshop band that I played in when I moved to Los Angeles in 1979--a crucible of musicians who have since made first-rate careers for themselves. After a series of ignominious bus rides, I moved to New York and drove a cab, then to Los Angeles and, after starting a family, felt the need to withdraw from music altogether. I layed out for nearly ten years and made a career in publications work. In the early nineties, as my marriage started to fall apart, I was drawn back to making music. I had a lot of good friends who helped me get back in circulation, first in rehearsal bands, then working dance bands, then I was drawn like a moth to Jan in Austin. I wanted my kids to know that I was the guy who owned the saxophones in the closet, and I think I was successful to a great degree.

As time passed I explored things as a resident of Austin, not Orange County. I found myself playing a lot of unrelated music, the common denominator being the preponderance of the blues: R&B, Tejano, show bands, pit bands, big bands that swung to a lesser or greater extent. When a certain local bandleader with an overactive thyroid canned me, he left me with a concept that could be rendered into this equation:

R&B + Sinatra + Classic Rock (a few) + Tower of Power + charts for all the parts = wedding band

From Wedding: Austin Club 7/18/09

And so Original Recipe was born. See, this bandleader, who was bald, by the way, had no charts. So everyone who came on board had to memorize the parts, which no one knew. It may sound simple, but it has something of a dialog between Chico Mark and Dr. Hackenbush about it. I READ trivial music and MEMORIZE what I deem to be significant and challenging.

Five years ago I made a cold call to Princess Cruises to see if they needed a guy like me. They did, and I worked for them, playing in the show bands at sea. I left the Original Recipe Band to brother Jimmy when I went to sea. But even when I was in the Baltic for the summer I still wrote charts. The Original Recipe BIG Band is my project now. I’m writing furiously to make a deadline for a demo recording.

From Wedding: Austin Club 7/18/09

The ORB did a wedding last Saturday, which, while not perfect, was pretty damned good, and probably as good an effort as can be expected outside a major metropolitan area like New York or LA. Brendan came down and played some relief drums so Jimmy could line up with the canaries, and I am well and pleased with the kick-ass way he’s drumming.

At every one of these signposts, I think I lost something–the jazz aesthetic. Tonight I reconnected with some of that through the services of the iTunes music store. I had a phrase rolling around in my head from an album by the pre-Rassan Roland Kirk. I “went” to the music store and there was the album containing the tune containing the phrase. It was offered for sale for less than $7. I bought it. As I listened to this Roland Kirk album I hadn’t heard since college, I felt myself relax and bathed in the feelings of sometime in the early seventies. I remembered how it felt be wanted by Selective Service. I felt like I was going to Keystone to hear Kirk, or the Berkeley Civic Auditorium to hear Chick Corea or Gil Scott-Heron.

Really. Music is some powerful ju-ju. Perhaps musicians ought not be trusted with the emotional language that it carries. I feel renewed now, and I am realizing that many of the qualities I like about Roland Kirk are in Tony Campise–specifically their abilities to be able to execute whatever their imaginations dish up from the subconscious. I need to talk to Tony about that. Gotta do some more hanging out with him.

Next time I get in the dumps I’ll know to look at Roland Kirk, who overcame the damnedest obstacles imaginable.

Pollyanna

From Pollyanna jpegs

Of all the motivating things that got me to insist that this band be put back together–and, for that matter, for it to be founded originally back in Los Angeles nearly thirty (THIRTY!) years ago–none is more contradictory than one song that my father wrote back in 1964, Pollyanna. But I wonder how much internal pressure I’ve had and how much is coming from my siblings.

From Pollyanna jpegs

We were living in little more than a shack on the beach in Fairfield, Connecticut while my dad was setting up a partnership called Heritage Square Music Publications with John Bunch (not John Bunch the piano player, John Bunch the adman and part-time drummer).

This much we all agree on. I remember the winter on Lalley Blvd., between Edwards St. and Fairfield Beach Rd. It was a house that should not have been standing, much less occupied in the winter by a family of five children, two adults, and a long-haired dachshund. All around us were the prosperous and well-heeled, some of whom were classmates at Tomlinson Junior High school where my sister Noreen and I were students. We were looked down upon for having a dad in the music business, and for being a big family in a drafty sea cottage. We had our share of conflagrations too. The heater in the house caught fire one cold night and we were saved by the quick response of the Fairfield Fire Department.

The accepted story was that, lacking the means to buy my mother an anniversary gift, my father decided to write a song to the innocence and completeness of his love with a woman, that being my mother.

I remember a few things about this song, because I was working at my father’s office (which spectacularly burned to the ground, along with the entire inventory of Heritage Square Music Publications). I remember my dad telling Lou Fratturo, one of his friends and an amazing alto saxophone player, that he’d written a song with a long form verse and chorus, just like all the songs in the thirties were written. I remember him playing it in manuscript for Lou, who responded favorably.

My dad was trained as an engineer, so his gateway to musical architecture was not emotional. He attended Shillinger House, where Joseph Schillinger’s method of musical composition was taught students to analyze musical works on graph paper.

Dad wrote amazing stuff, and like all arrangers he had a bag of tricks he drew from when he was working.

When I first heard the song that was to become Pollyanna I heard a lot of Duke Ellington influence. Steal from the best, I say. I was 13 at the time, so picking out an Ellington influence may have been calculated wishful thinking on my part or perhaps something my father said that my young precocious ears heard. More than likely, a lucky guess.

I have my doubts about the family legend that this song was a gift of tender affection from my father to my mother, because there was so little affection going around at that time. When I think back to that time I remember a lot of heated arguments, most of them out of the range of the younger children. This could explain why Noreen and I remember this period a good deal differently than our siblings. The song could have been presented as a truce. I don’t know where my mother would have heard it, because we didn’t have a piano at the house and I don’t remember her ever coming to the office. A demo of the song was recorded, just to cloud things up a little bit, by a combo led by John Bunch, the piano player, at the studio in BBDO, the ad firm, where John Bunch, my father’s partner, worked. I don’t know if any of these recordings survived. There were three other tunes on the record with incredible contributions from Toots Thielemans on harmonica and whistling along with his guitar, and Bob Wilbur on soprano saxophone.

My father died in 1967. He was 40 years old.

When my band had a steady gig at the Playboy Club in Los Angeles in 1981 my mother came out to hear us. I had written a very basic chart of Pollyanna, and Laigh Langly sang it for her, but she seemed indifferent to it when we played it. Nevertheless, the myth has grown over the years, amplified in its telling over holiday tables and 4th of July picnics.

A lot of emotional weight has been loaded on me for years about Pollyanna. My sisters always ask about the song, even though I don’t think any of them has a recording of it, or even a lead sheet.

Well, I’ve had enough of this song. I’m going to record it, but then I’m through. I admire it as a work of music, in the abstracted, architectural style that my father favored before his death in 1967. I’m writing a chart right now which ought to, in the words of Slim Galliard, “nail it to the roof.” Jimmy will sing it, I’m thinking, and because this is the way of the world, we will never play this song again. Why? Because we only play what people want to hear, and that’s not on the event horizon for Pollyanna.

From Pollyanna jpegs

But I’ll get the job done. Being the dutiful oldest of his brood, I will do my father’s memory proud. There will be tightly voiced flutes in the verse, the horns will bounce off the melody, never overpowering the singer, then a lugubrious tenor solo (which I hope Tony Campise will play), then back to the bridge and out, with the singer hanging on a sharp eleven just before the final resolution in the coda.

None of the dark times on Lalley Blvd. need to be relived in the retelling of this song. It’s just a song, and if it’s something more for other people, well, I can’t help that. As for me, once I get it out of my “In” box I’ll be better off.

Here are the lyrics:

(Verse)

I’ve heard it said
That a man should love a woman.
Here’s what I heard
From a man who loved his woman:
He obviously adored her,
Why then should he be sad?
She smiled through the bad times,
Few were the good times
That she ever had.

(Chorus)

Smile all the while Pollyanna,
You know what tomorrow will bring.
Our dream of a trip to Vienna
Is real, keeps you young, funny thing.

You walk to the end of a rainbow,
And laugh when you find nothing there.
In spring, when the cold winter winds blow,
Your voice is the sound of a prayer.

I wish old dame misfortune
Would for once turn her head and you’d be
A queen high in a throne dear,
And your most loyal knight would be me.

Oh, don’t ever change pretty pug nose.
You’re warm and you’re real, you’re alive.
As sure as the moon in the sky glows
Things have to look up, we’ll arrive.

And then, your special magic,
Showered on me every day,
Will shine like a light from our window at night.
“They’re in love,” all the world will say.

Words and music by Dick Fenno (ASCAP), copyright 1964 by Heritage Square Music Publishers.