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Maybe some explaining is in order. A few intrepid souls who are not members of my family may have seen pictures of my father and mother getting married. My favorite shot is the one where my dad is happily holding a crystal serving plate of donuts, looking pleased beyond belief in his rented white dinner jacket. The picture–my mother is in the frame too–was taken on April 29, 1950, at my mother’s parents’ house in the center of Fitchburg, Mass., before my grandfather bought an old farmhouse on the outskirts of town. My maternal grandmother, who supplied the donuts and was a bit of a wag, observed when I was born on January 29, 1951, that my gestational period was “nine months and twenty minutes.”
But, getting back to Basie, when the last donut was eaten my mother and father somehow were conveyed (my mother didn’t drive until 1960 and my father stopped driving when he had a rear-ender in 1948) to a Boston hotel, where, if one would infer and amplify on my grandmother’s sideways look of the world, my gestational clock started ticking. That night–for the wedding had taken place in the afternoon–my parents rose from their hotel room, impossibly young at 23 and 19, and took a cab to a night club (look it up in Wikipedia if you are unfamiliar with the term) called Storyville, and heard Count Basie’s band featuring Joe Williams.
My mother told me a lot of embarrassing stories about me and my sister, who was born as soon after me as she could be in the rich Irish Catholic tradition into which she–my mother–married, and one of the thing she tossed out once was that most of my feeding took place while she–my mother–was listening to Joe Williams and Count Basie.
It’s 1961. My dad is an arranger, a part time fill-in drummer at Disneyland, a repeated bandleader trying every desperate measure at his disposal to make the big bands come back. We live in Santa Ana, where thousands of acres of orange groves are being uprooted and replaced with tract housing. My dad converts the garage of our new tract home in the south side of Santa Ana into a teaching and writing studio. He borrows money from a family friend and sets up Dick Fenno Publications to tap into the uncertain waters of the stage band movement which is popping up in odd places like Texas and Lexington, Kentucky. Armed with little more than 4 charts he wrote when he was the arranging instructor at the doomed Westlake School of Modern American Music, a book with all the secondary schools in America and a two-sided flyer with the name BAND DIRECTOR printed as the addressee, my dad had the nerve to take the plunge with 5 kids aged between 10 and 2. One of the charts written at Westlake was called “I Remember Basie.” Above his desk at the garage studio and the incredible second story office which he rented when the charts started coming in from the printer were eight-by-ten glossies of Stan Kenton, Glenn Miller, and Count Basie. The orders come in for Dick Fenno Publications.
My dad plops me down in front of the Basie band at Disneyland (the original, in Anaheim) without comment on my birthday. Basie’s band is playing in Tommorowland, across from the GE house of the future or whatever the place was called. The band members are neatly dressed and wander around talking and smoking while Basie ascends to the piano with Sonny Paine, the drummer. Basie plays a gospel-based tremolo, then another, then 2 bars of eight note triplets. Somehow the band has miraculously gotten themselves onstage and picked up their horns, all within the span of this 10-second introduction–no longer than that. That’s when the band came in, Sonny Paine kicking them. Maybe you know the tune. Imagine the notes, based on the words of the song.
<I> <Can’t> <STOP> BREATHE <LOVING> <You>.
At the end of the third note of letter A, where the pause takes place between the words STOP and LOVING was the most exquisite space. I can still feel it, and when I play the chart now in my band it’s no less a thrill. Back then, when I’d been playing saxophone for six months, most of my practicing taking place in the family sedan, it was a revelation to understand that these guys were showing me that space is just as important as notes. The band was an extension of Basie, and the concept of space was central to his pianistic style. A strand of musical DNA got into my ear that night at Disneyland, sitting in front of the toughest lead alto player in the business, Marshal Royal, who put a hurtin’ on me. I remember the ride home, late at night for me, but feeling emotionally wrung out in a really positive way. Can you imagine a twelve-year-old seeing the Los Angeles Dodgers for the first time, with Koufax, Drysdale, Gilliam, Roseboro, Wills? Well, that happened too, but it just didn’t throw the switch like the Basie band did for me.
I went to college a couple years after my dad died, I stuck around after I graduated from a very stuffy university music department, because the local junior college band needed a baritone player. My boyhood buddy Art Baron was actually playing trombone on Duke Ellington’s band, and so I knew that anything could happen. The Cabrillo College Jazz Ensemble became notorious for going to jazz pow-wows and, rather than playing the ballistics most bands were playing at the time, digging into “Who’s Sorry Now?” at breakneck speed while exaggerating the dynamics. We left judge’s panels flat-footed and gasping. Thanks Leader Lile Crews, 1st Trumpet Billy Theurer, Bassist Steve Bennett, and most of all Altoist/Flutist Paul Contos . . .
One fateful night the Cabrillo band was to have opened the show at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium for the Stan Kenton band, which was on its usual endless string of one-nighters. When we got to the hall, we found the doors padlocked. A half hour before the show Stan pulled up on his bus and found our band and maybe 50 people who were milling about, wondering what would happen. (Remember now, any recovery of a contract requires the musicians show up at the gig, on time and ready to play.) Stan–in his big booming voice–asked how many people had paid to see the show. As I remember the scene, most of the milling crowd had. “Well, there’s just one thing we can do then. Let’s find out who has the key and open this place up.” Off he went with Jack, the road manager, to find a personage who had the authority and the key.
We opened for Stan Kenton that night. You don’t want to get in a hammer-clobbering contest with Stan’s band. Between the ten brass players and the 28-inch ride cymbal that Peter Erskine was playing, that strategy, especially in the boomy old Santa Cruz Civic, would have been pointless. So Lile took the opposite approach. We did a 40 minute set of straight ahead stuff, liberally leavened with Basie charts, including “Who’s Sorry Now?“. And we knocked the small but eager crowd and the Kenton band on their ears.
I could go on and on about Basie, about trips down to Disneyland from Santa Cruz because on summer nights you could hear 4 sets of the band for $12.50, about seeing Basie the night that Duke Ellington died, at the Paramount in Oakland, about the speculation when Marshal was relieved of his position in the center of the saxophone section, about how Basie returned to the piano chair in a motorized wheelchair, or how sometimes my dad’s classmate at Schillinger House, Nat Pierce, would fill in for him on piano. I’ve seen the band hundreds of times, and it never ceased to gas me!
Now that I’m trying to get this band reanimated, I’m happy to report that we’ll be recording new demo tunes at Promiseland Church on August 21, 2009. Playing first tenor saxophone will be Tony Campise, who played alto with Stan’s band that fateful night in Santa Cruz. The other saxes are me on alto, Tony Bray on the other tenor, and Paul Baker on baritone. Trumpets look like they’ll be Kevin Flatt and Pete Claggett. Ulrican Williams will be on trombone. Piano is a little up in the air, Ulrich Ellison on guitar, Kris Afflerbach on bass, my brother Jimmy on drums of course. Jimmy will supply male vocals and Marilyn will do the part of the canary, with Jennifer Zaveleta.
Especially for this event, Butch Miles will sit in on a takedown I cooked up on a Joe Williams/Count Basie collaboration called “All Right, OK, You Win.” Here’s a very young Butch Miles with the Basie band and Joe Williams doing the chart I took down, one of the recordings we’ll do in the 21st.
Yeah, I remember Basie. As luck would have it, I played with Kenton, the Glenn Miller band and the Modernaires on various bus rides across this and other continents. When I married my ex-wife, her father set the entertainment budget at whatever it takes, so we hired the Capp-Pierce Juggernaut, a Los Angeles-based big band that plays from the Basie book.
I feel lucky that I played with two of the three photos in my dad’s studio.
But no band’s sound floats my boat, or has influenced me more than Basie. That DNA that got into my system all these years ago keeps spinning.
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