The Ballad of Jim Baum

I’m having a rough time writing this. I’ve been putting it off for weeks. It's been weeks since I got on an airplane and headed toward California and a memorial service for one of my oldest, dearest friends, Jim Baum.

Jim was sixty-one, working as a gigging drummer and a taxi driver in Santa Cruz, where we met nearly 40 years ago. He was the drummer in the Cabrillo Jazz Ensemble when I started playing second alto, balancing my last 2 years at UCSC, where I was very much a different sort of a musician. I sat next to Paul Contos, who has been leading the Monterey Festival High School Jazz Band for quite a while now. The bass player was Steve Bennett, who died early this spring from cancer, but carved out quite a career for himself as a bass player and as a pilot. Paul Nagel played piano in the band, Bob Contos (Paul’s brother) played first trumpet. A crazy surfer kid named Danny Young played trumpet, next to him a crazy hippie named Robin Anderson. Dennis Broughton, who founded California Brazil Camp, played congas and percussion. Lile Crews directed the band. I can say that that band, of all the big bands I was in since, had something special, a swinging edge that is sometimes lost when jazz is taught and studied in college.

A lot of that can be attributed to the rhythm section of Nagel, Bennett, Broughton, and Baum, who should have set up a law firm and made themselves partners to use that terrific combination of names.

Toward the end of my first semester at Cabrillo, we were devastated to hear that Nagel and Baum had been offered a road gig, playing with Robben Ford, backing up Jimmy Witherspoon. Replacements were hastily arranged, but the spirit of the band was gone when Paul Nagel and Jim Baum left town.

By the time Jim got back to town, there was an emerging scene in town, revolving around the Cabrillo Band. Jim was playing in a band called Fafner (the dragon from Wagner’s Ring cycle, as I was learning in my other musical life across town at UCSC) with Bennett on bass, Bob & Paul Contos on trumpet and reeds, and various other characters. Fafner was one of those bands that was delightfully doomed from the start, unlike, for example Harper’s Bizarre, a loccal band that DID make good because of management getting them to hold some lines.

I graduated UCSC and chose to stick around town and play in the Cabrillo Band, which by that time was really swinging. I went on the road with a couple bands, but I always came back to Santa Cruz. There were gigs there, not enough to make a living, but enough to challenge me.

Jim came back too, when the gig with Spoon fell apart, and every time thereafter when he toured or moved for greener pastures.

In the next few years, Jim and I played together a lot, mostly in de facto ensembles set up to cover someone’s wedding we’d managed to snag. Jim had a day gig: playing with Don McCaslin outdoors at Cooper House. Aside from the fact that this band made virtually nothing for their 7-day-a-week efforts (and they were playing right across the street from the Santa Cruz Local of the Musicians Union) the band raised the jazz visibility quotient in Santa Cruz, proving that hippies can play jazz too. Predictably, when a muralist and part-time conga player built the mural of Warmth, McCaslin’s band, Jim was in the center, almost like Christ at the last supper.

Back then, Jim drove a 1941 Plymouth businessman’s coupe, a car built for salesmen who needed a place for their sample cases. With a half seat behind the drive and the long wheelbase of an American car of the day, the gray primered Plymouth Jim fit his drum cases into the space behind the front seat, where the sample cases once were carried all across the midwest. David O’Connor drove a bright yellow businessman’s coupe, making for a strange fleet in the musician division, Santa Cruz chapter.

Whenever one of my buddies from back east showed up for a few days, I’d call Baum and we’d hang out, so the Visitors from the East could get some idea of what being a working musician in a small coastal town in California was like. We’d scoop up Baum after the Cooper House gig and go out to Tampico on lower Pacific Avenue for enchiladas. I remember one time that Jim surprised a New Yorker by saying his car was unlocked, and flabbergasted him by showing him that the keys were still in the ignition.

Then there was the LED watch. Jim knew a guy in the business, like he knew a guy in almost any business. Anyway, this particular guy offered to make him a watch with virtually any phrase of two words or less programmed into the watch. So after a few minutes’ thought Jim selected CHOW TIME as the phrase which showed up on the watch for a few seconds before the time was displayed. Jim would ask a pretty girl on the gig, and there were a lot of pretty girls on the gig, to ask him what time it was. Then he’d grin and punch the button on the side of the watch, saying, just as it was displaying CHOW TIME, “It’s CHOW TIME!”

Santa Cruz was an interesting place in those days. I was playing with a band called Sofrito, which was started by a conga player from Puerto Rico named Raul Rivera. One of our steady gigs was at the Crow’s Nest, a chophouse at the mouth of the yacht harbor. After a while I was wotking there with the first iteration of Scary Lala, a band led by Larry Scala with Tom Moelering on bass, Jim, and me on reeds. Scary Lala copped two nights at the Crow’s Nest, all good news for me because I was living within walking distance of the place. There was a LOT of cocaine going through Santa Cruz at the time. Legend had it that the giant seagoing trimarans which looked to be pleasure craft were disappearing from the harbor for a couple months at a time were returning from South America with one pontoon filled with white powder. We were spoiled at the Crow’s Nest by folks who genuinely dug what we were doing. Jim was into the scene. He never missed an opportunity to have a snort (of any sort), nor did he let too many good-looking gals go without enveloping them like the smooth operator he was. I remember his favorite line with the ladies was, “So, xxxx, do you ever go out on dates or anything like that?”

In 1977, I loaded up a VM microbus and headed out for New York City. Jim came along, to test himself musically. We drove all the way to North Platte, Nebraska before we stopped for anything more than gas. I had driven all the way from Santa Cruz, and Jim was popping bennies and babbling on like a beatnik that he was. Somewhere east of Grand Island I heard him calling me from the driver’s seat as I was napping and I saw that Jim had our entire stash of bennies on his tongue. He was really sailing then, so I decided to move up to the front of the bus and make sure Jim was cool. Somewhere near Omaha Jim suggested it might be a good idea for me to drive. I settled into the driver’s seat, he went crashed on the bed in the back. The next time I heard from Jim we were in Pennsylvania. I was still driving, and I had tried at each stop for fuel to wake Jim without result. It wasn’t until we crossed the last mountains into New Jersey that Jim woke up.

Jim stayed longer in New York than I did. He moved into the city, while I needed to stay with Sharon Wong and her then-husband Mark Buchalter in Englewood, New Jersey to stay remotely sane. Famously, Jim, whose expressed intention was to play with Bill Evans, got to play a few tunes with Bill when he was between drummers after Elliot Zigmon left the trio. He didn’t get the gig, but it was Mission Accomplished. The van accumulated sufficient parking tickets in the city to render it property of the City of New York when it was finally towed off for a violation.

I returned to Santa Cruz and re-orchestrated a resurgent Sofrito, but what I really wanted to do was play in Woody Herman’s band. My friend on the band who was trying to leave told me that I should think about building a reputation outside of Surf City, so I packed up and moved to Los Angeles to do just that. If memory serves, Jim came back to Santa Cruz just as I was leaving, in 1979. I drove off in a 1959 VW bug to an uncertain place where I would have to prove myself all over again.

The next time I was Jim was at my wedding, October 10, 1981, at the Balboa Bay Club. Jim was there with a redhead who was carrying his child. I believe she was a singer. Somewhere there’s a picture of the Santa Cruz contingent at the wedding. I gather that that child grew up and now lives in Portland.

Soon after, Jim met Gayle Mozée, whose brother Ben played tenor in the Cabrillo band. Gayle was from what I hear pregnant, abandoned and working on a law degree. Jim stepped in and took over the fathering of Gayle’s child. By the time I met them as a couple they had two of their own. Gayle was working in San Jose, with a daily dose of Highway 17, each direction. Jim seemed like the perfect domestic husband, working gigs at night and taking care of the kids by day. I know there are temptations on the gig, and they come looking for you. Some temptations Jim had already established that he was susceptible to.

I don’t presume to judge Gayle, I didn’t know her well enough for that. They always seemed a model tight couple to me whenever I saw them. But I know what it feels to be deprived of music by a loved one, and it’s a lot worse that a mouse being deprived of its cheese. Some time in the nineties Gayle told Jim to stop playing music until the kids were grown. Jim being Jim, he shrugged and got a job at the Ace Hardware store on the west side of Santa Cruz. With me it was more subtle than that, no ultimatum.

Jim returned to playing just a couple years ago. The kids were well launched. I’m sure he felt that his job was done.

I went to the hardware store in the middle of May, 2010, when we’d come out for my daughter’s college graduation. Jim had quit a month before and nobody seemed to know how to contact him. I shrugged, resolved to look him up when I had more time, and headed up the coast.

What happened next is the part I cannot understand. Gayle and Jim were having trouble. Jim moved from their westside home to an apartment in Live Oak. Here’s a pretty well-balanced account from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, October 7, 2010, by Wallace Baine:

It will likely be a long time, perhaps years, before the shock of Jimmy Baum's death gives way to warm reflections on his life and music. But a memorial event Sunday at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center is, said its organizers, a first step in that direction.
On Sept. 24, the 61-year-old Baum, a well-known and accomplished jazz drummer in Santa Cruz, was shot and killed by his estranged wife Gayle Mozee-Baum, who then turned the gun on herself. The murder-suicide has shaken the tight-knit Santa Cruz musical community, which is expected to turn out in huge numbers Sunday at Kuumbwa for what is being billed a celebration of his life.

"The loss is just incalculable," said Santa Cruz bassist Stan Poplin, a bandmate and friend of Baum's going back almost 40 years. "We'll all miss him terribly. I lost two friends in this. I loved Gayle, too. And in this celebration, we're just not going to have any negativity."

Poplin said friends were aware that the couple had a troubled marriage. After 25 years together, they had in recent months separated and Baum had moved out of the family home. But, said Poplin, the seriousness of the Baums' situation was not well-known.

"I don't know how to understand how it came to this," said Poplin. "Jimmy downplayed a lot of it. We could see there was trouble. But the most he would say was, Well, Gayle's having problems.'"

The Kuumbwa is the natural place to gather in Baum's memory. Baum played a role in the famed jazz club's early days as the drummer in the unofficial Kuumbwa house band. Baum, in fact, is a significant part of Santa Cruz's jazz history.
He came to Santa Cruz 40 years ago from his original home town of Atascadero in San Luis Obispo County. At Atascadero High, Baum's father was the head of the music department and young Jimmy, along with his two younger brothers, excelled in academics, music and athletics. Besides playing trumpet in the school band, Jimmy was also the quarterback of the school football team.

"He was kind of a god," said Bill Bosch of Boulder Creek, a bass player who was a freshman at Atascadero High when Jim Baum was a senior. The two later became bandmates with the popular 1980s Santa Cruz soul band the Cool Jerks.

When Baum first moved to Santa Cruz, he hooked up with Poplin, pianist Paul Nagel and the young guitarist Robben Ford in a blues band that showcased Ford's preternatural talents. The band caught the ear of the legendary blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon who soon hired the whole line-up to be his backing band on the road. In his early 20s, Jimmy Baum found himself playing on big stages all over the world including at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1973.

When the wild ride with Witherspoon came to its inevitable end, Baum bounced around throughout the 1970s, moving to New York, where he worked as a cab driver while studying jazz drumming. When he arrived back in Santa Cruz in late 1970s, he instantly became part of the downtown Santa Cruz scene centered around the Cooper House, where he sat in with Don McCaslin's Warmth. He re-upped with Poplin and began playing serious jazz gigs with the Hy-Tones with Poplin, Nagel and saxophonist Paul Contos.

Though he was playing in a number of styles and taking just about every gig he could find, Baum, said friends, nursed a fierce devotion to jazz, particularly upbeat, swinging jazz.

"Jimmy was not a competitive guy. He had no ego," said Bosch, who had played three separate gigs with Baum in the two weeks preceding his death. "Throughout his life, he would take lessons from all sorts of people, just to learn. It was all about getting better at playing drums."

"Jimmy loved to talk shop," said friend and veteran jazz drummer Charles Levin. "He swung hard. He had a great groove. Swinging is not something you can really teach. It really transcends technique in a lot of ways and he had it."

Baum had one son by a previous marriage and three sons with Gayle. In the 1990s, Baum surprised friends and music colleagues by announcing he was done with playing music. "He decided to be a stay-at-home dad," said Poplin. "It was a big sacrifice for him."

In the last couple of years, however, Baum jumped back into regular gigging and was in fact playing drums on stage the night before he was killed.

"It's beyond processing," former bandmate Paul Nagel said of Baum's violent death. "He was so personable and self-deprecating. And he was really well-liked."

Nagel, who now lives in Massachusetts, had lost touch with Baum until 2008, when Baum called shortly after he heard that Nagel had been diagnosed with leukemia. As a bandmate, Nagel particularly remembers Jimmy's coolness under pressure. Years ago, the two were playing back-up to rock legend Chuck Berry. As the concert approached, Berry was nowhere to be found.

"So, Jim just jumps up and starts ad-libbing to the crowd, like a stand-up comedian. The crowd was getting restless to see Chuck Berry and Jimmy just took down the pressure. I remember thinking, Wow, that guy's got guts.'"

Stan Poplin, who met his wife through his association with Jimmy Baum, points to Baum's self-awareness on stage as a mark of professionalism.

"Jimmy was always aware of people dancing. Most musicians don't think too much about dancers. But for Jimmy, he kept an eye on them. Because, he said, If they're not groovin', you're not doing your job.'"

JIMMY BAUM

BORN: Feb. 12, 1949


DIED: Sept. 24, 2010


HOME: Santa Cruz


OCCUPATION: Jazz/blues drummer, formerly with the Robben Ford Band and the Jimmy Witherspoon Band, as well as the Hy-Tones and Cool Jerks and several other groups and combos.


SURVIVORS: Sons Stephen John Jacques of Portland, Ore., Cameron, Tjader and Parker Mozee-Baum from Santa Cruz
SERVICES: A celebration of the life and music of Jimmy Baum will take place at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center from 2-6 p.m. on Sunday. The music will continue at Bocci's Cellar after the Kuumbwa event. A fund in his memory has been created at Bay Federal Credit Union to help his four sons. Those who wish may contribute to this fund or any charity in Jim's name.

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So what really happened? My guess is we’ll never know. The forces between them were so much like icebergs with only a small fraction of their mass exposed. In deference to his sons, three of whom have lost their mother in this tragedy, and due to the fact that I have no real insights into the dynamics the couple was laboring under, I choose not to condemn Gayle out of hand.

But, if I could ask her, I’d love to pose this one question about the tragic events of September 24, 2010. That question is this: “Gayle, as an officer of the court, as one who stands up for justice, what makes you think you can condemn someone you love—and yourself—to execution? Do you have the right to declare any of Jim’s actions worthy of the penalty of death? And can you justify the pain you’ve caused to your sons, your family and your friends?”

I’ll never know the answers to these questions.

Two Summer Camps

Just about forty years ago, in the hot southern California summer of 1970, I had my one and only experience with summer camp. I was nineteen and the world was seemingly falling apart. Personally, I had spent a year at UC Santa Cruz, wondering if I really had what it takes to major in music. My family was adrift somewhere in Ohio, having left me high and dry when I was a senior in high school. My beautiful college campus had turned upside down after May 4, 1970. Classes were mostly suspended. Some were just cancelled. I had been doing my best as an emancipated minor to keep my life on the other side of the line with respect to the draft, and so, seeing so many of my high school buddies sucked into the jungles of Vietnam, I went into the summer wondering what was next for me.

One thing was certain, though. I had to work. And work meant getting out of Santa Cruz and heading south for Santa Ana. But on my way out of Santa Cruz I pulled a brochure off the bulletin board at the Music Board of Studies for the Stan Kenton Camp at the University of Redlands.

I worked for six weeks leading trucks all night at the remains of the Santa Ana Army Air Corps base in Costa Mesa. That was enough to sustain me through the summer and pay for camp, which I’d registered for at the beginning of my short career loading trucks.

When the camp was about to start, I loaded everything into my 1964 Plymouth Valiant and headed into the smog belt for Redlands. I remember auditioning for Mike Vacarro, who placed me in Mike Vax’s band, which had the advantage of a real live arranger (whose name I cannot remember, but who rehearsed the band). My roommate was a genial baritone player who became a band director in Fresno. Improv class was taught by Dan Haerle, who was at Monterey Peninsula College at the time and soon moved to North Texas. One of the funnier highlights for me was being singled out (with the Porcaro brothers and a couple others) as a second generation jazz musician at the camp. We were interviewed and photographed and at some point an article appeared in some publication or other.

The camp revolved around Stan and the band, of course. We all wanted to get on that bus and to work for him, doing one-nighters without complaint. (If we only knew how hard you had to work for the pittance that it paid!) It was a pretty good version of the band, and students of the genre will note that the Live at Redlands album was recorded there, Wally Heider officiating. (I lent some labor to Wally, dragging cables.) The album was taped on an 8-track Ampex, the glory of the age. Nobody mixed a live big band like Wally, and that album was one of the longest-standing inclusions in my iTunes collection.

I’m sure they don’t remember it, but a couple of the musicians and teachers I dealt with at the camp were pretty encouraging to me about my chances of pursuing a career as a musician, so I was pretty excited when camp broke and I pointed the Valiant toward Santa Cruz.

In the meantime, Cabrillo College, the local junior college in Santa Cruz, was in the process of setting up a Jazz Ensemble. Third year at UCSC I’d start playing second alto at Cabrillo, in the best big band I’ve played in. My senior year I switched over to baritone saxophone in the band. At the end of that year, we opened a show for Stan Kenton’s band at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium. Six months later, I was on the Kenton band, playing baritone.

I’m getting ready to go to another camp, 40 years almost to the day after the Redlands Kenton Camp.



The California Brazil Camp was co-founded more than 10 years ago by Dennis Broughton, who was the conga drummer/percussionist in the Cabrillo Jazz Ensemble, and one of the founding members of Sofrito, the legends of salsa music in Santa Cruz. I played in the first and third iterations of Sofrito, and wrote most of the horn charts.

Dennis’s idea was to set up a Brazilian immersion camp in the coastal foothills of northern California for dancers and musicians. And the idea seems to be working. The camp has spread to Brazil itself, in February, 2010, where one of the teachers was no less than Hermeto Pascoal.

The California Camp is no slouch either. Teaching staff includes Guinga, the Carioca dentist-composer, Marcos Silva, Cliff Korman, Michael Spiro (another founding member of Sofrito), Chico Pinheiro, and lots more.

Learning Brazilian music is a humbling thing for me. And so far, every person who has crossed my path has been generous and encouraging, in fact a lot like the the big band guys from 40+ years ago. But the essential element is to mantain beginner’s mind going into the Brazil Camp experience. These guys are the real deal, and to come on like I actually know something would somehow be inappropriate. I can read whatever is thrown at me, and that’s an advantage. I plan on bringing a assortment of horns to make myself useful.



I’ve got a sleeping bag and a tent and I’m borrowing Adam Ray’s “extra” SUV to get from Oakland to Cazadero. Oh, that’s another thing: Unlike Redlands 40 years ago, where we occupied concrete-block low-slung dorm rooms, California Brazil Camp is held in a towering redwood forest, much like UCSC. While campers can sleep 4 to a tent, my sleep habits may lead me to use my own compact tent. I’ll be the one in the tent playing Scrabble on his iPhone, something I never imagined when I went to Redlands to absorb Kenton’s music.

So come on, fill me up, Brazilian music! I’ll be all ears.

A Digression . . . Jim Morrison to Phil Ochs, 1969-70, College 5, UCSC

Of all my brushes with famous people—and there have been plenty—nothing quite compares to 1969-70, my freshman year at College 5 at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

I arrived there flat broke with the promise of a work-study job, and a grant check pending while my dorm food would sustain me. I soon took a shine to Jan Gillespie the girl who took down my number in the food line. With an interruption to marry other people, we are still together, forty years later.

I had arrived in Santa Cruz hitchhiking, my third trip to get my stuff moved from southern California, and I arrived at about the same time a arge box containing my vinyl records came in by freight on a Greyhound bus. The clerk wanted extra money for the records, whose box by then was starting to split and spread. I triend reasoning with him, and in the end he relented. I was soon hitchhiking up to the campus from the town with a huge bursting box flled with my records and the records I’d inherited from my dad when he died two years earlier.

No matter, it had been a logistical nightmare getting all my stuff up to Santa Cruz, but I’d be safe there. Thre I’d have three square meals and a shared room in the redwoods. There I’d be safe from the draft, which was already gobbling up graduates of the 1969 founding class of Saddleback High School. There I would build my own life, not just be a participant in my mother’s attempts to drag us into the vortex of madness that saw her devoting herself to a brutal and incoherent drunk after my dad died and dragging my younger brother and sisters—who were not yet teenagers—to Ohio as my older sister and I were graduating from high school.

This was Santa Cruz, a new and innovative campus of the greatest university in America. Here I’d plant my flag. Here I’d find family by voluntary selection.

But first, I’d talk with EOP. Although I never identified that I was a member of a minority when I applied for the program, I could see the shock on the face of the counsellor of the Educational Opportunity Program when I walked into his office. He looked at me, studied my folder, looked up again and said, “You know, in our language “freno” means stirrup.” I smiled and said little. I was, after all, from a barrio of sorts.

I had come from a part of Santa Ana which was even then run down, although our high school was new and sparkling and our subdivision, whose developer had gone bust, was new and populated largely by white folks. Nonetheless, in my capacity as an emancipated minor, I sought every opportunity of financial assistance at my disposal.

My next stop in the Central Services building was the financial aid office, where I learned that grants are distributed at the end of the month and not when you arrive at a college. So I borrowed a fifty dollar Bing Crosby Temporary Loan. Der Bingle had left a bequest to fund this loan fund for just this purpose, and I thought it right and just to take advantage of the fund for the 10 days before I’d be getting my grant check from the Financial Aid office.

Back then if you scored high enough on your SAT you qualified for a California State Scholarship, good at any campus in the state—public or private—for most of your fees. In those good old days before Proposition 13 and herpes, attending school in California was a no-brainer, especially with the personnel needs of the military in Southeast Asia.

I cashed my Bingle check at the cashier’s window, stuffed the bills in the pocket of my jeans and went to the work study office, where I had a look at the job openings for the new quarter. I had done a bit of audio-visual work in high school, so I decided to try that, and, referral in hand, went off to the A/V office. I was assigned to the College 5 dining hall as a projectionist and soundman, neither of which I was qualified for. I had supervisors (all of whom smoked constantly) who would show up to train me on the equipment and then slip away. I got to ferry equipment around the campus in retired postal vehicles without driver’s seats which had an alarming tendency to roll over on the winding campus roads.

One of my first big gigs as a work-study projectionist was the lavishly named College 5 International Film Festival, which is one of the few events in this world that has no mention in Google. These were experimental films, presented by lecturer in film Tony Reveaux, with an all-star panel of judges including none other than Jim Morrison of the Doors. When it was time for the judges to award their individual prizes, Morrison gave his to a tedious short of a kitchen faucet dripping. It was then, October 17, 1969, as I was rolling up a cable outside the projection booth, that I had a chilling encounter with Morrison, who was making his way out of the judges’ area and heading out to rejoin the Doors. (To see a chronology of Morrison’s eventful 1969, click here.) It was one of those casual moments that doesn’t seem like anything at the time. No words were spoken as Morrison passed and looked at me. What I remember thinking is, “This man’s dead.” He may have been walking, but he was dead. Just a few months later, he was.

By the time Spring quarter, we’d all had enough of the weather in Santa Cruz, where It rained constantly for weeks at a time as the Pacific storms made landfall in Monterey Bay, stopped, and moved on. There were a lot of rumblings as the spring brought on fundamental changes in the weather and our outlook.

Then, just as it seemed like we should be dancing around a maypole and celebrating fertility, Nixon played the Cambodia card. Anybody could have told him that he was opposing natural forces which could never be controlled, least of all by a career Republican politician with his physical aspect. We were young, it was spring, and we were not going to take this shit.

The University had a system called the tie line which connected the campuses, office-to-office. A couple of guys I knew liberated one of the tie lines so we could contact fellow revolutionaries at the other campuses. I don’t remember quite how or why, but soon Bob Deasy and I were going south in his Volvo 122 to make sure that the tie line connections were working. Or something like that. I really don’t remember what moved us to the Volvo, but we made it to San Diego overnight, then headed back north for UC Irvine, UCLA and, finally, Santa Barbara, where, less than 2 months previously had been under martial law when the Bank of America branch in Isla Vista was torched.

Bob Deasy and I just regular civilians with not much in the way of political interest at that point in our lives, but we had aspirations to perform great deeds, and what with our campus on strike (faculty included) and not much incentive to stick around when the National Guard presumably came to call on College 5, we just thought this was the thing to do.

When returned to UCSC the strike had been moved into another whole direction that wouldn’t involve our efforts and we were rendered suckers for doing what we had done because someone had decided that the campuses would not be rising up as one over Cambodia and Kent State. It turned out to have been nothing but a pleasant trip up the coast.

A day or two after we returned to the dorms, my next-door neighbor Mike, whose surname has receded into the back of my brain, knocked on my door. Mike was a Vietnam vet, an interesting guy who gave a barnburner of a speech about his experiences in country and seemed a lot saner than he had every right to be. Mike told me that the famous Phil Ochs would be coming to campus to support our efforts in the strike, and he wondered if I could arrange to have a PA in the College 5 dining hall. The next day, Phil Ochs appeared in Mike’s room. I was called in and introduced by Mike as a music major. Phil Ochs shook my hand and said, “Well, you probably know more about music than I do.”

I assured him I did not, and we got down to business.

I had the key to the locker where the sound equipment was kept, and I told him that we could be assured that the giant Voice of the Theatre speakers, the underpowered Shure mixer, and a couple microphones ought to do the trick.

So off I went to the locker for an unauthorized usage of university property. Not that everyone else wasn’t appropriating whatever they could to stop the craziness that we’d seen taking place in southeast Asia, Kent, Jackson State, and the rising up around the country of the young against the old.

I set up the PA in the dining hall and we had a nice little concert. Phil thanked me afterwards for my little role in things.

It wasn’t long before the quarter sputtered and died. I went south to Sure Trucking in Costa Mesa and loaded freight on the night shift and lived at the Fishers’ house while they were in Colorado for the summer. Here’s a picture of me taken that summer taken by Richard Kuhlenschmidt, who also lived at the house:



Would you say I looked angry?

That first year at College 5 I worked sound for Ravi Shankar, Julian Bream (who shared his whiskey with me), poet Richard Braughtigan, and a few others who have flown out of my head through the years. But I’ll always remember that school year as starting with Jim Morrison and ending with Phil Ochs. It was an extraordinary place, with extraordinary people at an extraordinary time in the history of my generation and how it fit into American politics and culture. We felt like we were changing the world. Maybe we were.

At long last, a name

We’re going to try this one: Receita Nova, which means new prescription or recipe. The tag line just sort of came to me, something to define and separate us from the other choro ensembles in Texas, which there may be none for all I know.

I did a quick logo, testing my memory in Adobe Illustrator CS (which is good, better than I thought).

We have a rehearsal on Thursday, May 6, Max on trombone, Bruce singing and playing guitar, Dell subbing on bass, and me on as much alto flute as time will allow. It sounds like a Goose Gumbo rehearsal! In those days, before I even returned to ships, these guys were the hard core, the players who could be depended upon, the grownups.

A Necessary Change of Course

This is a picture I took from the deck of the QE2 at 6 in the morning on the day we docked in Rio de Janiero harbor.

Thanks to the elemental restorative powers of Brazilian music, I am thrilled once again to be writing, practicing, and playing.

Not that the dealings with the big band weren’t fantastic. Getting to record charts by me and my dad with Butch Miles is not an honor to be sneezed at. And capturing the artistry of Tony Campise on a recording that will endure is an honor I’ll think about whenever I write a tenor solo’s hashmarked chord symbols from here onward.

But something happened, something that sapped all my musical energy and a considerable amount of life energy as well. No, I’m not going into that here, but it’s just the ancient story of trust betrayed writ large and personal. I had to find something that would revive me. Astute readers of this blog know that I have health issues that are complicated by stress, and if MUSIC means stress, music must go. Or, alternately, music must change. I chose the latter, reinforced by the passing of my 59th birthday.

And that’s when I remembered that Bruce and I have been talking about getting something Brazilian together for a very long time. Almost since we met, perhaps when we were still plowing the field of Mr. Fabulous, when I heard Bruce sing the Girl from Ipanema the way it ought to be sung, in Portugese, we’ve been talking about exploring the rich contradictions of Brazilian music. By that, I mean this: How can a country so intrinsically sad produce so much music that is uniformly happy? Why are there songs whose titles use the word Triste—sadness—but whose bouncy rhythms and elegant harmonic language is nothing if not happy.

By the time I called Bruce, I’d already written a couple charts. If nothing came of it, I’d just be using them to practice on my own. The charts were chôros, a style of music that was in vogue in Brazil roughly from the 1920’s to the 1950’s. I had been pulled in by a recording of chôros by flutist Paula Robison called Brasilierinho which Ginger Von Wening pointed me to. She had set up a band called Double Coyote in Houston, playing chôros and bossa novas, but had just recently moved back to California.

I figure if the worst that could happen is I’d have some new parts to ‘shed, that’d be just fine. So I called Bruce and I called Monte Mann and asked them over to rehearse a few things to see how they sound. The three of us were very pleased with how things went, and I remembered just how much fun it is to play with guys who know how and don’t bring their shitty little sideshows into the music with them. We rehearsed around 10 tunes in 2 hours.

Pleasantly glowing from the experience, we I sounded 2 more possible recruits for what was becoming a project.

Jimmy Shortell, who plays jazz trumpet and accordion, was the first. I ws thinking how great it would be to add his playing to the stringed instruments, and how he could lighted the load of every member by being able to play chords and solos. I kid him mercilessly about that accordion, but the fact is that it fits into the folkloric thing about chôros, which have roots in the streets of Rio. Jimmy can read like nobody’s business. So off I went to rewrite all the charts I’d written for the first core, adding accordion and trumpet parts.

We had some ideas for a percussionist, but I remembered Fernando Ledesma, who was the drummer in Double Coyote, Ginger’s band in Houston. I called to get his number, and rang Fernando to find he wasn’t busy and he was always ready to play Brazilian music. Fernando’s played with the band Opa in the seventies and, through an association with Uruguayan pianist Hugo Fatturoso, with Airto, Flora Purim, and Hermeto Pascoal. This guy’s the real deal!

Last night was our first rehearsal with the five guys, and it was fantastic! I’m inspired to diligently practice and I need to keep writing to keep everyone interested until we get a couple gigs happening. Booking a 5-piece Brazilian band is lots easier than booking an 11-piece big band!

And even so, Marilyn’s been working some dialog up from an outline I wrote for the Mineshaft Canaries, which we’ll be rehearsing on March 10th. Seeing all of the Canary charts are written for my rather unique instrumentation, I might be headed back to the big bands sooner rather than later. But it won’t be the center of things again.

From the ancient archives: Dick Fenno's Hobby Is Music

This is an article my aunt sent me, published in the Fitchco-Deco News, house organ of the Fitchburg Paper Company. in August, 1956.

At the time, my dad was working as a draftsman at the paper mill, one of the many industrial jobs to be had in the brick mills of Fitchburg, which included Independent Lock Company (ILCO) and the Iver Johnson Arms & Cycle Works. When you started at one of these factories, you usually retired from them 50 years later. A co-worked of mile when I worked at South by Southwest started at Fitchburg Paper when my dad worked there and retired when they closed the factory in the early eighties.

That was the way things worked in Fitchburg. If you were lucky and hung on, maybe you’d retire to Florida and wait for the reaper there. My family pulled up stakes and left Fitchburg for southern California in October, 1960–as the Pirates were beating the Yankees and the last weeks of the campaign between JFK and Richard Nixon were taking place. This was considered by some–including both sets of my grandparents--as downright heretical. We were leaving the steady paychecks of Fitchburg Paper for the much less solid Westlake College of Modern Music, recently relocated (an accounting scandal was the reason) from Hollywood to Laguna Beach.

The writing in this article is wonderful, but the tone of the piece is clearly that Fitchburg was getting too big for dad’s britches and he was looking for bigger and better things. Odd then that no mention is made of his children, just Noreen and me at the time, but Cindy on the way in November of 1956, and 2 others, Jimmy and Marcia, to come.

Odder still is that the article is published in a column called Hobby Corner, with a cut in the corner of photography, stamp collecting, electric trains, and woodworking. Music didn’t have that relationship with my father. It was central to his life.

Dick Fenno’s Hobby Is Music

There’s nothing unusual about a five year old boy beating a toy drum – but when it is a snare drum and the forerunner of a career in music – that makes it news.

Our child drummer is Dick Fenno, who works in the Chief Engineer’s office at #4 Mill. Dick kept at it and had acquired a full eight years of practice on the drums by the time he played his first professional engagement at the tender age of thirteen. Two years later he joined Eddie Hamilton’s Orchestra and for three years this young lad hit the college and ballroom circuit all over New England and New York State. That was from 1941 to 1944.

Then Dick enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the 392nd Army Service Forces band. He toured the Mid-West and South with the band on War Bond and Recruiting Drives. This band recorded V-discs for use by Armed Forces Overseas and made a number of recordings for transcribed radio use.

Upon his discharge from the Army in 1946, Dick joined up with the Gene Carlson Orchestra and worked the New England ballroom circuit for a couple years, building up a bankroll to further his music studies. In 1948 he enrolled at Schillinger House of Music (now Berklee School) and whizzed through the four year course in three years. During this period he played nights with Karl Rhode’s band for six months and with Freddy Guerra’s Band for a year, to provide funds for his studies.

When he completed his music course at Schillinger House, he re-joined the Eddie Hamilton Orchestra and did freelance arranging n the side. This was in 1950 and the arranging work simply poured in. He wrote the complete music library for the Frankie Dee Orchestra, made a number of arrangements for Freddie Sateriale’s Orchestra, and wrote arrangements for the entire library for the Lad Carleton Orchestra.

Last year he organized the Dick Fenno Orchestra of seven musicians and a male vocalist. This group has played for Fitchco events and it is a smart outfit. It has been very successful at colleges, high schools. ad small clubs and ballrooms throughout New England.

Dick recently re-organized the Lad Carleton Orchestra, which is preparing to start out in the early fall. Big units are on the way back, Dick says, and the new set-up runs to eleven musicians and a vocalist. It will be billed as the New Dick Fenno Orchestra.

Prodigious for a young man of 29 to cram so much experience into so youthful an age. But remember, Dick started at five and was a professional musician at thirteen. There have been a lot of drum flourishes in the years since.

Drums and piano are Dick’s instruments and he leads from the percussion section. Progressive Jazz is his preference in Music. Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan are idols. Dick believes very strongly that the big bands are on the way back, and backs up his belief with his new eleven-piece outfit. Bad as Rick and Roll is, says Dick, it is a step in the right direction. It’s got a beat that sets your foot tapping.

It’s been nice to visit you and learn about your hobby, Dick. It must give you a lot of pleasure and if you are lucky and hit it right it could bring you fame and fortune. We hope it does!

Back at it, with an opinion from the past

It’s been a while since I added to this blog, but I think it’s time to get back in the saddle. There are just too many things going on NOT to post, so I will try to habituate.

First off, Tony Campise is still a guest of the medical establishment, at a rehab place in Austin. He was moved by turns from the ICU to the regular wards at the hospital in Corpus, to a rehab place in Austin at St. Davids, where my cardiologist practices his craft, to an outside rehab place to Brackenridge Hospital to treat a staph infection, and back to an outside rehab place, where he is now.

We did a benefit for him in December, the day after we returned from the Sapphire Princess, and it was at that gig that three gals–Marilyn Rucker, Diana Bray and Lisa Clark–stepped forward and performed three zany Christmas songs on their own with the big band behind them. Their delivery was so engaging that they brought down the house.

Somehow a switch was tripped inside me which said, “You know, if you’re having difficulty booking your eleven-piece band, why not add three girl singers and give it a go?” Such are the ways of the arranger’s brain.

I remembered that we I had done arrangements of a couple Andrews Sisters tunes, “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy” and “Say Sĺ Sĺ” and I thought they’d have a blast singing Jimmy Rowles’ “Ballad of Thelonious Monk.” Then there was “I Wan’na Be Like You,” originally sung by Louis Prima in the Disney movie of Kipling’s Jungle Book.

So off I went to write.

That was 5 weeks ago. We were all busy on New Years, and soon afterward Marilyn had a surgery, so we still haven’t had a rehearsal, but that hasn’t stopped me from dreaming up a name (Mineshaft Canaries) and a dramatic concept which the whole lot can be dropped into.

I’ve taken leave of the small band for the first six months of this year so I can concentrate on this project. In addition, I’ll be trying to put together a 5-piece band doing Brazilian music. I’m trying to justify all the money I have invested in flutes, and I’m on the verge of selling off some Craigslist acquisitions to get an alto flute. As usual, there’s no cash for this purpose, just a room full of stuff I don’t use that ought to generate interest on Craigslist.

And another thing . . .

I picked up a copy of a 1955 Down Beat magazine (which changed its name in the seventies to down beat—ay carumba) with an interesting column by Leonard Feather, or, as we used to call him when he was writing jazz criticism in the Los Angeles Times back in the seventies, Learned Father.

Here it is:

Ruth Cage raised a provocative question in her April 6 column in which she suggested that the recent campaign against suggestive rhythm and blues lyrics was inspired by ASCAP’s battle against BMI.

There may be something to her theory but my own feeling is that larger issues are involved in any discussion of the current status of r&b music. One can dismiss the complaints leveled against r&b lyrics by pointing out that Trixie Smith recorded He Likes It Slow in 1926, that Bessie Smith’s famous Empty Bed Blues was cut in 1928, and that you can trace smut all the way back to Shakespeare and beyond.

There may have been no other reason for raising the issue, at this particular moment, than the time-honored tradition among periodicals of drawing attention to themselves by deliberately stirring up controversies.

What concerns me much more deeply about the r&b state of the nation is not simply the lyrical content but the overall musical level of this phase of the arts, which Miss Cage herself has mentioned from time to time.

Until a few years ago, when a very sensible campaign for a change of name was started by Billboard, r&b records were known as race records. Now I would ask you kindly to compare the sort of records that were being sold successfully in that field years ago with those that are making the grade on r&b best-seller lists today.

Back in the 1920s and ’30s the biggest sellers included such singers as Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, and scores of others in the same general class.

Instrumentally, there were Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, even Duke Ellington, and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, Jimmie Lunceford, Fats Waller, Don Redman. All these and dozens more, at least in their earlier years, sold exclusively to the r&b buyers (this was before jukeboxes, of course, but the audience was exactly compatible with today’s r&b market).

All these artists, you need hardly be told, became music immortals; their records are being reissued to this day. There was no real borderline between jazz and r&b music.

All right, now let’s look at the r&b picture today.

Can you picture an LP reissue, 25 years from today, of immortal classics by the Hearts, the Charms, the Penguins, the Moonglows or the Crows?

Do you think such early r&b hits as Downhearted Blues, Loveless Love, and West End Blues will be superseded by such currnt masterworks as Oop-Shoop, Tweedle Dee and Bazoom, I Need Your Lovin’?

Can you see a jazz fan in a record shop, after buying the latest experimental works of Charlie Mingus, turning around to ask the clerk, “What’s new by Willis Jackson?”

With rare exceptions such as Joe Turner and Ruth Brown (Atlantic is to be commended for the high level of its offerings), the entire r&b market today is dominated by three factors:

• Vocal groups that seem to have issued to one another a challenge boasting: “We can sing out-of-tuner than you can.”

• Tortured, tortuous ballad singers who would lose all their appeal if they were fitted with spines.

• Instrumentalists who made names for themselves on personal appearances by playing a solo and simultaneously removing their jacket. pants, shirt, and teeth while suspended from a chandelier.

These artists are suitably served by two kinds of material:

• Love songs whose lyrics literally (and I mean literally) could have been written by any reasonably bright third-grader in grammar school.
• Novelty jump tunes written by the younger brothers of those who wrote the love songs.

Many a fine jazzman who has been forced to work r&b, in order to make a living, will confirm these judgments. “I feel as though I’ve just come out of jail,” a young trumpeter told me when he quit a typical r&b band recently. After three months of playing three chords, he almost needed an orientation course to get back to jazz.

I’m sorry, but the fact that somebody is raising a ruckus about naughty lyrics seems mighty unimportant when you stop to consider a much more shocking fact—that music, as a creative art, and the average r&b performance, by today’s standards, are about as close together as Eisenhower and Bulganin—and a meeting between the two seems equally distant and improbable in both cases.

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I was just four when this issue of DB hit the streets, so I can hardly comment on his direct charges. But bringing the argument 25 years forward presents interesting possibilities.

Leonard had a habit of stirring things up (I believe he coined the phrase “moldy figs” to describe the musicians still playing “traditional jazz”), yet so much of this resonates with my theory that (forgive me, Les Paul for you know not what you did) the ability to have technology in the form of overdubbing, pitch correction, and countless other gimmicks which were not available to musicians in most of the twentieth century have given rise to technology-based art, which is, ultimately, technology.

What do you think?