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.
