Growing Up on LA Radio

I grew up on southern California with the radio on. My family moved to Laguna Beach in 1960 from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for crying out loud. I was nine, and the Pirates were beating the Yankees in the World Series the night we flew, far from non-stop, across the country on TWA. My young ears were open as we left Boston’s Logan Airport, over the considerable hum of the engines from our Lockheed Super Constellation, the most beautiful transport plane ever made. By the time we had reached LaGuardia, Mazeroski had faced Ralph Terry and it was all over for the Yankees.

Once we’d settled in Laguna Beach and adjusted to the idea that a Catholic like us could be President of the United States and that the November did not necessarily mean adjusting to snowfall. One of the first adjustments I made to the rarified atmosphere of early sixties southern California was the voice of Chuck Niles, delivered through the radio, through KNOB (“The Jazz Knob”) in Long Beach.

From that day forward, I’d be follow Chuck to various stations around the dial. Radio changed formats, but not Chuck. His bass/baritone, impeccable timing, and unquestionable musical taste dragged me into some swinging places, with some very swinging and ultra-hip musical forces. Chuck never let me down, even he ended up at KLON, a public station in Long Beach that had inherited the library of KBCA and a low-watt transmitter. Chuck’s greatest moments were when he was drolly commenting on the traffic reports at KLON. (I remember a truckload of sheep loose on the Pomona Freeway . . . )

Then, there was KMPC.

As soon as I heard Gary Owens, my goose was cooked. He was the zany afternoon guy at the station that was owned by Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, who also owned the Anaheim Angels or whatever they’re now called. Before the gig with Laugh-In, he was there every afternoon being silly and playing some stuff a little to the right and a little more corporate than Chuck was playing.

Then there were Roger Carroll and Johnny Magnus.

They jointly set up the Teenage Underground just in time for me to join as a teenager.

In an amazing stroke of luck I won tickets to see, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a TAU concert with Miss Ella Fitzgerald backed by Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, and Ed Thigpen. That afternoon was a real ear-opener for me. In fact, I thought I’d be hearing things like Ella and Oscar for the rest of my life. As if!

Later high-flyers on the singing cowboy’s station included Bob Arbogast and Jack Margolis, who admitted over the air that they smoked pot and were against the war. It WAS a great time to be young, after all.

The thing that all these gentlemen had going for him is the dark and deep resonance of their voices, which added to the appeal of the music they were playing. Their voices were instruments which managed to grab me through the static of AM and the relative dearth of FM, sit my ass down, and play some music for me, along with associated hi-jinks.

By the time I’d become a disaffected teenager with a learner’s permit, I’d run into KPFK, the permanently-embattled Pacifica station in Cahuenga Pass. Blessed with a massive signal, the station was at the time home to Lowell Ponte, who led The Party of the Right and went on to obscurity as a minor talk show host. Then there was Elliot Mintz, who at the time was using the Youth Culture (whatever the hell THAT was) to break into the business of being a press agent to the impossibly glamorous.

Then there was Radio Free Oz, where the Firesign Theatre was born. If you’re asking who the FST was, you’re too young to understand who they were, but you could look it up in Wikipedia. Basically a freeform show hosted by Peter Bergman (another great LA radio voice) RF Oz hit me right between the eyes when I was most vulnerable, and I even started credible variations on the FST voices so I could memorize their records, which soon followed.

About this time, KRLA was playing during the news an incredible skit team called the Credibility Gap, and that’s where my radio dial was every day at least once. I had next to no interest in the music that was playing, but oh the satire of it all!

The best known of the Gap, and one of the great voices of our age, was Harry Shearer, who’s been doing voices on the Simpsons, as well as the bass player in the various incarnations of Spinal Tap, for a very, very long time.

The Gap was edgy in a way that satire could only be that was written the day it was performed, and these guys knocked me out. (Harry’s still doing great things, including a documentary about the levees breaking in his adopted home, New Orleans.)

Then I moved to Santa Cruz, where there were a lot fewer radio stations.

Cabrillo Countdown: The Real Cabrillo

I can hardly believe this is happening. After nearly a year of kicking around ideas about a Cabrillo College alumni band made of musicians of a certain age, honoring Lile Cruse, our band director back at the founding of the band in the seventies, we are actually doing it. "It" will be at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, in just a couple days.

I hate the poster. Why did I not step forward and volunteer my graphic design skills?

Lile looks like Herbert L. Clarke in the photo. Also, several of our number won't be there, but I suppose that's the way it goes. But we will have a full band of eager players, the promise of at least one full house, some great charts to run, and camaraderie that will have withstood our decades apart.

Here's the truth: Lile rounded up, in every sense of the word, a motley group of hippies and hardened Vietnam vets and gave us the authority to have a little fun with music, something I personally needed at the time. When he recruited me he didn't even give me time to think about it. Next I knew I was sitting next to an impossibly young Paul Contos. Now it's nearly 40 years later, and it's amazing how central music is to the lives of the guys (and gal!) who will make up the band on October 1.

Real heroes include Danny, who beat the drum mercilessly in the local press, Matt, who flew in all the way from Barcelona for this, Rich, Billy and Brad, all of whom turned down the kind of gigs musicians ought not turn down to free up a rehearsal day on Friday and the gigging day, Saturday.

Folks start arriving tomorrow, and I can hardly wait.

Sydney Greenstreet and the End of Jazz As We Know It

Let's call this guy Sydney Greenstreet. Not so much for his girth (I fought girth all my life, after all . . . ) but as a way to identify him in the context of the Greenstreet characters late of the cinema: the plotting, the deviousness, the sureness of his evil intent, the shiftiness of the eyes which evade contact with other warm-blooded creatures.

In January, I was knocking around the rooms of my old college because my enamored one was teaching that night, It so happened that her teaching was being done close to the music building. The new music building is a deeply-flawed new building which replaced a deeply-flawed old building and now looks to be 20 years older than it is because the budget no longer allows for simple maintenance. Once there were mighty musicians who trod the boards in the (old) building. More about that in a future posting which will shamelessly plug a reunion of these musicians.

So back to January. I had driven myself to the college with my horns in the trunk—some of them anyway—thinking that if I could play a few notes it would be a good night. What I walked in on was a crisis.

Sydney Greenstreet was nowhere to be found, although he'd made a commitment to playing a semester at the helm of the reed section in the jazz ensemble. He was not answering his mobile and, in fact, he may have been still out of the country on a vacation. I walk in and offer my services to the band director, who plugs me in and that is that. The rest of the semester I am playing lead alto in the current version of a band that I joined in January of 1973, an interval of 38 years.

Sydney shows up finally a couple rehearsals later, plays loud tenor and complains throughout. On packing up, he quits.

I was (happily) oblivious what was going on with Sydney and the band director, but they seemed to have a cordial enough thing going between them while they were having phone tag, but the band director was visibly shaken when Greenstreet welched on his commitment to even play tenor—featured tenor, mind you—that they had made in the prior semester.

I did my best to lead a section of scruffy learners who had a tendency (especially the tenors who plugged into the section to replace Sydney) to forget about rehearsal even though it was the same time every Thursday night. Not the best readers, the section fought its way to resectable concert performances anyway.

Cut to the start of the current fall semester and I find myself drawn as if a moth to a flame to the music building once more for a look at the first rehearsal of the band. Actually it was the vain hope that someone else, someone far more qualified, someone who could count two bars without slowing down at the top of a tune, someone who had been to the Big Show (also with Kenton) would this semester lead the band. But there was the band director, and there, in due time, walked Sydney Greenstreet.

Everybody in the music racket knows a guy like Sydney. He has an agenda and the way he carries it out is to play more notes louder and faster than anybody else in the tri-county area. His warm-ups are legendary for their ear-splitting volume. He'll never subsume his sound into a section because he just won't share the spotlight. Jazz for him is a contact sport, one that begins the moment he takes his own out of the case and runs endless diminished scales at top volume.

It's all about Greenstreet, all the time. He's usually in a small enough town that he won't get his ass handed to him. And he has his protectors. They are usually band directors who think, "If I could only harness his loud sound and flurry of notes for my purposes many good things could ensue for my band."

They are wrong.

Improving the band's quality is off the table. Only the self-aggrandizing alto feature will capture the interest of Sidney Greenstreet, so you're looking at an endless number of them.

Once, in LA (at the Big Show, which is held in two places only in the US, both of which I lived in) I played in a big band that had a sax section made up of four Greenstreets and me, The problem is that when you've got a Greenstreet, let alone four Greenstreets, you better have a backup for each one. I had to back up all of them at one time or another, because each of them had important business that would draw them away from rehearsing or even performing with the band. I became a floater in that section, alto one week, baritone the next, then tenor.

This I fear is the fate of my old college band: Having looked at the situation and figuring that I had no interest in backstopping Sydney Greenstreet, and after a rehearsal on the low tenor chair I told the band director that I thought my business at this place was done. That's something, when you consider how many years I have in this place.

Better it should happen in that first rehearsal, when things are all new and everything is possible.

Now that some of it has come back to me due to to certain wagging tongues that were in the rehearsal room, let me say that I wanted to save myself the bother of watching Sydney Greensteet subvert the very nature of jazz and of the band. I don't want to see the band director press jazz education into a neat pyrotechnic box where the players become automatic wind-up toys and explode on cue.

Jazz is pretty important to me. I've learned that it's the gentle stuff that matters. Not all ballads, but an approach to every subgenre that has respect for what's going on.

Here's what Tony Campise taught me: "Swing your ass off. Remember the blues. Put things into their right places."

I couldn't do that in the rehearsal room for a new semester, so that's why I faded into the parking lot. I hope my fellow saxophonists in the section I left behind understand that that's why I decided not to join the band this semester.



I haven't talked much about Tony Campise since he passed. There was no better example than Tony of someone who COULD have turned his considerable talents and abilities into the Greenstreet of all Greenstreets.

But in his Aw-shucks-Texas kind of way Tony, son of Sicilian greengrocers in Houston, realized that jazz is fun and you ought to grab all the fun you can get your hands on.

Tony never let his prodigious technique get in the way of his ability to play the blues. Nobody I ever heard could do what Tony could do. He never resorted to the film flam of running all-purpose diminished patterns over every dominant seventh chord in a tune.

And Tony played better flute than most classical flute players. (Tony would never show up without all his doubles to any rehearsal or gig, however modest.)

There are plenty of examples of Tony Campise on YouTube, some of them awful cell phone camera affairs from great distances, all of them worth checking out.

My favorite album of Tony's is the most straight-ahead. It's called First Takes.

I believe that Tony Campise is the anti-Greenstreet, and I urge you to listen to his music and feel the joy in his playing.

Aligning Myself With the Forces of Darkness

OK, so the bandleader called back and offered me the gig on the 20th of August which I described in the last post.

I could have said no. When it's all over, I might very well wish I had. But I need the money and I want to work. Not to mention this being exactly the thing I do pretty well.

How the worm turned and things he got around to calling me again I'll never know. We re-enacted that awkward conversation about "What is your rate," but I made it simple for him by asking what the other guys are making, which he wouldn't tell me of course, but which made the opening for him to offer me a sum that I consider respectable.

Now I'm committed to two rehearsals, one on Sunday the 14th up at this end of the bay, one in Monterey next week on an undetermined weeknight, and the gig itself, which if I understand correctly will be at a somewhat new restaurant.

There look to be two horns, me and a trombone player.

Then the guy sends my a buttload of MP3 files of Frank singing Frank. Like I need this. OK, so I'll be listening for keys and going with the backgrounds I remember. I mentioned that I have a book, but he was non-responsive so I let it drop. Too bad. I could have a whole book for the gig but it'll cost ya, buddy!

It all reminds me of the old English folks I used to encounter on the QE2 who were taking her last World Cruise in 2008. The would fulminate about the old ship being sold to Dubai for "mere money." I will, it appears, work for anybody offering me the same.

Sideman Follies, or What's It Take To Be a Bandleader?

Just in case you were wondering what the mental health requirements are for being a bandleader in the current economy, let me fill you in.

I've been in Santa Cruz for long enough to have established a little cred by sitting in around town, doing uncompensated rehearsing of other people's bands (OPBs) and generally making a nuisance of myself. I work in the only music store dealing with band and orchestra instruments in a serious way. People are in and out of here every day taking advantage of the boss's good nature for instant gratification repairs (IGRs) at low or no cost because of the trivial nature they see to the turning of the right screw on an adjustment, a screw they themselves could not even FIND much less TURN. I've done some rehearsing of my own band, and did a couple gigs where I was bandleader for not a princely sum but enough to get the troops deployed. (Not without its consequences though. I had a piano player and a trumpet player cancel on a paid gig in June less than a week before the gig, leaving me in the lurch with my limited knowledge of the local scene to scuffle for subs.)

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Two days ago I'm at work with my phone off and a voicemail comes from a singer-bandleader saying I'd been recommended by Zach, the young Soquel-based drummer who is just a kick to play with. The gig was on the 20th of August, and he was checking my availability. As soon as I got the message I called him back, and left a message on HIS voicemail saying YES I CAN DO IT. I tried again into the night, but got voicemail every time I tried. The next day I tried again, got voicemail, restated my availability for the gig, and I went off to work.

Once again, I try not to use my phone at work, because that's how I was brought up. After work I had to meet with Sue to set up her Itinerary for the January Wine Tour in France, so we slogged that out with my zero knowledge of French spelling, she very patient, me designing as I go, something the Old Fellows who taught me the graphic arts racket would never do.

It wasn't until I was at my seven o'clock rehearsal at Casa Dryden by Cabrillo, where Zach was the drummer, that I thought to check my phone. I asked Zach the rundown on the cat who he'd recommended me to and I'll keep that conversation privaleged as his confessor. Emboldened, I dialed the number of this guy.

Huzza! Finally an answer, though not the one I'd expected!

Seeing he hadn't TALKED to me (never mind whose fault THAT was) he decided to go with another saxophone player! Through the gritted teeth of a 60-year old "new cat" in town (although I lived here before) I heard this turkey trying to turn the tables on me, like it wasn't his fault that he didn't check his own voicemail.

But that's not the part that pissed me off. He asked me what my rate was. My RATE?? WTF does THAT have to do with anything? I told him, look, I moved here from Austin, where I was working with my 4-horn book with various Sinatra-like singers in front, and I've been here 8 months now and I don't HAVE a RATE!

After I cooled off a little Zach said he'd still the waters at least for the possibility of future gigs.

But here's what this cat is missing by not using me on the 20th:

I show up early, not "on time," but genuinely early.

I wear what I'm told to wear, not trying to upstage anybody in the process.

I know all the tunes you'll likely play by memory, and I can transpose in my head.

I can read anything you put in front of me, and I can transpose THOSE parts in my head.

At the end of the night I help knock down. I don't leave until I can't do anything more to help.

So that's how it goes with the state of bandleading in the central coast of California.

"Oh," in the words of Duke Ellington, "Don't worry, we've got plenty more . . . "

Listen! Another Giant Has Fallen.

(I wrote this in September, 2007, right before I joined the QE2 in Southampton. My other blog is closing down, but I decided to save a few posts that are important to me.)


I met him once, when my friend Ginger (who now teaches flute in Houston) took me to one of his Duke classes, in 1975. Ginger was a composition major at Berklee, a school which then doted on its guitar players but had enough respect for Herb that it practically enshrined two of his classes, Line Writing and Duke Ellington, after Herb returned to the school in the mid-seventies. Even though he had never met me, he made me feel right at home auditing his class, during which he played 78 rpm records and explained, as best as anyone could, what was going on. It was an impressive performance.

Afterward we talked, and to my astonishment, Herb told me about my dad's writing when they were both at Berklee--then called Shillinger House. He told me about a big band book my dad had written for a 13-piece band and how he was so proud of it that he had tried to get Herb out to Fitchburg to hear it. (Forty miles was a lot longer back then.) Herb continued until I had to leave, filling me in on a few details I didn't know about the band, and about my dad's education. (My dad was the first drummer to be admitted to what became Berklee. Back then drummers hardly ever read music.) The funny thing was, my dad's 13-piece big band was started right after I was born. At the time I met Herb I was 24, just off the Stan Kenton band.

There's nobody I know that Herb didn't touch this way. He made you feel special for just being there. He ran rehearsals the same way. Believe me, it's a struggle to get to a band rehearsal when you're playing 2nd Tenor Saxophone. You need to know that you're making a difference to make the rehearsal. Herb knew that, and knew how to bring out the best in your playing, because he knew what was going on musically all around him, and how important the internal parts are. This he learned himself from a lifetime of study of Duke.

It's easy to grow cynical in the world of music. While music becomes not so much an artistic pursuit as a study in survival, there are plenty of posers who get paid more than Crosus and Duke put together ever imagined. And yet, these are the people the mainstream press talks about as "musicians," people who mastered the are to lip-synching and who perform not music, but spectacle, and derivative spectacle at that.

That's what made Herb's life all the more remarkable. When he was 22, he was playing with Charlie Parker. Yet he never wavered in his resolve as a bandleader, as a teacher, as a player. He didn't have any bad habits. He never went to rehab or drove a Jaguar into a tree.

The night Duke died, I had tickets to see the Basie band play a gig in an old movie palace in Oakland, California. Needless to say, there was a bit of a wet blanket on the festivities. Basie himself pulled the plug a little early. I remember thinking that, if Basie was upset, there was something to be upset about. There was something, I reasoned, that would not and could not be replaced by Duke's passing. And so it was. No new Duke rose.

And so it is with Herb Pomeroy, son and grandson of Gloucester dentists. You made a difference.

See Herb's Wikipedia listing here.