When I arrived in Santa Cruz to attend UCSC, one of the first friends I made was Nick Robertson, a Russian major with serious jazz aspirations. Nick was a vibes player, and he set me up with my first gig, Dave Molinari at the old Catalyst on Front Street. Before that happened, though, Nick took me around to meet the local jazz gentry who were playing around town. One of the most memorable of these exploratory nights was when he took me to the Surfrider, across from the beach between the Wharf and the Boardwalk, where Don McCaslin was playing piano in a trio. That's Don on the right in the photo above.
At Don's suggestion and with Nick's complicity, I pulled out my alto and started playing some standard or another with the trio when the door to the kitchen few open and a man in a chef's toque poked his head through. He smiled, closed the door and returned a couple minutes later, in civilian clothing with a Selmer Balanced Action alto saxophone.
Little did I know that Frank Leal was the owner of the Surfrider, the chef, and, when there was musical fun to be had, alto-in-chief. That's Frank in the center in the above picture, with Monk, another club owner, on the left, and Don, who's still playing every Thursday at Severino's in Aptos.
Bill St. Pierre moved to Santa Cruz in 1970 from Los Angeles, where he had a rich and varied career as a writer and player. Bill had played in Dick Stabile's band at the Coconut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel with my teacher, Dick Houlgate. He wrote plenty of attributed and ghosted cues for movies and television.
Bill was an incredibly gifted tenor player who could gush Dexter Gordon-like phrases all night if the job called for it. We did a couple shows together and what impressed me about his musical abilities most was that they never stood in the way of his human, one-one-one communication skills. He didn't use his technical knowledge to keep us younger players at arm's length.
I was one of the jazz babies hanging around Santa Cruz in the 1970's and people like Bill and Frank Leal were always willing to sit down and talk things over with me, my saxophonist girlfriend, or, as far as I could tell, anyone trying to acquire the skills needed to play.
Bill and Frank were veterans, hardworking saxophone players active at a time when there were enough gigs out there to motivate a young person to enter the field of music. By the time the "factories" (more accurately "band busses") for music shut down the whole calculus of becoming a musician had changed. Once they had moved to Santa Cruz, Bill went into real estate and Frank was owning and running restaurants. But still they played, and shared the joy of their music, to the end of their lives.
Frank died a decade ago, and Bill left us just last week. To the end, Bill was playing clarinet with the Watsonville Band.
Another event last week:
Two fine local musicians slugged it out on Facebook, musicians I'll call the pianist and the drummer.
The pianist posted that "Life is to short to do shitty gigs." The drummer responded that the problem is not shitty gigs, but the shitty attitude that the pianist possessed since returning from New York. A male vocalist took the original remark personally and severed relations with the pianist, who also managed to alienate a girl singer who'd been nurturing him through some rough patches. On it went, all because of a passive-aggressive remark on social media open to interpretation.
These guys are friends of mine. As someone who left here and returned myself, I have bemoaned that there are shitty gigs here, and that we don't get paid enough, and that there are far fewer opportunities to play. But I'd never make a blanked statement on Facebook like the pianist did, which has the effect of a firehose of unattributable charges without regard to friendship or civility.
I am siding with the drummer on this one. I remember doing gigs with both of the cats mentioned above that would have to be characterized as "shitty." Somehow they knew they could add to the proceedings anyway, and add they did. Bill and Frank, both of whom made their cred elsewhere, where the competition was fierce, came to Santa Cruz and did not try to impose a New York or Los Angeles mindset on the place, nor on the musicians who occupy the space. They got on with their careers and found ways to grow musically. I always will admire them for that, and I'll always wonder why a great player like the pianist can't understand that they can do it, too.
