Almost a year later . . .

It's been ten months since I posted in this blog, but I have a good reason. I've been out there suffering the indignities every musician faces, trying by best to get the folks into the NFSO's gigs without an implosion of the sanity of the club owners.

Specifically, the small band we set up around me and Tennessee was canned from Hoffman's for no real reason that was ever enumerated to me. Mind you this was a FREE gig, one we'd been doing for a year.

Lucky for me, the NFSO's personnel has been remarkably stable, once we case off a certain tenor player who could play his ass off, but who could neither read his watch nor a calendar.

The high point for me in this time period was the charity event we played at the Cocoanut Grove in April. Sure, the band's pay came largely from the band itself, me included. But the Grove is a remarkable venue for big bands, the genre of music for which the room was designed. You don't have to mic soloists, just light mics on the vocals.

I've played other events at the Cocoanut Grove, but they were all amplified too much.

My daughter was kind enough to come down and shoot video of the band from the horseshoe balcony, and these YouTube videos are the result. (Caitlin's dad did the editing. A bandleader's work is never done.)

Every second Friday (and fifth Friday, should the month have one) has been Bocci's for us all year. The attendance has been up and down, especially in the just-ended summer, when 8,000 people attended the free concerts held at the same tine at the Boardwalk.

An Eventful Weekend

I thought I'd have a chance to post as things heated up for the band, but I happily have been playing some gigs outside the fold, so here it is Monday morning and I really have no excuse. Here goes:

We keep inching toward respectability, and in the process we swing harder, louder, and softer, which is how I've always heard things in my mind's ear. My introduction to this music, back in the hi-fi days, was based on my dad playing the music of Count Basie, which was also the first band I heard live, when I was 12, at Disneyland. When that band dropped the volume they never left swing behind.

Around the same time I was hearing Basie at Disneyland, in a totally different type of music, I remember Fred Rothmeier, my band director at Ralph C. Smedley Junior High in seventh grade, drilling us to keep the intensity high when the volume dropped. I think that lesson's lost on a lot of big bands nowadays, many of which seem to only have the high end of the volume scale working. And that's a pity, akin to an artist with only a couple colors in their paintbox. There's nothing quite as satisfying as a big band getting soft while maintaining the forward motion, the unique propulsion of this American and now universal music.

So along comes this opportunity to play at the Elks Lodge in Santa Cruz . . .

Chris Charman, our bassist, himself an Elk, sets up a deal whereby the lady running the kitchen is offering a lasagna dinner for $13, with another $5 cover charge for the band. As at Bocci's, the cover charge is split up among the musicians. All of these details had to be approved by committee, so we got our go-ahead about a week and half before we played the gig. We handled all the promotional efforts at our expense. With only had a couple weeks' lead time, we did what we could, including an ad Chris placed—designed by Stella—in the Santa Cruz Sentinel.

I invited some friends to cover for regulars who had gigs that night. Paul Contos played tenor saxophone. Besides playing lead alto in the Cabrillo Jazz Ensemble with me back when the earth cooled, Paul led Monterey Jazz Festival honor bands in which Emily Intersimone (piano) and Tennessee O'Hanlon (bari saxophone) played.

Steve Johnson, the first trombonist in the band when it was founded in 1980, drove up from the San Fernando Valley in his Corvette, at 30 mpg.

That's Steve holding the trombone in our Playboy Club publicity photo in 1981.

One major advantage of the Elks Lodge over Bocci's is the size of the dance floor. It's a quantum jump larger at the Elks, and dancers are free to navigate the floor without plowing into each other. The plaque in the room states that capacity for a dance is 467 people. Another advantage is the drinks cost less and there's no attitude being dispensed at the bar.

We figure we had about 110 dancers, which is pretty good considering it was the first weekend in December, and that we had only enough time to beat the drum so much.

Thanks to all the musicians: Paul Contos, Stu Reynolds, Tennessee O'Hanlon, saxes; John Helnsley, Ray Hill, trumpets; Steve Johnson, trombone; Emily Intersimone (piano), Steve Hayes (guitar), Chris Charman (bass), Olaf Schiapiccasse (drums), and our singers, Stella D'Oro and Anthony Jones.

We'll be negotiating our return this week sometime. It'll be nice to have an upscale venue in addition to Bocci's, where we resume playing on January 10.

Bill and Frank and Life Before Facebook

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.

Next-to-Last Tango on Pacific Avenue

In a previous post I indicated that I would be working at the notorious local restaurant (featured in Restaurant Impossible on basic cable) where musicians are expected to play for nothing, or damned near it.

Now it can be told that I tried my best to fit a totally unique musical genre into to format there for three gigs, two of which were lauded for their originality and volume appropriateness, and the last of which was. even though we played to two tables and the bass player's grandfather at the bar, accused of playing inappropriate music at extreme volumes by the owner, who was not even there.

It didn't take too much deductive logic to figure out that the complaints came from the help, which was having a time of it talking to each other in the absence of the owners.

The band was a saxophone quartet we call the Bootleg Saxophone Quartet. The reason is I've always thought the music business could be brought to its knees by a band called Various Artists releasing an album called Self Titled.

Once I became aware that Tennessee O'Hanlon was in town it was at once easy and inevitable to dust off my sax quartet library, which consists of light saxophonic Americana like Henry Cowell's Sailor's Hornpipe, Geo. Cobb's Saxophobia and G.E. Holmes' Memories of Steven Foster, published over a hundred years ago by C.L. Barnhouse, my dad's old publisher. In equal measure, there's all the wonderful Lenny Niehaus arrangements for the Hollywood Saxophone Quartet, arrangements requiring string bass and drums.

No matter. We'll probably at some point play in front of this restaurant and make a good deal more money than we made in the restaurant. In fact, I remember in the seventies when we pulled in over $20 an hour each an hour playing Christmas music on what was then called the Pacific Garden Mall. That was tall cotton back then.)

I'll be going in tonight with a guitar-based quartet willing to slug it out for two hours to be paid in a meal. I'll check it out, but I believe in the saxophone quartet, especially with Tennessee on baritone. Some venue out there is needing this concept without knowing it.

Meanwhile, Stella by Starlight in Bb. It could be worse.

I could own a restaurant where the help frolics when I'm gone and double-crosses the musicians when I return.

Another Band Launch

Much has happened around here since we last talked.

The New Flamingo Swing Orchestra played a gig at Kuumbwa Jazz Center and thoroughly blew the roof off the place.

We've been working a saxophone quartet at Hoffman's every other Monday. with Jason Tellez on alto, Brad Hecht on tenor, and Tennessee O'Hanlon on baritone.

I just posted on Facebook:

I used to think that the way to bring the music business to its knees would be to have a band called Various Artists come out with an album called Self Titled. Come hear the latest variation on that theme, as Tennessee O'Hanlonon baritone, Bradley Hecht on tenor, Jason Tellez on alto, and yours truly on soprano/alto perform as the Bootleg Saxophone Quartet. Hoffman's on Pacific Avenue, 6:30, to be joined at 7:30 by bassist Isaiah Roberts and drummer Olaf Schiappacasse for music of the Hollywood Saxophone Quartet and others. No cover, dinner specials, full bar.

Will video tonight's gig.

More later . . .

Musician's Wages: 1976 vs 2013

Oh boy, does this topic ever get me riled up.

Back in 1976 I worked with several bands, notably Sofrito--a salsa band we made up out of whole cloth--and Scary Lala, the guitar-based quartet consisting of leader Larry Scala, Tom Moelering on bass, and me on various saxophones. I was living by the yacht harbor in a place we rented for around $300 + utilities. When the weekly total of gig money was made, I would often have pulled in $300-400 for just 4-5 gigs, most of them recurring weekly slots at local restaurants like the New Riverside (Francis Tong!), the Crows News (2 blocks from my house), the Pacific Steamship Company by Harvey West Park, and a couple occasional places downtown like Pearl Alley and the Catalyst.

The bad news is that the $40 gig back then pays $30 now, and that's without adjusting the cost of living from that era to this. You already know what I paid for rent, and gas was still under 50 cents a gallon in 1976. Some of the places even just give the band a meal and the right to lay out the tip jar. Some of the places noted above are still in business, and usually it'll be Olaf playing them on drums. How he's managed to make the adjustments from yesterday's money to today's is a great mystery to me. He's a fine drummer, a reliable guy to have on the gig. But can you think of any other profession where the wages paid are the same or less than they were 35+ years ago?

I didn't think you could.

So what's different?

First and foremost, the owners of restaurants and clubs are operating with a different set of assumptions about musicians. There's enough squeeze on the jazz musicians from the retired set who've moved into town with no professional aspirations but a willingness to play for free. That's new. There used to be young energetic rockers who'd do it for free, and that whole scene collapsed when the club owners found their liquor sales down.

A side note: I am a musician, but I am also in charge of selling beer, wine, mixed drinks and food. I'm the guy up on the bandstand counting drinks and making sure that our crowd for the evening is spending money. If we need to, I adjust the repertoire and the "heat." I consider this to be a sacred responsibility.

Now I know it's a time of shrinking margins, and I know if the ASCAP guy comes around, the BMI guy is sure to follow with licensing fees nobody told you about when you were opening a restaurant. But, and I'm speaking to club owners everywhere here, how can you in good conscience pay less to a band of musicians that fill your bar with drinkers than you pay your lowest-rung server?

Santa Cruz was a whole different city back then, of course. In the bicentennial year, there were two (TWO!) television stations you could get if your rabbit ears were set just right, and no cable TV. There was one screen each at the Nickelodeon, the Del Mar, the Rio, and the Capitola Theatre. The trek over Highway 17 and thence to "civilization" was a lot curvier and more dangerous back then, so there there's another reason to support local bands.

And I think there were less expectations about music generally, so that whatever one found out there was just good enough. (I've got some Sofrito tapes that Steve Peterson made with a handheld cassette recorder, and they don't sound half bad. I also have sound files of the 1972 Cabrillo Jazz Ensemble which are downright frightening, the best big band I think I ever played in.)

So what are the musicians to do?

I for one am venturing into the belly of the beast and started a biweekly gig under my name at a notorious venue just to see what the deal is. All we get are the contents of the tip jar, a drink or two, and a meal for two hours with a quartet.

I'll let you know how it goes. I want to gain the perspective of the the musicians who work these gigs, the restauranteurs who supply the space for what might be a working rehearsal, and the folks who come and listen.

I've already been the latter, hearing bands whose members I know. This I know from the experience: It's an odd thing to know that the musicians putting in their dinner orders at the end of the first set are ordering their pay.

Still, it can get worse. I know that there are clubs in Los Angeles and Austin where bands are responsible for selling a set number of tickets for each gig. THEN they play. And if the door count and the bar receipts are favorable, they might get payment for their efforts.

Don't like the system? Next!!

It hasn't gotten that bad here, yet.

I have a theory that there's an invisible tollbooth at Summit Road on Highway 17 which neatly divides Santa Clara County (where there are both jobs and commerce) from Santa Cruz County (which has neither). When you go through that invisible tollbooth you take a vow of poverty, which makes those who live here convinced that, even though they may drive a 700 series BMW and live in a house worth three quarters of a million dollars, they are poor.

I think that's the real issue. A poverty of spirit prevents these sackcloth and ashes wearing simpletons from doing the right thing: You gotta pay the band.

More later.

Trader Joe's should be in Austin: a post from my 2006 blog

UPDATE, 5/19/2013: Trader Joe's has announced plans for their third Austin store, even before they cut the ribbons on the first two. There's now a store in Ft. Worth, near my son's house, which is also very close to an Aldi Mart. I now live close to the downtown Santa Cruz store (which used to be an Albertson's when I lived here before) and the Capitola TJ's I mention in the post.

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One of my first memories when my family moved to Laguna Beach from the steely northland was a high-pitched, rather strident owner of the Pronto Markets chain who insisted on doing his own radio commercials. That was Joe. Joe Coulombe. When 7-11 stores started popping up like mushrooms after a rain in the forest, the story is that Joe went to a hilltop overlooking the Pacific and came back with a plan. He would reshape Pronto Markets into the "anti-7-11." Instead of trying to sell lots of things, the new markets would concentrate and staples, wine and beer, and quirky gourmet items packaged with "house brand" labels. Workers would wear tropical shirts.

And so Trader Joe's was born. You've gotta love the image of the owner of these stores responding to the invasion from Texas by deciding to do something so different that the Southland Corporation just washes over him and something unique is born in the process. This is the stuff of fairy tales. Does it matter that it might be weak on details? Did it matter when Moses brought down his tablets from the mountaintop?

Years later I went north for college and Trader Joe's followed me with a pretty large store in Capitola and, eventually, like the string of missions founded by the Franciscans, a necklace of TJ's went up El Camino Real to San Francisco and beyond.

I married and moved back to southern California. Our apartment was within walking distance of a busy (and small) west LA TJ's.

They say you never miss the water 'til the well runs dry, and ten years ago I learned what that really means when I moved to Austin, Texas. Austin is a great town, and I moved here to share it with someone I deeply loved. There is a great big supermarket here called HEB that does a pretty good job of things. Whole Foods started here. Central Market was started here by HEB. The town is food obsessed. But where was Trader Joe's?

Of course, ten years ago TJ's just occupied the west and east coasts. Around that time a TJ's opened in Worcester, Mass., which is pretty clost to where I was born. But no TJ's in Texas.

I understand distribution. I used to work for a tradeshow contractor who dealt with every concievable problem of logistics. I knew warehouses had to be built, trucks needed to roll to supply these stores. Still, when a couple stores opened in New Mexico I began to think the days of my flying places with empty suitcases were about to end.

But they didn't end. Now there are TJ's stores in New Mexico, Missouri, Georgia. We're surrounded, though Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana buffer us to the east.

But clearly there is movement on breaking into Texas. You'd think with a state as business-friendly as Texas is that there would be no problem. They might get a sweet deal on tax abatement. Everyone else seems to.

I'm thinking it's a complex set of circumstances. Besides logistics, there's the TABC, the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Control folks. Last year they famously stationed investigators with arrest powers in bars and had them arrest drinkers for drinking.

TJ's is first and foremost a liquor store. The first one I went into, when I was too young for it to matter, had an impressive wall of Scotch. Something tells me that it might not be a good match, that maybe we're waiting for a political turn in the direction of the government agency responsible (still) for making sure that grocers don't selll booze before noon on Sunday.

Meanwhile, before I go to a gig out of state (I play saxophone for a living) I plan my TJ's stop. I spent the summer on a cruise ship in the Baltic, where TJ's owners since 1979, Aldi Mart, dominate the discount wine and booze marketplace and resemble in some ways TJ's. I'm trying to get on a ship for winter that docks every ten days about 4 blocks away from the North Beach TJ's in San Francisco.

The underlying problem, though, is that we don't have a TJ's in Austin, nor anywhere else in Texas. And that, besides the anecdotal reminicences of various former Californians, is what this blog is alll about. Thanks for checking in, and let me know if you have a story to contribute.


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This is a post from this summer's blog about working on a cruise ship in the Baltic. Not many folks know that TJ's is owned by a reclusive German company, reclusive in large measure because one of the owners was kidnapped in 1971. While mighty Wal-Mart gave up on the German market, the Aldi chain owns 3.5% of the marketplace in ALL of Europe.

This entry starts off with a complaint that the English panic over alleged highjack bombers had made hash out of travel, while the English Minister of This and That would come on and report that the investigators had unearthed another pint of hydrogen peroxide. We had passengers on board the ship whose luggage, detained by the crunch in Heathrow, never in their 10 days on board the Star Princess caught up with them.

Seems like an odd transition to Trader Joe's, but bear with me.

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Well, the British have managed to get the all that unpleasant business in Lebanon off the front pages or, in the case of the cruise ship musician, the crawls of CNN international and BBC World. What they did was round up a bunch of Pakistanis who may or may not have figured out a plot to make bombs out of common household materials that could be smuggled on to planes undetected in common carry-on baggage. As a result of all the hysteria there is no carry-on baggage allowed at Heathrow, All well and good, but if this catches on it’ll make it difficult to fly back to the states with my horns and my Powerbook in tow, to say nothing of my effects, as they call all my stuff I packed for four months in the Baltic.

I don’t anticipate flying through Heathrow. but what scares me is that this might spread to Copenhagen, where I will likely depart Europe in 31 days (this having been written August 11) for JFK or Dallas if I get real lucky.

Good news, though, as we are in Warnemunde for one last time. The last time we were here I thought I’d stumbled upon a store owned by the parent company of Trader Joe's. Our Berlin tour guide pointed out a market about a mile from the ship and said that tourists from Sweden came in on ferries to stock up for parties. So I checked it out that night, only to find the store closed. I did manage to look inside the place, though and it had a very TJ's feel to it.

Of course I had my doubters.

But when I got there this morning, three weeks later, I found a place very much like TJ’s. Things for sale were piled up everywhere, the booze boxes had been knifed open on one side, there were plenty of pre-wrapped cheeses and produce, and the usual assortment of sausages (Germany, remember) and frozen stuff and chocolates. I was delighted to find some Arnica gel, which I’d run out of, and which is spelled completely differently in Germany. It’s a great relief to my neck, which gets a workout holding saxophones. Still, I hadn’t found the smoking gun until, turning to the freezer case form the cereal, I found Trader Joe's branded prunes! I know that Joe doesn’t make stuff for its competition, so I did my best to ask the check-out gal if the company she worked for had any association with TJ's.

So I bought my gel, six bottles of vitamin-enhanced orange and carrot juice, Eurodont mouthwash, a chocolate bar, and those prunes--just under ten Euros. I was lax in my booze purchasing, but I felt like the Swedish passengers on the ferries deserved no competition from me. Tomorrow we start a two-day in Copenhagen. This almost felt as good as when I found a current New Yorker in Helsinki at the legendary Stockman department store. Even though it was 6.9 Euros I had to have it.

Anyway, this place is Aldi Markt. They have stores all over Germany and a certain division of their company will be opening 700 stores in the states this year. Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of the stores will be in central Texas.

Peter, wish you were here to help with the translating!

The other thing happening this day was a big sailing festival with Tall Ships everywhere. I took some shots outside the ship when I was walking around.

That’s the bow of the Star on the upper right.