Thinking about Kenton

I found this clip on YouTube and it might explain why, fight it as I will, I’m just a tiny satellite that once orbited Planet Stan. I was always convincing myself that I wanted to play in the Basie band, but I never got close. Kenton was another story.

I was at a concert where Stan expressed an interest in my father’s work, back when I was 14. (My dad finished the spec chart a month before he died.) Kenton expressed a passing interest in my alto playing and gave me enough encouragement to really set me on fire. I practiced more than ever, did a few gigs with my dad’s friends playing baritone, and listened to a lot of music constantly.

That was when we were in Connecticut, and we were to go back to California soon after the Kenton concert, then back to Connecticut, where my father died.

It was only later that I learned that my dad had a big band that used to rehearse when I was 12.

So, on this YouTube clip there are Quin Davis, Kim Frizell, Willie Maiden, all three of whom had played in that band, back in Orange County.

Mike Vax, the lead trumpet player, was the leader of the band I played in at the 1970 Kenton clinic in Redlands. Ray Brown, one of the jazz trumpeters, was the only arranging teacher I ever studied with besides my dad, at Cabrillo College, outside Santa Cruz.

Ramon Lopez, the guy playing congas, was my roommate when Dick Shearer, the lead trombonist and band wrangler, called me for the gig on high baritone. (Unlike most big bands, the Kenton band had one alto, two tenors, and two baris, one of whom used to double on bass sax.) Dick had heard me at a concert in Santa Cruz where the Cabrillo Band opened for Stan. The year was 1974. Stan died in 1979.

And of course, though he’s not on this clip, Tony Campise lives right here in Austin, and doesn’t get nearly the respect he ought to for all he’s done.

I think I’ll listen to “Live at the Tropicana,” one of the most straight-ahead of the Kenton recordings. Then maybe a little Basie.