Well, here we go again . . . Only it's my hope that I'm stitching some of the scattered threads of this 30+ year old project into something that actually represents a business now.

We've had a couple very successful gigs at Bocci's Cellar since I last posted. Stella has proven to be an tremendous asset, unlike a lot of singers I choose not to name. I've been writing like a fiend. The band never seems to need rehearsing, and we've been so well received at Bocci's that we have steady second Fridays of each month until the place closes for party season come December, 2013. Nancy Carr, the ball of fire who took over running the Friday Swing Dance Happy Hours, suggested we might make it a goal to resurrect the spirit of the old Catalyst Happy Hours with Jake Stock and Wally. Thinking this was a pretty good idea, I put together this press release, which I am mailing out to press outlets today:

. . . and here we are, almost three weeks out, with plenty of time to get this ball rolling. The big news, as may be inferred from the poster, is that Art Baron is going to play trombone with us on the 8th of March. While we didn't go to the same school, I was in 8th grade across town from Art in Fairfield, Connecticut when we played together in the first big band either of us was in, the Fairfield Police Athletic League Dance Band. (Shout out to my Irish twin sister Noreen, who also played in it!) My family returned to California when the next year, but Arthur and I stayed in touch, and when my dad got another job in Connecticut and we returned to Fairfield, we were both seasoned pros of many dances and jam sessions, me a sophomore in high school, Art a junior. We got to fill in whenever my dad's various bands needed personnel (and when do big bands not need personnel?) and remember well the great times with my dad and his friends that Art and I had.

When my dad suddenly died, the family packed up and headed back to California. Art and I never lost touch, though. I was a high school senior when he entered Berklee (my dad's alma mater) in 1968. He studied with Phil Wilson, who took a shine to him, and befriended a trombonist-arranger from Monterey called Jackson Stock, who would later be the guy sitting next to me at the Catalyst that taught me the forms of Dixieland tunes. Art hung up his spurs at Berklee for a road gig with Buddy Rich, followed by and extended association with Stevie Wonder.

I remember there were only two soloists listed on Stevie's album Music of my Mind, which I bought when I was a freshman at UCSC. One was guitarist Buzz Feiten, whose brother, photographer-trombonist John Feiten, shared a mailbox with me at College Five, UCSC because of the alphabetical proximity of our surnames. The other soloist was Art Baron on trombone. Coincidence?

During his Stevie tenure, Art came out to Santa Cruz a couple times for a hang with me, Jack Stock, Jim Baum, and may others. Here's a shot of us playing music Jack and I put together behind the pre-earthquake Bookshop Santa Cruz.

Then, as I was graduating from UCSC, word came that Art, aged 23, had been hired by Duke Ellington. THAT Duke Ellington. He'd been hired to play the Tricky Sam plunger parts. I mean, come on, really? I knew Art was great, but there usually was an old guy standing in the way from any of these fantastic road gigs! How was this possible?

I remember walking on the beach one night at 26th Avenue after I heard the good news with Dian Smith, my girlfriend and fellow saxophonist. I was comfortable living on the cheap in Santa Cruz, playing in the Cabrillo band, occasionally doing gigs, but this was seriously challenging my world. I decided that night that I too would get a glamorous road gig (Ah! If I'd known then what I know now!). The Cabrillo band was soon to open for Stan Kenton's band at the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium, and I decided that this was a big chance for me. I was playing baritone (a niche market instrument, much like Art's plunger trombone), and I knew Lile would feature me on a number or two. So when the band arrived in town on their glamorous bus (except for Glen Stewart, whose son drove him in his Porsche) with their leather jackets and their hangers-on, staying at an otherwise drab motel on Ocean Street, there I was, waiting in the weeds.

Tony Campise, a hero of this blog from my days in Austin, had just been married, so rather than schlocking onto him, I fused with baritone saxophonist Roy Reynolds. When Roy grew weary and switched to a vacant tenor chair in the band, about six months later, I got the call for the freed-up baritone slot. Off I went, January 5, 1975, 23 years old for another 24 days until my 24th birthday, which we spent crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a PanAm 747.

What happened next doesn't bear repeating, but suffice to say that I did my term with Stan, and I trace all of it back to the feelings I had when I was walking the beach with Dian that night, trying to make sense out of Art getting a gig with Duke Ellington. That feeling still spurs me on from time to time when I waver in my resolve.

In other news, I put together a new band website, http://newflamintoswing.com. I joined Gigmasters for a trial six months, and you can find us by searching for Swing Bands in Santa Cruz. I'm toying with the idea of an organ trio, because how much better is it to call two guys instead of 11?

I got a replacement road bike, but I still miss my Bruce Gordon BLT, which was stolen in September. I'm trying to get serious about biking, although serious at 62 and serious at 22 are two way different things. Still, I am putting in the miles.

Oh, and I am, I guess, somehow retired, as my main income stream comes from my Social Security benefits. I opened my account at my 62nd birthday. All those years of working for The Man finally pay off!

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.

From the ancient archives: Dick Fenno's Hobby Is Music

This is an article my aunt sent me, published in the Fitchco-Deco News, house organ of the Fitchburg Paper Company. in August, 1956.

At the time, my dad was working as a draftsman at the paper mill, one of the many industrial jobs to be had in the brick mills of Fitchburg, which included Independent Lock Company (ILCO) and the Iver Johnson Arms & Cycle Works. When you started at one of these factories, you usually retired from them 50 years later. A co-worked of mile when I worked at South by Southwest started at Fitchburg Paper when my dad worked there and retired when they closed the factory in the early eighties.

That was the way things worked in Fitchburg. If you were lucky and hung on, maybe you’d retire to Florida and wait for the reaper there. My family pulled up stakes and left Fitchburg for southern California in October, 1960–as the Pirates were beating the Yankees and the last weeks of the campaign between JFK and Richard Nixon were taking place. This was considered by some–including both sets of my grandparents--as downright heretical. We were leaving the steady paychecks of Fitchburg Paper for the much less solid Westlake College of Modern Music, recently relocated (an accounting scandal was the reason) from Hollywood to Laguna Beach.

The writing in this article is wonderful, but the tone of the piece is clearly that Fitchburg was getting too big for dad’s britches and he was looking for bigger and better things. Odd then that no mention is made of his children, just Noreen and me at the time, but Cindy on the way in November of 1956, and 2 others, Jimmy and Marcia, to come.

Odder still is that the article is published in a column called Hobby Corner, with a cut in the corner of photography, stamp collecting, electric trains, and woodworking. Music didn’t have that relationship with my father. It was central to his life.

Dick Fenno’s Hobby Is Music

There’s nothing unusual about a five year old boy beating a toy drum – but when it is a snare drum and the forerunner of a career in music – that makes it news.

Our child drummer is Dick Fenno, who works in the Chief Engineer’s office at #4 Mill. Dick kept at it and had acquired a full eight years of practice on the drums by the time he played his first professional engagement at the tender age of thirteen. Two years later he joined Eddie Hamilton’s Orchestra and for three years this young lad hit the college and ballroom circuit all over New England and New York State. That was from 1941 to 1944.

Then Dick enlisted in the Army and was assigned to the 392nd Army Service Forces band. He toured the Mid-West and South with the band on War Bond and Recruiting Drives. This band recorded V-discs for use by Armed Forces Overseas and made a number of recordings for transcribed radio use.

Upon his discharge from the Army in 1946, Dick joined up with the Gene Carlson Orchestra and worked the New England ballroom circuit for a couple years, building up a bankroll to further his music studies. In 1948 he enrolled at Schillinger House of Music (now Berklee School) and whizzed through the four year course in three years. During this period he played nights with Karl Rhode’s band for six months and with Freddy Guerra’s Band for a year, to provide funds for his studies.

When he completed his music course at Schillinger House, he re-joined the Eddie Hamilton Orchestra and did freelance arranging n the side. This was in 1950 and the arranging work simply poured in. He wrote the complete music library for the Frankie Dee Orchestra, made a number of arrangements for Freddie Sateriale’s Orchestra, and wrote arrangements for the entire library for the Lad Carleton Orchestra.

Last year he organized the Dick Fenno Orchestra of seven musicians and a male vocalist. This group has played for Fitchco events and it is a smart outfit. It has been very successful at colleges, high schools. ad small clubs and ballrooms throughout New England.

Dick recently re-organized the Lad Carleton Orchestra, which is preparing to start out in the early fall. Big units are on the way back, Dick says, and the new set-up runs to eleven musicians and a vocalist. It will be billed as the New Dick Fenno Orchestra.

Prodigious for a young man of 29 to cram so much experience into so youthful an age. But remember, Dick started at five and was a professional musician at thirteen. There have been a lot of drum flourishes in the years since.

Drums and piano are Dick’s instruments and he leads from the percussion section. Progressive Jazz is his preference in Music. Stan Kenton, Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan are idols. Dick believes very strongly that the big bands are on the way back, and backs up his belief with his new eleven-piece outfit. Bad as Rick and Roll is, says Dick, it is a step in the right direction. It’s got a beat that sets your foot tapping.

It’s been nice to visit you and learn about your hobby, Dick. It must give you a lot of pleasure and if you are lucky and hit it right it could bring you fame and fortune. We hope it does!