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!

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.

Tony: Winter of a Kentonite

Last night Tony Campise, who played with the band Monday night on wobbly legs, fell in his Corpus Christi hotel room soon after checking in. He never made it to the stage of the Texas Jazz Festival, where he was booked for a couple nights he had stretched to a 4-day hotel stay.

There was certainly nothing wrong with his playing Monday at Ruta Maya. But he was a little more edgy than usual, even accusing me of misrepresenting the hours of the gig. (He subsequently looked in his book and cleared me of all charges.) But, he had to be helped onto the stage and he was having an intestinal struggle.

Tony and I might go back further, I suspect, than anyone in this town. The Kenton band played in Santa Cruz in 1974, when Tony was the alto player and leader of the saxophones. My college band, the Cabrillo Jazz Ensemble, opened the show, and I was lucky enough to hang with some of the guys. I subsequently joined the band, but just after Tony left.

Since I moved to Austin I’ve played with Tony many times, not enough to get alienated by some of Tony’s quirky habits, nor he with mine. He was the first guy I called when I was setting up the recent demo session. I knew he’d cost more than any of the other guys, but I also knew he was worth it. Tony was on his very best behavior at the session, playing a couple torrid solos and helping the band through some rough spots.

I always try to mix generations, because the best results happen musically when the energy of youthful enthusiasm is tempered by the example of experience. That day, Tony was the éminence grise to all of us, and particularly to a young trombonist originally from Houston called Ulrican Williams, who shared with me a story of the day that Tony spoke to the kids at his middle school. That long-ago day Tony filled Ulrican with something that he’s been chasing ever since, culminating with him playing on the same recording as Tony.

I feel like the same thing happened to me, 35 years before, in Santa Cruz.

At 4 this morning it was determined that the fall had caused fluid to fill Tony’s brain which would need surgery to relieve. It’s now 7 pm as I write this, and we haven’t word of Tony regaining consciousness yet.

We have another gig at Ruta Maya Monday, one for which I’ll need to hire a tenor player.

In the Can

I’ve had a week plus to consider the consequences of the recording. Here are my thoughts:

The studio, and the engineer who runs it, are every bit as tip-top as Eddie King, who owned and operated the studio where we recorded nearly thirty years ago. It’s a lot easier to handle the vagaries of recording a big band than Eddie behind the wheel of his Neve 3 board, going directly into two channels. The stuff we recorded last week is still in multi-track format, with virtually unlimited tracks we can add or use for experimenting with or clam fixing.

Nonetheless, Mike Hersh has a real respect for the music which shows in just how close the tracks sound now to a finished project. The tendency is to improve those tracks to perfection, which I am not interested in because every iteration seems to lose something, not in sonic quality but in feel. Mike worked great with Jimmy Shortell, who knows how to push the guys by reading the score and gently nudging them toward product.

No complaints about the band I put together. It was a real thrill having Butch (Basie's drummer for many years) and Tony Campise (who left Stan Kenton pretty much the day I joined back in 1975) there. Paul Baker and Tony Bray rounded out the saxes with me. The youth movement was the brass section with Kevin Flatt and Pete Clagett (we were on QE2 together) on trumpets and Ulrican Williams on the slide trambone. It was a bit of a youthful rhythm section too, with Ulrich Ellison on guitar, Angelo Lembisis on piano, Kris Afflerbach on bass, and Jimmy on drums. Marilyn Rucker was the canary.




The main thing a brought away from this session, though was that, despite the fact that I had a coronary and I have an ICD watching over me, I can still write all the charts, select the tunes from our massive and growing repertoire, select from among the many studios in town one that would be most big-band friendly. I selected and hired the personnel at my cost, while using the perfect combination of veterans and young studs.

Many thanks to Noreen and Larry for providing lunch.

In fine and one half hours we recorded 10 tracks, all of which we were sightreading.

Next step the clam fixes, the final mix, and we’ve doubled the size of our nearly 30-year old demo.