We're At It Again . . .

Well, here we go again, only this time, it really is about the band. I have untangled all my personal problems from my musical career. It all started when Nancy Carr took over the booking at Bocci's for the Friday afternoon Happy Hours. She approached me with a great plan. Her idea was my band would play at least once a month starting in January, 2013.

Not only did I agree without hesitation, I suggested to her that we'd be really charged to do Black Friday, November 23, 2012. That's usually a hard one to book, and the consensus was that they'd probably blow off that Friday. I thought it was a great opportunity, so I let Nancy know that we'd do all we could to make this otherwise unlikely afternoon a success.

So far, I've secured the services of sax players Kurt Stockdale and me (waiting on Paul Contos and a special guest on baritone), the brass is Stan Sorokin, John Hemsley and Dave Gregoric, Jon Dryden on piano, guitarist and former Santa Cruz resident Steve Hayes, Chris Charmin on bass, and Olaf on drums. This will be a very hot band, at least the equal of the bad that played back in August in Bocci's.

And then I thought about Stella.I have a couple female vocal charts I did with Marilyn Rucker back in Austin, and several more we didn't get to back there. So I sounded her and she responded with no small enthusiasm. We'll be harnessing her energies. I've been talking to her, and I need to talk to her some more, about the classy girl singers I've worked with in the past (and in their twilights), notably Helen Forrest. Stella is a student of her craft, a hard-working singer who has disciplined practicing techniques. I look forward to working with her.

So far, I designed the flyer, put an event up on Facebook, and we've got more than a month to go before the Happy Hour. I designed the flyer around the concept of Black Friday, as in, "What are you going to do? Shop at the mall?" Adding one of Stella's flirty head shots was a natural.

So, come on down to Bocci's on November 23 for the New Flamingo Swing Orchestra, with Stella D'Oro on vocals. Your $5 cover goes 100% to the musicians.

The more things change . . .

And so, things have changed. But I decided that we would go back to our original identity for the next gig. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, we are the New Flamingo Swing Orchestra—only now, we are Richard Fenno's New Flamingo Swing Orchestra.

Why? I'm still shaking off my time in Texas, where we were the Original Recipe Big Band. The New Flamingo Swing Orchestra was what we were when at our founding, back when I was scribbling charts in our spare bedroom on Westwood Blvd. in Los Angeles, soon to be occupied by our about-to-be-born son, Brendan, who is now 28 years old and himself living in Fort Worth with his lovely wife, two huge dogs, and a gig most weekends playing drums with a young people's jump jive band.

I guess I just like this incarnation better. Texas was a lot of frustration for me, despite the good and enduring friendships there. Something about being at war with the climate on a fundamental level, either too cold or blisteringly hot. Ah, the heat, and the fire ants. Don't get me started on fire ants.

So here I am living alone in paradise, and the band's a reflection of that. For better or worse, this is my identity and the band's.

I continue to write charts like there was a demand outside the band for them. (Perhaps someday . . . ) Recent additions are Blues in Hoss' Flat by Frank Foster for Count Basie, Greasy Sack Blues by Don Rader for Woody's band, and, now that I'm all wrapped up in Benny Carter's compositions, I Was Wrong, a lovely little ballad we'll be playing at Bocci's.

The band at Bocci's will be me on alto, Paul Contos and Brad Hecht on tenors, Paul Tarantino on baritone, Stan Soroken and John Hemsley on trumpets, Dave Gregoric on trombone, Mark Howell on guitar, Jon Dryden on piano, Chris Charman on bass, Olaf Schiappacasse on drums, and young Nick Roberto doing a couple vocals.

I'm going to get a few club/restaurant owners in to Bocci's to hear us. I want them to see how we pack the place whenever we play, how we take care of the customers and use our fan lists to bring them out. Ultimately the business is all about butts in the seats, couples on the dance floor, and how many drinks are consumed per person. I've always counted beers at tables from the bandstand. Try it. It works.

Ever onward.

A year has passed.

A year has passed since I moved to Santa Cruz, with my eyes wide open. I knew then that it'd be a hard slog, and I haven't seen anything yet that contradicts that assumption. I've had comical musical experiences (see this post) and meaningful ones too, like the Cabrillo Reunion back in October, where most of the 1975 jazz ensemble's members got together with Lile Crews at the helm once again.

Making a living hasn't been easy. I took a part-time job at a struggling music store. I've never been this close to the ground in retail. Always I had the advantage of being detached from the customer by a distributor, importer or wholesaler when I ventured into the music trades.

Sue's been marvelously supportive. In the last year, I landed a couple gigs–one for my big band even–through her kind offices. But it's time to get serious on a number of levels, including hastening the divorce and getting rent checks in on time, as she's struggling too.

So I've decided that I'm going to redouble my efforts to get my various bands hired. I already built a website called fennomusic.com that's still got a few glaring deficiencies, although the structure and look are just about right.

It's been a long haul from the time I decided to set up my big band once again, through my ship contracts, to the heart attack in 2008, through my marriage ending, leaving Austin, and here in Santa Cruz, where I had to step on the first rung of a ladder that I'd pretty much climbed 35+ years ago, where people play for free nowadays and restaurants expect not to pay musicians for making music.

I'm also going to try a little writing again. I wrote this book for Peachpit Press in 1998. Unfortunately the product was pulled off the market the very week the book was released, the reason being that Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and decided to reallocate the software development, canceling titles that were under the Claris banner. (Not that I'm pissed at his memory, because at the time I was mopping up Apple shares with my 401(K) rollover account. If he hadn't closed that unprofitable appendage of Filemaker along with about a million other details, I'd have a lot less in that account than I do now.)

What has me intrigued is Apple's new textbook initiative and the tool they released for authoring textbooks. For free. Unlike when I wrote and produced my last book, which I did the prepress production on as well, there will be no copy editing through MS Word (ugh!) files passed back and forth among several editors, page proofs generated in Quark ExPress, and then off to some RR Donelley plant in northwest Ohio. Just my iMac and maybe an iPad to test pages.

There are several things I feel I know enough about to be able to produce a text aimed at a very tight market segment. More on this later.

Then there's the issue of the royalties. If I remember correctly I made less than 2 bucks on each book sold. Cover price was $16.95 if I remember right. They sold a lot of them eventually, but the take per book was less than stellar. I was green behind the ears, though, it being my first book.

That's what I don't understand about pundits bloviating about Apple's cut of a finished textbook in the iTunes store. Seventy percent of a book going to the author sounds pretty good to me!

Whether that's good enough to get me going and sustain me through the process, well, that's another matter.

I'm also thinking Sue, who just earned a French Wine Expert shingle from the French Wine Institute, and who just returned from an almost mythical tour of Burgundy with a group of admitted partisans, has a book in her waiting to gently be extracted. The Women Vintners of Burgundy, perhaps? Or something a bit more general?

Again, more as it develops.

Meanwhile, I'm playing almost every night of the week somewhere in Santa Cruz, usually for free or a cut of the tip jar. I'm writing some charts for Dan Young's Pleasure Point Horns which we're about to unleash on an indifferent universe. I'm doing my best to get a saxophone quartet off the ground. And I'm thinking about hiring an organizer. I'm wondering when we can do a reunion of Sofrito.

Growing Up on LA Radio

I grew up on southern California with the radio on. My family moved to Laguna Beach in 1960 from Fitchburg, Massachusetts, for crying out loud. I was nine, and the Pirates were beating the Yankees in the World Series the night we flew, far from non-stop, across the country on TWA. My young ears were open as we left Boston’s Logan Airport, over the considerable hum of the engines from our Lockheed Super Constellation, the most beautiful transport plane ever made. By the time we had reached LaGuardia, Mazeroski had faced Ralph Terry and it was all over for the Yankees.

Once we’d settled in Laguna Beach and adjusted to the idea that a Catholic like us could be President of the United States and that the November did not necessarily mean adjusting to snowfall. One of the first adjustments I made to the rarified atmosphere of early sixties southern California was the voice of Chuck Niles, delivered through the radio, through KNOB (“The Jazz Knob”) in Long Beach.

From that day forward, I’d be follow Chuck to various stations around the dial. Radio changed formats, but not Chuck. His bass/baritone, impeccable timing, and unquestionable musical taste dragged me into some swinging places, with some very swinging and ultra-hip musical forces. Chuck never let me down, even he ended up at KLON, a public station in Long Beach that had inherited the library of KBCA and a low-watt transmitter. Chuck’s greatest moments were when he was drolly commenting on the traffic reports at KLON. (I remember a truckload of sheep loose on the Pomona Freeway . . . )

Then, there was KMPC.

As soon as I heard Gary Owens, my goose was cooked. He was the zany afternoon guy at the station that was owned by Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, who also owned the Anaheim Angels or whatever they’re now called. Before the gig with Laugh-In, he was there every afternoon being silly and playing some stuff a little to the right and a little more corporate than Chuck was playing.

Then there were Roger Carroll and Johnny Magnus.

They jointly set up the Teenage Underground just in time for me to join as a teenager.

In an amazing stroke of luck I won tickets to see, at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a TAU concert with Miss Ella Fitzgerald backed by Oscar Peterson, Ray Brown, and Ed Thigpen. That afternoon was a real ear-opener for me. In fact, I thought I’d be hearing things like Ella and Oscar for the rest of my life. As if!

Later high-flyers on the singing cowboy’s station included Bob Arbogast and Jack Margolis, who admitted over the air that they smoked pot and were against the war. It WAS a great time to be young, after all.

The thing that all these gentlemen had going for him is the dark and deep resonance of their voices, which added to the appeal of the music they were playing. Their voices were instruments which managed to grab me through the static of AM and the relative dearth of FM, sit my ass down, and play some music for me, along with associated hi-jinks.

By the time I’d become a disaffected teenager with a learner’s permit, I’d run into KPFK, the permanently-embattled Pacifica station in Cahuenga Pass. Blessed with a massive signal, the station was at the time home to Lowell Ponte, who led The Party of the Right and went on to obscurity as a minor talk show host. Then there was Elliot Mintz, who at the time was using the Youth Culture (whatever the hell THAT was) to break into the business of being a press agent to the impossibly glamorous.

Then there was Radio Free Oz, where the Firesign Theatre was born. If you’re asking who the FST was, you’re too young to understand who they were, but you could look it up in Wikipedia. Basically a freeform show hosted by Peter Bergman (another great LA radio voice) RF Oz hit me right between the eyes when I was most vulnerable, and I even started credible variations on the FST voices so I could memorize their records, which soon followed.

About this time, KRLA was playing during the news an incredible skit team called the Credibility Gap, and that’s where my radio dial was every day at least once. I had next to no interest in the music that was playing, but oh the satire of it all!

The best known of the Gap, and one of the great voices of our age, was Harry Shearer, who’s been doing voices on the Simpsons, as well as the bass player in the various incarnations of Spinal Tap, for a very, very long time.

The Gap was edgy in a way that satire could only be that was written the day it was performed, and these guys knocked me out. (Harry’s still doing great things, including a documentary about the levees breaking in his adopted home, New Orleans.)

Then I moved to Santa Cruz, where there were a lot fewer radio stations.

Cabrillo Countdown: The Real Cabrillo

I can hardly believe this is happening. After nearly a year of kicking around ideas about a Cabrillo College alumni band made of musicians of a certain age, honoring Lile Cruse, our band director back at the founding of the band in the seventies, we are actually doing it. "It" will be at Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, in just a couple days.

I hate the poster. Why did I not step forward and volunteer my graphic design skills?

Lile looks like Herbert L. Clarke in the photo. Also, several of our number won't be there, but I suppose that's the way it goes. But we will have a full band of eager players, the promise of at least one full house, some great charts to run, and camaraderie that will have withstood our decades apart.

Here's the truth: Lile rounded up, in every sense of the word, a motley group of hippies and hardened Vietnam vets and gave us the authority to have a little fun with music, something I personally needed at the time. When he recruited me he didn't even give me time to think about it. Next I knew I was sitting next to an impossibly young Paul Contos. Now it's nearly 40 years later, and it's amazing how central music is to the lives of the guys (and gal!) who will make up the band on October 1.

Real heroes include Danny, who beat the drum mercilessly in the local press, Matt, who flew in all the way from Barcelona for this, Rich, Billy and Brad, all of whom turned down the kind of gigs musicians ought not turn down to free up a rehearsal day on Friday and the gigging day, Saturday.

Folks start arriving tomorrow, and I can hardly wait.

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.

Aligning Myself With the Forces of Darkness

OK, so the bandleader called back and offered me the gig on the 20th of August which I described in the last post.

I could have said no. When it's all over, I might very well wish I had. But I need the money and I want to work. Not to mention this being exactly the thing I do pretty well.

How the worm turned and things he got around to calling me again I'll never know. We re-enacted that awkward conversation about "What is your rate," but I made it simple for him by asking what the other guys are making, which he wouldn't tell me of course, but which made the opening for him to offer me a sum that I consider respectable.

Now I'm committed to two rehearsals, one on Sunday the 14th up at this end of the bay, one in Monterey next week on an undetermined weeknight, and the gig itself, which if I understand correctly will be at a somewhat new restaurant.

There look to be two horns, me and a trombone player.

Then the guy sends my a buttload of MP3 files of Frank singing Frank. Like I need this. OK, so I'll be listening for keys and going with the backgrounds I remember. I mentioned that I have a book, but he was non-responsive so I let it drop. Too bad. I could have a whole book for the gig but it'll cost ya, buddy!

It all reminds me of the old English folks I used to encounter on the QE2 who were taking her last World Cruise in 2008. The would fulminate about the old ship being sold to Dubai for "mere money." I will, it appears, work for anybody offering me the same.