Jazz Film "Trove" - Ernest R. Smith

© -Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

According to the obituary that appeared in the New York Times on April 14, 2004, Ernest R. Smith, was 79 years old at the time of his death and “an authority on jazz music and dance.”

Mr. Smith, who was known as Ernie, developed an interest in jazz during his teens in Pittsburgh.

An Art Director for a New York advertising agency, Smith had a long-standing interest in jazz and jazz dance that began during his youth in Pittsburgh, Pa. Early on, Smith discovered that jazz music was best appreciated while dancing. He became an accomplished Lindy Hopper, frequenting both white and African American ballrooms.

He worked at several advertising agencies in New York. Among them were Sudler & Hennessy and Lubalin, Smith & Carnase, where he developed a logo for PBS.

His job at the advertising agency supported Smith's two passions - painting and jazz dance and music. Smith was also a film enthusiast so, in 1954, after taking a jazz class at the New School taught by Marshall Stearns, a leading jazz scholar, who with Jean Stearns wrote Jazz Dance: The Story of Vernacular Dance.''

he began collecting examples of jazz and jazz dance on film. In the process of creating his film collection, Smith became one of the leading authorities on jazz and jazz dance films.

In the process of collecting films Mr. Smith became an authority on jazz music and jazz dance films, providing the film listing for the Stearns book. He also wrote the entry on jazz film for the 1988 edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Jazz. He contributed films to many documentaries and lectured at colleges and museums throughout the country.

Smith built his film collection by identifying films of potential interest and acquiring them through trade and purchase. He created lecture reels on specific topics -- the history of jazz, social dance, tap dance, Duke Ellington, Lindy Hop -- and presented lecture/screenings nationally and internationally. He also provided footage for numerous documentaries and maintained active relationships with filmmakers, other film collectors, jazz scholars, the swing dance community, and musicians.

Ernie Smith donated his film collection to the Archives Center at the Smithsonian Institution in 1993.

He continued to lecture and participate in swing dance activities, but devoted the majority of his time to painting and related artistic pursuits until his death in 2004.

Mr. Smith's collection at the Archive Center at the Smithsonian Institution includes an 1884 film and 352 reels.

Despite his monumental behest, Ernie Smith was not widely known in general Jazz circles, this despite an essay about him by Whitney Balliett, the distinguished Jazz author and Jazz critic that appeared in The New Yorker magazine. The essay was also included under the title Trove as one of The New Yorker pieces in Whitney’s Dinosaurs in the Morning [1962].

Trove

“THERE'S NO gainsaying that Hollywood's cheerful desecration of the arts has been all but impartial. Literature, music, and the dance—let alone the film itself—have been sterilized with equal vigor and concentration. But jazz, which didn't reach Hollywood until the late twenties, is an exception. To be sure, countless full-length burlesques of the music exist, among them those oleaginous biographies in which Danny Kaye appears as Red Nichols and Kirk Douglas as Bix Beiderbecke. Nonetheless, while Hollywood's right hand was fashioning such vaudeville items, its left hand was turning out untold numbers of invaluable jazz shorts. Though almost invariably hoked up with dancers, Uncle Toms, precious photography, and costumes ranging from bellhops' uniforms to leopard-skin togas, these films often contain excellent jazz—some of it, in fact, by groups that were never recorded elsewhere.

One celebrated example is Elmer Snowden's 1932 Small's Paradise band. A disheartening number of these shorts have been lost or have simply disintegrated, but a good many others have been rescued by valiant collectors. Recently, one of these collectors, Ernest R. Smith, a fast-talking, thirty-seven-year-old advertising executive, exhibited, as the first of three programs, eleven jazz shorts (all but two from his collection) in a small auditorium in Freedom House.

The program was opened and closed by two extraordinary films—St. Louis Blues, a short made in 1929 with Bessie Smith, and Jammin' the Blues, photographed in 1944 by Gjon Mili. Miss Smith plays what appears to be a lady of the night who is knocked down and robbed by her man. (The story lines of these shorts were never more than transparent.) Most of her picture, which is an odd mixture of realism and soap opera, is given over to a scene in a night club, where Miss Smith, propped drunkenly but magisterially against the bar, sings a monumental version of the title song, accompanied by part of Fletcher Henderson's band and the Hall-Johnson choir—a combination that lends an operatic atmosphere to the number. (Joe Smith, Henderson's great, ruby-toned cornetist, is also visible and audible.)

Parts of Jammin' the Blues are arty, but the picture is largely a straightforward record of such men as Lester Young, Harry Edison, Jo Jones, and Sid Catlett playing a couple of blues and a standard. Included are superb shots of Young's lidded, moonlike face, a bassist's bony, concave fingers, and Catlett obliquely from the rear, his sequoia self swaying slowly from side to side, his left arm hanging limp, wire brush in hand.

In between these pictures, Smith ran off two Ellington shorts—Black and Tan Fantasy (1929) and Symphony in Black (1935)—that are, despite their theatrics, filled with commendable solos by Bubber Miley, Johnny Hodges, Tricky Sam Nanton, Cootie Williams, and Lawrence Brown. Moreover, in the second one, Billie Holiday, in perfect voice and looking as fresh as a butterball, sings a couple of choruses of the blues.

The Ellington shorts were almost matched by a Louis Armstrong film, Rhapsody in Black and Blue (1932), in which Armstrong, at the height of his powers and dressed in a leopard skin, gets off a fast "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You" and a fascinating "Shine,” sung and played in both middle and up-tempos.

The rest of the evening was more absorbing sociologically than musically. Armstrong reappeared, both live and animated, in a Betty Boop cartoon, also entitled I’ll Be Glad When You're Dead You Rascal You, which is so tasteless it is funny. (At one point, Armstrong's huge, mugging, disembodied head chases a tiny animated missionary type across an endless plain.) The program was completed by five so-called "soundies," which were three-minute films made in the early forties for jukebox-like machines equipped with small screens. Two were by Gene Krupa's band (1941-42), with Roy Eldridge and Anita O'Day, and three by Fats Waller (1941 and 1942), who, surrounded by a gaggle of beauties, rubbers and jowls his way through "Ain't Misbehavin'," "Honeysuckle Rose," and "The Joint is Jumpin'."

All but two of the fifteen or so films in Smith's second showing, which included shorts, sequences from shorts and full-length pictures, and soundies, were from his collection. The best things were often the most tantalizing. In an excerpt from After Seven, a short done in 1928 with Chick Webb's band, there was a single, fleeting glimpse of Webb himself—peering, tiny and spidery, over the top of his drums—and a great deal of James Barton, singing and dancing in blackface.

A Count Basie short, made in 1939 by the greatest of the Basie bands, was centered on the Delta Rhythm Boys and on let's-get-it-over-with footage of the band doing three lightning numbers that included solos—and good shots—of Harry Edison, Buck Clayton, Jo Jones, Walter Page, Don Byas, and Basie, dressed in a Glen-plaid horse blanket. Bundle of Blues, a 1933 Ellington short, was less frustrating. Although most of the film was taken up with poetic shots of a rain-streaked window, an axe stuck in a wet stump, a slave cabin in the rain, rain on leaves, and rain on a pond, while an invisible Ivie Anderson sang "Stormy Weather" (what a good singer she was!), there were satisfying closeups and statements from Cootie Williams, Tricky Sam Nanton, Freddy Guy, and Sonny Greer.

Best of all was a 1940 short, filmed in the vanished Cafe Society Uptown. Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson buffaloed their way through "Boogie Woogie Dream," Lena Horne sang a blues, exhibiting the finest teeth ever owned by a human being, and Teddy Wilson's small band (Emmett Berry, Benny Morton, Jimmy Hamilton, and J. C. Heard) played an exemplary medium-tempo blues.

The rest of the evening was either square and funny or given over to maddening snippets. The squarest moments came during shorts by Artie Shaw (1939) and Stan Kenton (1945). In the first a commentator anatomized swing ("a pounding, ensenuating rhythm") while Shaw and Buddy Rich, looking barely hatched, did a duet, and in the second a leviathan Kenton ensemble (six trumpets, four trombones, five saxophones, four rhythm) demonstrated how to play for the millennium. The snippets were sometimes dazzling: Cab Calloway shouting and shimmying "Minnie the Moodier" while Cozy Cole, Jonah Jones, Mousie Randolph, and Danny Barker graced the background; Jack Teagarden singing and playing "Basin Street Blues" in 1938 (shots of the Mississippi and the Mardi Gras); part of a 1946 "March of Time," showing the Art Tatum Trio on Fifty-second Street and an Eddie Condon group with Dave Tough, his face cavernous and haunted, his arms like thongs; and another Basie short, made by his sextet in 1950, that included two superb selections by Billie Holiday ("God Bless the Child" and a blues), and half a dozen boogie-woogie numbers by Sugar Chile Robinson, a ten-year-old prodigy whom Basie treated as if Sugar Chile were Charlie McCarthy and he were W. C. Fields.

The final showing numbered two dozen shorts, snippets from shorts, brief films done around 1950 for television, and soundies. Since Smith's collection, like all treasure-troves, has a bottom, the program was pretty raggle-taggle. There were lots of vocals by Louis Jordan, Peggy Lee, Sarah Vaughan, June Christy, Billy Eckstine (with his 1946 big band, which had Gene Ammons and Art Blakey, both of them visible), and Fats Waller, as well as instrumental by the clean-cut, 4-H bands of Glen Gray, Buddy Rich, Larry Clinton, and Stan Kenton. But the scattered exceptions were wonderful. In a couple of 1942 Louis Armstrong soundies, done with the last of his big bands, Armstrong sang "Shine" and played a fine short solo, and the late Velma Middleton, straining the joists, sang and danced "Swingin' on Nothin’”

The high points of the Armstrong selections, though, were several fleeting shots of Sid Catlett, who was between jobs with Benny Goodman and Teddy Wilson's Cafe Society Uptown band. A monument-like figure behind his drums, his eyes revealing the slightly malevolent expression they sometimes assumed when he was concentrating, he could be seen, in a last glimpse, casually spinning a drumstick through the air (a blurred-moon effect) with his right hand while his left descended like an enormous fly swatter on his hi-hat cymbals.

Of equal value were a number by Al Cooper and his Savoy Sultans, a semi-legendary and very hot Harlem band from the late thirties, and two short television films by Jack Teagarden (made in company with Ray Bauduc and Charlie Teagarden), who fashioned first-rate solos in "That's A-Plenty" and "The Jack Armstrong Blues." Three kick-the-can Lionel Hampton big-band numbers (1950-52) were saved by the spectacle of Milt Buckner, a round, bespectacled frog, who played the uptempo "Cobb's Idea" with such fervor that he cleared both the piano stool and the floor on each beat.

The usual Uncle Tom effects were visible during the evening (Armstrong's "Shine" opened with two Negroes shining a huge shoe—an unpardonable visual pun, since the title of the song is simply a pejorative term for a Negro) and reached an apogee in "Sophisticated Lady," a 1951 Duke Ellington short, in which the alto saxophonist Willie Smith, who is a nearly white Negro, was shown not in the band but as a soloist standing well in front of it, his chair in the saxophone section remaining resoundingly empty throughout the picture. This sort of discretion and thoughtfulness must make white-supremacists weak with gratitude.

Not long after Smith's film showings, I was invited to a preview of a taped one-hour television show called "Chicago and All That Jazz, “ a spirited attempt to re-create the jazz played in Chicago from the mid-teens until 1929, when the music moved its headquarters to New York.

About three-quarters of the program was given over to performances by Kid Ory, Red Allen, Jack Teagarden, Lil Hardin Armstrong, Johnny St. Cyr, Meade Lux Lewis, Blossom Seeley, Al Minns, and Leon James. The remaining quarter included an array of striking and often extremely rare film clips from old feature films, newsreels, shorts, and home movies, which offered glimpses of, among others, Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Noone, and Bix Beiderbecke.

My host was Ernest Smith, who has spent all his spare time and cash during the past five years collecting jazz-and-film memorabilia, stills from films concerned with jazz, and the films themselves. As a result of this activity, Smith probably knows as much about the subject as anyone alive. Smith's collection of stills, about a thousand strong, is unmatched, while his collection of films, which includes seven or eight features and some eighty shorts, is surpassed only by that of John Baker, a Columbus, Ohio, collector who owns well over three hundred items. I learned these things shortly after the screening, when I had a talk with Smith at his apartment, at Lexington Avenue and Ninetieth Street.

Once I was settled in Smith's workroom, a small, immaculate box filled with reels of film, cardboard files, huge loose-leaf notebooks, and film reference books, I asked him how he had become involved with "Chicago and All That Jazz." Smith, who is a short, amiable, firmly built man with a soft aquiline nose and dark hair, told me that N.B.C. had approached him late in June, and that he had worked closely with an admirable woman named Helen Kiok, who was the show's film researcher.

"They asked me if I knew of anything on Eddie Lang or Bix Beiderbecke or Mamie Smith,” Smith said, putting out a cigarette and taking a brownie from a dish at his elbow. "I didn't, but things got started when Len Kunstadt, a jazz-collector friend of mine who lives in Brooklyn, told Helen that Tony Parenti, the clarinetist, had a home movie of Lang, with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, taken in a recording studio. Helen reached Parenti, but unfortunately the film wasn't used, even though it's great— Lang standing by a piano with the Dorseys off to one side.

More important, Parenti said that the twenties bandleader Boyd Senter—Boyd Senter and His Senterpedes he was known as—might have some film or stills. But where was Senter? As it happened, on my way to Kalamazoo by train early last summer I had got off in Detroit and bought an apple and all the local papers—a research habit I've gotten into. This was before I'd even heard of the television show. I found a tiny ad in one of the papers: Boyd Senter and His Orchestra. When the matter of Senter came up, I told Helen about this, and she called the place in the ad, and they said Senter had just closed and gone home to Mio, Michigan.

She left a message with the sheriff in Mio — Senter has no phone — and Senter called back. He didn't have anything, but suggested she contact Doc Cennardo, in California, who was a drummer with Jean Goldkette, and who had a home movie with Bix Beiderbecke on it. I flipped; I'd never heard of Bix on a film. Helen reached Cennardo, and he pooh-poohed the film, saying it was a bad print, made in 1927, in Massachusetts, and that Bix was only visible for seconds.

But we looked at it, and there's Bix, in a natty suit and white socks, his cornet in the side of his mouth, playing with a bunch of Goldkette musicians. All I had on Mamie Smith was a note that mentioned a 1929 short, Jail House Blues. Helen looked up the copyright material in the Library of Congress and discovered that Columbia Pictures had made the film. However, Columbia, it turned out, had sold TV rights to all its early shorts to a California distributor. Helen tracked down the distributor, and, miraculously, he still had a copy of the short. But there wasn't any sound track.

Before sound tracks were perfected, they sometimes used regular discs that were synced with the lip movements, and when John Baker heard about the film, he said he had an acetate disc that might fit it. And, astonishingly, it did. Baker mailed the record, a twelve-incher, to Helen. When she opened the package, Lord, there it was—in six perfect pie-shaped pieces! A technician at N.B.C. stuck them back together. Then they put the record onto tape, edited out the cracked sounds—over two hundred of them —and the awful surface noise, and matched the edited tape to Mamie's lip movements, with the help of the original continuity sheets, which Columbia provided in New York. The results are fantastically clear."

Smith picked up another brownie, and I asked him how he had started his collection.

"I've been both a jazz fan and a film fan for years," he said, chewing vigorously. "But the idea of collecting jazz films only occurred to me about five years ago, when I was helping Marshall Stearns, down at the Institute of Jazz Studies, on Waverly Place. How to start? I went to Irving Klaw's old-photographs place, on Fourteenth Street, and sifted through thousands of stills dealing with all aspects of show biz. Then I read every issue of Variety from 1926 on up. In the early days, Variety had a column, ‘Talking Shorts,’ in which each new short was reviewed in detail. When I came to a mention of, say, a 'darkie jazz band' or 'dancers hotfooting it,’ I had photostats made.

I went through Down Beat and Metronome. I also went through periodicals like Film Fun and Billboard, which were even more helpful than the music magazines. I began indexing all this material, and now I have three or four thousand pages of references.

I’ve discovered that there have been countless films made by all-Negro casts strictly for Negro audiences, and that a lot of them, terrible as they are, have jazz in them. Lena Home was in something called Bronze Venus long before anyone heard of her,and Ruby Dee was in Love and Syncopation. I bought my first film—a Fats Waller short—three years ago, and in the last year or two I've accelerated. I spent nearly two thousand dollars last year alone on films, stills, and the like. I've begun writing a history of jazz in films, but I have so much more research to do—the Negro newspapers, the Library of Congress, the Schomberg Collection, on West 135th Street.

I belong to all the film societies in New York, and every Saturday I tour all over the city, stopping at places like the Memory Shop, on Fourth Avenue, where they keep a file in my name. I look at all of the Late Late Shows on television, where things are always turning up, like Girl Without a Room, a Charles Ruggles picture, a while ago, in which there was a Paris night-club scene showing a Negro band dressed in Zouave uniforms. I'm positive one of the musicians was Lionel Hampton. I've been going without much sleep since I was sixteen, and it doesn't seem to bother me."

Smith told me that he was born in Los Angeles.

"My parents were on the Hungarian stage circuit that existed in this country until the depression almost knocked it out,” he went on, popping a last brownie into his mouth. "In fact, my father was a kind of Hungarian Orson Welles. I didn't go to college, but I studied art in Pittsburgh and on the Coast. I joined the advertising firm of Sudler & Hennessey, where I work, in 1951. I'm an art director and a vice-president. When I first came to New York, I still wanted to paint, and I used to hang around the Cedar Street Tavern, hoping to run into De Kooning and people like that. I don't paint too much any more. This jazz-film thing has become all-consuming. I wish it could be my whole life, but that would take more bread than I'm making now from a full-time job.""

If you are a Jazz fan, You should know about this man and his collection. It’s an incredible behest.

ERNIE SMITH JAZZ FILM COLLECTION, Archives Center, National Museum of American History

1894 - 1979 [Dates for the Film Collection]

#491

(30 cubic feet: 352 reels of 16mm motion picture film)

by: Ben Pubols, Franklin A. Robinson, Jr., Wendy Shay, 2/2001

.

Scope and Content Note

The ERNIE SMITH JAZZ FILM COLLECTION, 1894-1979 consists of 352 reels of 16mm motion picture film. Most of the film is 16mm black and white and sound (composite optical track print), although a few titles are silent or in color. The collection is comprised of compilation reels created by Ernie Smith to accompany his lectures, topical compilation reels created by Ernie Smith, compilation reels created by the Archives Center, and single title reels. The Archives Center produced master and reference video copies using a wet-gate telecine film-to-tape transfer system. Titles were often combined to allow for increased ease of handling, storage, and duplication.

The ERNIE SMITH JAZZ FILM COLLECTION, 1894-1979 is strongest in the areas of jazz dance styles including Lindy Hop and tap, overviews of jazz musical performers and styles; specific jazz musicians and performers including Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Woody Herman, Artie Shaw, Bob Crosby, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Jack Teagarden as well as a wide range of female vocalists; and documentation of the New York jazz and club scene. The collection includes feature films and excerpts from feature films, Soundies and other film shorts, television kinescopes, and documentary films.

The collection is not arranged in accordance with standard archival procedures. The breadth of the collection and the existence of so many multiple topic and/or performer compilation reels made it impossible to impose traditional archival series order. Therefore, each reel is described at the item level in the container list.

Provenance

The Archives Center acquired the collection from Ernie Smith in 1993. America's Jazz Heritage: A Partnership of the The Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund and the Smithsonian Institution provided the funding to produce many of the video master and reference copies.

Stanley Turrentine: Texas or ... Pittsburgh? [From the Archives]

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“He said, ‘I'm Stanley Turrentine.’

For whatever reason, I had never met him before, although I had certainly enjoyed his playing, big-toned, bluesy, powerful, almost forbidding.

He is like that physically, too: tall, big-shouldered and big-chested. But often men of imposing physique and bearing seem to feel no need to prove manhood, and are notably gentle, even sweet, men. Stanley seems to fit that mold.”

- Gene Lees, upon meeting Stanley Turrentine on an S.S. Norway Jazz cruise

When tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine walked toward the stage of a Jazz club he was appearing at in Hollywood, CA some years ago, the announcer said: “Get ready for some big Texas tenor sounds by welcoming Stanley Turrentine and his quartet to the stand.”

When Stanley got on the bandstand, he looked at the crowd before him and while adjusting the microphone he said to nobody in particular: “Hey Man, I’m from Pittsburgh.”

The remark elicited more than a few chuckles because if any tenor saxophonist ever exhibited the big, bluesy qualities of the wide open spaces - what Cannonball Adderley use to refer to as - ‘the moan within the tone’ - it was Stanley Turrentine.

Who knew?

Come to find out, Stanley Turrentine really was from Pittsburgh and after you read the following piece by Gene Lees, you’ll be surprised to learn how many other distinguished Jazz musicians also hail from Steel City.

Gene Lees

Jazzletter

November 1999

The Pittsburgh Connection

“Scratch any Pittsburgh jazz musician, and what you get is not blood but an exudation of civic pride. These folk are what I wryly think of as the Pittsburgh nationalists, and they will immediately rattle off a list of significant players born in their native city:

Roy Eldridge, Billy May, Billy Strayhorn, Billy Eckstine, Ahmad Jamal, Kenny Clarke, Art Blakey, Roger Humphries (who still lives there), Erroll Garner, Steve Nelson, Mary Lou Williams,

Eddie Safranski, Bob Cooper, Paul Chambers, Ray Brown, and George Benson. The film composer Jerry Fielding was born there.

Some of the natives stretch it a little by including Henry Mancini in their home-boy list, but he was actually born in Cleveland and spent his childhood in West Aliquippa. But then that is a sort of suburb of the city, and he did study music in Pittsburgh, so perhaps we should let them get away with it.

"Gene Kelly was from Pittsburgh," said my friend John Heard, the bassist and artist, "and so were Maxine Sullivan, Oscar Levant, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, Adolf Menjou, Dick Powell, William Powell, Michael Keaton, and Shirley Jones. Lena Horne's father was the numbers king in Pittsburgh. Shall I keep going?"

Sorry I asked.

The disinterested observer could make a pretty good case for Philadelphia as a hothouse for jazz players, and Donald Byrd would run a number on you about the importance of Detroit and Cass Tech. Then there's Chicago, with Dusable High, and Brooklyn and for that matter Manhattan. Even poor oft-denigrated Los Angeles, and Jefferson High, produced a lot of great jazz players.

But of Pittsburgh: "I think it must be something in the water," said Tony Mowad of radio station WDUQ, the Duquesne University public broadcasting station. He's been a jazz disc jockey for thirty-five years, Tony is a native, needless to say.

"Sammy Nestico is from Pittsburgh,” I was reminded by trombonist Grover Mitchell, now the leader of the beautifully reconstituted Count Basie band (about which more in the next issue). The touch of pride in his voice is the give-away: Grover too is from Pittsburgh.

Stanley Turrentine reminded me of another native: "A lot of guys are asleep on Dodo Marmarosa. He was a great piano player. He could play."

Stanley was one of three Turrentine brothers born in Pittsburgh. The youngest, drummer Marvin, never got the chance to make a national name for himself. He was killed in Viet Nam. The oldest of the three (there were also two sisters) made a very large international name: trumpeter, arranger, and composer Tommy Turrentine.

"He died three years ago, May 11, 1996," Stanley said. Cancer Tommy was sixty-nine. Somebody should run a statistical survey on the incidence of cancer in jazz musicians, who have spent their lives inhaling sidestream nightclub smoke.

John Heard said: "Tommy was a monster trumpet player, and he was a hell of an educator When musicians came to town, they had to pass what we called the Turrentine test, the jam sessions at Local 471. He was the guy all us kids used to go out and watch."

Tommy was Thomas Turrentine Jr. The father, Thomas Turrentine, had played saxophone with the Pittsburgh Savoy Sultans. But Stanley was born in the dark of the Depression, April 5, 1934, and his father was then working as a construction laborer. "My mother cleaned people's houses," Stanley said.

John Heard believes that a proliferation of artistic creativity, including dance, occurred in Pittsburgh for a simple reason: money. The immense amounts of money invested in the school system, the Carnegie Library, the Pittsburgh Symphony, in museums, galleries, and concerts, meant that children were exposed early and heavily to their influences. Few cities in America have enjoyed the lavish artistic endowments of Pittsburgh.

I passed John's theory on to Stanley.

"John's right," Stanley said. "Oh yeah. The arts were a priority. You had to take some kind of music appreciation class — which they've cut out now — and they'd furnish you with instruments. A lot of guys who came up with me, if it hadn't been for the school system in Pittsburgh, they wouldn't be playing today. They wouldn't have been able to afford a saxophone or trumpet. The schools had all those instruments that you could use. If you played saxophone, you could take the horn home and practice until the end of the semester

"The teachers there were excellent. I remember a teacher named Nero Davidson, a cellist. He played for the Pittsburgh Symphony. He was my high-school teacher He looked at my hands and said, 'You've got great hands for cello.' I played cello for half a semester But I didn't practice, because I was playing saxophone. I had good ears. I muddled through that. I'd go home and put the cello in the corner and grab the saxophone.

"We had all kinds of activities, there were art classes, and bands. My first band was called Four Bees and a Bop. I used to play for proms and basketball games. After the basketball games, they'd assemble in the gym and have a dance. It gave guys a chance to play.

"Oh I just wanted to play music. I wasn't exactly that big on school. Only reason I went to school was for lunch and band."

Pittsburgh was long viewed with a certain condescension as one of the blighted cities of America. The steel industries that generated all that money also fouled the air with so much smoke that, at times, streetlights would have to be turned on at midday, and at night the skies were orange with the light of coke ovens and Bessemer converters. Henry Mancini remembered that the first snowfalls would render everything white and lovely, but almost immediately the snow would turn black with soot and fly-ash.

The steel industry is long gone, the great mills lie idle and rusting. The air is clean. And Pittsburgh, which now thrives on high-tech and medical industries, is revealed as one of the most beautiful cities in America, its center on a sharp triangle where the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers meet to form the Ohio. Carnegie Mellon University is one of the country's best training-grounds for the arts, particularly drama, and saxophonist Nathan Davis heads the jazz department at the University of Pittsburgh. (He is an interloper, a native of Kansas City.)

The city is developing a vigorous little movie industry, and often one spots the city's dramatic backdrops in pictures. There are good images of Pittsburgh in the 1993 Bruce Willis cop movie, Striking Distance, and in the bizarre 1992 black comedy Innocent Blood, in which Robert Loggia plays a Mafia don who gets turned into one of the undead when he is bitten by a beautiful and sweet-natured French vampire. Weird picture; good views of Pittsburgh. Both films were made on location.

John Heard says Pittsburgh has "the mentality of a coal miner with culture."

Interesting town, and it seems to live in a curious cultural cocoon, separate from the rest of the country. If it were a person, I would say: It knows who it is. And doesn't care whether you do.

"When I was coming up, man," Stanley said, "there was just so much music. It was always music. Even in elementary school. Ahmad Jamal talks about Mr. James Miller. He was a piano teacher Ahmad used to take lessons from him.

"My father started me playing. I used to take lessons off Carl Arter. He was a great teacher He's a piano player now, but he was a saxophone player then."

Given that all five of the Turrentine children, including the two sisters, were given music lessons, I told Stanley that in almost every case of people, men and women alike, who have made successes in music, there seems to be a background of family support for this most uncertain of enterprises. Consider the Jones boys, Hank, Thad, and Elvin. Or the Sims boys, Zoot, Ray, and Gene; the Candolis, Pete and Conte; The Swope brothers, Earl and Rob; the Heaths, Percy, Jimmy, and Albert, and so many more.

Nodding, Stanley said, "I had my daddy's horn, a 1936 Buescher, which he gave me. That was the best horn I ever had.

"That was when I was at Herron Hills Junior High.

"We were poor. But we didn't know it. When I'd come home from school, I'd have to practice. During dinner, we would be talking about bands and musicians. It was always about music.

"The radio was our entertainment. We had games. If we were listening to Duke or Basie or Woody Herman or Benny Goodman, Paul Whiteman, all those guys, we'd have little tests. My dad would say, 'Who's playing trombone? Who's playing third trumpet? Who's playing first alto?'

"My father would take me to concerts like Jazz at the Philharmonic. And I'd walk within a radius of three blocks and hear about four bands, trios, quartets. There was always music in the neighborhood. And as soon as they took all the music out of the neighborhoods, I mean, it just ... ." His voice trailed off in a resigned eloquent silence. Then he resumed:

"And we used to exchange records. We used to trade the Charlie Parkers, Dizzy, Don Byas, Wardell Gray. We just listened to music all the time.

"I knew I was going to play music when I was seven. My mother said I'd hear something on the radio and I'd sit down at the piano and start playing it by ear.

"Ray Brown used to come by the house. Joe Harris, the drummer out of Pittsburgh who played with Dizzy's first big band, was around.

"I remember just as clear when Ray Brown came by and got Tommy, my brother, and took him on the road for the first time with Snookum Russell's band. Joe Harris was in that band also. It was a great band.

"When I was growing up, we had an eighteen-piece band. It was Pete Henderson's band. My brother did a lot of arranging for it. We'd hear Dizzy's arrangement of, let's say, Emanon, Manteca, and somebody would write it out.

"I was listening too. My father's favorite saxophone players were Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Don Byas."

I said, "I have often thought Don Byas is still under-rated."

"Oh, you better believe it! I've got his picture in my office at home, beautifully framed. You know, I had the privilege of meeting him, after he came from Europe. He was playing with Art Blakey. He came to a friend of mine's, a lieutenant colonel retired. He was a big jazz fan named Bick Ryken. When I worked in Washington at the Bohemian Caverns, we would hang out.

"We went to his house, me and Don Byas, and just talked and listened to music until the wee hours of the morning. He was a great man. I was just in awe of him. The technique! He was really sick by then, and about two weeks after that he died.

"He said a lot of profound things to me that night. He felt that he made a mistake in going to Europe and staying for over thirty years. He was one of the first guys. He felt that he wasn't getting the respect here that he got over there. But he said that as he thought about it, he felt the battle was here, and he could have been a bigger influence. Don said to me that he should have made his career here. And over there he became like a local musician, and that was it.

"He was a tremendous player So many people came from him. Lucky Thompson and Benny Golson are very similar to his style of playing.

"I had all kinds of idols. Illinois Jacquet. Coleman Hawkins. Lester Young. But I wouldn't dare try to play Sonny Rollins. I wouldn't dare try to play their thing. Because ... it ain't me.

"My father told me, ‘Put this solo on.' I'd try to play this Lester Young solo, and I'd get so frustrated. Oh man, I'd want to play it note for note. I'd try to play a Wardell Gray solo exactly. I might play the notes, but it didn't sound like Wardell.

"My father sat down and told me, 'Stanley, let me tell you something: I have yet to hear a musician that can play everything. This is a big world. There's a lot of music out there. If you look within yourself, you'll find a lot of music.'

"That kind of calmed me down. It got me out of that 'I want to be a star. Like Lester'"

"Well your friend from Pittsburgh, Ray Brown, said, 'Nobody does everything best.'"

"No! It's impossible," Stanley said. "Look within yourself, you'll find a lot of things, that's what my father told me. That cooled me out. I'm not afraid of playing myself. As a matter of fact, that's the only way I can play."

My several days of conversation with Stanley began by happenstance in the middle of the night at a ship's rail. It was in October, aboard the S.S. Norway, on its most recent jazz cruise of the Caribbean. I was out on the balcony of my cabin, contemplating a stunning silver path of light across calm waters to-a low-hanging full moon. The rows of cabins on that top deck are separated into private units by gray plastic partitions. I was leaning on the rail, awed by the moon's display. Someone came out onto the adjacent porch, a big man, and he too stood staring at the moon. I said, "Good morning." Or maybe he did. And we introduced ourselves.

He said, "I'm Stanley Turrentine."

For whatever reason, I had never met him before, although I had certainly enjoyed his playing, big-toned, bluesy, powerful, almost forbidding. He is like that physically, too: tall, big-shouldered and big-chested. But often men of imposing physique and bearing seem to feel no need to prove manhood, and are notably gentle, even sweet, men. Stanley seems to fit that mold. John Heard, chuckling, said, "Tommy was a wild man. Stanley was much quieter."

In the course of the next few days, Stanley and I talked several times, and I repeatedly heard his current quartet, which is superb. Sometimes the conversations were in his room, sometimes on the balcony. Ahmad Jamal was in the room on the other side of mine.

"Ahmad and my brother were very good friends," Stanley said. "I'd come from school, and Ahmad would be practicing on our piano."

I asked Stanley how he came to break out of Pittsburgh, to become one of its famous expatriates.

"That was back in the Jim Crow days. At that time, Lowell Fulsome, blues guitarist, had a band. Ray Charles was the pianist and vocalist. The secretary of the union, local 471 — separate union — called me and said they were looking for a saxophone. I was about sixteen-and-a-half years old. I decided to go.

"My Mama cried, 'Oh Stanley!' I said, 'Oh Mama, I don't wanna make you cry. This is just something I have to do.' I made sure my father wasn't there that day! He was at work. He probably would have deterred me from going. I felt that, anyway.

"I just got on the bus and left home, went on the road. We headed straight down south. It was bad."

"Woody Herman hated the south," I said.

"Well there were a lot of reasons back in those days," Stanley said. "You knew that, literally, our lives were in danger. Just for playing music. A guy put a forty-four in my face. Drunk. He said, 'Can you play the blues?'"

He laughed. "That's why I play the blues today, I think!" His laugh grew larger: "'Can you play the blues?' 'Yes, sir!' I'm still here, so obviously I could play the blues."

How anybody can laugh at such a memory is beyond me, but I've heard that kind of laughter from Clark Terry and Dizzy Gillespie and so many others, and I am always amazed.

Stanley said, "I was the youngest guy in the band. We had what we called a flexible bus -- held together by bailing wire and chewing gum. It broke down every hundred miles or so. We'd see a lot of strange things. We'd pull over and somebody would be hanging in a tree.

"You'd run into all kinds of crazy rules. You'd have to step off the sidewalk and walk in the gutter if some white people were walking toward you. You couldn't eat in restaurants. You couldn't stay in the hotels. We had rooming houses — sometimes! If you wanted to eat something, they had places 'For Colored Only.' It was outside the restaurant. They didn't even give you a menu. You had to eat out there. Lynchings were commonplace.

"Some of the places, even up north — I call it Up South — it was no different.

"We'd see some of these horrors. And you'd get up on the bandstand, and release it. You'd go through some trying thing. And Ray Charles would sing the blues, sing whatever he's thinking about. He doesn't say a word about what the incident was. But it's there. That was part of the experience that I had.

"How serious that bandstand is to me. It's like a safe haven to me. You get up on that bandstand, and it's very serious. That's what I tell the kids in the workshops I do. That bandstand is what we love to do. That's the way we express ourselves. I say, 'It's not the bandstand, it's getting to the bandstand.' With the little dues I paid, I can imagine what Lester and Coleman Hawkins and all those guys had to go through, 'way worse than it was for me.

"I tell the younger cats, 'Hey, man, you didn't research it. Listen to these cats. They've got some experiences. They're not in books. You can't write this stuff down. It's in the way they play. They play the pains of their experiences. You'll never get that experience. And those cats probably couldn't explain it even to themselves. I know I couldn't, because you want to forget a lot of the things you had to go through just to play music, to express yourself.

"But, you know, the good side is that it teaches you to admire things. And it teaches you not be afraid to express yourself. A lot of guys today, they want to copy all this, too much of that. They're great musicians. But you don't hear any stylists. They read, they've got all the blackboard knowledge, but you hear one piano player, or one trumpet player, they're all playing the same thing — to me. You can't distinguish one from another.

"After that job, I came back to Pittsburgh. I didn't want my mother and father to see me without money. Sometimes we went on gigs and the promoter left with the money. I went through all of the usual stuff. I wouldn't go home until I had something new or some present for them, to try to show them: 'See, Mom, I'm doin' okay.'

"I stayed in Pittsburgh for a while, working around in bands. Then me and my brother moved to Cleveland. He started working with Gaye Cross. Coltrane was with the band. I was working in a band with Foots Thomas. And then I used to occasionally get some gigs with Tadd Dameron. Nobody wrote like him. He had a quartet or quintet. Then 'Trane left Cleveland and went with Earl Bostic, and later when he went with Johnny Hodges, he recommended me to Bostic. We traveled the chittlin' circuit. Walking the bar, and entertaining the people."

I mentioned that Benny Golson had described walking the bar, and said that his friend John Coltrane did it too.

"Everybody did it," Stanley said. "You did if you wanted to work! That was part of it. You had to entertain the people. I stayed with Earl for three years and then came home, and about two years after that I had to go into the army. I was in the 158th Army band for two years, stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky."

"Weren't Cannonball Adderley and Junior Mance in that band?"

"Not in that band. They were in it before me. Nat Adderley had been in that band too. And then, when I got out of the Army, in 1958, Max Roach was playing in Pittsburgh at the Crawford Grill. He had Art Davis on bass, and Julian Priester, and George Coleman, and I can't remember who the trumpet player was. The trumpet player, and George Coleman, and Art Davis left the band. Max had to replace them. He called my brother, and my brother suggested me and Bobby Boswell, another bass player out of Pittsburgh. And we joined Max. That's when I really got national and international acclaim. We played in New York, we traveled to Europe, we started making records.

"I stayed with Max about two years. So I got on the New York scene. I got married and had my first child, Sherry, in 1959. I left Max and went to Philadelphia. My wife was from Philadelphia. We moved to a section of Philadelphia called Germantown.

"Jimmy Smith, the organist, lived about two doors down. One day I was coming out the door, and he was coming out his door, and he said, 'Hey, man, you wanna make a record?' Just like that. I'd known him for quite a while. When he'd come to Pittsburgh, I'd come and play with him. We got to be pretty good friends. I just jammed with him and hung out with him at the time. So when he said, 'You wanna make a record?' I said, 'Yeah.'

"We jumped in his car, and went up to Rudy Van Gelder's in Englewood Cliffs in New Jersey and recorded. He had built the new studio by then."

"And you couldn't smoke in it," I said.

Stanley said, "Well you could smoke in the studio, but you couldn't smoke in the control room."

"I asked Rudy why, and he said that that stuff gets into the equipment. And of course it does. If you smoke, look at the windshield of your car and imagine what gets into your lungs."

"You couldn't smoke there," Stanley said, "and you couldn't touch nothing.

"He didn't have an assistant, as engineers usually do. He did everything. He'd have an eighteen-piece band, he did the whole thing.

"Well we went up to Rudy's and made a recording. It was called Midnight Special, and it was a hit for Jimmy. I made about five albums in that period.

"Then Alfred Lion approached me. He wanted to record me. I started recording with Blue Note and stayed about fifteen years. They've put those records out on CD now. The only way I found out was from a little kid. I was playing a festival in California. I think it was at Long Beach. A kid came up to me with about ten CDs. He said, 'Oh, Mr. Turrentine! Would you autograph these — your new CDs?' And I looked at them, and there were things from 1960, 1964. But they were new to that kid."

I said, "And you're put in the position of being in competition with yourself. Your old records are competing with your new records."

"You know what? I don't mind that," Stanley said.

"So long as you get your royalties."

"They have to give them to you, if you know. But they're not going to let you know. You have to find out."

"In the immortal words of Henry Mancini, 'Do not ask and ye shall not receive.'

"Receive" Stanley said in unison. "Right. So you have to watch. I've got a great entertainment lawyer.

"So they released this stuff, and this kid came to me, and the records were new to him."

The professional association that followed his period with Max Roach would prove to be one of the longest of Stanley's life; and it became personal as well: that with organist Shirley Scott, whom he married.

"I was living in Philadelphia," Stanley said. "Just finished a record date with Jimmy Smith. Lockjaw Davis had left Shirley's trio. Arthur Edgehill was on drums. I replaced Lockjaw.

"My relationship with Shirley lasted for thirteen years — and three children, three daughters. We got together in 1960. We traveled all over.

"Shirley recorded for Prestige and I was recording for Blue Note. Sometimes I would be on her record. My name would be Stan Turner. When she recorded with me, she would be Little Miss Cotton."

(Two of these collaborations with Shirley Scott are available on Prestige CDs: Soul Shoutin', PRCD-24142-2, and Legends of Acid Jazz, PRCD-24200-2. Prestige is now part of the Fantasy group. Stanley also recorded for Fantasy for a time, starting in 1974. Three albums are available on that label: Pieces of Dreams, OJCCD-831-2, Everybody Come on Out, OJCCD-911-2, and The Best of Mr. T, FCD-7708-2.)

"Oh man, Shirley was phenomenal," Stanley said. "She was very serious about the organ and about music. She had her own way of approach. We had a great time.

"After Shirley — that was 1971 — I started to record for Creed Taylor at CTI."

That association began at a dark time in Stanley's life. He and Shirley had been divorced. He was facing some financial reverses. And he had no record contract. One day the phone rang. A man's voice said that this was Creed Taylor. He wanted to know whether Stanley might be interested in recording for his label, CTI. With an inner sigh, Stanley said yes, and Creed asked if Stanley could come to his office next day for a meeting.

I checked with Creed about that first encounter. Creed said he was nervous about meeting Stanley, assuming, as we are all prone to do, that the music reflected the personality of the man. Creed had been listening a lot to the Blue Note records. Creed said:

"He's completely individual. It's the voice of Stanley Turrentine, and nobody could imitate the aggressive melodic magnificence of Stanley's playing. I loved it. And I loved the stuff he'd done with Jimmy Smith and Shirley. He's such a powerful voice on the instrument, and I anticipated that the personality to follow would be: Look out! He's the antithesis, for example, of Paul Desmond. Stanley was not at all what I anticipated."

Stanley arrived at Creed's office in Rockefeller Center. I can easily imagine the meeting. Creed is a shy, reticent man, difficult to know at first, seemingly reserved and distant, but warm and considerate when you get past that. Stanley told me he went into that meeting in a state of depression, telling Creed he was facing some financial problems. Creed asked him how much it would take to ease them. Stanley gave him a figure. Creed wrote him a check and asked how soon they could get into the studio.

They were in the Van Gelder studio in Englewood Cliffs the following week, beginning a relationship that both men remember with warmth — a highly successful relationship.

"We made a record called Sugar and it was a hit," Stanley said. "Sugar, the title track, was his tune. "I've had a band ever since then.

"Creed was a wonderful producer, a great producer. I think he set a precedent for the music. Even the packaging. His covers were works of art. As a matter of fact, the covers sold as art. Packaging had never been done like that. And he had a CTI sound.

"And look at the people he had in that stable during the time I was there: Herbie Hancock, George Benson, Grover Washington, Freddie Hubbard, Jack De Johnette, Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, Hank Crawford, Esther Phillips, Milton Nascimento, Airto, Deodato. Oh man, it was just tremendous."

I told Stanley that one of the things I had noticed about Creed, during many of the recording sessions I attended with him, and sometimes worked on, was his capacity seemingly to ignore the clock and its measure of mounting expenses. He never let the musicians sense anxiety. His wife told me that this tore him up inside, and the tension was released only when he got home.

Stanley said, "He is so invisible! Did you ever notice that there are not many photographs of Creed? He's always in the background. Away from it. So many of the other producers, they want to be seen.

"I'd go into the studio sometimes, and record. No strings or anything. I'd go on the road and he'd hire Don Sebesky or somebody to add the strings. Or Chico O'Farrill to put brass arrangements behind it. Or Thad Jones. A lot of people got a little antsy about him doing that. I figured it helped me. It enhanced the records. I made a lot of albums for him. Maybe seven or eight. He was a music guy. There are no more cats out there like that. He loved the music. He loved the guys he was interested in. He heard them and tried to enhance what they were doing. He had such great taste. And we were all on that label at the same time.

(In the continuing process of corporate megamergers, the Turrentine CTI records have become the property of Sony-Columbia, and they are unavailable, as, for that matter, is that entire excellent CTI catalogue.)

"The record companies today are something," Stanley said. "There are no more music people in the business. They're just accountants and lawyers. The musicians are just numbers. How many records do they sell? They don't even have the courtesy to send you copies of your own albums.

"My wife called one of the record companies. She got the secretary of the vice president. She wanted to order some of my records. The girl said, 'Who's the artist you want to get? She said, 'Stanley Turrentine.' She said, 'Who?' That's just one of the things.

"But you know something? I think the Internet is going to bring some justice to the record companies. They're running scared now.

"I think the younger players, those coming up today, have got more schooling than most of the guys I know, as far as music is concerned.

"But you can't read your press releases all the time." He laughed his warm laugh. "And you can't believe what you read in the press. If you start believing that's what you are, then your attitude changes.

"I'm not afraid to be myself, good, bad, or indifferent."

I said, "We were talking the other night about Dizzy's generation, who saw the value of entertaining the audience."

"Oh yes. Well you know, Dizzy was just a natural. He was a genius as a musician. We all know that. But, as far as knowing how to read an audience, that's very difficult to do, and Dizzy could do that at the snap of a finger. He could look over an audience and know exactly what to play. And the audience, all of a sudden, unbeknownst to them, were all with it.

"There was another cat that did that, that I worked with: Earl Bostic. I don't care how many thousands of people he would be playing for, it seemed to me that he'd just look them over from the stage and knew exactly what to play. That's what I am trying to learn, continually trying to do. Because that's part of playing. I think. You have to be entertaining people some kind of way, you know what I mean? I mean a lot of cats get up there and play snakes, play all their wares. And they can't get a gig.

"Most of the people who made it knew how to entertain. Look at Duke Ellington. He was a master at reading the audience. How to capture audiences! Basic, Jimmie Lunceford. Oh man. Andy Kirk. All these cats.

"When I get up on the bandstand, even me — " it was as if he were embarrassed to have mentioned himself so soon after these others " — I say, 'Hey, let's have some fun.' And that's what we try to convey. And the audience will start to have fun too. You can't fool 'em. There are many things we are selling. Sound, first, to me. This is just my opinion, it might be wrong. I've been wrong many times. Anyhow. Sound, feeling, and emotion. A lot of people think feeling and emotion are the same thing. That's not necessarily true in playing. Not as far as I'm concerned. I've seen cats that could play with feeling but no emotion, and cats who could play with emotion and no feeling.

"You don't have to be a Juilliard graduate to figure out those three things: sound, feeling, and emotion. That's what we're selling out there. The layman knows these three things. Let's face it, man. A lot of cats are playing a lot of stuff, or think they are. And if you don't ring that cash register, you'll find you'll be playing nowhere. This is still a business. And Dizzy and those cats, Miles, all of them, took it to the max. And people used to go in to see Miles to see what was he going to do next. When was he going to turn his back? Or is Monk going to stand up from the piano and just start dancing? There are all kinds of ways.

"But the ability to read the audience is a very important thing."

Stanley does it well. And his enthusiasm and that of the members of his current quartet communicate to an audience. The rhythm section comprises bassist Paul Thompson, at twenty-four the youngest in the group, drummer Lenny Robinson, and pianist David Budway. When Stanley is playing the head of a tune, or taking his own solo, he strides the bandstand (he has one of those tiny microphones in front of the bell of his tenor) with the authority of a captain on the bridge of a ship. When he isn't soloing, he'll sit down on a stool and listen with smiling satisfaction to the others. Even then, he cannot keep from moving. He tends to rock his hips back and forth on the stool, reminding me of a phrase I got from actor George Grizzard in 1959. We had spent some time hanging out in Paris together that year. George came home some months ahead of me, and he was appearing in The Disenchanted on Broadway with Jason Robards Jr. I called him as soon as I got off the boat in New York. He invited me to the play, and afterwards he asked what I wanted on this, my first night home. I said, "A real American hamburger and some jazz!" We went to P.J.'s for the first and several joints for the latter. In one club or another, I can't remember which, some group was really cooking, and George coined a phrase that has stuck with me. He called it "Good old ass-shakin' jazz."

Watching Stanley in delighted involuntary motion, I thought of that phrase.

I was particularly struck by the work of David Budway. There was something radically different about it. He is a highly percussive player, a really loud pianist, but his playing brought to mind something Buddy Rich once said: "There is a musical way to play loud and an unmusical way." Budway's percussive approach to playing really caught my ear I was listening to it with Tony Mowad, the aforementioned jazz broadcaster Tony is a stocky, husky man with a mustache and deep-toned skin. "You know," Tony said with the pride peculiar to Pittsburgh people, "David is my cousin." And, he said, the outstanding young guitarist Ron Afflf, now living in Los Angeles, is another cousin, also born, like David Budway, in Pittsburgh. (Indeed, including Stanley, three quarters of the quartet is from Pittsburgh.)

Something struck me then. I said, "Tony, what's your ethnic background?"

He said, "Lebanese."

"Then that may explain it."

I have long held a theory, one that Gerry Mulligan shared, that white American jazz musicians tend to play with a stylistic influence of the music of their national origins. The Italians play very Italian, the Irish play very Irish — consider Mulligan and Zoot Sims — and so forth. Paul Motian is Armenian, and he told me that he grew up listening to the complex polyrhythms of Armenian music. This is hardly a universal principle, but it is an interesting insight into styles. At least Gerry Mulligan thought so, and I do.

And so. Was I hearing an Arabic influence in David Budway's playing? I asked him.

"Big time!" he said without hesitation.

Budway is a highly-trained classical pianist, little known nationally or internationally, because he chose until recently, when he moved to New York, to remain in Pittsburgh, teaching classical piano at Carnegie Mellon University and jazz and classical piano at Duquesne and playing with the Pittsburgh Symphony. He is yet another to shatter the myth of irreconcilable difference between jazz and classical music, which persists in spite of the careers of Mel Powell, Keith Jarrett, Joe Wilder, John Clayton, and many more. He has completed two as-yet unreleased classical albums with Hubert Laws, one devoted to all the Bach flute sonatas, the other to "impressionist" composers including Poulenc and Ravel.

His father, David told me, played "classical" violin but also toured with his brother, David's uncle, playing Arabic music. "I called my father the Arabic Bird," David said. David soaked in this music, at home and on the Lebanese radio station he listened to. "I got used to those Arabic rhythms, things like 9/8 and 10/4, the stuff was all over the place," David said.

And although the piano hardly lends itself to the melismatic practices of Arabic vocal music, David's playing does hint at Arabic minor-scale practices. Primarily, however, it is his rhythmic concept that seems so Arabic to my ears.

Stanley clearly delights in the group, as they do in each other. "I have a chance to play with some nice young musicians," Stanley said. "All the cats are nice. They're gentlemen. We have a good time. We all listen to each other. That's what makes it fun. We're trying to play together."

Stanley remains in close contact with his daughters, and he is concerned for the fragile health of his ex-wife, Shirley Scott. He has married again. "Three times and I finally got it right," he said.

"I think this is one of the happiest times of my life."”