Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers - Indestructible -1964 (FULL ALBUM)

"Teef" - Louis Hayes Quintet

Check out Yusef Lateef's big, bluesy, bar walking tenor sax solo on this one. Man, could he bring it. My thanks to Gary Foster for hipping me to this one. "Teef," indeed!

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."”

A Kettle of Fish (Digitally Remastered) - Stanley Turrentine feat. Herbie Hancock

Stan Getz - East of the Sun: The West Coast Sessions - The Ted Gioia Notes [With Revisions and Additions]

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

“Flawless technique, perfect time, strong melodic sense and more than enough harmonic expertise, fabulous memory, and great ears. Add a superb sense of dynamics, pacing, and formal. Top this off with a sound of pure gold, and you have Stan Getz.

He was a charismatic musician. His music actually affected the course of people's lives. They fell in love with his music. They fell in love because of his music, and they made love to his music.

My association with Stan started in Woody Herman's Second Herd, the "Four Brothers" band. Stan was already in the band when the Jimmy Giuffre original "Four Brothers" was recorded for Columbia Records. But the real breakthrough came with the recording of Ralph Burns' "Early Autumn" at Radio Recorders in Hollywood for Capitol Records. By that time I had become a band member. I was fortunate to work with Stan from that time on — playing, recording, and traveling together in the Forties. Fifties, Sixties. Seventies. Eighties and, finally, in 1990.

After Stan left the Woody Herman band in 1949, he made a string of important recordings, including Jazz At Storyville,  the "Moonlight in Vermont" series with Johnny Smith Focus with Eddie Sauter and the huge success, Antonio Carlos Jobim's bossa novas "Desafinado” and "The Girl From Ipanema".

When Verve first asked me to contribute to this presentation. I accepted without hesitation. Then the tapes arrived. Listening to previously released material was great, but a lot of the unissued takes became further proof of the unfaltering quality of Stan's playing.

These recordings contain many outstanding solos by Slan. but if I had to choose one. it would be the lengthy solo on "S-h-i-n-e". This has been a topic of conversation since it was first released. It is Stan in full stride.

When an artist leaves a legacy of recordings such as Stan's, it is overwhelming. But when the artist affects the lives of his audience, he is then in a class with a chosen few. Such an artist is Stan Getz.

On the bandstand and in the studio he brought out the best in those who played with him.

And I for one say, "Thank you. Stanley."

- LOU LEVY, Jazz pianist

The insert notes to the Verve three CD set Stan Getz - East of the Sun: The West Coast Sessions [314 531 935-2] by the distinguished writer Ted Gioia were made a hash of when they were formatted into the booklet.

I’ve rarely seen a more garbled mess disgrace such important Jazz recordings.

The irony here is that Ted is the penultimate all-things-West-Coast-Jazz historian and was actually contracted by Verve to produce these notes!

What a waste.

But fear not; the editorial staff at JazzProfiles contacted Ted and he gave his blessing to having his notes developed into manuscript form so that they can be clearly read as presented on these pages.

“I remember how unhappy I was with the layout of liner notes in the booklet, which made it almost impossible to read the text. I'd be very happy to see them made available online.”

Nothing like making one of the best writers on the subject of Jazz “happy.”

© -Ted Gioia, copyright protected; all rights reserved; used with the author’s permission.

“Stan Getz always equivocated about the West Coast jazz scene. During the late 1980s, when he lived in California. I frequently had the opportunity to talk with him about various jazz musicians, both current and historical. He was bluntly honest during these informal discussions. Typically sparing in the compliments he paid other performers (except for a handful of figures he clearly admired), he seemed especially reserved about many of the prominent West Coast names. Getz kept a safe distance from the local scene during these years, and he almost always had a rhythm section flown in from New York for important gigs. Even while soaking up the sun and enjoying the ambiance of West Coast life, Getz seemed an inveterate East Coast character in his attitudes, mannerisms, language, and temperament

Imagine my surprise at his reaction, when I told him one day that I was researching a book on West Coast jazz. He looked at me in silence for a moment, puzzled, then asked.  “Do you include me in West Coast jazz?" For all his aloofness, he knew how strong his ties were to the California scene, not just in the Eighties but also during the glory days of West Coast jazz in the Fifties. Yet looking at his career in retrospect, he honestly didn't know if he was a West Coast jazz musician.

Was he? These recordings from the mid-Fifties include the most powerful statements in defense of Getz as a major exponent of jazz on the dream coast. Joined by some of the finest players on the Los Angeles scene. Getz participated in a series of memorable sessions. The title of the initial LP release of some of this material left little doubt about the intended marketing angle: It was simply called West Coast Jazz.

This was a long way from Getz's Philadelphia birthplace and childhood in the Bronx. He often dismissed the impact of these formative years on his career, offering snippets of information or relating a meandering anecdote about his first performance on the harmonica. Yet the evidence clearly shows that Getz was a phenomenal talent almost from the start. The late Shorty Rogers mentioned rehearsing in a band with Getz when the latter was barely in his teens and had only been playing saxophone for a few months But even then. Getz was garnering a reputation as a sax prodigy attracting the attention of bandleaders. He lasted for only one year of high school, but had he persisted he might well have fulfilled his teacher’s dream of attending Juilliard. Getz’s primary instrument was the bassoon at this point and he quickly earned a coveted spot in the all-New York student orchestra.

The jazz life had already beckoned and the tenor sax replaced the bassoon as Getz’s horn of choice. Truant officers were tracking him down at the Roseland Ballroom bandstand. So before long Getz bid adieu to James Madison High School choosing to go on the road with trombonist Jack Teagarden. The tenor saxophonist was so young that Teagarden had to be named his legal guardian. Stardom also came at an early age. Getz was barely out of his teens when he dazzled jazz fans with his celebrated playing on Early Autumn with the Woody Herman band.

Getz gravitated to the West Coast in his early career At age sixteen, he traveled to Los Angeles while still with Teagarden. He returned to California as an 18-year-old bandleader in 1945, leading a trio at the Swing Club in Hollywood, but he soon left to go on the road with Benny Goodman. He returned again some time later and parlayed a gig at a Mexican ballroom into a celebrated stint with Herman.

At Pete Pontrelli's Spanish Ballroom, the unlikely staging ground for this movement, Getz participated in the development of a completely new jazz style, one that came to be known as the "Four Brothers' sound". The band's repertoire on this gig consisted primarily of stock arrangements of Mexican and Spanish tunes, supplemented by an occasional jazz chart. But arranger Gene Roland was working on a new way of voicing the sax section, which Jimmy Giuffre took and refined further for the Herman band. The result was a lightly swinging ensemble featuring three tenor and one baritone saxophones — with Getz helping to recreate the sound from Pontrelli's in his new role as a Herman sideman. The recording of “Four Brothers,” from the close of 1947, exhilarated listeners — so much so that jazz fans were soon calling this edition of the Herman orchestra the "Four Brothers band".

By this time. Getz had developed the translucent tenor tone and softly swinging style that gave an airy lightness to the Four Brothers' sound and would distinguish his mature work. Getz's debt to Lester Young in this regard has often been cited, and Getz was the first to admit he admired the older tenor saxophonist. Yet Getz brought a more overtly modernist sensibility to his playing that sharply distinguished it from Young's. Although Getz was never an ardent bebopper, he had listened carefully to Charlie Parker and brought a deep understanding of modern jazz into his own, cooler style.

This influence is especially marked on these West Coast sessions, where Getz draws uncharacteristic inspiration from bop-inflected tunes, such as Gillespie's A Night in Tunisia and Woody 'n' You, and offers a tour de force solo on S-h-i-n-e. These progressive leanings were evident throughout Getz's career, as seen by his constant use of young sidemen with new musical ideas. One recalls with admiration how, more than a decade after these sides, Getz was careening over Phrygian scales and navigating through some of Chick Corea's most complex material on another Verve release, the seminal Sweet Rain. On that record he showed a daring unmatched by any other Young disciple from the postwar years. Or listen to another Verve outing, the justly celebrated Focus, which finds Getz engaging in a marvelously intricate dialogue with a string section. The claim that Getz merely commercialized a variant of the Young sound falls to the ground after even the most casual listening to these recordings.

But what Getz did learn from Young was his essentially melodic approach to improvisation. Throughout most of the history of jazz, the prevailing approach to the tenor sax has stressed the harmonic possibilities of the instrument. Substitute changes, intricate cadences, unusual modes that imply equally exotic harmonies — a range of techniques has been used in the paradoxical attempt to extract a chordal texture from this inherently monophonic instrument. Getz, like Young, never got caught up in this quixotic pursuit. Instead both adopted an unabashedly linear approach, unapologetic in its lyricism There was an almost brutal honesty in this style. No shiny ornaments were hung out to distract attention from its melodic core.

"Players like Stan and Al Cohn (another Young follower from the period] thought about the song more than other jazz musicians," pianist Lou Levy remarks. "The melody line was important to them. I suspect that Stan paid attention to the lyrics as well. I remember giving him the music to the song “No More” — one of the pieces that Billie Holiday used to sing. Stan looked over the sheet. 'It's a good story,' he said, and we went on to play it." His solos had the flow of a well-paced narrative. Yet the structure never got in the way of the music's emotional immediacy. Few players of any generation could construct solos of such logic and rigor while maintaining a depth of feeling and, at times, such poignancy.

These virtues made Getz a natural participant in the West Coast scene that gained notoriety in the early Fifties. The influence of Young was especially prominent among the Los Angeles saxophone players of this period. The emerging cool-Jazz style, which Getz had helped promote with his early work, was also making waves near the Pacific. Getz's Los Angeles-based band with Bob Brookmeyer reflected this side of the West Coast aesthetic, with a formalist compositional approach somewhat akin to the Mulligan-Baker group efforts from the same period. (This similarity was perhaps more than a coincidence, since Getz-Brookmeyer were working at the Ambassador Hotel when Mulligan-Baker were gracing the bandstand across the street at the Haig.) Getz later joined Mulligan on a celebrated Verve recording in 1957, and he occasionally collaborated with other leading West Coast players. Yet these tended to be exceptions to the rule. Getz spent most of the Fifties in musical pursuits far afield from the West Coast jazz scene: in heated jam sessions with Jazz at the Philharmonic; in exceptional recordings with Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt, and other bop masters; and leading a variety of ensembles under his own name. Many of these settings no doubt resulted from Getz's relationship with record producer Norman Granz. Granz had only a limited interest in the burgeoning West Coast scene, and his projects with Getz mostly reflected this attitude.

But by the middle of the decade, the West Coast label had proved to be such an effective marketing device that even Granz was taking notice. Getz and Granz were now determined to make a more dedicated foray into the West Coast scene. On July 27, 1955 Getz made the plunge when he kicked off an engagement at Zardi's, a major Southern California jazz club on Hollywood Boulevard, fronting a new West Coast quintet. This combo was essentially a pickup group, organized specifically for the Zardi's gig. But the quality of the musicians more than compensated for the lack of rehearsal time. Audiences were dazzled by the new California combo. By the time the quintet entered the studio, some two weeks later, to undertake the first of the sessions included here, it sounded like a veteran unit.

Getz drew on some of the finest players on the Los Angeles scene for these sessions. Levy had played with Getz in the Herman band and had recently relocated to California from his native Chicago. In an interview from the period, Getz pointed out that Levy was “more than a two-handed pianist. He plays with all ten fingers.” Levy's orchestral approach and harmonic ingenuity is well-documented on these recordings. Listen to him move into a polytonal mood midway through his solo on There Will Never Be Another You, pushing the chord changes to their limits. Although Levy has often been labeled a bebop pianist, his roots go much deeper. His earliest models in the jazz world were, in fact, the big bands that he heard in his native Chicago. The pianists he listened to were especially diverse. "I heard Al Haig before I heard Bud Powell, and before them I heard Nat Cole. But I was listening to Teddy Wilson long before that. And of course there was Art Tatum who was in a category of his own.”

“The most prominent sound in the the rhythm section on these Getz sessions is Leroy Vinnegar’s bass,” explains Levy with characteristic modesty. “You can hear its strong rhythmic presence.

“Leroy is always there, his time is as solid as a rock, and everyone plays off him." Like so many of the Indiana natives who made their mark in modern Jazz (Carl Perkins, the Montgomery brothers. Freddie Hubbard), Vinnegar boasts an uncanny knack for swinging effortlessly, for propelling a Jazz band without any wasted energy.

Shelly Manne, who worked with Vinnegar in many settings over the years, lets the bass serve as the pulse of the band, using his drum kit to supply color and deepen the textures of the ensemble sound. "Shelly took more chances than most other drummers," Levy adds. "He was always interested in trying something different, in experimenting.  While Stan Levey, on the later sessions, was more of a bebopper, a terrific drummer with an outstanding modern-jazz feel."

Conte Candoli, who joined Gelz in the front line, was another transplanted Indiana native and one of the hottest trumpeters on the West Coast scene. In a jazz environment where subdued or cerebral approaches to the horn received more publicity, Candoli took a different tack. His improvised lines generally burst forth with exuberance and vitality. His work with Getz on this date is surprisingly subdued, but on “S-h-i-n-e” he lets loose with the compelling devil-may-care brashness that is very much his trademark.

Despite the Los Angeles sidemen and the marketing of these sessions as West Coast Jazz, I have always felt that there was something incongruous about this whole project. In fact, I'm half-convinced that Getz was slyly trying to subvert the West Coast marketing label attached to his new approach. The opening track on the original West Coast Jazz album was East of the Sun — was he making a little joke here? And why did he make such a point of drawing on East Coast composers for the band's repertoire? There is enough Gershwin material from these dates to make a whole theme album. (Hmm. Gershwin….wasn't he a New York boy who made most of his best music on the East Coast, but came out West to make money with some blatantly commercial efforts?)

Getz's choice of sidemen was equally telling Candoli, Vinnegar, Levy, and Manne or Levey — they were all West Coasters, more or less, but not one was a native Californian. Each one had started back East or in the Midwest. And why was Getz playing, in addition to Gershwin, all of these East Coast bebop tunes — so rare for him — on a project that supposedly celebrated the West Coast?

Maybe I am reading too much into the tenor saxophonist's choice of material. But his wry sense of humor was just the sort that would delight in this type of cryptic playfulness. I recall a similar ambiguity from Getz's later years, when he had given up drink and was an ardent participant in Alcoholics Anonymous — yet seemed to play a booze song, “Lush Life” or “Sippin' at Bells,” at every concert! Indeed Getz always had an irreverent attitude toward song titles — who else would introduce his mega-hit “Desafinado” as "Dis Here Finado" (this coming on the heels of such soul-jazz tunes as “Dis Here” and “Dat Dere,” then the rage), then add offhandedly, "This is the song that is going to pay my kid's college tuition.”

"This was not a West Coast Jazz session," Levy asserts confidently. He notes that the most celebrated performance from this project, “S-h-i-n-e,” counters any stereotype of laid-back West Coast playing. "Everybody always liked this one." Levy continues. "Stan really forges ahead. His intro is clear as a bell He plays those eight bars unaccompanied, but with a real momentum and swing. Then — bam! — the band comes in and he's off. He really lets loose on this piece, and never falters, charging all the way through to the end."

Yet there were many moments on these sessions where Getz was the consummate lyrical soloist, very much in the vein of the West Coast sound. In fact, these sessions include some of the most effortlessly graceful performances of Getz's career. He is low-key on “Like Someone in Love” where he kicks off his solo with a deliciously lazy break and follows up with a richly melodic solo. His work on “Too Close for Comfort” is equally noteworthy and could serve as a case study in relaxed improvisation. The two complete lakes of “Our Love Is Here to Stay” are both masterly examples of thematic improvisation. The unreleased version is an especially brilliant example of how Getz could weave baroque lines while continuing to hint at the contours of the melody. And even when Getz tackles a stop-time interlude, as on “Blues for Mary Jane” or “How About You?” his playing retains an elegant sureness, a calmness even in the most fiery surroundings.

Not that the experimental side of Getz's playing is totally absent here. On “Woody 'n' You” Getz plays atypical, polytonal games with a simple motif. This interlude sounds like a parody of Coltrane's A Love Supreme. It couldn't be, of course, since the Coltrane performance was still a decade in the future, yet the resemblance is uncanny. Other feints and jabs — an occasional bebop lick in double-time, a judicious bit of bluesiness, a tongue-in-cheek quote — are dished out in sparing doses, showing how much Getz always kept in reserve, waiting for the right moment to let it loose.

Yet if we ultimately grow wary of associating Getz too closely with West Coast jazz, it is only because he kept a safe distance from all of the passing fads and fancies of the jazz world. Although he was linked to the cool jazz sound, Getz played some of his hottest music during the years when cool was in its ascendancy. And his collaborations with other leading cool players were surprisingly rare. Years later. Getz was equally detached from the stardom he attained when crossing over with his bossa nova recordings. He could have made a whole career from this popular, Brazilian-inflected style, but he ultimately abandoned it for other projects and approaches. His work with Chick Corea anticipated the fusion craze, but Getz soon left that format behind as well. One is forced to conclude that even when Getz jumped on the bandwagon, he was always among the first to jump off.

And so it is with these West Coast sessions. For a brief period, Getz met West Coast jazz at least halfway. But there were no compromises here, no banal attempts to find a commercial sound. The music was Stan Getz, plain and simple, with all the beauty and richness that he brought to every performance, whichever the coast.

“Playing with him was like a music lesson," Levy remarks. "He had a sense for the right tempo, the right volume, the right way of sequencing the solos. He knew when to stretch out and when to hold back. He knew when to let the bass and drums sit out and when he’d bring them back in. He had such great time and technique, and [he] could react to anything. He would even make the wrong chords sound right. He could lake a small combo and make it sound like a symphony."

And Getz does just that on these performances. Was Getz a West Coast player? That question may well remain unanswered. Was he one of the greatest soloists to play the saxophone? Of that there can be no doubt. The more than three hours of music on these discs provides compelling evidence and a persuasive account of one of the jazz masters in top form.”

Ted Gioia

[Ted is a pianist, a jazz historian and the author of West Coast Jazz: Jazz in California, 1945-1960, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.]