Woody Herman, The Metropole Cafe and Gene Lees

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Scuffling,” in the sense of getting by on a low income or struggling financially is not a term used very much these days in Jazz circles, although given the deleterious effects of two years of the pandemic on musicians’ incomes, it could very well be.

But it certainly was applicable to the lives of many of those attempting to make their way in Jazz during the years following the breakup of the big bands in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Stan Kenton and Woody Herman managed to keep their bands going, although Basie and Herman resorted to smaller combos in the 1950s before reinstituting their larger ensembles.

Reviewing the trials and tribulations they encountered, sometimes one gets the sense that their passionate love of the music was the only thing that kept them alive during their early years of trying to make it in the music.

And this was true not only of this select group of big band leaders but it also pertained to those whose careers were based on writing about the music.

Given the success he had with his subscription-based Jazzletter from 1981 until his death in 2010, one might be surprised to learn that Gene Lees did his share of scuffling until the royalties from his English translations of the lyrics for some of the hit tunes associated with the bossa nova kicked in along with the subsequent revenues from his writings and books. 

One of these books is Leader of the Band: The Life of Woody Herman [1995]. Some Jazz fans - especially those awaiting his never-to-materialize biography of the late pianist, Bill Evans, with whom he was a close friend - were quite surprised when Gene wrote his Woody bio.

But after you read the following excerpts from the book, perhaps you’ll better understand why he took on this project. They will also give you a renewed appreciation for the scuffling the Jazz musicians endure to make the music happen.

“Of the time in his life just before the birth of the new band. Woody said, "Once again I was running out of gas. I took a small group on the road." And that group was the nucleus of the new band, which had the same rhythm section — Pierce, Andrus, and Hanna — and Chase as lead trumpeter.

"It was really tough to get bookings," Woody said. "And yet, that was the beginning of the '60s band, right there. What put it together was the Metropole."

The Metropole was a rowdy cavernous bar on the east side of Seventh Avenue in midtown Manhattan. It booked small jazz groups in its upstairs room. Its main, ground-floor room didn't even have a bandstand. Woody was asked by the management (and I never did find out who owned the place) to bring a big band into that room. But where could it play?

Behind the bar. The bar was very long, running perhaps fifty feet back into the darkness of the place. Behind the backs of the bartenders was a long platform. If a band were to play there, it would be under conditions that violated every principle of acoustics that big bands had always observed: saxes in a line in front, trombones seated behind them, trumpets behind them, on three platforms rising to the rear. Rhythm sections were placed to one side, usually stage right, audience left. The reason for this arrangement was a practical one: so the musicians could hear each other and thus play tightly. At the Metropole, if Woody brought in a big band, they would have to stand, not sit, in a straight line. Furthermore, the band would face a mirrored wall; not only would the musicians be staring at themselves, but their projected sound would come snapping back into their faces. Woody should have turned down the job; he didn't. The arrangement should have been a disaster; it wasn't.

The unorthodox formation baffled musicians who came in to listen. With the rhythm section in the middle and the saxes standing audience left, the brass audience right, the end man on the one side was a good fifty feet from the end man on the other, and the acoustic delay between the two ends of the band was considerable. How did they manage to play with rhythmic coherence? They had found an odd solution to the problem. They watched the drums in the mirror on the facing wall. More specifically, they watched Jake Hanna’s high hat, and played to that. And some of the band's hottest nights occurred at the Metropole.

The Metropole became the band's base of operations for the next several years. "It took a lot of responsibility off me," Woody said. "The salaries of the band and so on were paid by this place. And I was actually given a salary that simply would take care of my immediate needs. And we could pick and choose a time. If we got some good dates, we could go out for two weeks or four weeks, and come back and go back in for two or four weeks, or whatever we wanted. It was a great place to break in a band, by sheer necessity, because you either played together or you'd never see each other again. It was like being in a police lineup above a bar and playing into a mirror for a baffle. But it really worked into a remarkably quick way to get a band in shape.

"Another thing that made it all possible was, in the midst of this whole scene, I went in with the rhythm section and did a quartet album for Philips. It was the first successful album we'd had in several years, as far as sales and [air] play went. And from that I was able to convince them, because we were now in the Metropole, that they should record a big band. They had no eyes. Most labels didn't at that period. But they went ahead with it.

"Sal Nistico, Chuck Andrus, and Jake Hanna were there, constantly, and Nat Pierce and Chase were there every night, and Nat got different trumpet players at different times. They were usually guys from Boston or the New York area. That was his department. And then the trombones. It was some time during that earliest time when we brought in a guy from Richmond, Virginia, Henry Southall."

By now Abe Turchen was the band's business manager. He and Woody had taken office space at 200 West 57th Street, an outer room and then two smaller rooms, which looked north over 57th Street. At a desk to your left as you entered sat Dick Turchen, Abe's nephew, who sometimes had worked as the band's road manager; he had made the South American tour with Woody. But he now had a business of his own. Video Components, and was only peripherally involved with the band.

On the facing wall as you entered were two doors. The one on the right was Abe's. The one on the left led to a small room sublet from Abe and Woody by one of Woody's old friends, Lou Singer, an excellent orchestral composer and sometime amanuensis to composer Frank Loesser. Lou had written Sleepy Serenade and, after he actually heard someone make this order in a restaurant, One Meat Ball. That silly little song haunted him, but he was a well-trained composer, educated at Juilliard and Columbia University, who had studied with Wallingford Riegger. His office contained a spinet piano, a nondescript settee, a desk, chair, telephone, and nothing else. He was a very humorous man and kept the office bright.

The building was heavily tenanted by show-business people. Down the hall was the office of the Modern Jazz Quartet, run by their manager, Monte Kay. Elsewhere in the building was that of Woody Allen, whom Woody would occasionally encounter in the elevator, saying to the comedian, "Hi, I'm the old one."

Woody had enormous faith in Abe Turchen's acumen and gave him total control of the business. Abe, who stood about five-foot-eleven, was bulky now, his weight having risen to about 250 pounds. He always looked rumpled. Abe had married again. His second wife, Cindy Richmond, had worked briefly at the Copacabana. At the time of the marriage, she was nineteen, Abe was forty-three. She was very pretty. She and Abe had two sons, Steven, born August 3, 1957, and David, born June 22, 1959. They lived in a corner apartment on Riverside Drive at 78th Street that commanded a magnificent view of Riverside Park, the 79th Street Boat Basin, the smooth expanse of the Hudson River, and New Jersey beyond it. In the living room were a heavy and well-upholstered pale blue sofa and armchairs.

Abe Turchen had remarkable powers of persuasion and booked the band with ingenuity. At the same time, he was an indefatigable pessimist; his prognosis for almost everything was: "It'll never happen. It'll never happen." He liked show-business comics, particularly Jack E. Leonard, always called Fat Jack Leonard in the business, and I think Abe, whether consciously or unconsciously, affected Jack's misanthropic style of delivery. He tried to be humorous, with only intermittent success, his efforts to tell Jewish jokes foundering on his inability to get the hang of the accent. By contrast, Lou Singer, a native New Yorker, had the accent under perfect control, and always knew the latest Broadway jokes.

Abe would sit there every day, playing solitaire and watching sports on television, quietly placing bets on the telephone, shuffling the incredible clutter of papers on his big old wooden desk in a search for some phone number or other, and from time to time on sudden impulse or inspiration picking up the phone to place a bet or book the band into some improbable gig like the opening of a shopping mall. Meanwhile, as Woody noted to Stuart Troup, the outer office was "usually loaded with bookmakers, moneylenders, and others he was doing business with." Abe, as everybody said, was a character. Anyone who could book that band and carry all the information in his head would seem a natural at counting cards, and everyone who ever saw him play in Las Vegas said he was a master at blackjack. "It's too bad he went overboard," Ingrid Herman said, "and bet on the wrong things, instead of gambling like a professional."

The new band was taking form. And because of his obvious organizational abilities, Nat Pierce was road manager. This meant he was in charge of paying the men, getting them to and from each job, and seeing that things ran smoothly.

It was at this point that I got involved with Woody and with that office. I was editor of Down Beat from May, 1959, to September, 1961, when I resigned. In February, 1962, I left for Latin America with the Paul Winter Sextet. By the time we got back in July. I had translated into English some of the songs of a Brazilian composer I had met, the late Antonio Carlos Jobim. No one in New York was interested in them.

Those first months in New York were terrifying. I could not sell my writing, either my prose or my songs, and I was living at the West Side YMCA, a famous but depressing oasis for artists arriving in the city. Tennessee Williams wrote some of his early plays in that place.

I rapidly learned a dark lesson during that period. When I had been at Down Beat, I was useful to the record companies, and they treated me with a graciousness of which, fortunately, I was always a little suspicious. But now that I was needy, I learned quickly who my friends were. And they were the musicians. They were the ones who stood by me in a bad time, and I have never forgotten who they were. The complete list would be long, but their names include Art Farmer, Miles Davis, Gil Evans, Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Bob Brookmeyer, Philly Joe Jones, Wynton Kelly, Gerry Mulligan, and, particularly; Woody Herman and Bill Evans.

Somehow or other I ran into Woody. I probably went to hear the band at the Metropole. I saw him repeatedly over the period of a month or so. And Abe Turchen said to me, "A guy like you shouldn't be living like this. Why don't you come to work for us? We can give you a small salary, and you'll have the use of the office." "Doing what?" I asked.

"I don't know," Abe said. "Publicity, You could help us with that."

I took the offer. Later, I was talking to Nat Pierce about the time when

Abe hired me. Nat said, "Abe didn't hire you. Woody told him to do it. I was

there."

Thus I became one of the many souls whose lives were reshaped by

Woody Herman.

With what Woody was paying me, I was able to take a small basement apartment at the rear of a brownstone (actually, the stone was gray) on West End Avenue between 70th and 71st Streets. A door opened onto my own cool, shaded little courtyard that let you look up at a geometric piece of sky against which the leaves of a locust tree made patterns. Around the corner from me, in a large modern building, lived Erroll Garner, Roger Kellaway, and many other musicians. My little apartment became a meeting place of sorts. Antonio Carlos Jobim came to New York, and we wrote a number of songs in that apartment. The first of the songs I had translated in Rio, Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars (Corcovado), began to be recorded, one of the first versions being by Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto. I wrote some others with Gary McFarland.

I got used to the chaotic nature of the Woody Herman office. One day he called in from the road, seeking someone's phone number. He said, "Take a look in the files, and . . . . " He broke off, laughing, and said, "Hah! What files?"

When Woody ran out of clean shirts on the road, he simply bought more. He accumulated huge quantities of them, along with his shoes: he carried with him as many as twenty-six pairs of shoes hand-finished by his father. There was a suitcase full of shirts under a bench in the office, and more clothes in a closet. He came in from the road and said, "Have you got any room at your place for these things?"

"Yeah, I s'pose," I said.

"Would you mind taking 'em home and keeping 'em for me?" I remember that there was an excellent pair of gray slacks and a brass-buttoned blue blazer in this accumulation of unused wardrobe.

I had discovered a curious object in a drawer. Woody by then was losing his hair. It had thinned and receded from his forehead. It troubled me that he was, as it seemed to me, growing old: he was forty-nine. The object in the drawer was something hairy. I asked Abe, "What is this weird-looking thing?” Abe said, "It's Woody's rug. He hates it. Won't wear it." So when Woody asked me to take his clothes home, I opened the drawer, took out the toupee, dangled it between my thumb and forefinger, and said, "What would you like me to do with this?"

"Oh, that's disgusting!" Woody said. "Get rid of it!" And I tossed it into a wastebasket.

The musicians in those days in New York used to hang out in four bars, within walking distance of one another in the midtown area: Jim and Andy's, Junior's, Charlie's, and the Spotlight. Some favored one over the other, but most of the jazz musicians patronized all four. I was partial to Jim and Andy's. When Woody's band was in town, playing two or three weeks at the Metropole, its members could often be found at Jim and Andy's, Woody among them. You'd find him hanging out with his guys, listening to the woes of the younger musicians with a paternal patience. Everybody by now called him the Old Man. I do not know whether they had yet started calling him the Road Father, but that was the role he was more and more assuming: the great teacher, the one-man finishing school. 

The band was becoming phenomenal, now that it had overcome the problem of being stretched out in a line. On the left were the four saxes. Then came the drummer, Jake Hanna, then the bassist. Chuck Andrus. Then Nat Pierce, seated at a small upright piano, the only man with his back to the audience, and for that matter the only man who wasn't standing, playing the charts from memory. Then came the five trumpets, and on the far right, the three trombones.

And sometimes, standing at the bar, facing them, was in effect another Woody Herman band, veterans of the earlier herds, including trombonist Willie Dennis, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, Don Lamond (busy with studio work and a regular at Jim and Andy's), and more. Sometimes, when they were in New York, Johnny Mandel and Ralph Burns would wander by. The members of that Four Brothers band who had treated him with such contempt had grown up and now treated him with reverence. It was an incredibly celebratory atmosphere, for the old hands who came in would marvel at the prowess of this new generation of players. The band played Caldonia at twice the speed of the original record, and when he sang it, Woody stumbled over the time, trying to keep up. When the Neal Hefti trumpet unison passage arrived, Bill Chase would jump his part an octave above the others so that the thing bordered on the frightening.

Phil Wilson recalled, "The Tonight Show was at the Hudson Theater. When it let out, all the guys from the Tonight Shaw were there, hanging out. And you'd have Dizzy running in and Ben Webster, I was just in heaven. Woody used to call me a stranger in paradise, with all of these people. Wow. What a time."

The band was contracted for nine weeks at the Metropole that year, and had the management been able to get more time, it would have stayed there longer. But the bookings were accruing, I was managing to place a great deal of publicity about the band, but it soon became unnecessary; the publicity was generating itself, with critics and musicians alike saying this was the best band Woody had led since the Four Brothers band. By the end of 1962, Abe had booked the band all the way into August, 1963.

George Simon wrote in the New York Herald Tribune:

What is so exciting about this particular Herd?

First of all, it has the almost-forgotten sort of pulsing ensemble sound that makes you want to cheer. The arrangements are exciting. The brass is brilliant. The trumpets blast as one. They blow high, but they're accurate and they get a great blend. The saxes are loose and easy. And the rhythm section — well, if there's one reason why this Herd stands out from among all the rest, it's because of the rhythmic trio's fantastic, swinging drive .... In Jake Hanna, Woody has the most propulsive big-hand drummer to emerge on the jazz scene in years. The way he drives everything before him (with valuable assists from Chuck Andrus) is absolutely astounding.

He did not exaggerate. Quincy Jones had gone into debt trying to start a big band, and the magnificent Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band could only make a living overseas. Who was responsible for this remarkable new band? 

The principals inclined to give rather than take credit.

Nat Pierce told me, "It's because of him — Woody. If there are so few big bands out here, it's because there are so few professional bandleaders. Woody's a pro.”

"Being a professional bandleader involves knowing when to let a guy play because he's playing exceptionally well. Some leaders might not like to see their sidemen getting a lot of applause. Woody's delighted. Another thing: Woody's an entertainer as well as a musician. He can get away with a lot of things on the mike, quips and that sort of thing, that younger guys couldn't.”

"One reason the guys love to work for Woody is that we never feel we're actually working for the man. It's more like working with him. He appreciates what we're doing, and he lets us know it. And the guys appreciate and respect him. So they work all the harder."

One night when Al Cohn came by to hear the band, I asked him why all

Woody's groups, no matter what their size, had the same quality of fire.,

"It's the way Woody rehearses a band." Al said. "He lets the guys play around with a new chart, run it down themselves, get their own feeling going on it. After that, he steps in and cleans it up. For this reason, the guys get a lot of themselves and a lot of feeling into it."

Bill Chase said that it was the same now as in Al's days with the band. "We'll get a thing run down," Bill said, "and then Woody will come in and say, 'That's good, but I don't like this other thing. So go from letter K over to here, and then take it out.' And he always seems to be right.

"I'd like to make this one point, though: that quality isn't always there. I've been with Woody when it wasn't there. We have to have the right rhythm section. Jake Hanna is very important to the feeling this band gets."

Jake said, "Woody's flexible. He goes along with the way the band feels instead of sticking strictly to the book. That makes it always interesting and exciting for us. If a man's really blowing, Woody doesn't stop him after eight bars because the arrangement says so. He lets him keep on wailing."

Woody said, "If I may be so bold, I'll compare myself to Basie and Ellington. If Duke had a whole bunch of new people tomorrow, it would sound just like Duke. The same with Basie.

"But I have to have the right kind of people. If you have people who are content in what they're doing and believe in it, you'll have a hell of a lot better result. If I haven't got the right people, I can't do it.

"I think I'm a good organizer and a good editor. I try to let the band have its head and then strengthen what they're doing.

"Mind you, for each guy I've told 'Go blow' there have been nine others I've told, 'Don't blow.' I don't mean to upset anyone's progress, but at that point I decide whether a guy should blow or not. For the first two weeks, I don't listen to a man. I'll hold off for a while. And then I want to hear him."

Actually, the process was a little softer than that. When a new young musician would come into the band. Woody would tell him not to worry about anything, just relax and get used to the book. Then, when it seemed the young man had become familiar with it, Woody would hold up a finger and nod to the musician, meaning, "Take one chorus." If that chorus went well, he might hold up two fingers, meaning, "Take another one." And thus he would judge. He was no martinet.

But, Woody said, "we've got to have pros in this band, in both attitude and playing ability.

"A guy who's been a tremendous aid to me has been Nat Pierce — his writing, his way of encouraging others. He's got everybody in the band writing. This band has more amateur writers! I'm even writing some."

Phil Wilson thinks Woody had mysterious abilities that defied analysis. "In front of a band he was very subtle," Phil said. "He would react. He never missed a note. He listened to what everyone was doing. He sold the music to the public by his reactions to it. It could be the facial expression, it could be the way he moved his coat. He had a show-biz sense. He could take something outrageous that we were doing back in the band, and react to it with an outrage, much like the Marx Brothers, and a lay person who knew nothing about music — particularly the stuff we were doing, because damn! it was advanced — would get it. Woody would make light of it, make fun out of it, make pathos out of it, he would react to it so that the common man would be able to say, 'Hey, there's something going on back there.' I watched him night after night after night, wondering, 'How can I ever do that?'

"For all the freedom of the band, there was a discipline there. Very strict. We had a respect for it. And you knew it. We were in shape. You could confront Woody in the most embarrassing situations you could imagine, and he was together when he had to be — always!"

Neal Hefti thinks that Woody was intimidated by the sheer brilliance of the players he had hired for the Second Herd. Phil Wilson concurs. Phil said:

"Woody was a great clarinet player. The problem with him is that the son of a bitch developed to such a musical degree that he got nervous in front of his own band. If we were playing the Dallas Country Club, which we often did, and the lights were out and we were doing great old standards and nobody was clapping, boy! how he played. I'm a connoisseur of clarinet players. I look at clarinet players like I look at great wines. Woody was a giant player. But when he had a high-pressure band, he was intimidated by it. And the band I was on was high pressure.

"God, what a musical band."

But mere musicality was not enough to make the band a success. The ballroom business was all but finished. Booking agencies were not interested in helping anyone build a band. The cost of transporting a band by bus had risen to fifty cents a mile — a small figure now, but not a small one then. Furthermore, booking agencies were inclined to kill a band with one-nighters. The reason was peculiar. The American Federation of Musicians allowed a booker to take 20 percent of the fee for one-night engagements, but only 10 percent for long engagements, known as locations, such as the Metropole. Further, the collective gross for a week of one-nighters ran higher than that for location jobs. So it was in the short-term financial interests of the bookers to get double the commission on a larger gross. But without being able to stay in one place at least for a little while from time to time, a band became exhausted.

Abe despised booking agents. He said in his mortuary voice, "We work with agencies but not for any one of them." And so he functioned as both manager and booker for the band, which technically was contrary to an AFM regulation forbidding anyone's filling both roles. But Abe collected only a manager's commission. His years on the road with the band stood him in good stead now that he was booking it. "For one thing," he told me, "I know every ballroom operator in the country."

And when any one market grew weak, Abe looked about for new ones. "I started the whole college market," he claimed. "I started in it in 1948 and 49. This was after we came back from Cuba and broke down to six men. The band business was down to a nub. I picked up the phone and started calling small colleges, with 500 students and up. I'd say, 'I know you don't operate in midweek, but how'd you like to have the Woody Herman band for nothing?'”

He would let the school take its expenses for tickets and publicity off the top. Woody would then get everything up to a predetermined figure, perhaps a thousand dollars, after which the proceeds were shared by the band and the school. This ingenious but simple plan took all risk out of the venture for the schools.

"Colleges were the only reason Woody survived for twelve years," Abe said.

Woody's view was different. When I told him what Abe had said, Woody said, "Abe's the reason I survived."