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“I was blessed, being around artists like Duke, Basie. They’re the ones that did it. When you join ranks with people like that – artists and humanitarians like that – you’ve got it made, because all you’ve got to do is keep your eyes and ears open, and they’re teaching you, every night on the bandstand. I know some drummers who would give their left arm just to play one number with Duke, and I had two and a half years once, and one year another time. That’s a blessing. So my take on this is, if it wasn’t for them, where would I be? I’d be home making spaghetti.”
- Louie Bellson, drummer extraordinaire
Brown: Take 2 of the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History interview with Louie Bellson in his home in San Jose, California. We’re talking about Chick Webb. Please continue.
Bellson: Chick Webb – in some early interviews, when I was young, I failed to mention him, because I forgot that I had met him once. I met him in Chicago. I was amazed at the sound he got with that big bass drum. I think it was either a 28- or a 30-inch bass drum. If you were looking at him from the front, all you saw was a [?] of hair and his sticks flying up in the air. God Almighty. It was most amazing. And the way he played in the band. It’s too bad we don’t have a lot of footage on him, because a lot of college kids or young high-school kids asked me, “What about Chick Webb?” I could only go so far. But what he did in that short span. Buddy [Rich] talked about him too. There was nobody like Chick Webb. He was a champ.
Brown: He was the first big-band drum leader – drummer who led a big band, at that point.
Bellson: Yes, that’s right.
Brown: So I think that that’s very important as far as his impact on his music. Other people who played with him – of course Ella [Fitzgerald] – spoke so highly of him – and other folks.
Bellson: Cozy Cole spoke – he loved Chick. Everybody loved Chick. He was a nice person besides. I can imagine – Cozy told me he was in a lot of pain before he died, because of that back injury. But then he went ahead and played. It didn’t bother him. When you go to see him – that’s the first drummer I ever saw, when he was playing a solo, he used real tiny thin sticks. I could see the chips of wood flying up in the air. I never saw that before. I said wow, wow.
Brown: But you did get a chance to meet him.
Bellson: Yeah.
Brown: How tall was he, about?
Bellson: He was – Roy Haynes – he wasn’t as big as Roy Haynes.
Brown: A heart of gold.
Bellson: A heart of gold. When they – I always have to put this in. For years, in my later career, there’s three drummers, Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, and Louie Bellson. I say, no – yes, there’s three drummers, but where did we get that from? Chick Webb, Big Sid Catlett, Jo Jones. You have to name those three. You have to know where you came from in order to know where you’re going. If you think you’re doing something new, they did it then. Baby Dodds. There’s another. I didn’t realize – I didn’t get a chance to meet him. But one time when Pearl [Bailey] – I was married to Pearl at that time – when she went to New York, I put on a record of Baby Dodds, and I was amazed. He’s playing all those press rolls. Anything that Gene or Buddy or Jo Jones played, he did it years ago, Baby Dodds. Credit’s got to be credit where credit’s due.
Brown: Did you listen to any other New Orleans drummers, like either Paul Barbarin or Zutty Singleton?
Bellson: Yeah. Dannie Richmond, Paul Barbarin, and somebody else down there – Earl Palmer. In fact I had Earl Palmer play drums when Pearl did her television shows. She did 15 shows. I conducted the show. I had Ray Brown on bass, Earl Palmer on drums, because Earl could play anything. Great drummer.
Brown: Is there something special about those New Orleans drummers that you can say or talk about as a drummer yourself?
Bellson: They had – they utilized the rudiments to the fullest extent. Steve Gadd plays all those rhythms now. He got them from studying the rudiments and studying some of those drummers. Preservation Hall. I went down there once. The drummer was 92 years old, but he was swinging. All they had was a snare drum, field drum, a wood block, and a cowbell, and oh man.
Brown: You talked about the main influences that came before you, Buddy, and Gene, which were Papa Jo, Chick Webb, and Big Sid. You talked about Chick Webb and Papa Jo. What about Big Sid? Can you talk about Big Sid?
Bellson: Fabulous. He was just the opposite of Chick Webb. He was enormous. He was a big man. When he played, the right stick looked like a toothpick in his hand. But yet he had the most finesse of anybody. A big guy – you expected him to have a blow like that metal drum stick I got in front, but, to quote Dizzy Gillespie – he said nobody could play the Chinese cymbal like Big Sid. With that big hand, he played – sometimes guys overuse it, bash it – but he played it with the bell up and had a beautiful touch. He could really swing. Great, fabulous drummer. He taught me all about brushes, hi-hat – like Jo Jones, how to listen.
Brown: When you say he taught you this, was that just drummer to drummer, maybe sitting to the side? Or did he give you formal lessons?
Bellson: Yeah, he called me aside. I’d be there by that drum set. I remember going to Atlantic City to hear Benny Goodman’s band. Big Sid was playing with Benny. During one of the intermissions, Big Sid said, “Come here, kid.” He said, “Here’s how you play the hi-hat.” You’ve got to have a special touch for the hi-hat. “Here’s how you play the brushes.” That guy was a champ with the brushes, Jo Jones. He came into the nightclub with Bobby Cranshaw. Quartet. John Bunch on piano and Ted Nash on saxophone. Let me tell you. He came in with a newspaper rolled under his arm. When I introduced him, he said, “I’ll play the newspaper. You play the snare drum, Lou. I’ll play the wall and the newspaper.” I wish I had recorded that. He was out of sight. He did more with a newspaper and brushes and the wall than most guys could do with a full set of drums. Fabulous.
Brown: It sounds like the drummers were a fraternity of sorts. It sounds like you guys had a real rapport and looked out for one another? Is that really the case?
Bellson: Oh yeah, yes, absolutely. To the extent, if one guy couldn’t make – like if I was out in California working for Quincy Jones and I couldn’t make a certain date, I’d call Shelly Manne or Earl Palmer or Paul Humphrey. We’d always look out for one another. Drummers were very close, and we would go hear one another, like Buddy Rich coming to hear me play. I’d go hear him play. One thing about him: he always used to cop my hi hat and my snare drum. I’d come to the gig at night, and no snare drum and hi-hat. Good thing I had an extra. I said, that darn Buddy Rich – took my hi-hat and my snare drum.
Brown: When’s the first time you met Buddy Rich? Do you remember meeting him for the first time?
Bellson: I met him in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He was with Tommy Dorsey’s band. I was still going to high school at that time. He impressed me very much. I heard him on radio broadcasts coming from the Hotel Astor in New York with Tommy Dorsey’s band. I said, I’ve got to meet that guy, because it sounds like he’s got a lot of technique – not only technique, but he plays good with the band. From that point on, I joined Benny’s band, and we got to know one another. That relationship went on for about – right up to when he died.
Brown: What was he like when you first met him? Because he has a reputation for being abrasive.
Bellson: He was brisk, yeah. That’s a good title for him, brisk. But he took a liking to me, because I was asking the right questions.
Brown: Such as?
Bellson: On your radio broadcast from New York, how did they set up the microphones? Because I could tell all the beats that you were playing.” He said, “The heck with the microphones. That came from me.”
Brown: That sounds like Buddy.
Bellson: From that point on, we chatted for a while. I got his address – New York address. I called him. We got to be good friends from that point on, close friends. We had a lot of high respect for one another. We played together quite a few times too.
Brown: Let’s got back and talk about the rest of that triumvirate. We already talked about Papa Jo, Big Sid, and Chick Webb. Now we have the Gene, Louie, and Buddy. So talk about your first meeting with Gene Krupa. Here you are. You’re playing with Benny Goodman. Gene’s the one who really made that chair. So what was it like to meet him for the first time?
Bellson: He’s the first guy that brought drums to the foreground – made it a solo instrument. I think it was done before by Baby Dodds, all those early drummers . . .
Brown: Chick Webb.
Bellson: Chick Webb, really, because they didn’t get the credit for it. Whoever marketed Gene and Buddy and myself, they did a hell of a good job, because if that would have been the same thing for Chick Webb . . . . We know why. Because the black bands weren’t as popular in those days. They were popular, but they didn’t get the just dues, where the credit goes. The credit goes there. That’s where it started. That’s got to be said. I say it all the time, because I’m not going to say I invented this and I invented that. It was an outcome of those great players. They’re the ones that did it.
Brown: Gene always gave credit as well.
Bellson: Yes he did. Yeah. Buddy did too, on different occasions. He always talked about Jo Jones, because he loved that Basie band.
Brown: It’s hard not to.
Bellson: I first met Gene on one of my trips to go study with Roy Knapp. I used to go to the Panther Room in the Hotel Sherman, where Gene had his band there. I always found him to be very congenial. Whatever you wanted to do, great. He took time in between sets to come over and chat with me. I was just a kid. He’d buy me a drink. Of course it was soda then. No liquor. I was never a drinker anyway. But he took time to show me things. Then of course years later – not too much longer – I won the contest. He remembers me coming into the Hotel Sherman to catch him. That was the first time I met him. My first wife used to make an example of Gene. She said, “I’m married to a great drummer, Louie Bellson, but if you put on stage twenty drummers, include Gene Krupa, Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson, Jo Jones, Shelly Manne, J. C. Heard – twenty drummers up on stage, bingo! Your eyes are going to go right to Gene Krupa.” He was a master showman. He could make more out of [Bellson sings a rhythmic phrase ending in “BAM”] – hit that little cymbal, and the house would come down. When he did that thing with Buddy Rich, Buddy Rich would play a tremendous four-bar break [Bellson makes a whirring sound], Gene would go [Bellson again sings the rhythmic phrase ending in “BAM”], and the place would go crazy. And Buddy would go, “Nahhhhhhhh. How’d you do that?”
Brown: Do you know what the secret is?
Bellson: That was Gene. Benny Goodman told me – he said, “I respect drummers like Jo Jones, Big Sid Catlett, you and Buddy, but Gene was my man. He played for me.” That came from Benny Goodman. So there you go. Tommy Dorsey had a lot of great drummers – Gene played with Tommy Dorsey for a while, and so did Davey Tough. There’s another guy that could play. He had a tremendous right foot. And he was a poet – wrote poetry. He had a lot of smarts.
Brown: You knew him personally. You lived – I saw an account that you lived with him for a couple of months, maybe just before he died. Is that right?
Bellson: Yes.
Brown: Can you talk about Davey Tough? Because he’s another one of those that didn’t live very long. History really didn’t capture some of his contributions.
Bellson: That’s right. He was another little guy. Soaking wet, he weighed 98 pounds. They used to hire another drummer to come in, because after the first hour he’d get drunk and fall down in back of the bass drum. But he’s the first guy to play damp drums, bass drum. By that I mean, years ago guys used to tune their drums – if you had a skin head, and you had to play outdoors in the sun, that drum head would tighten up and you’d get a real peashooters sound. But Davey Tough would carry a little pail of water and a shammy skin, and he’d wet that head down so you got a good damp sound. First guy to do that. Also he’s the first guy – two guys, Jo Jones and Davey Tough – to play the out chorus, the shout chorus, on brushes. Usually when you play the shout chorus on brushes, you were [?] – give me the [?]. No, they played the shout chorus with brushes. It’s really obvious in recordings with Woody Herman: Apple Honey – that’s what Davey Tough is doing. He had a different concept of drumming, but it was beautiful. He had a great right foot. On one of those things – maybe Apple Honey or one of those things – at the very end, after they played the last chord, the bass drum goes [Bellson sings a rapidly repeated note]. His [?] foot. Tremendous. I asked Tommy and Benny about Davey once, and they both said he made you swing. That was his forte. He made you swing. Yet he didn’t have enough knowledge on drums. He wanted to learn how to play tympani before he died, but he never made it. A fabulous drummer. He never got his just dues, too. He was always in the background. The guys that knew, they said yeah, he was up there. Shelly Manne loved him, as other players did.
Brown: We’ve talked about the drummers through the swing era. We talked a little bit about the New-Orleans-style drummers and the swing-era drummers. You started talking a little while back about when you first started hearing Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. We talked about Kenny Clarke. Then earlier, off mike, we talked about Max Roach. Do you want to talk more about Max Roach?
Bellson: Yeah. Max and I did the first clinic – it has to be close to 55 years ago, or maybe more. We did it in Brooklyn. Max and I were the two set players. Sol Goodwin was the tympani, and Jose Bettincourt was mallets. During that clinic, I learned so much from Max, because when I played my segment, Max told me – he says, “Lou, I got a big charge out of listening to you play. Do you ever think of the melody when you’re playing a drum solo?” I said, “No. I don’t think so.” He said, “If you are playing Cherokee, that should be your main thing.” So every time I played Cherokee from that point on, I thought about the melody. He taught me how to play melody on the drums, pertaining to the song that I’m playing. It makes a lot of sense. Also, I went to hear him quite often when he was on 52nd Street, playing with Dizzy, Bird. Every time, I got a lesson. He did something different that I didn’t know about. I was always aware of the fact that he was listening to Bird and Dizzy. That’s what really impressed me. In those days they didn’t have monitors and too much, but they were able to hear one another. Max said, “If I’m playing too loud and can’t hear Dizzy, that means I’m playing too loud. So simmer down, so I can hear what’s going on in the front line.” Because otherwise Dizzy would turn around and say, “What kind of house are you building back there?” Dizzy taught me how to lay off the bass drum quite a bit, because I came from an era of – when Buddy and Jo Jones and all of us played hard swing, that swing era where you played four beats to the bar on the bass drum, because the music called for that. But now, with the bass players like Ray Brown and Milt Hinton and all those greats today like Christian McBride, they’ve got the four covered. So now this is syncopated – the bass drum – which you know, and the left hand is syncopated. So I learned from Dizzy. Dizzy said, “Lou” – the first time I played with him, he says, “You don’t have to play the bass drum on all four beats. You mix it up a little bit.” I found it hard to do first, because [I was] coming from that other school, but it didn’t take me long, working with Dizzy, doing recordings and things with him, to grab a hold of that idea, especially listening to Klook. He’d swing you into bad health any time. Just listening to him play four bars was enough.
Brown: It’s great that we’re able to get this perspective from somebody who was there, got to see them, knew all of them, and worked with them. Now that we’ve talked about drummers, I’m going to come back to your career again and talk about the late ’40s. At that time you’ve already worked with Tommy Dorsey. You worked with him from ’47 to ’49. Then you co-led a sextet with Charlie Shavers? Is that – you started working in a small band?
Bellson: Yeah.
Brown: Do you want to talk about that period?
Bellson: Charlie Shavers was in Tommy’s band for three years too. We were roommates. There was one of the greatest trumpet players that ever lived. Tommy Dorsey said he was – because he was not only a great trumpet player. He was a great piano player, great arranger, composer. Undecided. He wrote Undecided with the John Kirby Sextet: O’Neill Spencer, brushes . . .
Brown: Talk about O’Neill, because a lot of people don’t know about him.
Bellson: He was in a class with George Owens when it comes to brushes and playing with a sextet. Taste. Ultimate. Fabulous. O’Neill Spencer was something else.
Brown: Max Roach talks about him too.
Bellson: Yes. Another guy that played with Basie’s band was – Shadow Wilson.
Brown: Talk about Shadow.
Bellson: When I first heard him play – that four-bar break he made on – with Basie’s Band – Queer Street, that’s a classic. Today there’s a guy around called Harold Jones that’s another fabulous drummer. He lives up here [Northern California]. He can really play. He’ll swing you into bad health too. He knows that book. Sonny Payne was great. I know he was a master showman, throwing the sticks up in the air, but that was a gimmick. But he could really play. That Atomic album that Neal Hefti wrote for Basie, Sonny really played well on that.
Brown: Let’s go back and talk about that sextet that you co-led with Charlie Shavers. Who else was in that band?
Bellson: I had – Terry Gibbs was the vibraphone player. Lou Levy was the piano player. Oscar Pettiford was the bass player.
Brown: A star band. Bellson: Yeah. What a band that was. Jerry Winters, I think, was the clarinet player. Charlie Shavers, we were roommates for three years, and we never went to a restaurant to eat. He went out and got a hot plate, went to the grocery store, and came back. Charlie was a great cook. We had home-cooked food. It smelled so good in the theaters that Tommy Dorsey had to come up and say, “What are you guys doing?” He joined us. Black-eyed peas, cornbread, greens. All soul food, but good, prepared right.
Brown: Did you guys record?
Bellson: Unfortunately that record ban was on at that time. It’s too bad, because that was a good little band. That’s the first time that Oscar Pettiford played the cello, because he knew that Charlie Shavers could play bass. After a while Charlie said, “Hey. I play trumpet too. I could play bass, but not every number.” Oscar Pettiford was having a ball, playing that cello, which he played very well. First time he did it, with our sextet. It’s too bad we didn’t have some recordings of that, because later on we had a little band with Zoot Sims, George Duvivier on bass, Charlie Shavers, and Don Abney on piano. That was a good little band too. We couldn’t record with that either. The record ban was still on.
Brown: So you felt comfortable working in big bands or small bands, because . . .
Bellson: Oh yeah.
Brown: . . . you could play in any context at this point.
Bellson: Because with Benny Goodman, I played with the sextet, quartet, and the trio. Tommy Dorsey had the Clambake Seven. Yeah. I had a lot of early training. Brown: Then after the sextet you played with Harry James. Is that correct?
Bellson: Yeah, Harry James.
Brown: How did that go?
Bellson: Wonderful.
Brown: How long were you with Harry? Bellson: He played drums for the circus. He’d come from a circus band, and he could play the drums. He could play all the gallops. He could play. Great trumpet player too. We were working just weekends with Harry. He was semi-retired. Great player. I had a great time with Harry.
Brown: When did you – do you remember the circumstances for joining that band?
Bellson: When I left Tommy’s band, I wanted to study with Buddy Baker. I mentioned him before: my composition teacher. While I was out there, I stayed at Juan Tizol’s house. That’s how I got with Duke’s band.
Brown: That’s a story there.
Bellson: That’s coming up. So Harry – Juan Tizol – I stayed at his house. Charlie Shavers was – no, we’re past Charlie now. We’re with Harry, aren’t we? Yeah. I wanted to study with Buddy Baker, so that was my excuse for leaving Tommy’s band. He got mad at me. Tommy got mad at me. Remember I talked to you about that, the revolving platform? He got mad at me and turned me around. When he found out that I was leaving the band, he turned me around and left me there. I made one comment which is a classic. I turned around to Tommy and said, “Even Shakespeare’s got an ending.” Then he really got mad at me. We parted friends after that, because he understood. But he didn’t want me to leave the band. Actually, I was having a good time, but things – I was interested in composing classical music, learning how to write for strings, woodwinds, orchestra. My first assignment with Buddy Baker – he gave me the full score of Daphnis and Chloé by Maurice Ravel. He said, “Here. Take it. Next month I want you to learn the whole thing.” I said, “I beg your pardon?” But I got into it.
Brown: That’s a masterpiece of orchestration. For me, that is incredible. He started you on the best there is.
Bellson: Bartok – Bela Bartok – was another one. I missed a chance to meet him when I was with Benny Goodman’s band in 1942. Bela Bartok was still living. He was broke. After writing Concerto for Orchestra and all of the brilliant things, he wound up broke. Mel Powell, the piano player with Benny Goodman, used to bring him groceries to keep him alive. I was supposed to go with Mel one day, but Benny had me doing something else. So I missed the opportunity to meet Bela Bartok. He died in 1945. A genius.
Brown: What else were you studying with Mr. Baker. Did he have you work out [of] any books? Obviously he had you look at scores. So did he have you . . .? Because you talk about other people like Gershwin or even – he studied the Schillinger method. Is that something that you worked with as well? Or did you work at the Piston method or any of those?
Bellson: I just stuck with Buddy. He gave me specific assignments. He said – the interesting thing about Harry James is The Hawk Talks, which I wrote – with Duke [Ellington], I wrote that for Harry James, because they referred to him as the Hawk. Not only Coleman Hawkins, but Harry James was the Hawk. We called him the Hawk. I wrote that for Harry James while I was with the band. I’ll tell you how that fits in with Duke later on. Harry was one of the first guys to play my music, my arrangements: [?] Swing, Hawk Talks. I did those things. He played my music. Whereas with Tommy, he had his own arrangers. It’s an odd thing. While I was with Tommy for several years, I wrote the score to Skin Deep. I wrote it, put it in a suitcase, and forgot about it. It didn’t come to life until I joined Duke’s band, but I wrote it in 1948.
Brown: I don’t know if we captured it or not: how did you get into Harry James’s band?
Bellson: That was through Buddy Baker and Marty Berman, the baritone saxophone player with Tommy’s band. They both recommended me to join Harry.
Brown: What were the circumstances of your departure from Harry’s band?
Bellson: As I said before, I stayed with Juan Tizol, because Juan Tizol was with Harry, but every day he talked to Duke. They talked over the phone every day. Willie Smith was also in Harry James’s band, the lead alto player who played with Jimmie Lunceford for years. You know about him?
Brown: Yeah. His saxophone’s at the Smithsonian.
Bellson: Jimmy Crawford was another drummer with Jimmie Lunceford. They played the two-beat style, Snooky Young playing trumpet. After being with Harry, Juan Tizol told me, “I just talked to Duke. He knows about Willie Smith. I told him about you. He’s looking for a drummer.” So the three of us decided, let’s talk to Harry, since he’s only playing one day a week, and tell him we’ve got a chance to join Duke. So all three of us said, “Harry” – called him Hawk. “Hey Hawk. We’ve got a chance to join Duke Ellington’s band: Willie Smith, Tizol, and Louie.” Harry James paused for a minute. He looked at me, and he said, “Take me with you.” He actually said that. So we did. We went. He didn’t want to see us go. We worked one night a week, and we worked with Duke. He loved Duke. So there we were.
Brown: So Juan facilitated that one – Juan Tizol – going over to see Duke.
Brown: Was that the first time you met Duke Ellington?
Bellson: No. The first time I met Duke was in my hometown, Moline, Illinois, when Duke’s band came to town to play the Illinois Theater. That’s a good memory, right? I feel ashamed to say this, but Herb Jeffries was with the band, and they wouldn’t let the band stay at the hotel. They had to sleep on their bunks on the train. They came on the train. Duke offered to pay for the whole floor of the hotel. They still wouldn’t let him stay there. Herb Jeffries and I talk about that all the time. I met Duke then. I met Ben Webster first. I met him backstage. He said, “Come on. I want to introduce you to Duke.” I met Johnny Hodges, Duke, Ben Webster, Barney Bigard, Tricky Sam [Nanton], Lawrence Brown, all of them. Ben Webster told me, “Hey kid. You play drums, don’t you?” I say, “Yeah.” He said, “Where can I play, after the theater? I’d like to go out and do some jamming.” So him and I went out to Stan[?] Shores, a little place where they play jazz. I had a quartet. I played with Ben Webster all night long. I’ll never forget that. That’s an experience. We played so good. We wound up just him and I. We left the trumpet player back – 10,000 choruses back. That’s how I met Duke – through Ben Webster.
Brown: Do you remember that meeting with Duke? Do you remember him.
Bellson: Yeah. It was very congenial. He’s always been a trustworthy gentleman, always has time for you. I know he dug me because I didn’t ask him a lot of questions. I was brief. I could tell by the way he looked at me – let me check this dude out. He remembers that, later on – that meeting. He said, “I know, because Ben Webster told me, ‘You’ve got to hear this kid play’.” I think that was a break-in for me joining Duke’s band later on.
Brown: Now you’re back with Juan Tizol. You guys look into getting into the band. Now you’re meeting him for the second time. What happened at this meeting, when you went over there with Hawk and all those folks?
Bellson: When I joined the band, they were doing a dance gig tour, which is much easier than those big, long, extended compositions that Duke – because [there was] no drum book, nothing to go by.
Brown: You were replacing Sonny Greer? Or not?
Bellson: No. Sonny Greer had left for a while. He had Charlie Smith. Brown: Oh Charlie. A left-handed drummer.
Bellson: Charlie played good with the band. He preferred to play in a small band, but he played good with Duke’s band. I followed Charlie Smith. No drum book at all. Nothing. And nobody said anything. Clark Terry was the only one that answered one of my questions. They said, “That’s okay, Jake. You’ll hear it.” I’m sure I will hear it, but I’d like to have some kind of cue. Anyway, I was doing okay, being that I was an arranger. I was sitting right next to Lawrence Brown. The trombone book – I could see it from my drum chair, so I could tell what figures they were making that were important. So I got along okay for the dance band, because they’re all the same tempo. I looked at the itinerary. Coming up in Champagne, Illinois: Duke Ellington in concert, playing the Harlem Suite. So I went to Clark Terry. I said, “Clark. What about Harlem Suite?” He said, “No problem.” I said, “I know it’s no problem with you, but I’m asking you to tell me about it, because we’ve been playing dance gigs, which is easy. But now, tell me about the Harlem Suite.” So he took his part out. 12 pages long. He said, “The key to this whole thing, Lou, is you’ve got to watch Duke. He’s going to give you all the directions you need. So, be cool, and listen. Look over the trombone book if you want, but I can tell you this: keep your eyes on Duke, and he’ll give you signs like, ‘I want to hear you, or soft, or staccato, or fluid, or tacit, lay out, come in, give me wood, brushes’.” And he did. How I got through that, I don’t know. But Duke did it. That was a lesson in being alert, because later on I had a chance to record with the New York Philharmonic. Just John Lamb and I – we were the only two members – 125 players in the orchestra, and Duke conducting. I was the only one that didn’t have any music. It was The Golden Broom and the Green Apple, 20 minutes of music. Duke saw I was worried. My drum set was right below him. He came over to me, bent over me right before the down beat, and said, “Lou, the first part’s in 3/4.” I said, “Thanks.” Can you imagine that? 125 players. After – we played for an hour and a half – all the string players and woodwind players around me said, “Oh, you memorized it, huh Lou?” I said, “No. I never heard it before.” They said, “How’d you know what to do?” I said, “I watched him.” So what I did: I took the score home. Luther Henderson wrote the score out for Duke just on that one piece – Tone Parallel of Harlem. Duke wrote it – the score and everything. But Luther Henderson wrote the score. I took the score home and made a complete drum set part and handed it to Duke on my way out, after we played with the symphony orchestra. So Duke said, “Now you can understand why I didn’t write a drum part for you. It isn’t every day I get a Louie Bellson drum part.” I said, “Yeah. You took me through my paces, though.” “Yeah, that’s all right.” He had his way of doing things, Duke. That was something.
Brown: I’m going to read one of my favorite passages from Duke Ellington’s autobiography. Page 225: “Louie Bellson (Louis Balassoni) is so handsome a cat that when he’s on the stand the chicks don’t see anybody but him. Chicks come, wait, and hope, but he’s not very forward with the girls.” “He took us, the entire band and show – Nat Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Patterson and Jackson, Timmie Rodgers, Peg Leg Bates, and I don’t know how many others – to his house one night when the Big Show of ’51 played Moline, Illinois. His beautiful mother, who is as cute as can be and whom everybody calls Curly, served an Italian dinner of endless courses. Patterson and Jackson, the heavy boys of the eating league, were filled to overflowing and knocked out ’way before the last course. I paced this gorgeous feast with the proper salad punctuations, of course, and came off champ. Everybody else thought every course was the main course. I was alone with – and ate – the dessert. It was the greatest reception since Mrs. Carney laid the band out, stuffing them with Boston-type food. What a wonderful family!” “Louis Bellson is the epitome of what Paul Gonsalves means when he says, ‘He’s a beautiful cat, man!’ For in spite of his outrageous beauty, Louis Bellson is truly a beautiful person. With never a thought about getting even or getting the better of any man, he has the soul of a saint. There is nothing too good for someone he likes, and I don’t know anybody he doesn’t like, or anybody who doesn’t like him. He and Billy Strayhorn were very good buddies when he was with us as a musician.” “Supporting or solo, he is the epitome of perfection, a brilliant performer. We really felt it when he had to quit to go and organize a band to back up his lovely wife, who, as you must know, is sometimes known as Pearlie Mae, the inimitable Pearl Bailey.” “We are proud indeed to have been the first to present him as a musician extraordinaire in an entire fifteen-minute feature. Then, too, he keeps coming back with great big bands, for which he writes the orchestrations. We are still getting requests for his ‘Skin Deep’ and ‘The Hawk Talks’.” It sounds like you guys were a mutual admiration society.
Bellson: I was blessed, being around artists like Duke, Basie. They’re the ones that did it. When you join ranks with people like that – artists and humanitarians like that – you’ve got it made, because all you’ve got to do is keep your eyes and ears open, and they’re teaching you, every night on the bandstand. I know some drummers who would give their left arm just to play one number with Duke, and I had two and a half years once, and one year another time. That’s a blessing. So my take on this is, if it wasn’t for them, where would I be? I’d be home making spaghetti.
When you have that kind of – because all those bandleaders were not only great on the bandstand, but off the bandstand – humanitarians. They had time for everybody. He spent as much time with you as if you were the President. Duke’s dressing-room door was always open, whoever had a problem. That’s why he had all those guys for so many years: Carney, 50 years; Rabbit [Johnny Hodges], 45 years; everybody – Lawrence Brown, Sonny Greer. That’s another guy. Sonny Greer. I loved him. He fit that band to a tee, that early band. A different style altogether, but good. Last time I saw him, he had been out of the band. I was with Duke’s band at the Apollo. He came up to me and says, “Lou, I need to get a pair of hi-hats.” I always carried some extra ones. So I went out to the dressing room after the show and gave him the hi-hats. He kissed me and says, “Great.” A fabulous guy. One of a kind.
Brown: How would you describe his style, his drumming style?
Bellson: Strictly original. There’s nobody else who was like him. He fit that band. First of all, his stature on the seat. He sat real high. He played with his toe almost all the time. Very seldom with the heel down. He had beaucoup instruments around him. All he had to do was go like this with his right stick and he’d hit something: a set of tympani, chimes, vibes, bells, everything, and he played all of that. He was strictly original.
Brown: Did you know him personally?
Bellson: Yeah. Brown: How was he as a person?
Bellson: Wonderful. Funny. All drummers are funny, anyway. My first wife, Pearl, said, “Drummers are funny,” and my wife now says, “You guys are all comedians.” We learn that. Getting back to that theater, that’s the one thing that I’m sorry to say went out of style, if that’s the right word to use – the theaters, RKO houses, when you’d go in and hear a great band, and the likes of Bill Bailey on tap-dancing, Teddy Hale, the Nicholas Brothers, the Berry Brothers, all that. If that was going on today, the kids would say wow, wow. The ballrooms were open, swing. All that television knocked all that out. I’m not saying that television is bad, but that upbringing of living on the stage and playing with all those greats, it really stays with you, because you learn to be a comedian. You learn to tell jokes. You learn how to be an m.c. You learn how to tap dance. You learn how to do the whole thing. That was a golden era, really, in a way. There’s a lot of great things happening today, but the barometer is, if you go to a lot of colleges and ask the kids – like they ask Clark Terry, “How was it like, playing with Duke’s band?” and “How was it like to play with Basie’s band?”, and you’d have a pow-wow session and tell them, they’d all say, “We were born 40 years too late.” “How was it to play with Dizzy Gillespie? Bird?” There again, when you have that kind of teachers – those kinds of mentors – all you have to do is pay attention, and it rubs off, because that’s the history of American music, right there.
Brown: We were talking about your time with Duke’s band. Obviously he felt comfortable enough with you and either invited you or allowed you to bring your own music. Can you talk about how that process came about?
Bellson: When Tizol came to me after I’d been in the band a couple of months – the first couple weeks Billy Strayhorn and I roomed together, because he used to go with the band once in a while. There’s a genius. Billy Strayhorn was a genius. I learned an awful lot. I made the mistake of saying to him, when I first met him, “Strayhorn, how did Duke voice Caravan?” He went like this to me: naaaaaaaaa. They kept their ideas secret. Only later on, they came to me, and Duke showed me how they did it. But when I first joined the band, Juan Tizol said, “I told Duke that you write arrangements. So Duke says, “Tell Louie to bring in an arrangement.” When Juan came back to me, I said, “Are you kidding? Me bring an arrangement to Juan Tizol, Billy Strayhorn, and Duke Ellington? No way.” So Juan came to me a second time. “Duke said, ‘Bring the arrangement in’.” He had to ask me three times. He said, “Now, Lou. Bring in those arrangements.” I handed them to Duke, and I ran. The thing that knocked me out was the first time he heard The Hawk Talks, he recorded it on Columbia. I was amazed.
Brown: Ellington Uptown.
Bellson: Yeah. Then came Skin Deep. The history of Skin Deep: I told you I wrote that when I was with Tommy’s band in 1948, put it in a drawer, forgot about it. I took it back out when Duke said, “Have you got a drum vehicle?” I said, “Yeah, I do have.” During those years, it was hard to record drum beats – especially fast beats – and make them clear. Duke was a little leery about going into the studio to do that. We were playing onenighters up around Fresno. We played in a wonderful old ballroom – one of those oldfashioned ballrooms. Duke said – that night we went to Dutch Leonard’s house, the famous baseball player. Invited the whole band. He had a guy named Bert – no, not Bert Ryan. I’ll think of his name. The guy that invented hi-fi. Bert Porter. Bert Porter was the first guy to use hi-fi. He recorded the concert that night in – where’d I say it was?
Brown: Fresno.
Bellson: Fresno. When we heard the playback, Duke says, “Everybody, next day, down to the ballroom. We’re going to record Skin Deep.” We had two takes. The first take, the right bass drum beater flew out of the pedal. So I had to stop and do it over again. But I did it on the second take. We heard the playback, and Duke said, “This is it.” We sent it in to Columbia, and they accepted it. It was done in Fresno. That’s the history of that, Skin Deep. That’s why you heard all the clarity of the beats. Even Buddy Rich called me after he heard it. He said, “Where’d you record that?” I said, “In Fresno.” He says, “No wonder.” He says, “I was wondering how you got all those fast beats in there.” Clear.
Brown: Yeah, because you do that double-time section after that intro. Burning.
Bellson: I prayed every time I had to do that. Especially in the later years.
Brown: Duke didn’t get the revolving stage for you or any of that? He didn’t need that.
Bellson: Oh yeah. He got that.
Brown: He got it?
Bellson: He used it.
Brown: He did do it.
Bellson: Clark Terry did the button. I always warned – I told Clark – I told Clark, “If you see me getting tired with my feet, push me back.” He says, “Okay. All right.”
Brown: So you had a really good rapport with the band – the guys in the band.
Bellson: It was beautiful. Every guy in that band was beautiful. It’s a family. It was a family band. We shared everything. Even on that tour. You were asking about that tour, Big Show of 1951? The three main characters were Duke Ellington’s band, Sarah Vaughan, and Nat “King” Cole. That was really segregated. We played all those places down South. Birmingham, Alabama, was the first one. They still had all the signs up. “Colored only.” “White only.” So I would hang out with the band. I’d be eating next to Nat “King” Cole in this train station. He’d look at me and say, “What are you doing here?” I’d say, “I’m with the band. I’m here.” He’d start breaking up. “You better get out of here, man.” A strange thing happened there. Jack Costanza was with Nat “King” Cole, bongos. Jack’s of Latin descent. The [?] turned around to him and said, “You cannot perform with Nat ‘King’ Cole on this show.” Because he wasn’t black. There are segregated audiences, white and colored. They didn’t know about me. I had already rehearsed with the band when we got that notification. They didn’t know about me. So Duke came to me and said, “We’re going to make you a Haitian.” So, I’m from Haiti, right? I said, “Okay.” He said, “You know the problems, don’t you?” He said, “We’re going down to Mississippi and . . .” I said, “Yeah. Okay.” Rose Tizol came with us on the tour, and she was worried about me, because she was a dear person, wonderful, because they had these guys working backstage who were real crackers. When they saw me setting up my drums – my own drums – they said, “This is really an oddity. They’ve got a white band boy.” So they didn’t know about me. They were cautious. So Rose ran back to me. She was worried. It was time for the first performance. I couldn’t find my trap case. Rose was right in back of me, and these guys were looking at me. I got irritated, because the first number in the concert was [?]. That was a real fast tune. I needed my sticks, and I couldn’t find my trap case. Finally I got so mad, I said, “Where’s my m.f. drumsticks?” I heard one of the guys backstage say, “That’s okay. He’s one of them.” That was quite an experience, because they couldn’t hire a drummer. I had already rehearsed a whole week with Nat “King” Cole, with Sarah, with Duke, with Peg Leg Bates, with Patterson and Jackson. Where are you going to find somebody to suddenly jump in. Besides, I was featured with Duke’s band. So that was an experience. But I got through it. [recording interrupted]”
To be continued in Part 3.
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