Part 1 - "My Friend, Buddy D." - Terry Gibbs

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

This is from Terry Gibbs’ autobiography - Good Vibes: A Life in Jazz [Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, 2003].

“Since 1980, besides doing some TV shows with Steve Allen, I worked a lot with Buddy DeFranco and also worked as a single doing clinics and playing colleges using the Dream Band library. Working with Buddy has been the most creative and musically fun thing that I've done in the last twenty years.

I first met Buddy back in the 1940s. I think I was with Woody Herman's band and he was playing clarinet with Tommy Dorsey. We both went on to become leaders of our own bebop quartets and always felt the same way about music, especially Bird and Diz. They were our gods.

It wasn't until 1980 that Buddy and I played together. We never even played opposite each other in clubs or festivals. Sometimes we would meet on the road when he and [accordionist] Tommy Gumina had their group.

I remember Tommy, Buddy, and I appearing on a talk show with three other guests who were scientists. The host of the show was pretty hip but also knowledgeable about various subjects. It was a funny show in that when he talked to the scientists. Buddy, Tommy, and I didn't know what they were talking about at all. Because this was our younger days, the three of us were being silly. We would purposely answer every question from the host with the hippest language ever used. WE didn't even know what we were talking about. We'd just say something stupid and break up laughing. I have a photo of us on the show with Buddy, Tommy, and I breaking up and the three scientists looking like somebody just died.

I think that from the 1940s until the time we worked opposite each other in England in 1980, I was only in Buddy's company about five times. Our friendship started at Ronnie Scott's club in London, England, where we were booked as two separate attractions. We met at the rehearsal where Buddy was going to play a half-hour with a rhythm section and I was going to follow him and do the same. The reason I was going to follow him was not that I was the main attraction, it was because Ronnie Scott mentioned to us that it would be nice if we played one song together at the end of the set. Being that I sweat a lot. Buddy was nice enough to let me go on last so I wouldn't have to sit around all wet, waiting for the last song. The vibes that the club rented for me to play hadn't shown up for the rehearsal, so I rehearsed my part of the show playing two-finger piano. Buddy and I still hadn't played together.

After Buddy and I each played with our groups, I introduced Buddy and told the audience we were going to have a jam session. This was true because at the rehearsal, we never talked about what we were going to play. Buddy and I looked at each other on the stage and we picked "Lester Leaps In" for its "I Got Rhythm" chord changes, which we both knew. We also knew that the chord changes to that song wouldn't hang up the rhythm section. We thought that that part of the show was going to be a throwaway.

Immediately, we started to click, playing individual choruses, then eight bars each, then fours, twos, and ones. Then we played together and jammed for about three or four choruses. By the time we got to the end, the people in the audience were standing and cheering. We didn't believe it. Ronnie was so knocked out that he said, "Why don't you guys play two songs next time?" We did and broke it up again. This time we added Charlie Parker's "Now's the Time." We both knew the bebop songs so there was no problem there.

As the nights went on, we were playing less individually and more together. We weren't just knocking out the people in the audience, but also the guys in the rhythm section. But mostly, we knocked ourselves out. We were having the time of our lives playing together. Because Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton made the sound of the clarinet and vibes so popular, you could take any two idiots who play those instruments and it would sound good. What Buddy and I found out was that we had something special. Buddy, being a little pessimistic, wasn't sure if it was just this engagement, but I knew that there was something special there.

When we got done at Ronnie's, we agreed that when we got back to the States, we should occasionally try to work together.

I don't know how. but word must have gotten back to somebody in the States because when we got home, I got a call from my old friend Jim Washburn, one of the producers on Operation: Entertainment. Jim was now in charge of entertainment at KCET, the PBS television station in Los Angeles. He wanted us to do an hour-long TV show, which of course we did. That was the first time that Buddy and I ever worked together in the United States.

We hired Frank Collette on piano, Andy Simpkins on bass, and Jimmie Smith on drums and the show came out great. Word was really starting to get out about us because we got a call from Herb Wong, a producer for Palo Alto Records, who wanted us to record an album. After meeting with Herb, we decided to record the album live, because Buddy and I played better before an audience. It was much looser; we'd have the freedom to stretch out more, and we wouldn't be restricted to how many choruses we could play.

We booked ourselves into THE hot club in L.A. called Carmelo's. It was the perfect place to play in and record because it almost reminded me of a Fifty-Second Street club. It wasn't too big or too small; the audience was right next to the stage and it was great for getting them involved in what we were saying and playing.

We recorded about twenty songs and were going to pick about nine or ten for the album. When he listened to the tapes. Herb Wong didn't know which ones to pick because they were all so hot. So he told us that since he couldn't make up his mind, he would pay everybody for two albums and put them out six months apart.

A few months after the album "Jazz Party—First Time Together" came out, we got a surprise call from The Tonight Show telling us that Johnny Carson heard our version of "Air Mail Special" and wanted Buddy and me to play it on the show. This knocked us out. They flew Buddy in from Florida and put him up in a nice hotel. It seemed like a lot of other people liked "Air Mail Special" also. John Wilson reviewed the album for The New York Times:

“Both he (DeFranco) and Gibbs are wild swingers, which they daringly establish by opening this, their first disc together with a Goodman-Hampton specialty, "Air Mail Special." Goodman and Hampton were pretty exuberant on this number, but DeFranco and Gibbs outdo them, neither one ever sounding like his Swing Era counterpart.”

Those were very strong words coming from somebody who had never been one of my biggest fans.

We did The Tonight Show again about six months later. When we were on the first time, we didn't go on until near the end of the show. When we played our last song with the Doc Severinsen band, the show ended while we were in the middle of the song. I got to talking to Johnny before the second show and mentioned that to him. He said.

"Don't worry, I'll tell the producer to put you on first," which he did.

The Tonight Show helped us a lot, for we got booked into the lounge at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas for three weeks. We took Jimmie Smith with us and hired two local musicians who I had played with before to play bass and piano. We really broke it up and they asked us if we would like to play in the main room, using a big band. It was in a show starring Wayland Flowers, a ventriloquist who did an act with a puppet called Madame. We played there for five weeks and it was great.

Even though we had rooms at the hotel, they gave us the famous Jerry Lewis dressing room to change our clothes in. It was more of a suite of rooms than a dressing room. Every night, we'd have a lot of celebrities come backstage and tell us how much they enjoyed our playing. Playing the main room was much easier because we did two shows and would get through by midnight. In a way, the lounge was more fun because Las Vegas never had many jazz attractions play there, so after all the shows were done, we'd draw all the hip entertainers and showgirls. The people who were vacationing there would come in to see us and get a double treat by seeing a lot of famous people.

A piano player from Australia named Ron came in and told us that he could get us to play in his country. He said that his brother Stan, who was a very prominent attorney, was also a big jazz fan and was now promoting jazz concerts. He wanted his brother to hear us in person and asked us where we would be appearing in the near future.

After Las Vegas, we were on our way to Europe to do a tour for George Wein. We told Ron our itinerary and he told us that Stan would be in London at the same time and we could possibly meet there.

Buddy and I went by ourselves and George supplied us with a rhythm section. We told George that we didn't want any other horns to play with us because we had our arrangements down. All we had to do was give the rhythm section our little lead sheets that were not too hard. Any other horn would ruin the sound that we got with the vibes and clarinet.

We were starting to get known as the bebop answer to Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton. You would think that the rhythm section of John Lewis on piano, Elvin Jones on drums, and Pierre Michelot on bass, who I didn't know, would be a ball to play with. In some ways it was okay, but they weren't made for each other. I never got to know how good Pierre was because when they backed us up, John was playing Chopin etudes, and Elvin sounded like he was starting World War VII. Maybe if they all had played the same style, we would have had more fun. We didn't know what style to go with; we just wanted to play some straight-ahead bebop.

Timing in life is everything. For example, if you are standing on a corner and move away and somebody else stands where you were and two minutes later gets hit by a car, that's bad timing. This may be a strange comparison to what happened to us, but it's all about timing.

As part of the tour, we were to play Ronnie Scott's club in London and Shelly Manne was to play drums with us. George Wein hired two English musicians to play in the rhythm section along with Shelly. Stan, the attorney from Australia, was to come into the club on our first night. He called us from his hotel in London and told us that the trip from Australia made him too tired to come in and see us and he would come the next night.

This is where the timing comes in. The first night was a catastrophe. It rained and there weren't many people in the club. The sound system was screwing up all over the place and Shelly was having trouble playing with the pianist and bass player. The next night, when Stan came in to see us, the place was packed. The P. A. system was working and Shelly had had a long talk with the other musicians. That night we swung our tuches off and the audience gave us a standing ovation. We were a winner. That's what I mean by timing.

When Stan heard us and saw how packed the place was and the audience's reaction, when it came to talking about our fee, we were in the driver's seat. I handled the business for Buddy and me and got us a great deal. Besides the money that we agreed upon, I told Stan that we wouldn't go unless we could take our wives with us, have business class seats on the airplane, and our hotels and food paid for. He was still knocked out by our last show, so he agreed to everything.

We were to play three one-nighters in Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne, and he was going to try and book some more jobs, which we would be paid extra for. I also asked for a deposit on the signing of the contract. When we got back to the States and I got the contract from Stan, I couldn't understand anything that was written on it. Stan, being a trial attorney, had drawn up a contract that had "the party of the first part" and "the party of the second part" in every other sentence. I didn't have the slightest idea what this was all about. I wasn't sure who the party of the first part was compared to the party of the second part. So in any sentence that I didn't understand, I wrote "by mutual agreement" so he couldn't make us do anything other than what we first agreed upon without talking about it first. He called me from Australia and told me that I was the best attorney that he ever worked with.

Stan really treated us great. In fact, he gave us a credit card to use for food just in case we wanted to eat at some place other than the hotel we were staying at. I think that if I didn't have children and grandchildren that my wife and I would live in Australia, because it's so beautiful.

Before we left for Australia, Buddy and I got called to play in the band that did the music for the Burt Reynolds picture, "Sharkey's Machine." Burt handpicked most of the musicians and was a big jazz fan, which I didn't know. Bob Florence wrote the arrangements, and Joe Williams and Sarah Vaughan sang the theme song. Just to mention a few musicians on the date, Shelly Manne played drums, Ray Brown played bass. Art Pepper and Marshal Royal played alto sax, Conte and Pete Candoli and Harry (Sweets) Edison were on trumpets. Carl Fontana and Bill Watrous were on trombones, plus Buddy and myself. It was definitely an all-star band.

I wanted to meet Burt but didn't want to bug him. When I saw him talking with Pete Candoli, I walked over to them. Burt was standing there with a book under his arm and I saw that it was The Encyclopedia of Jazz by Leonard Feather. I didn't want to interrupt the conversation but it didn't look like I would be intruding, so I said, "Burt, my name is Terry Gibbs. I just want to say hello."

He looked nervous and started stuttering and fumbling, looking like he was in awe of me. "Are you kidding? I know who you are. I ASKED for you!" We talked for about a minute and then he said, "Would you mind meeting somebody?" I didn't know what he had in mind so I said sure. He took me over and introduced me to Sally Field, who ALSO had The Encyclopedia of Jazz under her arm. When Burt said, "Sally, this is Terry Gibbs," all of a sudden, SHE got flustered. Both of them seemed like they were in awe of every musician there. I felt like asking for a raise.”

To be continued in Part 2.