An Afternoon with Benjamin Francis Webster

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

“Look at those two heavyweights!.”

The speaker was Jack Marshall a guitarist who was perhaps best known as a composer-arranger in Hollywood recording circles. He composed TV series themes and wrote the arrangement for Peggy Lee’s big hit Fever which featured drummer Shelly Manne, one of Jack’s closest friends.

The “two heavyweights” in question were drummer Stan Levey and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.

The venue for this two-brute-sighting was The Manne Hole, Shelly’s Hollywood Jazz club, which also happened to serve great soup for lunch. [“Brute was one of Ben’s nicknames.]

Just about every studio musician in the greater Hollywood area - which extended north into the eastern San Fernando Valley to include both Warner Brothers [Burbank] and Universal Studios [North Hollywood] - tried to stop by Shelly’s for lunch during their breaks from recording.

It was our way of “throwing some business his way” as we all knew the kind of stress and sacrifice Shelly went through to keep his club open for 12 years in order to give local Jazz musicians a place to play, including many studio musicians who relished the opportunity to play Jazz whenever it presented itself.

I recorded with Jack as a drummer and/or percussionist on a few occasions and we had just finished a TV commercial that morning when Jack suggested we “go up to Shelly’s for some soup.”

By way of background, I gather that one of Stan Levey’s first gigs as a drummer was working with Ben Webster’s quartet which “Frog” [another of Ben’s nicknames] had formed shortly after leaving Duke Ellington’s Orchestra in the early 1940s. They instantly took a liking to one another and became lifelong friends. Each of them were “big men” and they formed an imposing sight when they stood together.

Now here they were a little over twenty years later talking to Shelly and Rudy Onderwyzer, the manager of The Manne Hole, about Ben’s quartet playing a gig at the club for a long weekend with a local rhythm section to be led by Stan. [If my memory serves me right, not always the case these days, Jimmy Rowles was going to be the pianist.]

Scheduling conflicts at Shelly’s were compounded by the fact that Stan Levey was still traveling often as a member of Peggy Lee’s trio, so the two-big-men-of-Jazz reunion gig never happened and Ben went back to New York and eventually formed the quartet that Stanley Dance described in this essay/interview about Benjamin Francis Webster (March 27, 1909 – September 20, 1973) which appeared in the May 21, 1964 edition of Downbeat magazine.

“Stride piano, the left hand fast and precise, filled the telephone receiver.

"Hello."

"Ben?"

"Yeah. Wait till I turn my waking-up music off."

The sound of James P. Johnson's piano was abruptly diminished.

"You downstairs? Come on up."

One of tenor saxophonist Ben Webster's afternoon musicales was in progress. A tape on which the Lion, the Lamb, James P., Fats Waller and Art Tatum strove mightily together — his waking-up music —  was still on the Wollensak [tape recorder], but an album by Tatum was now placed on the phonograph. A facet of that pianist's genius was about to be demonstrated to Duke Ellington's bassist, Ernie Shepard, and drummer Sam Woodyard — who occupied nearby hotel rooms and had come in to discuss the previous night's activities.

Webster had sat in for a set with the Ellington band at its Basin Street East opening, and he was happy about the experience. Chuck Connors' arrival having been delayed that night, Webster had taken Connors' seat in the trombone section and been duly introduced to the audience by Ellington as an expert on claves in cha-cha-cha. When the saxophonist came down front later, Ellington had suggested he play "Cottontail," Webster's best-known recorded performance during his principal stay with Ellington, 1939-'43. The performance ended with a chase between Webster and Ellington's regular tenor saxophonist, Paul Gonsalves. It had been a kick.

"If Duke likes you," Webster said, "you're home free." There were bottles of beer sitting on the windowsill outside, cold and ready to drink, and ale on the dressing table, but the main business this afternoon was music and reminiscence. A tape of a 1940 Ellington performance at the Crystal Ballroom in Fargo, N.D., was produced.

"It was so cold there that night," Webster remembered, "we played in our overcoats, and some of the guys kept their gloves on!"

The music coming from the tape had an exciting kind of abandon — the abandon, perhaps, of desperation.

"Sometimes," he added, "when you've traveled all day in the bus, and had no sleep and are dead tired — that's when you get the best playing out of a band. It just happens. And sometimes the opposite."

The material was inspiring. After "The Mooche" came "Ko-Ko," "Pussy Willow"...

"I learned a lot from Rab [Johnny Hodges], but you know what his only advice to me was when I came in the band? 'Learn your parts.'"

The tape continued rolling. "Chatterbox," "Harlem Airshaft," "Jack the Bear," "Rumpus in Richmond," "Sidewalks of New York," "The Flaming Sword," "Never No Lament"...

"That's why Duke leaves his mark on you, forever," Webster said.

"Clarinet Lament," "Slap Happy," "Sepia Panorama," "Rockin' in Rhythm," "Cottontail"...

"Sonny Greer, and he's swinging!" Webster exclaimed in admiration of the drummer who worked with Ellington from the '20s to the '50s.

"Conga Brava," "Stardust," "Rose of the Rio Grande" and "Boy Meets Horn" preceded the finale, an uproarious version of "St. Louis Blues," on which trombonist Tricky Sam Nanton took over from Webster and carried through to the coda.

"We were drinking buddies," the saxophonist said, and laughed, "but you heard how he tore right in on me there."

After a few jokes, the conversation came back to piano, steered by the host, and the striding hands of yesterday stretched out again on tape and vinyl. Often they belonged to Fats Waller.

"

All that fun but never a wrong note," Webster remarked. "If only he could have lived until TV!"

Contemporaries were considered and Ralph Sutton commended as "a wonderful cat." Earl Hines, too: "Earl swings his head off."

A memory of the Beetle [stride pianist Stephen Henderson] intervened, the diffident-seeming Beetle who took part in the piano battles uptown and seldom played anything less than an easy, rocking, medium tempo but who triumphed nevertheless. Another memory returned, of the Lamb — Donald Lambert — who came to the battlefield once or twice a year, astounded everyone, and then retired to New Jersey again. From that point, it required little urging to get Webster to tell of his first experience with the Harlem piano school.

"I shall never forget the time when I met Count Basie," he began. "It was while he was in Kansas City with Gonzel White, and he used to stop the show. I always did like Basic, and I always did want to play the piano. He bore with me for a long time, and he told me that in the event I ever got to New York, I was to be sure to find the Lion—Willie Smith. He had already told me that the bosses were James P. Johnson and the Lion, and that then came Duke, Fats and Willie Gant. I don't remember all the names, but there was a gang of great piano players in those days.

"Clyde Hart and I managed to get with Blanche Galloway. Clyde was a friend of mine, a piano player, and Edgar Battle sent for us in Kansas City We played the Pearl Theater in Philly, at 22nd and Ridge, I think it was, and Clyde and I got on the train the first day we had off and came to New York.

"Basie had briefed me. 'Go to the Rhythm Club,' he said, 'and that's where you'll find the Lion. He knows all the piano players and all the good musicians. They hang out there, and the Lion will introduce you right. Naturally, I wanted to hear people like Benny Carter, Johnny Hodges and Coleman Hawkins too. Basie had also told us how to approach the Lion so that he would bear with us. Basie said he liked a little taste every now and then, that he loved cigars, and that maybe he would play a little for us.

"So we walked up to the Rhythm Club on 132nd Street and Seventh Avenue, and we met the Lion. There was a cigar store right on the corner, and in those days they had great big El Productos, three for a half-dollar.

'"Mr. Lion,' we said, 'would you care to have some cigars?'

"The Lion rounded on us and said, 'Say, you are pretty nice kids. Yes, I'll have a cigar or two.'

"

So we walked with him to the corner and asked him how many could he smoke.

"'Oh, maybe two.'

"So we bought him half a dozen, and then he smiled and said,' You kids are really nice kids!'

"Then we asked him, 'Would you care for a little drink, Mr. Lion?'

"'Yeah,'he said.

"Then we told him we would like to hear him play, and at that time there was a place right across from the Rhythm Club, and he took us over there, and he got in the mood with his cigar and a little taste in between.

"It was one of the greatest experiences of my life to hear a man play like this. Though I had heard James P. Johnson around 1925 in Kansas City, that was a little early, and I think I could understand more of what I was listening to when I got to the Lion.

"He played for us for three or four hours, and we kept buying him a little taste, and he kept saying we were nice kids. I had a beautiful day and I never will forget it."

Until about a year ago, Webster had resided for several years in Los Angeles, taking care of his mother and grandmother, but when they both died within a year's time, he had no family reason to stay in California, and he moved to New York City.

He has brought back to the ingrowing New York scene the good humor and expansive generosity of spirit that have been dwindling for some time among its hard-pressed musicians. Webster is big physically — broad-shouldered and

straight-backed — and he is bigger than the rat race. One is soon aware that music occupies his mind far more than money— music as, above all, a means to enjoyment.

Ellington's wasn't the only band he sat in with during the winter. Gerry Mulligan's Concert Jazz Band found it had an impulsive new pianist one night in Bird-land, and at the Metropole on another occasion, Webster took Marty Napoleon's place at the keyboard for a set.

The appearances with his own quartet at the Shalimar, Birdland and the Half Note have proved popular. His material, consisting mostly of the better standards and well-known Ellington numbers, is strong on melodic content. Just as he did 20 years ago, with men like pianists Marlowe Morris and Johnny Guarnieri and drummer Sid Catlett, he likes to open and close a performance with a statement of the theme. Good melody, well phrased, communicates as strongly in the jazz idiom as in any other, and there are distinct advantages from the audience's viewpoint to having the melody established in the mind when following the variations. Webster recognizes this, plus the importance of good tempos.

Stylistically, he illustrates the evolutionary process always at work within the music.

The jazz audience was probably first made aware of him in 1932 on the several explosive records that indicated the musical ferment in Kansas City—those made by Bennie Moten with Basie, trumpeter Oran (Hot Lips) Page, trombonist Eddie Durham and reed man Eddie Barefield, in addition to Webster — "Moten Swing," "Lafayette," etc.

In his subsequent recordings, there was uninterrupted development, but up until the time he joined Ellington, listeners generally recognized the influence of Coleman Hawkins rather than the personality of Ben Webster. Yet, as Hughes Panassie perceptively noted, "The grace of his melodic line makes one think of Benny Carter." In fact, it is Carter whom Webster names first among saxophonists—then Hawkins, then Johnny Hodges ("the most feeling") and then Hilton Jefferson ("the prettiest").

Established stylistically in 1940, Webster himself became an important influence. Prominent among those to acknowledge it was Eddie (Lockjaw) Davis, at one time known as Little Ben.

When Paul Gonsalves took the tenor chair with Ellington, his ability to play solos in Webster's style profoundly surprised the leader, but in the 14 years that have followed, Gonsalves' musical personality has developed on strongly individual lines, a fact evident when he and his early mentor played "Cottontail" at Basin Street East. It was even more evident in a jam session at Count Basie's bar in Harlem, when Webster, Gonsalves and fellow tenor man Harold Ashby were together on the stand. Ashby is a close friend of Webster's who proudly proclaims his friend's influence, but all three were individually and instantly identifiable by tone and phrasing.

"He's improved so much he scares me," Webster said of Ashby's playing, using his most admiring epithet.

Gonsalves, too, he esteems highly. One of the records often played on his phonograph is "I've Just Seen Her," from Ellington's All American album, a Gonsalves performance that never fails to impress saxophone players.

At Webster's musicale, Gonsalves reminisced about the first time he heard Tatum. He had gone to a club with Webster, Basie and trumpeter Harry Edison to hear Tatum, but the master didn't feel like playing that night. So Webster sat down at the piano and played awhile. Then Edison played, and finally Basie. With that, Tatum decided to play—"Get Happy" at a very fast tempo. What astonished him, Webster said, was the way Tatum's left hand took care of business while the right reached for a drink.

Perhaps this anecdote passed through Webster's mind at the jam session at Basie's club. He called "Get Happy" They took off, lightning fast, and Gonsalves went into a furious and fantastically devised solo.

"Paul's getting so hot," Webster exclaimed with mock alarm, "I don't think I should have called this tune!"

Another afternoon visitor was tenorist Budd Johnson, who had first shown Webster the scale on saxophone and how to play "Singin' the Blues." Webster had been taught violin, but had not liked the instrument. There were two pianos in the Webster house, his mother's and his cousin's ("I ruined my cousin's piano playing blues"), and when he should have been practicing violin, he was usually busy on one or the other of them. Pete Johnson, who lived across the street, taught him how to play the blues.

"If you lay the violin down a week, you're in trouble," Webster said, "but you can lay a horn down a year and be OK." So when he switched to piano, it was the end of the violin phase.

He was playing piano in a silent-movie house in Amarillo, Texas, when Gene Coy's band came to town, and he met Budd Johnson and his brother, trombonist Keg. The saxophone fascinated Webster, and in 1929, when he was 20, he heard that the Young family band needed another saxophone player; he went to see Lester's father.

"I can't read," he said.

Mr. Young was amused.

"I haven't got a horn," he added.

Mr. Young was then even more amused, but he provided Webster with an alto saxophone and taught him to read.

"Lester's father mostly played trumpet, but he could play anything, and, what's more, he was a master teacher," Webster recalled.

Lester played tenor, and Webster insists he was playing wonderfully even then. Lee Young and his sister, Irma, were also members of the band and played saxophones at that time, too.

The group went to Albuquerque, N.M., for some months, and it was there that Webster, a strong swimmer, helped save the lives of both Lester and Lee. Lester got into difficulties in the Rio Grande and was carried away, tumbling over and over in the water until Webster and guitarist Ted Brinson rescued him. On another occasion, Lee stepped off the bank into a deep sand hole, and Webster managed to haul him out.

"Lee dived right in again," Webster remembered, "but Lester didn't want to think about swimming for a long time after that."

Some months later, after Budd and Keg Johnson had left it, Webster got a call to join Gene Coy's band ("about nine or 10 pieces") in which Harold Coleman was playing tenor. That was really the beginning of the professional career as a saxophonist that brought him, experienced and mature, into New York City, 1964.

“I think I’m playing better than ever right now,” he said. Then he repeated, “I think.”

Lou Levy: A Most Musical Pianist [From The Archives]

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

For many years, George Ziskind, a friend who resided in New York City, was one of the biggest fans of these pages. He was constantly sending me supportive messages and these "at-a-boy's," "way to go's,"  and "well done's" meant a lot to me, especially during the early going when the blog was on less surer ground.

George wasn't one to let an error go by and his encyclopedic knowledge of Jazz and its makers often rescued my miscues and mistakes, but he always did so in a kind and gentle way. What made this soft approach to correction so remarkable was that George could be a pretty gruff guy who didn't suffer fools - gladly or otherwise.

"What you're doing is important," he would say. "You're a musician, too, and you know how hard it is to play this stuff," he often remarked. "People need to learn to appreciate that. You can't just pour it our of a can. Don't they know how many people died for this music?" 

He never let up. One of his fondest expressions was "America is about three things: [1] The US Constitution, [2] Baseball and [3] Jazz. Ken Burns [documentary film maker for the Public Broadcasting Services] got the first two right, but he messed up on Jazz." 

He especially like my features on Jazz piano players, I suspect, in part, because George was one [and a darn fine one at that.]

George died in 2014 at the age of eighty-six years old. The JazzTimes carried an obituary about him which you can locate by going here.

He was very close friends with Lou Levy and I thought it might make a sort of tribute to George's memory to reprise this piece about his old friend.

I miss my old friend.

“For all of his modesty – and it is real, not affected – Lou, in an instrumental setting, is a fleet, inventive and brilliant soloist.”

- Gene Lees

“Lou Levy is quite a musician. Long an established and a highly respected pianist among his fellow musicians, he has been woefully neglected by the public and even by jazz fans. In his approach to the piano, there is always a great sense of assurance, of playing on a larger scale; there is intensity, reflection, humor and showmanship.”

- Andre’ Previn

“Lou Levy is two things that seem incom­patible: the archetype of the bebop pianist and the most sympathetic possible accom­panist for singers.”

- Gene Lees

Like so many other teenagers growing up in the 1940s, Lou Levy was captivated by the language of Bebop.

Unlike many of those teenagers, however, Lou Levy developed the facility, skills and melodic inventiveness to play piano with the best of the Beboppers.

Lou’s Dad played piano by ear and, as a result of his father’s encouragement, he began studying piano at the age of ten in his hometown of Chicago, IL.  Lou’s early idols were Bud Powell and Art Tatum.

In 1945, at the age of seventeen, Lou took his first professional gig with Georgie Auld’s band. Thereafter he performed with artists like Sarah Vaughan, Chubby Jackson and Flip Phillips and bands like the Boyd Raeburn Orchestra and Woody Herman's Second Herd, the bop band that featured saxophonists Zoot Sims, Stan Getz and Al Cohn.

He joined Tommy Dorsey’s band in 1950. Tommy fired him after telling him: “Kid, you play good. But not for my band.”

In recounting this story to Gene Lees, Lou went on to say: “And he was right, I didn’t like it and he didn’t like it.”

Lou never got fired again.

In the early 1950's Lou dropped out of jazz for two years to live in Minneapolis and work in the medical-journal publishing business.

However, it has never been possible to keep a natural and accomplished a musician as Lou away from his chosen instrument for too long a time, and in 1954 he capitulated to numerous requests to return to music and opened at Frank Holzfeind's Blue Note in Chicago, playing solo intermission piano.

Woody's band was booked into the club, and suddenly the sidemen were paying Lou one of the great musi­cians' compliments: they were using their intermissions to sit around the stand, listening closely and passing the word around that Lou was back and in great form. On the last Sunday of their engagement, Al Porcino, the wonderful trumpet player, lugged in his tape recorder and took down some fifteen or twenty of Lou's solo efforts.

These tapes soon achieved almost a legendary status. Musicians all over the country heard them, some had them copied, others remembered them in detail, and "Hey, did you hear those Blue Note Lou Levy tapes?" became the opening gambit of many a jazz discussion.

In 1955, Lou moved out to Los Angeles and began gigging around: with Conte Candoli, Stan Getz and Shorty Rogers, on record dates and one-nighters.

He also began an 18-year association (including some breaks to take other jobs) with the singer Peggy Lee. From then on he became known as a particularly sympathetic accompanist for singers. Like Lester Young, one of his idols, he believed that a musician should know the lyrics of a song he was interpreting and said that a bandleader -- even if not a singer -- should be considered a voice.

As Gene Lees has observed: “Lou Levy is two things that seem incom­patible: the archetype of the bebop pianist and the most sympathetic possible accom­panist for singers, including three of the best: Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Peggy Lee. Peggy calls him ‘my good gray fox,' both for the color of his hair and the clever yet sympathetic nature of his accompaniment.”

After settling in California, Lou became a staple of the studios.   

And he worked with a number of other singers: June Christy, Anita O'Day, Lena Home, Nancy Wilson, Tony Bennett, and Frank Sinatra.

He played with the big bands of Terry Gibbs and Benny Goodman, and with Med Flory’s group, Supersax, which specialized in the solos of Charlie Parker orchestrated for five saxophones.

When Gene Lees asked him about those jazz pianists who are reluctant to accompany singers, Lou simply said, "They're crazy.”

Gene observed: “Lou has a love for the words of songs. It is manifest in the way he plays. He has had a long personal rela­tionship with Pinky Winters, a subtle and sensitive singer little heard outside Cali­fornia.”

Over the years, Lou had a very close and long working relationship with composer, arranger and trumpeter, Shorty Rogers. Along with Pete Jolly, Lou was Shorty’s pianist-of-choice for his own quintet as was drummer Larry Bunker.

In the 1950s, Shorty was hired by RCA to become the head of its Jazz artists & repertoire department and, not surprisingly, Shorty signed Lou to a recording contract with the label.

Thank goodness that Shorty stepped up with the RCA offer as the limited discography of recordings under Lou’s own name would have been significantly smaller.

In addition to a solo piano recording and a trio LP, Lou put together a quartet album for RCA with Stan Levey on drums, whom Lou had worked with dating back to their days together with the Boyd Raeburn Orchestra in 1947, bassist Leroy Vinnegar, everyone’s favorite bassist on the West Coast Jazz scene in the 1950s and Larry Bunker, who in addition to being an excellent drummer, was also an outstanding vibraphonist.

Lou’s quartet album for RCA was entitled Jazz in Four Colors: The Lou Levy Quartet [reissued on CD as Fresh Sound ND-74401].

Here’s what Shorty had to say about the evolution of the album:

“In planning this album, Lou and I spent much time try­ing to figure out a "different" instrumentation. This was no small problem in face of the fact that so many albums are being made today. While trying to figure out an instrumentation, Lou went to work on a job that enabled him to renew one of his favorite musical acquaint­ances: Larry Bunker on vibes. Lou and Larry enjoyed playing together and made a wonderful nucleus for a quartet. This also presented the possibility of forming a group that could record and appear in public.

This album could be called "the birth of the Lou Levy Quartet," and I must say that it was a privilege and a great thrill to be a witness to the birth of this swingin', tasty, musical baby.”

The following video has all audio tracks from Jazz in Four Colors: The Lou Levy Quartet [Fresh Sound CD; ND-74401] as performed by Lou Levy on piano, Larry Bunker on vibes, Leroy Vinnegar on bass and Stan Levey on drums. 

Stan Levey – Straight-Ahead and Always Swinging

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

“En fait, Stan a été influence par le jeu de Kenny Clarke sur la cymbal ride en accompagnement et par Max Roach pour les solos.”

- Georges Paczynski, Une Historie De La Batterie De Jazz, Vol. 2

“The art of jazz drumming has come a long way since the days of the bass drum player in the marching bands of ole New Orleans. Today we have come to expect a drummer to be an excellent technician, a well rounded percussionist, capable of improvising as well as any solo instrumentalist in any musical aggregation. It would take a very thick book to discuss the requirements of being a jazz drummer, and even then, it would be necessary to interpret the printed word through skins, sticks, cymbals, and mechanical contrivances in order to express yourself and your feeling for the music.

No doubt about it, drums and drummers are popular subjects; whether you're an avid jazz enthusiast or a bandleader, it is always interesting to hear and compare notes on the way different drummers play.”

-Howard Rumsey, Bassist and Jazz Club Operator

“You could set your watch to his time. It was one less thing for me to think about when I was playing.”

- Victor Feldman, Jazz pianist, vibraphonist and drummer

“I wish I’d had a really good teacher. There weren't too many around in those days. … There wasn't anyone who really could show me what it was all about.”

- Stan Levey

“Mechanical, my foot. You try playing his stuff and see how ‘mechanical’ it is.”

The late drummer, Stan Levey, is the fellow using the strong language [“foot” is substituted here for another part of the anatomy which was actually used by Stan in the quoted remark].

The context for Stan’s reply was his response to a statement that another drummer made about the playing of Max Roach to wit: “Oh, I don’t listen to Max much. He’s too mechanical.”

There is a reason why in his two volume Une Historie De La Batterie De Jazz, which won the 2000 Prix Charles Delauney, author Georges Paczynski follows his chapter on Max Roach with one on Stan Levey.

Stan adored Max.

Indeed, Paczynski subtitles his chapter on Stan :”Stan Levey le virtuose: à l'école de Max Roach.”

Stan was a gruff, no nonsense guy who, at one time, was a prize fighter. He left school at fourteen to make his way in the world, taught himself how to play drums, and did this well enough to be playing with Dizzy Gillespie in his hometown of Philadelphia at the age of sixteen.

Four years later, in 1945, he was working with Diz and Charlie Parker on 52nd Street along with Al Haig on piano and Ray Brown on bass.

Not a bad way to begin a career as a Jazz drummer before even reaching the age of twenty-one [21]!

The early 1940s was also about the time that Max Roach was coming up in the world of bebop and he and Stan were to become lifelong friends. As Howard Rumsey, Jazz bassist, who also was in charge of the music at the Lighthouse Café for many years, explains in his insert notes to Max and Stan’s Drummin’ The Blues:

“Ever since they first met on New York's famous 52nd Street in 1942, Max Roach and Stan Levey have felt intuitively that each was the other's personal preference. Their professional careers are closely paralleled, starting with almost four years on the "Street" with "Diz" and "Bird". In fact, Max was with Diz at the Onyx and Stan was across the street at the Spotlight with Bird when the modern period of jazz was officially born. Since then they have exchanged jobs many times with many great bands.”

Max would eventually recommend that Stan take his place with Howard Rumsey’s Lighthouse All-Stars at the famous 30 Pier Avenue Club in Hermosa Beach, CA and Stan stayed at the club from about 1955 to 1960.

Stan described his early years in the business this way to Gordon Jack in Fifties Jazz Talk, An Oral Perspective:

“I was completely self-taught because we couldn't afford a teacher, and that's why I play left-handed although I am right-handed; it just felt easier that way. I didn't learn to read really well until I joined Kenton's band in 1952, once again teaching myself. By the time I was doing studio work in the sixties and playing all the mallet instruments, I had become an accomplished reader. My first big influence was Chick Webb, who I saw with Ella when my father took me to the Earle Theater when I was about ten years old.” [p. 129]

And, about his first impressions of Max Roach’s drumming, Stan had this to say:

"The ferocity of the playing was new to me. I had never heard time split up like that. Max's playing had music within it. . . he changed the course of drumming."

I got to know Stan quite well during the last three years of his stint at The Lighthouse and I came to understand that he always had something of a chip on his shoulder about being self-taught.

Young drummers bugged him; they were always asking him technical questions about the instrument.

And because he couldn’t explain his answers in terminology or “drum speak,” he usually mumbled something and walked toward the back of the club.

What were you going to do, chase after him? The man was huge. He blocked out the sun.

Stan was never menacing or unkind in any way, he was just self-conscious about the fact that he didn’t have a studied background in the instrument.

Even though he was self-taught, Stan took the most difficult path to becoming a Jazz drummer.

By this I mean that he played everything open; he didn’t cheat or fudge. He didn’t press; didn’t finesse; didn’t adopt shortcuts.

Ironically, for someone who had never formally studied drums, he played them in a more “legit” way than most of the other Jazz drummers in the 1940s, 50s and 60s – many of whom were also self-taught.

To comprehend an open or “legit” sound, think of the crackling snare drums that almost sound like gunshots while listening to a Scottish Black Watch fife, bagpipe and drum corps or, most other drum and bugle corps.

Every drum stroke is sounded; nothing is muffled; nothing is pressed into the drums. Everything is struck. Art Blakey’s famous snare drum press roll would be unacceptable in such an environment.

To play in this manner, one’s hands need to be strong and they need to be fast.

Enter Stan Levey.

Enter Max Roach.

The following statement by Vernell Fournier speaks volume to the role that Max played in the development of modern Jazz drumming:

“What young drummers had been studying in challenging drum instruction book by Edward B. Straight and George Lawrence Stone began to make sense after we heard Max Roach. The great teachers laid out the raw materials. But we didn't know how to apply them — until we heard Max. When we got into his coordination, the way he used cymbals, the snare and bass drum, the answers to the puzzle began to fall into place.”

Although they came to their respective styles from different directions – Max had taken lessons - both approached drums the same way. Each relied on open strokes.

In Max’s case, because he had a sound grasp of the basic, drum rudiments and learned to cleverly combine them in a syncopated manner that particular fit the Bebop style of Jazz, his playing could be described as a “mechanical” in the sense of structured or fundamental.

This is especially the case when Max’s solo style is compared to that of other bebop and hard bop drummers such as Roy Haynes, Art Blakey and Philly Joe Jones.

But Stan didn’t hear the loser and freer drumming of Blakey and Philly Joe when he was putting things together, he heard Max [and also Kenny Clarke, Sid Catlett, and Chick Webb].

And even though he didn’t know the technical names for them, he learned to play solos in a manner similar to Max’s “mechanical” or rudimental style.

I knew Stan to be a fiercely loyal person and a very competitive one.

When your hero and your friend is being “put down” or “disrespected,” isn’t it all the more reason to be defensive and perhaps curt with those implying such disapproval?

Stan knew that what Max was playing wasn’t easy to do. But to his everlasting credit, he broke it down and incorporated many elements of Roach’s approach into his own. And, he did it all by ear!

Stan didn’t like to solo. He loved to keep time. He referred to it as: “Doing my job back there.”

And “keep time” he did, with the best of them.

Louie Bellson once said: “Stan’s time is alive. It has a pulse that you can always feel.”

Ray Brown declared him to be – “A rock, and a magnificent one, at that.”

Ella Fitzgerald said: “He never strays and never gets in the way.”

Peggy Lee “loved the intensity [of his time-keeping].”

Here are a few more testimonials for those in the Jazz World who had the utmost respect for his musical ability and his professionalism:

Howard Rumsey, Leader of the Lighthouse All-Stars:” Stan Levey is living proof that if you want to do something, you can. I remember I needed a drummer in 1954 at the Lighthouse — the jazz club in Hermosa Beach, California — capable of replacing Max Roach. Stan had done a great job with Kenton and was ready to get off the road after two years. Max called him, and he accepted my offer.

Stan never came late — never was a disappointment in any way, He had the highest standards of performance of any drummer I've encountered. A lot of people in music who came to the club became familiar with him and his playing and were impressed. Many musicians and record people employed him.”

Burt Korall, author of Drummin’ Men, The Heartbeat of Jazz - The Bebop Years: "Levey was a central figure in the evolution of his instrument — an activist in a musical revolution that changed and enriched American music. A prime mover in many ways, the Philadelphian took his cue from visionaries of the drums — Max Roach, Kenny Clarke, and Shadow Wilson — and from such older key figures as Chick Webb, Jo Jones, Dave Tough, and Sid Catlett.

It was quite clear to Levey that the old ways were no longer feasible. By moving more and more deeply into the new music, by playing and associating with Gillespie and Parker, and particularly by listening to Max Roach, he came to realize what had to be done.

The music called for a more responsive, fleet manner of playing. Drumming based on a military approach to the instrument, emphasizing rudiments performed in a highly symmetrical manner, was not reasonable any longer. Time stated in an extremely straightforward, unbroken manner on the hi-hat, on the snare drum, and essentially on the bass drum suddenly seemed cumbersome and inappropriate. The music's design more than implied that breaking time also would work well and be helpful.

Levey worked hard and learned. His playing became increasingly live and relevant. He felt good to listeners and to his colleagues. He served the beat, and it served him.

His solos, like his ensemble playing, were relatively uncomplicated yet effective. Where Max Roach caught hold of you with his imaginative use of the instrument, Levey was more basic, offering pulsation, an undercurrent of rhythm and sound, notable for its undeniably positive feel. He made it possible for the players to be comfortable and to reach out and experiment. 52nd Street in Manhattan was the laboratory where the new music was emerging.”

Drummer Phil Brown; “Stan Levey was one of the originators — the first white drummer who could really play modern jazz. He had that fluid, relaxed, new kind of time. I loved his time, maybe even more than Max Roach's. A pivotal figure, he just sat down and played, and pleased the musicians. He didn't overplay. He influenced drummers all over the country. When I moved from New York to the West Coast in 1948, the young drummers out there were talking about Max and Stan. They were the guys who played and recorded with Diz and Bird.

Stan grasped the style. He learned quickly. When the music was being formulated in '44 and '45, there were very few white guys who really got into bop. In the beginning, it was terribly hard to learn what to do and how to do it.

An "in group" emerged. Al Haig was the white counterpart of the most influential modern pianist, Bud Powell. Stan and Max were interchangeable. Trumpeter Red Rodney was another young player who had the technical acumen and instinct for the new music. And they all worked with Diz and/or Bird.

Stan Levey was at the right place at the right time and knew how to use his talent.”

Drummer Irv Kluger: “Stan sounded sensational when I first heard him in the 1940s. The rhythm players at that time didn't know what to do with bebop. It was so verbalized and rapid. The music demanded technique and endurance. You had to be able to go on for twenty-five to thirty minutes, playing at those lightning tempos.

It wasn't the only adjustment that had to be made to the new music. But it certainly was a major one. The demands of bop drove a lot of people right out of the business because they felt they could never play it. Stan had no difficulty. He also played piano; I first heard him in a little jazz joint in Philly. He knew about form, the structure of songs, and was into harmony. All this certainly had a positive effect on his drumming.”

Trumpeter Red Rodney: “Like me, Stan was a hometown Philly guy. I looked up to him. He was an exceptional player — thrilling to he in front of on the bandstand. He always was very friendly with me — ready to help with something. And he wouldn’t hesitate to give me advise whether I asked for it or not.

He was the first one to explain the new music to me. I remember when Dizzy played "Lover Man," I was waiting for the pretty, Harry James-type tones. When I didn't hear them, I was a little disappointed. Stan promptly pointed out to me: ‘You have to listen harmonically. Don't listen for the vibrato.’ He was a good musician even back then when we both were babies.”

Vinnie Dean, alto sax: “When Stan first came on the Kenton band, he had to get used to the whole thing. He was really a small combo drummer. After a short while, he showed what he could do. He became very important to the music. A lot of drummers are all ego. They seem to say; "Look, man, here it is. You follow me!" Stan got right in there with everybody and brought something fresh to the music.

At first, he had some difficulty reading the charts. Some of them were hard to get through. But Kenton went along with that. He allowed Stan to develop, and he got better and better. But jam sessions were his thing. I remember going to many of them with him, after hours. Stan was very much in his element — free, loose, swinging.”

Bill Holman, tenor sax, composer-arranger: “It was a real eye-opener playing with Stan on the Kenton band. He was the first really great drummer I had ever worked with. For a while. he made it purely on his basic ability. Then he really got into it, and the result often was awe-inspiring. Such swing! He didn't get much help from us; the band was notorious for its bad time. But he moved right through it. He was incredibly strong on and off the stand.

When he makes up his mind about something — that's it. I remember one time we had to play for a couple of acts at a show someplace. The musical director came over to him and tried to hand him a whistle. He wanted him to blow it at a certain time during the show. Stan said: ‘Oh, no, I don't do that sort of thing!’ And that was that.”

In addition to timekeeping, another aspect of Jazz drumming that that Stan loved to do was keep time FAST!

Few could rival him, and this from a naturally right-handed guy who was playing an open, three stroke cymbal beat with his left hand!!

Some of the best recorded examples of Stan’s time-keeping speed can be found on the Bebop, Wee [Allen’s Alley] and Lover Come Back to Me tracks on Dizzy Gillespie’s For Musicians Only album [Verve 837-435-2].

You can also hear Stan’s lighting swift left hand on the even faster version of Bebop that forms the audio track to the following video tribute to Stan with Victor Feldman on vibes and Scott LaFaro on bass which is taken from the November 10, 1958 broadcast of The Stars of Jazz television show.

There's also here a version of Bebop on The Arrival of Victor Feldman This recording, vintage 1958, is expressive and uncompromising. The set proves how much can be accomplished if peers work together. There's a lot of love and respect implicit in the playing. It's like three members of a close family exchanging views on light and heavy matters. Levey is essentially quiet, bringing underlying strength and swing and subtlety to the music.