“Bud Shank is too much. I told him I had his contract ready but I can’t get him to leave California. He was the greatest part of the Kenton Neophonic concert the other night, and he was even greater with us the last two days [recording the film score for Assault on a Queen]. He even shook up Johnny Hodges. Bud Shank is something else.”
– Duke Ellington, 1966
- Steven A. Cerra, introduction © Copyright protected; all rights reserved.
From the perspective of “my world and welcome to it” [with apologies to James Thurber], the guys I grew up with in Southern California in the late 1950s were all wannabe Jazz musicians. Our idols were the musicians who made up the Jazz scene on the West Coast at that time.
I was the runt of the bunch, as much because I was the youngest, relatively small in physical stature [I’ve since filled out a bit, unfortunately, in all the wrong directions] and because I was the drummer. In other words, barely tolerated as a fellow musician. Who cared: I got to play!
To the older guys that I hung out with, Bud Shank was the epitome of West Coast “Cool.” He was a tall, broad shouldered, good looking guy with a brush cut, who drove a sport car and who always seemed to have a good-looking babe on his arm. And, he also played the heck out of the alto saxophone.
Bud, however, was not just another pretty-face or wastrel artist-type. Rather, he was the living embodiment of the motto of my tax and financial advisor: “Work hard, put some of your earnings away and remember that it’s not all yours.”
Government, in its many manifestations, makes sure that none of us forgets the last part of this caveat. Uncharacteristically for a musician, Bud excelled at getting the “put some of your earnings away” part right, too. For although he appeared to be a young man who enjoyed a good time, it would seem that he also put some of his money to work in real estate investments, et al.; a not-too-common experience for a Jazz musician.
Of course, I didn’t really know any of this at the time, and if I had, it probably wouldn’t have made much of an impression on me. All I cared about was playing Jazz in any format, morning, noon or night.Interestingly, as some of us grew older and a few of us grew up, Bud’s business acumen and practices became a standard of responsibility that many of us attempted to emulate. I’ll bet he never thought of himself as a role model in quite this manner.
But for me, during these early years, Bud Shank was more like the geometric head start – I never caught up to him. At least not in actual space and time.
He was long gone from The Lighthouse Café in Hermosa Beach by the time I started frequenting the club [1957-1959]. And although trumpeter Conte Candoli or tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca and even bassist Scott LaFaro might drop by the club and sit in while I was there, I never caught Bud playing at that [even then] revered venue.
Yet, ironically, the first album by The Lighthouse All-Stars that I acquired had Bud playing with the group. He’s even prominently displayed on its cover.
In 1959, a quintet I was with played The Athenaeum Club, a members-only club on the campus of Cal Tech University in Pasadena, CA. Bud, too, gave a concert at Cal Tech. Unfortunately for me, it was three years earlier!.
The following year found me hanging out quite a bit at Jazz City, a club in Hollywood. Bud Shank’s Quartet appeared at the club that year, but the only alto player I heard perform there was Buddy Collette; a wonderful alto saxophonist in his own right, but not Bud Shank. Gerald Wilson was on trumpet with Buddy’s group which also featured Earl Palmer on drums before Earl (along with Hal Blaine and Jim Keltner) ensconced himself in the studios and made a gazillion dollars recording as a rock drummer.
For reasons of location and chronology [I was living in Providence, RI and was around 9 years of age], I had missed Bud’s work as the lead alto player in the Stan Kenton’s Innovations Band of the early 1950s. Thanks to a government paid excursion overseas for most of 1965-66, I also missed that orchestra’s “Second Coming” in the form of Kenton’s Neophonic Orchestra in which Bud once again played a leading role – this time as a featured soloist.
Upon my return, I worked a series of casuals with alto saxophonist Fred Selden in a group that would later include pianist Milcho Leviev, after those two met while on the Don Ellis Band. The first time Fred had a chance to open up a bit on one of these gigs, I was startled at how closely his tone and his phrasing resembled those of Bud Shank’s.While being sensitive not to offend him, when I gently mentioned to Fred during one of the breaks how much his playing reminded me of Bud’s, he got this shocked expression on his face and was at a loss for words for a moment.
I thought, “Oh, Boy. Here it comes. I’ve really screwed up and upset the guy.” But instead, Fred was overwhelmed by the comparison with Bud and took it as a great compliment! As I later found out, from this young man who would play first alto in Don Ellis’ challenging aggregation and go on to become a first call alto and flute studio player – Bud Shank was and always has been his hero.
[At this point, I am tempted to say that if memory serves me right, Fred may have actually studied with Bud, but these days, memory doesn’t always serve me right – you get the idea.]
But I still had yet to hear Bud Shank perform in person!
Thanks to my friendship with Fred, I was able to borrow some of Bud’s LP’s that were new to me and it was great fun going back over a decade’s worth of Shank’s recorded music.
Much of the music from Bud’s early career has been collected and released as CDs in the Mosaic Records set entitled: The Pacific Jazz Bud Shank Studio Sessions [MD5-180].
What comes to mind when I listen to Bud play is his honesty. Anyone who has ever attempted to play Jazz knows that you ultimately express who you are through your horn. With Bud, I always have the feeling of an unending search as he tries to arrive at an honest expression of his feelings through the music.Another result of Bud’s constant quest is that his style is constantly changing, sometimes, dramatically. Ted Gioia also notes this tendency:
“Shank’s musical evolution … [in] the decade of the 1950s found … [him] undergoing a gradual shift from a cool player to a hot one, a change that reached it’s culmination in the 1980s. … Unlike the stylistic continuity that marked the work of Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers, or Paul Desmond, Shank’s playing has continued to evolve….” [West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960, p. 216].
Listening to Bud play also reminds me of the anecdote that Chuck Israels tells about alto saxophonist Phil Woods while attending a rehearsal of the Quincy Jones band.
“I listened to a number of pieces in which there were solos played by various members of the band. It would be unfair to say that those solos were perfunctory, but later, when Phil Woods stood up from the lead alto chair to play his solo feature, the atmosphere changed. Phil played as if there were no tomorrow. [emphasis mine]
The contrast was striking and I have always remembered the impression it left. If you practice rehearsing, then when it comes time to perform, you are ready to rehearse. Phil practiced performing.”
I can’t think of a more apt way to describe a Bud Shank solo than to say that he, too, brings it all every time. He doesn’t short-change anyone, least of all himself.Not surprisingly, these qualities of honesty and integrity carry over from music into Bud’s verbal expressions as well. If you ask him for an opinion, you’d better be prepared for an answer – his!
For example, as the Jazz scene began to wane in Los Angeles in the mid-1960s, Shank was asked by a critic in a 1987 interview if, upon reflection, he thought his move into the studios was a copout. Bud responded:
“You have to eat. You have to survive. When I became a full-time studio musician, I had been unemployed for a long time since jazz music left us in 1962-63 or whenever. At that time, I don’t think a lot of us realized what was going on, but some American jazz musicians ended up here in Europe, some gave up playing all together, some went off into never-never land by whatever chemical they could find, and there were some who went into another business. That’s what I did. I went into another business using the tools that I had, which was playing the flute and the saxophone. Consider that a copout? I don’t.” [Roger Cotterrell, “Bud Shank: A New Image,” Jazz Forum, March, 1987, p. 25 as quoted in Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960, p. 218].
Fortunately for the Jazz world and especially for me, Bud made the decision to leave the studios and return to playing Jazz. As part of his re-involvement with the music, he also began making a number of appearances beginning in the 1990s and continuing up to the current year at the 4-day weekend events put on each year in May and October under the auspices of the Los Angeles Jazz Institute [LAJI].
In keeping with the mission of the LAJI, many of the themes for these events have to do specifically with Stan Kenton and more generally with Jazz on the West Coast from about 1945 – 1965.
It was at one of these LAJI events almost forty years later that I finally had the opportunity to see and hear Bud Shank perform. It’s been a cornucopia of riches ever since as I have been back to these events a number of times to hear him in small group, big band and even in panel discussion settings and he is still speaking his mind [and his heart] very directly in all of them.
Frequent visitors to the Jazz Profiles site are by now familiar with the custom of its editorial staff to try, whenever possible, to represent not only Jazz music and its makers, but also to bring forward great writing on the subject of Jazz.
In keeping with these efforts, Michael Cuscuna of Mosaic Records and Doug Ramsey, writer par excellence on all things Jazz, have graciously consented to allow Jazz Profiles to reprint the 1998 interview that Doug conducted with Bud for the insert notes to the Mosaic Bud Shank anthology [the album covers and photographs are our choices].
It doesn’t get any better than Doug Ramsey and Bud Shank talking about Jazz, except, of course, listening to Bud play it.
What follows is © copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“When I spent a couple of days with Shank and his wife Linda at their house in the woods near Port Townsend, Washington, he hadn't listened to this music since the original LP, THE BUD SHANK QUARTET, was released 42 years earlier. If the child is father of the man, then the thin, crew cut, diffident, inward-looking Bud Shank begat his opposite number. His substantial figure comfortable on a couch in a music room above a spacious lawn surrounded by tall pines, Shank agreed to do something he detests, look backward in music. With a mane of grey hair and a beard that squares off a solid jaw, he has the look of a Victorian sea captain. His appearance is appropriate to the history of the seafaring town he lives in, but one floor below is a garage containing his collection of Porsches and an Infiniti Q45. Shank's laugh comes often and usually accompanies strong opinions. It has resonance and a certain wryness. I persuaded him to listen to BAG OF BLUES, Bob Cooper's unusual composition.
(A) January 25, 1956When it was over, he said, laughing, "I was very young at the time. Formative period. Still learning. Still searching.
I could see evidence of some of those influences we talked about. Spots of Zoot Sims, spots of Lee Konitz, spots of Charlie Parker."I told him, "When you were listening to yourself play a double-time passage, you said, 'Show-off."'
"Well, yeah, but I really wasn't into showing off in those days. It came from some musical reason, but it didn't fit the flow of what I was doing before or after. I guess that's why it disturbed me. Again, that's the mish-mosh of different influences that were in me in those days. I didn't have it together yet."
I asked him about the rhythm section.
"Claude was all Bud Powell, and Chuck was all Philly Joe Jones. Don Prell was still back in the '30s somewhere - four on the floor, boom-boom - with all due respect to Don, who's a very close friend of mine. It was just a matter of the concept. Don's playing that way held us all together, in fact. He was one of the first people I met when I got to L.A. in 1946. We just sort of started a friendship off and on. I had a tremendous respect for his musicianship. He later ended up with the San Francisco Symphony for years. He retired from the orchestra two or three years ago. Every time I go to San Francisco, we see each other."Flores, five days into his 22nd year, had just left the edition of Woody Herman's herd known as the Road Band. With Herman, he attracted widespread admiration for his ability to kick a big band into a state of sustained, heated swing.
"Actually," Shank said, "when he started with us, he was still playing the same way. In The Haig, that didn't work too well. Little bit too much, but that fixed itself after a while. I was really surprised the way he was playing here. Sounded great. I loved those bombs he was dropping."NATURE Boy and NOCTURNE FOR FLUTE are in the mood of LOTUS BUD, a Shorty Rogers ballad that Shank recorded in 1954 on a Nocturne session later issued on Pacific Jazz. Audiences seemed to demand the flute. Shank complied, not happily.
"At The Haig, I would be playing things with the saxophone and I would notice that I was losing the audience. Quickly, I'd pick up the flute, using it as a crutch. I did this for years, saying, 'well, there must be something wrong with my saxophone playing.' This is analysis, looking back; I didn't know what the hell was going on when I was doing it."
How little was wrong with his saxophone playing is made clear in WALKIN', ALL THIS AND HEAVEN TOO, DO NOTHING TILL YOU HEAR FROM ME, JUBILATION and CARIOCA. His treatment of Vincent Youmans's classic Latin knock-off begins with the sensibility of his collaborations with Laurindo Almeida and quickly transmutes into pure hop. With the exception of those caught in the war between beboppers and moldy figs that was manufactured by know-nothing critics in the 1940s, no musicians have been more unfairly typecast than the young jazz players of Los Angeles in the 1950s.
"Neither Claude nor Chuck nor I was playing what was known as 'west coast jazz' music at that time," Shank said. "That happened a few years before then, and we were all breaking away from that."
"Meaning what?" I asked. "What were you breaking away from?"
"The very delicate way that we all played in earlier years...," he stopped in mid-sentence. "I don't even know what the hell west coast Jazz is," he said, with exasperation and no wry laugh. "It was something different from what they were doing in New York, so the critics called it west coast jazz. That Miles Davis BIRTH OF THE COOL album, out of New York, probably started west coast jazz. It was also very organized, predetermined, written. It was a little bit more intellectual, shall I say, than had happened before. Jimmy Giuffre, Buddy Childers, Shorty, Shelly Manne, Marty Paich, Coop, almost everybody involved; we all came from somewhere else, New York, Texas, Chicago, Ohio. The fact that we were in L.A. around the orange trees had nothing to do with it. I really think that everybody played the way they would have played no matter where they were. New York writers, they're the ones who invented west coast jazz.,,
"Those bastards," I said.
"Those bastards," he said, laughing uproariously.
Between 1951 and 1956, The Haig was a jazz delivery room. In the little house on Wilshire Boulevard across from the Ambassador Hotel, a block from The Brown Derby, were born the quartets of Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Laurindo Almeida, Shorty Rogers and Bud Shank. The club was tiny. The owner, John Bennett, ran it on a shoestring so short that although by law the club had to serve food, there was no kitchen. When a customer ordered a sandwich, the waiter stalled him while someone ran down the street to The Brown Derby for takeout. If someone ordered a brand of liquor not in stock, he had to wait until the band took a break and one of the musicians was dispatched to the nearest jar shop. In Shank's quartet, that was usually Chuck Flores's job; he was the youngest."It was a marvelous place to work in," Shank said. "It was so intimate, no sound system was necessary. It held maybe 50 people. Business was always good. We did very well while we were in there, from January until July. It was a great period. The place lasted until a year or so after that. Then somebody bought the property and bulldozed the whole thing."
I asked Shank how much he was paid at The Haig. A meticulous keeper of records, he went to an anteroom and retrieved a ledger listing 50 years of gigs.
"One-hundred forty-two bucks a week," he said. "Cleared $112. Everyone was paid individually."
In the summer of 1956, Shank and his band hit the road. From the ledger, here's the itinerary: The Newport Jazz Festival; a week at the Blue Note in Philadelphia; a concert in Shanks hometown, Dayton; the Rouge Lounge in Detroit; the Cotton Club in Cleveland; The Continental in Hartford; Olivia's Patio Lounge in Washington, D.C.; the New York jazz Festival; Olivia's again; The Modern Jazz Room in Chicago; Basin Street in New York; the Colonial Tavern in Toronto; a concert in Buffalo; the Storyville club in Boston; Chicago and the Blue Note again; a return to Detroit and the Rouge Lounge; back to L.A. in November for a series of dates at Jazz City in Hollywood; and into The Haig in December.
(B) NOVEMBER 7 & 8,1956
It was a tight, seasoned quartet Shank took into the studio after nearly half a year on the road. The confidence and increased mastery in his playing are obvious throughout; in the Lester Young drive and relaxation of his solo on JIVE AT FIVE; in the appropriateness and naturalness of the Charlie Parker quote in SOFTLY AS IN A MORNING SUNRISE; in his energy and effortless changes of pace in Williamson's suite, TERTIA. Even his flute work, particularly in A NIGHT IN TUNISIA, has a harder edge, a toughness.Gazing into the trees, Shank says, "I can hear myself become more and more a stronger player through this period."
Always in demand by fellow musicians for recording dates, Shank's jazz studio activity intensified in 1957. He recorded as a sideman with Pete Rugolo, Mel Torme, June Christy, Russ Freeman, Bill Perkins, Peggy Lee, The Modernaires, Georgie Auld, his close friend Bob Cooper and dozens of others. As motion picture and television studios began slowly to accept the idea that jazz players might be real musicians, Shank's versatility and dependable musicianship put him onto a new path. That path would lead to financial comfort and artistic frustration. Years later, Shank would jump off it, with dramatic results. For now, he was doing well in both worlds. His next recording was an anomaly, a surprise, a re-emphasis of his jazz roots.
(C) NOVEMBER 29, 1957
Shank had played tenor as a sideman on a few record dates, but for the most part his old 10M Conn stayed in the closet after his rhythm and blues days with George Redmond. Having learned that Chuck Flores was about to be drafted, he told Dick Bock of Pacific Jazz that he wanted to make a record before Flores left. Bock asked him what kind of record. Shank - he doesn't remember why - said he would record some standards on tenor."After that heavy discussion," he told me, "we went in and did the record. There was no preparation. There were no arrangements. We just did it. HAVE BLUES, WILL TRAVEL was done for one of Dick's anthologies, not the original tenor album."
Like the tenor players he admires most - Stan Getz, Zoot Sims and Al Cohn - Shank was clearly under the spell of Lester Young, but only the most superficial listener would mistake him for any of those tenor men. What did he think, hearing himself on tenor after all these years?
"I'm pleasantly surprised. I like it. I wouldn't have known who the hell it was," he said with a laugh. "I think I would have recognized myself on some of the tracks here. The one we were listening to, ALL THE THINGS YOU ARE, I would probably not have been able to guess that it was me. I started as a tenor player. It's still in me. But I never developed any particular 'style' of playing, an identifiable style. It takes time to do that, but I was very pleased with what I heard."
(D) APRIL 23, 1958
Shank and Cooper had made a quick tour of Europe in 1957. In early 1958, they returned for a package tour with their quintet and Cooper’s wife, the singer June Christy. Drummer Jimmy Pratt substituted for Flores, who didn't want to go back on the road. The six-month expedition included a side trip for a series of concerts in South Africa, sponsored by Natal University. While they were there, Shank was urged by fans to record. He called Bock in Los Angeles to see whether Pacific Jazz wanted to pay for an album. Pacific Jazz did not. The South African enthusiasts raised the money, and one day Shank, Williamson, Prell and Pratt found themselves in what was described as a studio.
"It was just a room," Shank told me, "not much bigger than this one, and it had a solid wood floor and cement sides. It was full of people. We got rid of them. Then we played a tune. It just boomed. Every note would reverberate, 'buduhdoot.' I can't imagine what they ever recorded in there. I said, 'bring blankets, blankets, blankets.' So, they went out and got blankets from somewhere and started putting them around the room to deaden the sound a little bit. Well, it didn't do enough, but we decided to go ahead."Then came the pennywhistle challenge. The record company people learned that admirers had given Shank one of the ubiquitous instruments beloved of children and amateurs and heard on street corners everywhere in South Africa. He had experimented with it in his hotel room. He had no thought of recording on it. The producers (to conjure up a job title for them) insisted that the quartet do something to honor African music. They produced a thumb piano for Williamson, gave Pratt a native drum and Prell a Nigerian bamboo harp. The result was A TRIBUTE TO THE AFRICAN PENNYWHISTLERS.
"I just made up something," Shank said. "It was a blues. The stupid pennywhistle ended up, as I remember, in the key of A-flat, by accident, because nobody down there ever played a pennywhistle with anything other than just a rhythm section, not another keyed instrument. I learned how to play the damn thing while I was making this record. When I first start playing it, I'm squeaking and very tentative and as it goes along, after about 20 choruses, I begin to figure it out."
Goofy as the assignment may have been, the performance has a good deal of charm and Shank seems to take modified pride in having subdued and adapted an instrument not remotely suitable for jazz improvisation. The band returned to their customary instruments for the other six tunes, which include three impressive Shank compositions, CHARITY RAG, MISTY EYES and WALTZIN' THE BLUES AWAY. After a shadowy life on obscure European labels, some of them pirates, this is the AFRICA album's first release in the United States.
(E) JUNE 30, 1958
The second version of MISTY EYES is not an alternate take from the South Africa album but a studio recording made later in Los Angeles and issued on a Playboy anthology. If any more material was recorded with this group, it no longer exists.
(F) APRIL 18, 1959
Bruce Brown was a Southern California surfer who wanted to make a documentary film about his sport. Shank thinks that they first met when he was playing at the Drift Inn in Malibu. Brown's plan was to do live in-person narration when he showed the movie. He approached Shank about providing music to accompany the picture, and Bud wrote themes that fit assigned sequences of the film SLIPPERY WHEN WET. Later he expanded them for a quartet recording. By this time, early 1959, his band had changed. Flores was back, but Williamson and Prell were replaced by guitarist Billy Bean and bassist Gary Peacock.
Bean was an experienced Philadelphia guitarist who worked with Charlie Ventura for a year and a half before he moved to Los Angeles in 1958. He played with Buddy De Franco, Calvin Jackson and Paul Horn, among others, before joining Shank at the Drift Inn. "A facile and impressively inventive guitarist," Leonard Feather called him in the 1960 edition of The Encyclopedia of Jazz."Good player," Shank says. "Very, very quiet. Liked to get up about 6 pm, have something to eat, go to work, stay up all night and go to bed at 7 am. Never saw the daylight. Around 1960, he just up one day and says 'I'm going home.' He went back to Philadelphia, and I've never heard of him since. I don't know what happened to him."
He knows what happened to Peacock. Anyone who follows jazz does. He began playing bass when he was in the Army in Germany in late 1955. By 1957, he was good enough to play with Shank and Cooper on their first European tour. Peacock was advanced technically and harmonically far beyond the norm for the period. He worked with pianist Bill Evans for a time in the 1960s, and later with Paul Bley, Miles Davis, Jimmy Giuffre, George Russell, Keith Jarrett and avant-gardes like Albert Ayler and Don Cherry. He is one of the giants of the instrument.
"His development," Shank says, "was phenomenal. He turned into one of the most creative bass players that ever happened."
I asked Peacock about his experience with Shank."Because of his own presence and his own interest, it created a space for me to be very, very flexible. That was a strong component of our connection during that time. There was a much greater sensitivity to sound quality than there is now, and when we recorded, we were all in the same room. We didn't get stuck in little cells or boxes. We played like we were playing a gig. I think that made an enormous difference in terms of the quality of the music. And Bud was – well everyone knows – the guy’s a master with the instrument. It takes someone like him to work in a framework like that. It was wonderful working with him.”
(G) May 1961
Peacock stayed with Shank well into 1961. With Bean back in Philadelphia, Shank hired Dennis Budimir, as adventurous on guitar as Peacock was on bass. The three of them generated sparks of creativity. Shank’s music moved onto a new plateau.
"Dennis was another intellectual, like Gary. He was his own man. He was very young when we made this record, 22 or 23. He never wanted to travel. He was by nature an improvising jazz player, a very good one. Very creative. But, he chose to forego that so he could stay home, stay in L.A. He became an extremely successful studio guitarist, still is to this day, probably the first-call guy even now. Very successful, and deserved to be. Of the jazz recordings he has made, this is one of the few. He did a solo or duo thing, in somebody's living room for Bill Hardy's little label called Revelation. This is the band, with the exception of Mel Lewis, that was working at the Drift Inn in Malibu at the time we recorded this."
For this session, issued as NEW GROOVE, Shank called Lewis in after drummer Frank Butler, on the morning of the record date, found himself in a bit of legal unpleasantness. One of the great big-band drummers, Lewis was also one of the great small-band drummers, and he proves it here.When he moved from Kansas City to Los Angeles in 1960, trumpeter Carmell Jones called his friend John William Hardy (the Revelation man) to ask if he knew of work possibilities. Hardy recommended Jones to Shank, who said, "Sure," and hired him for the Drift Inn gig. A superb player in the Clifford Brown mold, Jones made a significant splash in jazz during his California years. He made several Pacific Jazz albums of his own, before joining Horace Silver in 1964 in time to appear on the SONG FOR MY FATHER album. His star, but not his ability, faded when he spent 15 years doing staff orchestra work in Germany before he returned to Kansas City in 1980. He died there in 1996.
Shank is on baritone as well as alto for this date, at the direction of Dick Bock. Bock had noticed that Shank ranked on baritone in a music magazine poll and thought there might be record sales impetus in the big horn.
"Funny how those things happen," Shank told me. "I was becoming more confident and more aggressive, but when somebody like Dick Bock said do something, I did it. Shortly after, if that would have happened, I'd have said, 'Later.' If I'd had to play another saxophone, I would much rather have played tenor."
The robustness of his baritone work is welcome on Duke Ellington and Tyree Glenn's SULTRY SERENADE and the others, but it is the intensity, even ferocity, of his alto on WHITE LIGHTNIN' and WELL, YOU NEEDN'T that signals a change in Bud Shank.
After we listened to NEW GROOVE, I asked him, "You said, ,same horn, same mouthpiece, but different.' How is it different?"
"I hear different things in my playing. It's aggressive, different harmonically, by all means. Different notes, different parts of the chord changes that I'm playing in. And I think that working with Gary Peacock and Dennis Budimir probably got me thinking along those lines. I was becoming more adventurous. I was becoming a better musician, a better saxophone player. More confident. Getting away from the way I was playing eight years before. There's a hell of an advancement between 27 and 35. I really broke through musically. I'm starting to get it together."
(H) NOVEMBER 1961
Bruce Brown, the surfing filmmaker, did well with SLIPPERY WHEN WET. His career in motion pictures was well under way and although he would soon join the '60s trend for rock and roll on sound tracks, he wanted Shank to provide the music for his next moist epic BAREFOOT ADVENTURE. The band was Shank, Peacock, Budimir, Shank's frequent alter ego Bob Cooper on tenor sax, and the busiest (for good reason) drummer in Los Angeles, Shelly Manne. As he did for SLIPPERY WHEN WET, Shank wrote the entire score. The music, tied to the lighthearted subject matter, has less specific gravity than NEW GROOVE, but the players get in plenty of heavy licks.
The film turned out to be extremely popular, and when Brown toured with it, he sold the sound track albums, lots of them. BAREFOOT ADVENTURE became the closest thing Shank had ever had to a hit. That created for Pacific Jazz a fiscal crisis.
"This record sold a whole bunch," Shank said, "like about 10,000 copies, which for that time was a lot of records. Dick Bock had to get the accountants, and they figured out, all of a sudden, that he owed me money. And he had never owed anybody money before. He didn't have any money to pay royalties. So he went down to Hollywood Electronics and bought me a very, very, very good sound system. I've still got the speakers, AR3s. My nephew has the Dynakit tube amp. This was my first hit, my first royalties. A big deal. I never got any royalties after it, either, for anything."
With BAREFOOT ADVENTURE under his belt, Shank had evolved into a mature artist, secure in his abilities, enjoying his work more than ever, on the threshold of great possibilities, and about to be absolutely stymied. By now, he was increasingly dependent on his income from studio work because jazz was beginning to dry up. With the success of Henry Mancini's music for the "Peter Gunn" television series, the traditional Hollywood studio music system finally collapsed in both TV and motion pictures. The executives discovered that jazzmen could fill their needs. Freelancers were in. Big staff orchestras on permanent payrolls were out. As that happened, popular music changed, and so did jazz. Shank thinks the serious damage started in 1962 or 1963."The real thing was The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. Then John came along, Coltrane. Things started to get so complex that it was difficult for the audience. And we were starting to get complex. I was. Nowhere near where John was, but in a club Gary Peacock was all over the place, way ahead of where Scott LaFaro was. And Dennis was also. We kept things under control on the record, but we were all getting more adventurous. I think we'd got to the point where as Coltrane became more well-known and going the direction he wanted to go, it became so complex that we not only lost the audience, but we lost the musicians because even they weren't able to understand where it was going. That's what drove the consumer, the audience, to the simpler music of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and those things. They didn't have to think."
By 1965, Shank, Manne, Cooper and dozens of other stars of the Southern California music scene were rolling in studio work. They hated it, but the money was great. Jazz gigs were a low-paying luxury. Between 1965 and 1975, Shank says, he worked two or three times at Shelly's Manne Hole and two or three times at Donte's.
"The whole jazz business went in the toilet, and I didn't have a chance to make any more records, really, except the commercial albums with Michel LeGrand and all that junk that I did in the mid-60s. I didn't have a chance to make any more records until the mid-70s, and I had to start all over again. The bizarre thing is that I started all over again with The L.A. Four, with Laurindo Almeida. NEW GROOVE and BAREFOOT ADVENTURE are where it lay dormant for 15 or more years. It all just laid there and started to re-emerge when I re-emerged, 14 years later."Shank fell in love with Port Townsend on a festival tour in 1979. He bought a house there in 1981. In 1985, he finally cut his connection to the studios, got rid of the flute, moved to Port Townsend, founded the Bud Shank Workshop, became the artistic director of the Centrum Jazz Festival and declared himself, then and forever, a bebop alto player.
Doug Ramsey, April 1998 @Doug Ramsey 1998 Doug Ramsey is the author of Jazz Matters: Reflections on the Music and Some of Its Makers (University of Arkansas Press). A regular contributor to Jazz Times, he is the winner of an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for writing about music. [Of course, Doug is also the author of Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond, Parkside Publications and you can visit him directly at his website - http://www.artsjournal.com/rifftides/ ].
We are developing a Part 2 to this feature which is intended to bring Bud’s career forward to the present time by encompassing his recorded work since his return to Jazz over the past 25 or so years.
You can visit Bud directly at http://www.budshankalto.com/
Stan knew that I was mainly a rhythm player at that time, but he sometimes gave me solos on medium tempos, which I could handle. He seemed to like the way I fit into the rhythm section, and he kept me on through several changes in the group. Duke Jordan replaced Kaminsky, Frank Isola replaced Haynes, and then was replaced by Kenny Clarke. Then Raney left, and a little later Jordan and Clarke left, so Stan built a new group, keeping me on. Johnny Williams and Al Levitt came in on piano and drums. Bob Brookmeyer was to join us, but wasn’t available for the first two jobs, so Johnny Mandel substituted for him on slide trombone.
Teddy Kotick had been working with Claude Thornhill’s band, so when he left to go back with Stan, I was hired by Claude’s manager, and I started a summer of one-nighters. My reading was good enough to play big-band charts, but I ran into trouble with Claude’s theme song “Snowfall,” which had a repeating bass line in D-flat that was very difficult for me to finger using my self-taught technique. I spent one morning figuring out an alternate fingering, and that started me on the way to learning a better use of the fingerboard. Claude’s music was lovely to play, and there were some excellent jazz players on the band, especially Gene Quill on alto, Dave Figg on tenor and Dick Sherman on trumpet. I got along well with the drummer, Winston Welch, and the band sounded very good almost every night.
When Claude cut back on his schedule, I left his band to take a job with the Terry Gibbs Quartet, with Frank DiVito on drums and Terry Pollard on piano and vibes. Then Gibbs moved to California, and I found a little work here and there in New York. One of those jobs was with Don Elliot, at a club in the basement of the Plaza Hotel called Cy Coleman’s Room. Cy and his trio were the main event, and Don’s group played in between their performances. We started out with Dick Katz on piano and Denzil Best on drums. Don played both vibes and mellophone. With Dick Katz encouraging us to try a lot of John Lewis material, we had a nice subtle swing going with that group, though Don seemed to need the occasional bravura ending, grabbing the mellophone and sounding a tantara, or whooping like a crazed ambulance.
Denzil was still recovering from a bad auto accident. Don loved the way he had played brushes with George Shearing’s group, and told him to take it easy and just play brushes. But Denzil’s hands would swell a little by the end of the job each night, and his left leg was too weak to keep a steady hi-hat beat. Despite Don’s reassurances, Denzil felt he wasn’t playing up to par, and quit after the second week. To replace him, Don hired a drummer that Dick Katz didn’t agree with musically, and so Dick also left the job. Don said he thought he would hire a piano player he knew from a kid band in New Jersey, and that was how I met Bill Evans. At that time, Bill’s playing had some Tristano influence, but he was well on his way to developing his own thing.
Don had me over to his apartment a couple of times to help him work on a multitracking project he was working on. He wanted to be a vocal group and play all the instruments he could play. This was before multi-layered recording heads and wide recording tape had been invented. Don was recording from one single-track tape recorder to the other, adding parts as he went. He finally interested Phil Moore in the project, and in a studio with multi-track capability, we did an album called “The Voices of Don Elliot” for ABC Paramount.
When Don’s gigs ended, I did a short stint with Jerry Wald’s sextet at the Embers, and then Marian McPartland called me to join her trio, with Joe Morello on drums, at the Hickory House on West 52nd Street. Marian made me very welcome, and gave me a lot of solo space. Joe was easy to play with, and the three of us developed a good rapport. The hardest part of that trio for me was that Marian loved to modulate into different keys, and some of them were finger-busters for me, with my homemade fingering system. I was forced to learn to play in all the hard keys, and I improved my technique a lot on that job.
Morello had developed what he called his finger technique, in which he could keep his left stick tapping the drumhead with just the pressure of his left forefinger, and then he could add accents by rotating his wrist at the same time. Sitting with him at a back booth in the Hickory House, where he always had a pair of drumsticks and practiced on a folded napkin on the table, I borrowed a stick and figured out his finger trick, and I could keep it going pretty well. Joe loved to tell admiring students who visited us at the club, “There’s nothing to the finger technique. Anybody can do it. Here, look, even my bass player can do it!” And he would hand me a stick and have me demonstrate.
I was happy with Marian’s trio, but I couldn’t pass up an offer from Gerry Mulligan to join his sextet, with Bob Brookmeyer, Zoot Sims, Jon Eardley and Dave Bailey. Gerry’s music was beautiful, Zoot was the most swinging jazz musician I had ever heard, and Brookmeyer’s playing had been a delight to hear every night when we were together with Stan Getz. I met Bailey and Eardley at our first rehearsal, and when we began to play, I was knocked out by the quality of the music and the good spirit among us. Gerry had a way of organizing the music without limiting anyone’s expression, and the result was very exhilarating both to the sextet and to our audiences.
Dave Bailey had the touch Gerry was looking for, light and swinging. We locked in together right away, and had a working relationship for a number of years, with Gerry’s groups and with the quintet co-led by Bob Brookmeyer and Clark Terry. Dave was a good section-mate and a good road pal. We enjoyed traveling together, and had many laughs. Dave had been a pilot during the war, and continued to add to his flight knowledge in his spare time. Whenever we were working near a place where he could study something new about flying, that would be how he would spend his daytime hours.
After I joined Mulligan’s sextet, I soon realized that my lack of a good fingering system on the bass was giving me problems I didn’t need. With Marian, I played lines that fit my technique, since I was free to play whatever I chose. But Gerry had written certain things that I found difficult to play perfectly in tune every time, and it bothered me. Through a colleague, Trigger Alpert, I found my teacher, Fred Zimmerman, who at that time was the principal bassist with the New York Philharmonic. He straightened out my left hand, taught me how to use the bow, and set me on a path of discovery about the bass that I’m still on.
After a tour of Europe, Gerry’s sextet became a quartet, with Brookmeyer and Bailey, and a month or two later, after I had a disagreement with Gerry over something stupid, I resigned and went back with Marian for a couple of years, now with Dick Scott on drums, since Morello had gone with Dave Brubeck. That trio broke up on the road, and after a bit, Gerry called me to rejoin the quartet, this time with Art Farmer as the other horn.
Clark Terry joined the band at the same time I did, and I discovered what a spark plug he was in a band. He knew how to get a good section blend, and all his solos were exactly right for the arrangements. He had a very large bag of tricks, full of surprise and good humor. His technique was amazing, with very flexible lip control and a mastery of circular breathing that let him play amazingly long phrases.
Whenever Gerry’s work schedule had a hole in it, Clark and Bob Brookmeyer would put together their quintet for a week or two at the Half Note. Dave Bailey and I were regulars, and the piano chair, which belonged to Hank Jones, rotated among the subs Hank sent in: Herbie Hancock, Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan, etc. We finally stayed with Roger Kellaway, who was with the group until it ended when Brookmeyer moved to California. Roger amazed us all. Blessed with great technique, he could play any style, from ragtime to space music. Whatever style he chose to play at the moment would be filled with wonderful surprises that kept the rest of us continually delighted.
Gene Quill was Gerry’s lead alto player. I knew Gene from the Thornhill band, and was glad to see him again. He had learned his big tone and strong phrasing from Charlie Parker’s playing, and was just the right man to lead Gerry’s sax section. He was also a fiery soloist. Gene was a drinker, and when in his cups could be belligerent. Not being a large man, this belligerence often cost him. He was beaten up several times by larger drunks. Toward the end of his life, one such beating caused some brain damage, and he lived his last years with severe physical problems. But his days on Gerry’s Concert Jazz Band were golden. He had the time of his life, and we all enjoyed his fine playing.
At that time, Thad was a little spotty as a soloist. Sometimes his solos just flowed out of him, melodic, inventive, and right on the money. Other times, he sounded like his ideas were a moment ahead of his technique, and his solos would sound muddy, his tone would suffer, and he would seem to be struggling. By the time, the CJB had come to an end, Thad and our drummer Mel Lewis had put together their Monday night band at the Village Vanguard. Every time I heard that band, Thad sounded wonderful. Evidently whatever it was that he had been going through as a soloist had been resolved.
Many years later, Nick Brignola called me to participate in a concert he was preparing at a theater in Cohoes, New York, up near Albany. Nick was to play with three groups, a traditional jazz group, a bebop group, and a free jazz group. I found myself in the bebop group, along with Thad Jones. During one of the numbers, while I was playing behind Nick’s solo, I noticed Thad standing behind me with a quizzical look on his face. When we finished our set and left the stage, Thad pulled on my sleeve and said, “Come with me.” We went down to the bar while the concert continued. Thad bought me a beer and then stood back and appraised me for a moment. Then he said, “You’re a big band bass player, and I know it! Now, don’t think about money for a minute. Just let me tell you where we’re going! First, we have three weeks in England. Then we have a month touring the major cities of Europe. Then it looks like we can do a couple of weeks in Africa!” I looked at him for a minute, and then said, “’Bye!” He laughed, and I explained that though I loved his band, I couldn’t possibly leave my family for that amount of time. “Call me for some subs at the Vanguard!” I told him. He did, but Richard Davis, his regular bassist, didn’t take off very much. The band was too good. 
Mel Lewis had joined Gerry’s Concert Jazz Band when it was formed in California, and that was what brought him back to New York. When I joined the band, we connected through the music right away. Mel liked the middle of the beat, and preferred the band to settle into the center of a groove, rather than press forward on the time. He had a wonderful beat, and the sounds of his cymbals were perfect for Gerry’s band. I liked the way he decorated the beat with patterns around his drums. He once told me, “I don’t like to play the accents with the brass section. I like to let them swing by themselves. If you play everything they’re playing, they get lazy. I leave them alone, and instead, I play what the saxophones are playing behind them.”
Manny Albam liked the way Gus and I sounded together, and recommended us as a team on record dates. We made several records and quite a few commercial jingles together. In those days, record and jingle producers were always looking for rhythm section teams, the most in demand one being Milt Hinton, Osie Johnson and Hank Jones.
Since Jim Hall and I often went to jam sessions together, I got to play with him a lot. And now and then Mulligan would put together some work for a sextet, which included Jim. We made some nice records with that group, with Gerry, Brookmeyer, Art Farmer, Dave Bailey and Jim. I also played a couple of weeks in Hartford with Dave Mackay, one week with Jim Hall and the other with Jim Raney. When Jim Hall and Brookmeyer were with Giuffre and I was with Mulligan’s quartet with Art Farmer, we made a tour of Europe together, along with the Gene Krupa quartet. By the time we got to Italy, Krupa was no longer with us, due to previous bookings. 
In Milan, Italy, Jim Hall introduced me to a local guitarist, Franco Cerri, and to Lars Gullin, who was staying in Milan at the time. Our tour finished there, and I stayed for a week with Franco. Dave Bailey and I played a jam session with Lars, who sounded wonderful. A local businessman thought he could sell a record made with Lars and Mulligan’s rhythm team, so he asked Dave and me into a local recording studio. We had just played a jam session with George Grunz when we were in Switzerland, and so we asked them to fly him down for the session. Lars played well, and we all enjoyed the date, but for some reason the record never was released. 
The first time I met Phil Woods was on a rehearsal for a record date with Jimmy Raney. I was amazed at the strength and bravery of Phil’s playing. He really announced himself! Quite often after that, we found ourselves playing together on the same groups. And he was Gene Quill’s sub on Gerry Mulligan’s Concert Jazz Band. Since Phil moved out to Pennsylvania, I’ve had fewer chances to play with him, but occasionally the opportunity arises. He has lung problems now, but you would never know it to hear him play.
Not long after that tour, Zoot left to start a quintet co-led with Al Cohn. Often, when their regular bassist, Major Holley, was busy, I would take his place, and it was always a thrilling experience. We were just swinging as hard as we could, all night long. The tunes Al wrote were both interesting and easy to play, and the sound that he and Zoot made together was almost too good to be true. Mousie Alexander was usually the drummer, and Mose Alison the pianist. What a band!
And while my Jazz awareness developed to the point that I eventually worked my way back to the original, “original” quartet that Gerry formed in 1952 while working in Los Angeles with Chet Baker, bassist Carson Smith and drummer Chico Hamilton [I liked Larry Bunker better in the drum chair], I never lost my preference for the Farmer-Crow-Bailey edition of Gerry’s group.
I met Gail before I knew Gerry very well, thanks to a drummer friend of mine by the name of Buzzy Bridgford. He introduced us at an apartment in Greenwich Village owned by a lady named Margo, who was apparently a $100 a night hooker and was bankrolling Gail, who wanted to be a therapist and save all the junky jazz musicians in New York. Charlie Parker had agreed to go along with all this and was first on her list. Gail's plan was that, with Margo's money, she would buy a brownstone and start a clinic and all the guys would come and live there so she could straighten them out and get them off junk. Buzzy, who knew all the inside jazz gossip, claimed that Joe Albany, Serge Chaloff, J. J. Johnson, Stan Levey, and Gerry were also going to be involved, but unfortunately for Gail, she had an argument with Margo over money and the whole idea collapsed.
Looking back, I don't think there was any rivalry between Stan and Gerry, because they were both in a "star" position in the jazz world. Getz of course was more difficult than Gerry, and he was devious, which Gerry never was. Stan really was the "golden boy" who never had to make concessions to the commercial world, playing whatever he wanted in the clubs and recording anything he wanted in the studio. He was also a very good-looking guy, and I remember when I met him with his first wife Beverly, who was Buddy Stewart's younger sister, they looked like the beautiful young couple on a wedding cake.
I'll tell you a funny story about Stan and Al Cohn, who was very fast and had a wonderful sense of humor. Al was with a crowd in Jim and Andy's, our musicians' bar, and somebody was telling us about the record Stan had just made with Joao and Astrud Gilberto. Joao had been hired for the date because he was in town and he was "hot," and Astrud was with him as his interpreter. When they found out there were English lyrics to "The Girl from lpanema" and that Astrud could sing a little bit, they thought it would be cute to have her sing a chorus in English.
Pianist Billy Triglia loved Tony and tried to use him on gigs when the job wasn't too heavy. In other words, Billy could cover for him if he didn't show up or was too stoned to play. We were in a club in New Jersey, and one customer in particular liked the way Tony was playing, so he called him over and offered to buy him a drink. Tony's response was, "Well, man, I'm already pretty stoned and the bread's kind of light on this gig, so would you mind just giving me the money?" The club owner overheard and was furious, but that was typical of Tony. Charlie Barnet once fired him because he couldn't hear him, although I don't know why he took the job, because he didn't like to play with big bands. If he couldn't be where he could play softly, he would just forget about it.
I had played with Bob Brookmeyer when I was with Stan Getz, and he probably recommended me, since Gerry was looking for a rhythm section who were willing to take the role of accompanists; he didn't want fancy solo players. By now, Jon Eardley was with us and he was always complaining that he didn't get enough solos. Gerry used to say, "I understand how you feel but there isn't very much I can do about it. Being my band and wanting to play, I am going to solo a lot and I have Zoot and Bobby, who are two of my favorite soloists that I love to listen to, but I will give you as much of what is left as possible."
As a result, we were not welcome in some hotels and we were searched quite seriously on the trains. Of course, the authorities nearly always picked on Dave Bailey to be the one they searched, and he is the straightest guy you can imagine, and always has been. When Jon finally got his act together and moved to Europe permanently, he was a brilliant player for many years. I recorded with him the last time he was in New York with Eddie Bert, Benny Aronov, and Mel Lewis, but Loren Schoenberg hasn't been able to sell the album yet.
Bass solos in Gerry's piano-less groups could sometimes be a problem because the instrument was un-amplified in those days and, in some of the rooms, the resonance of the bass didn't cut through as well as it might. It isn't that Gerry's accompaniment was more assertive than a pianist's would have been, but the timbre of the baritone was so close to the bass that it was sometimes hard for him to stay under my sound.
If I was on a root, he would try to be on a tenth, and being a third an octave higher, he would imply all the notes of the chord in between. If I was playing around the sevenths and ninths, he would expect me to use those notes as passing tones, which meant I had to really start thinking about my solos in a different way that related to him. I would hear what he was doing in his backgrounds and try to turn my bass line in that same direction so that we could be together. It became an interesting game. and if you listen to the records, you can hear both of us listening carefully to each other when we solo. Of course, Gerry heard music from the point of view of a composer and arranger and improvised that way too, so that his solos sounded as though they could have been written.
I came into Gerry's Concert Jazz Band after they completed their European tour in 1960. Some of the West Coast people, like Conte Candoli and Buddy Clark, wanted to go home, so he hired Clark Terry and me to join what was already a very well-broken-in band at the Village Vanguard.
The esprit de corps of the band was so good because it really looked as though it was going somewhere. Gerry had some kind of understanding with Norman Granz where Norman would pick up the losses in the States if he, Norman, could have the recordings and European tours where he could make some money, and with that arrangement, we had a steady job. During that first week at the Vanguard, I couldn't believe how good the band sounded. During intermissions, we would jump off the stand and go in the kitchen to talk about the band until it was time to play again.
When Gerry first put the CJB together, I think he talked to everybody and said, "I have some money from the movies I made," but to get the band started, we have to keep the overhead down as much as possible, so tell me what you can accept as your lowest figure." He paid the guys with families a little more, and speaking personally, I never had any problems with Gerry about money. He was always wonderfully fair, and in fact he used to give me raises without my asking for them.
On a job, if we were playing something that was not a structured ballad, we would begin with some kind of written figure for a chorus or two, and then we would start with the solos. If someone was playing well, we would never go to the next written section until we had the cue from Gerry, because he would start improvising backgrounds behind the solo, like he did with the quartet. If the background was simple enough and had a repeat, by the second time around the rest of the saxes would be playing in unison or harmonizing with Gerry; then Brookmeyer or Terry would think of a counter-line, and the brass section would join that. The band might play behind a soloist for five or six choruses of improvised riffs and it would really get going, and only when it reached a certain level would Gerry give the signal to go into the next written section. For instance, that live version of "Blueport" from the Village Vanguard album was so long that Gerry didn't think he could put it on a record, so he took a big hunk out of it. Those fours and eights between Gerry and Clark went on forever, so he took out some of those, and there were other solos he removed when he found a spot where he could make an undetectable edit.
After that I didn't work with Gene for a few years, although we would sometimes run into each other in Charley's Tavern or Junior's. Then I joined Gerry, and there was Gene again. Bobby Donovan was the second alto on the band, and he idolized Gene, trying to be exactly like him, including the self-destructive parts, and as a result ended up destroying himself with booze. Bobby was a good player, although not the stellar player that Gene was, but with a better role model he might have survived.
Early in 1962 Gerry got some more work, and because Mel Lewis and Dave Bailey were busy, he was looking for a drummer. When he asked me who we should get, I suggested Gus Johnson, who had been one of my favorites ever since he'd sat in with the Terry Gibbs quartet at Birdland in 1954. There were a lot of good players around, but I knew Gus would be great, and I also knew he wasn't playing much, because he had been working as a bank guard.
Dave Bailey seemed to drop out of the jazz scene at about the same time that Gerry finally broke up the quartet in 1965. He had been traveling first class with Mulligan, who had been his main connection to the jazz world, so I don't think he wanted to go back to playing those funky little clubs again. I had already left Gerry, after a disagreement that had nothing to do with music, and had come back to New York, where Kai Winding hired me to work at the Playboy Club. I played there with Walter Norris for the next five years, and whenever Bobby and Clark had a gig at the Half Note, I would take time out to play with them, and usually Dave would be the drummer. Eventually, when he got his flying license back, he started working for F. Lee Bailey, who liked the idea of having "Bailey and Bailey" at the controls of his Lear Jet. Dave became so busy he just stopped playing, and if someone asked him he would say, "I haven't played for so long, I don't want to come out and make a fool of myself."