Nat Hentoff, Journalist and Social Commentator, Dies at 91

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

Back in the blog’s earliest days, I wanted to do a compilation of various writings about the late baritone saxophonist, composer-arranger and bandleader Gerry Mulligan.

One of these essays, not surprisingly given the breadth and scope of his writings about Jazz, was by Nat Hentoff.

Off I went, looking for a quick digital connect to ask his permission to use the Mulligan piece.

It was not to be - quick - that is, because Nat is not “connected:” no email, social networking, website, et al.

Someone, who asked me not to reveal my source [?], gave me his phone number.

So I called him.

He wasn’t in and I left him a voicemail explaining what I wanted.

A few days went by and I was in the middle of a house painting chore when the phone rang and it was Nat.

After saying, “Yes, of course,” to my request for copyright permission, he began asking me a series of questions about my background in the music.

After a few descriptive phrases he proffered a comment to the effect: “Oh, you’re a Left Coast [i.e. West Coast] guy.”

So while I held a dripping paint brush over a paint can, Nat launched into an informed discourse about a style of music and a group of musicians he had never heard perform first hand on the “Left” Coast,” but whom he had only heard and met over the years in clubs and festivals in Boston, New York and Newport, RI.

His knowledge on the subject was amazing as were the strength of his opinions.

His favorite was Dave Brubeck whom he referred to as “an original who shouldn’t be left out of the list of those influencing other pianists who were his contemporaries or that followed him. Brubeck was right up there with Art Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Nat Cole or Bud Powell.”

I couldn’t believe my ears! I had always thought that Dave Brubeck never garnered the credit he deserved for helping to shape some aspects of the styles of everyone from Bill Evans to Herbie Hancock to McCoy Tyner, but here I was hearing it from an East Coast based Jazz author and critic!

But then, how surprising was this considering the fact that over the years, I’ve probably learned more about Jazz from Nat Hentoff than from any, other man alive.

Which brings me to this obituary. Nat died on January 7, 2017. He was 91 years old.

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN, New York Times, JAN. 7, 2017

“Nat Hentoff, an author, journalist, jazz critic and civil libertarian who called himself a troublemaker and proved it with a shelf of books and a mountain of essays on free speech, wayward politics, elegant riffs and the sweet harmonies of the Constitution, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 91.

His son Nicholas said he was surrounded by family members and listening to Billie Holiday when he died.

Mr. Hentoff wrote for The Village Voice for 50 years and also contributed to The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Down Beat magazine and dozens of other publications. He wrote more than 35 books — novels, volumes for young adults and nonfiction works on civil liberties, education and other subjects.

The Hentoff bibliotheca reads almost like an anthology: works by a jazz aficionado, a mystery writer, an eyewitness to history, an educational reformer, a political agitator, a foe of censors, a social critic. He was — like the jazz he loved — given to improvisations and permutations, a composer-performer who lived comfortably with his contradictions, although adversaries called him shallow and unscrupulous and even his admirers sometimes found him infuriating, unrealistic and stubborn.

In the 1950s, Mr. Hentoff was a jazz critic in Manhattan, frequenting crowded, smoky night clubs where musicians played for low pay and audiences ran hot and cold and dreamy. “I knew their flaws as well as their strengths,” he recalled, referring to the jazz artists whose music he loved, many of whom he befriended, “but I continued to admire the honesty and courage of their art.”

In the 1960s and ’70s, he wrote books for young adults, nonfiction works on education, magazine profiles of political and religious leaders and essays on racial conflicts and the Vietnam War. He became an activist, too, befriending Malcolm X and joining peace protests and marches for racial equality.

In the 1980s and ’90s, he produced commentaries and books on censorship and other constitutional issues; murder mysteries; portraits of educators and judges; and an avalanche of articles on abortion, civil liberties and other issues. He also wrote a volume of memoirs, “Speaking Freely” (1997).

His writing was often passionate, even inspirational. Much of it was based on personal observations, and some critics said it was not deeply researched or analytic. His nonfiction took in the sweep of an era of war and social upheaval, while many of his novels caught the turbulence, if not the character, of politically astute young adults.

While his sympathies were usually libertarian, he often infuriated leftist friends with his opposition to abortion, his attacks on political correctness and his criticisms of gay groups, feminists, blacks and others he accused of trying to censor opponents. He relished the role of provocateur, defending the right of people to say and write whatever they wanted, even if it involved racial slurs, apartheid and pornography.

He had a firebrand’s face: wreathed in a gray beard and a shock of unruly hair, with dark, uncompromising eyes. Once, a student asked what made him tick. “Rage,” he replied. But he said it softly, and friends recalled that his invective, in print or in person, usually came wrapped in gentle good humor and respectful tones.

Nathan Irving Hentoff was born in Boston on June 10, 1925, the son of Simon and Lena Katzenberg Hentoff. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, and he grew up in the tough Roxbury section in a vortex of political debate among Socialists, anarchists, Communists, Trotskyites and other revolutionaries. He learned early how to rebel.

In 1937, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement and fasting, the 12-year-old Nat sat on his porch on a street leading to a synagogue and slowly ate a salami sandwich. It made him sick, and the action outraged his father. He had not done it to scandalize passing Jews who glared at him, he said in a memoir, “Boston Boy” (1986). “I wanted to know how it felt to be an outcast,” he wrote. “Except for my father’s reaction and for getting sick, it turned out to be quite enjoyable.”

He attended Boston Latin, the oldest public school in America, and read voraciously. He discovered Artie Shaw and fell passionately for Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and other jazz legends. As more modern styles of jazz emerged, Mr. Hentoff also embraced musicians like Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus and, later, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor.

At Northeastern University, he became editor of a student newspaper and turned it into a muckraker. When it dug up a story about trustees backing anti-Semitic publications, the university shut it down. Mr. Hentoff and members of his staff resigned, but he graduated in 1946 with high honors and a lasting devotion to the First Amendment.

After several years with a Boston radio station, he moved to New York in 1953 and covered jazz for Down Beat until 1957.

He was one of the most prolific jazz writers of the 1950s and ’60s, providing liner notes for countless albums as well as writing or editing several books on jazz, including “Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya: The Story of Jazz as Told by the Men Who Made It” (1955), which he edited with Nat Shapiro. It was a seminal work of oral history.

In 1958, he was a founding editor of The Jazz Review, an influential publication that lasted until 1961. In 1960, he began a notable, if brief, career as a record producer, supervising sessions by Mingus, Max Roach and others for the Candid label.

Around the same time, he began a freelance career that took him into the pages of Esquire, Harper’s, Commonweal, The Reporter, Playboy and The New York Herald Tribune.

In 1958, he began writing for The Village Voice, the counterculture weekly. It became a 50-year gig, despite changes of ownership and editorial direction. Veering from jazz, he wrote weekly columns on civil liberties, politics, education, capital punishment and other topics, all widely syndicated to newspapers.

In January 2009, he was laid off by The Voice, but he said he would continue to bang away on the electric typewriter in his cluttered Greenwich Village apartment, producing articles for United Features and Jewish World Review and reflections on jazz and other music for The Wall Street Journal.

Citing the journalists George Seldes and I. F. Stone as his muses, he promised in a farewell Voice column to keep “putting on my skunk suit at other garden parties.”

He wrote for The New Yorker from 1960 to 1986 and for The Washington Post from 1984 to 2000. He also wrote for The Washington Times and other publications. For years, he lectured at schools and colleges, and he was on the faculties of New York University and the New School.

Mr. Hentoff’s first book, “The Jazz Life” (1961), examined social and psychological aspects of jazz. Later came “Peace Agitator: The Story of A. J. Muste” (1963), a biography of the pacifist, and “The New Equality” (1964), on the role of white guilt in racial reforms.

“Jazz Country” (1965) was the first of a series of novels for young adults. It explored the struggles of a young white musician breaking into the black jazz scene. Others included “This School Is Driving Me Crazy” (1976), “Does This School Have Capital Punishment?” (1981) and “The Day They Came to Arrest the Book” (1982). They addressed subjects like the military draft, censorship and the generation gap, but some critics called them polemics in the mouths of characters.

Many of Mr. Hentoff’s later books dealt with the Constitution and those who interpreted and acted on it. In “Living the Bill of Rights” (1998), he profiled Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court, the educator Kenneth Clark and others as he explored capital punishment, prayer in schools, funding for education, race relations and other issues.

In “Free Speech for Me — but Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other” (1992), he attacked not only school boards that banned books but also feminists who tried to silence abortion foes or close pornographic bookstores; gay rights groups that boycotted Florida orange juice because it’s spokeswoman, Anita Bryant, crusaded against gay people; and New York officials who tried to bar South Africa’s rugby team because it represented the land of apartheid.

In 1995, Mr. Hentoff received the National Press Foundation’s award for lifetime achievement in contributions to journalism, and in 2004, he was named one of six Jazz Masters by the National Endowment for the Arts, the first non-musician to win the honor.

Mr. Hentoff was the subject of an award-winning 2013 biographical film, “The Pleasures of Being Out of Step,” produced and directed by the journalist David L. Lewis, which played in theaters across the country.

Mr. Hentoff’s first two marriages, to Miriam Sargent in 1950 and to Trudi Bernstein in 1954, ended in divorce. His third wife, the former Margot Goodman, whom he married in 1959, is a columnist and an author of essays, reviews and short stories.

Besides his wife and his son Nicholas, he is survived by two daughters, Jessica and Miranda; a son, Thomas; a step-daughter, Mara Wolynski Nierman; a sister, Janet Krauss; and 10 grandchildren.”

Frank Strozier - Cloudy, Cool and Concealed [From the Archives]

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

"Frank Strozier is one of the finest saxophone players I've had the pleasure of working with. He is creative. He is an individualist. He has a beautiful melodic sense. He swings hard and besides all this, he is a wonderful composer." 

- Shelly Manne, drummer, bandleader, club owner

“Strozier attacks every solo viciously, like a hungry hound ripping into a piece of raw meat. He can grab a line and strangle it in a profusion of notes, then, like a shifting wind, relax suddenly, and wail in a gentle baby sort of way only to regain his fire moments later and rip wildly again into the next chorus. His tone, an amazing combination of the harsh and the tender, comes out sounding very much like a Coltrane-Parker combination sandwich. It is at once searing and soulful - not easy to forget.”

- Sid Lazard, Jazz musician

From my perspective, the career of one of my favorite alto saxophonists went from “Fantastic” to “Cloudy and Cool” to Invisible.

Like so many other Jazz artists who came on the Jazz scene during the Golden Age of Modern Jazz from 1945-1965, Strozier was gone from it by the 1980’s.

Frank’s career had such a promising beginning with VeeJay albums to his credit as a member of drummer Walter Perkins MJT+2, an LP on VeeJay entitled The Young Lions with trumpeter Lee Morgan and tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter and two LP’s on that label under his own name: The Fantastic Frank Strozier and Frank Strozier Cloudy and Cool.

[You’ll find a link to Jazz historian Noal Cohen’s comprehensive discography on Frank at the end of this piece.]

Jazz columnist and critic Ralph Gleason predicted after his first hearing Frank Strozier recently that "we will all be hearing a lot more from this Memphis-born youngster."

Sid Lazard had this to say about Frank in his liner notes to The Fantastic Frank Strozier:

“The guy is just plain great - one of the freshest, swingingest, just all around bestest musicians on the jazz scene. Strozier is a triple threat. In addition to being an alto saxophonist of the highest quality, he is also a gifted writer and arranger.

In this album he displays his three talents with brilliance. Strozier's appearance and modest demeanour belie his wealth of talent. He's a quiet little blond guy whom you'd hardly notice in an empty room, but when he blows - a giant emerges.

Classifying Strozier's style isn't easy. He's not made in anybody's image, although the influences of John Coltrane, Charlie Parker and even Clifford Brown are often evident.

Strozier attacks every solo viciously, like a hungry hound ripping into a piece of raw meat. He can grab a line and strangle it in a profusion of notes, then, like a shifting wind, relax suddenly, and wail in a gentle baby sort of way only to regain his fire moments later and rip wildly again into the next chorus. His tone, an amazing combination of the harsh and the tender, comes out sounding very much like a Coltrane-Parker combination sandwich. It is at once searing and soulful - not easy to forget.”

Sadly, it was all too easy to forget because as Mike Baille recounts in the following insert notes from the 1996 CD reissue of Frank Strozier: Cool and Cloudy:

It could be said that Frank Strozier has not enjoyed over the years the acclaim and wider recognition which his alto saxophone playing so clearly merits. But that is the way of things, and with this CD, it is to be hoped that his name and talents will be more widely known.

He first saw the light of day in Memphis, Tennessee, on the 13th of June, 1937, and fellow students at the school he attended have included tenor saxophonist George Coleman, altoist Hank Crawford, trumpeter Booker Little, and pianist Harold Mabern. Frank's mother played piano, and so he studied that instrument to begin with before taking up the saxophone. After graduating in 1954, he moved to Chicago in order to study clarinet at the Chicago Conservatory of Music.

There, in the Windy City, he first came to the attention of the jazz cognoscenti and built a solid reputation for himself through his association and playing with Booker Little.

Strozier once toured the West Coast with Miles Davis' group, and was held in very high regard by his fellow musicians. That giant of the tenor saxophone Dexter Gordon said, for instance, "I dig the charm and subtlety that Frank Strozier gets out of his horn," while trumpeter Woody Shaw called Strozier's playing "intelligent and stimulating."

Drummer Shelly Manne was even more explicit when he stated that "Frank Strozier is one of the finest saxophone players I've had the pleasure of working with. He is creative. He is an individualist. He has a beautiful melodic sense. He swings hard and besides all this, he is a wonderful composer."

Praise indeed, and the three jazz musicians quoted above might well have had this album in mind when making their comments.

The genuine jazz buff will enjoy hearing the different takes of the enclosed recordings, and it would be as invidious as it is pointless to say which ones are 'the best'. That's not what jazz is about, although it would be fair to say that it's what make jazz so fascinating, and so very different from all other kinds of music. Cloudy And Cool is an attractive theme, and sounds to these ears like an amalgam of "Black Coffee" and "Parker's Mood".

A slow funky blues, all three takes show Strozier's pure alto tone to perfection. She is taken at a driving tempo and features solos all round, while Chris has the kind of chord sequence that John Coltrane used to get his teeth into, and Frank attacks it with genuine fire. The ballad No More will always be associated with Billie Holiday, while the gently swinging Nice 'N Easy calls to mind another Frank - Sinatra! (Vernel Fournier's brushwork here is noteworthy.) The two standards, Stairway To The Stars and Day In Day Out, both receive a good workout from Strozier. The former is Strozier all the way, a fine example of his ballad playing, while the latter is taken at a fast clip, the rhythm section urging Strozier and pianist Billy Wallace in their respective improvisations. Wallace in fact is a very crisp keyboard stylist who supplies Strozier with just the right backing, and whose solos are never less than good. And the immaculate and swinging drumming of Vernel Fournier is well in evidence throughout the album. Originally a rhythm and blues man, he joined the jazz fraternity through his playing with Teddy Wilson, and later paid his dues at Chicago's Bee Hive club where he accompanied such greats as Sonny Stitt, Ben Webster and Lester Young, before making a name for himself with those two masters of the piano, George Shearing and Ahmad Jamal.

The keen cutting edge of Frank Strozier's alto saxophone playing is heard to good effect throughout this CD. There are echoes of both Phil Woods and Charlie Parker in his approach, but he is nevertheless his own man, and plays with great authority. One of his personal trademarks that particularly stands out is the engaging way he will tail off an improvisation with an attractive little light phrase before plunging back into the solo with a great flurry of notes. And he can also wail in a graceful and appealing kind of way. All in all, an hour and more of quality modern jazz.”

I had the good fortune to hear Frank in person a number of times as a member of Shelly Manne’s Quintet at Shelly’s Hollywood Jazz Club, The Manne Hole.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing Frank’s hard-driving, blues-inflected alto sound, the following video will introduce you to it. The tune is the title track from Frank’s Cloudy and Cool CD.

And here’s the promised link to Noal Cohen’s discography on Frank Strozier which will also provide you with a more complete overview of Frank's career.

Milton Hinton and Jazz History: Parallel Courses [From the Archives]

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

Born in Vicksburg, Mississippi in 1910 and relocated to Chicago by his family at the close of World War I in 1918, it seems that bassist Milt Hinton had been around Jazz since its beginnings.

But like Osie Johnson, his drumming counterpart on numerous recordings sessions over the years, I found it difficult to locate much information about Milt despite the fact that the Lord Discography lists him on 1,205 recording sessions!

So when my copy of Down Beat: The Great Jazz Interviews a 75^th Anniversary Anthology arrived from Santa Claus this year, I was thrilled to discover that it contained Larry Birnbaum’s detailed essay about Milt entitled Milt Hinton: The Judge Holds Court, January 25, 1979.

Here are some excerpts that primarily focus on Milt’s nearly 16 year association with the Cab Calloway Orchestra.

I think you’ll find it to be a wonderful reminiscence of what the world of Jazz and the United States were like for a working musician from approximately 1935-1950.

© -  Larry Birnbaum/ Down Beat, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

"Bass means bottom. It means foundation, and bass players realize that their first job j is to support the musicians and the ensem­ble. Bass players know more about sharing ffld appreciating one another than any other musicians. In all my years I have never heard a bass player put another bass player down; they have great love for each other and they learn from one another and they share experiences and even jobs. It's why the art of bass playing has made more progress in the last 40 years than the art of any other instrument."

Milt Hinton should know. At 68 [Milt died on December 19, 2000 at the age of 90], the dean of American bassists stands at the summit of a half-century career that has taken him from the speakeasies of Chicago to the pinnacle of the big-band era with Cab Calloway to the jam sessions at Minton's in the early days of bop. …

"But to get back, in '35 Cab went to California to do a movie with Al Jolson called The Singing Kid. His bass player, Al Morgan, was a fantastic visual player. He was really my idol; I used to watch him just to see how a great bass player acted, and that's what I figured I would be like when I grew up—of course I'm nothing like that at all. When they made this movie, the cameras would be grinding away and every time Cab looked around, instead of the camera being on him it would be on Al Morgan, because he was a tall, black, handsome guy and he smiled and twirled his bass as he played. This got under Cab's skin because it was a little too competitive for him. But nothing happened about it until one of the producers said to Al Mor­gan, 'Look, you're so very photogenic that if you were going to be around here, every time we made a picture with a band scene in it you would get the job.' So this guy quit Cab in California and joined Les Kite's band with Lionel Hampton and all those guys who were established in Hollywood, and he stayed there.

"Cab started back east without a bass player, and my friend Johnson told Cab that if he was going through Chicago he should stop at the Three Deuces and dig Milt Hinton. By this time Simpson's band had broke up and the owner had opened a Three Deuces at State and Lake. Zutty Sin­gleton was the bandleader and Art Tatum was the relief piano player there. When Art played, it was my responsibility to stand by and come in for his finale. He played solo piano, but for his last tune, which would be something up-tempo, I was supposed to join him and take it out and then come on with Zutty's band. Of course, Art Tatum was so fabulous that I don't think I ever caught up to him; his changes were too fast for me and he left me standing at the post. But it was such a joy to see him, and he was a very nice person. He could see slightly if you put a very bright light behind his eye, so during intermissions we played pinochle together.

"Zutty had the band, mostly New Orleans guys. It was Zutty playing drums, Lee Collins, a great trumpet player whose wife recently put out a book about him; there was a kid from New Jersey, Cozy Cole's brother, who played piano, and Everett Barksdale was the guitar player. We worked for months at the Three Deuces and my acceptance as a musician was established, because Chicago was a New Orleans town—all the jazz was New Orleans jazz—and Zutty Singleton was the drummer. There was Baby Dodds and Tubby Hall, but Zutty was really the guy. He had been with the Louis Armstrong Hot Five, with Earl Hines and Lil and Pre­ston Jackson, who is now living in New Orleans. Zutty finally decided to take me into his rhythm section. Now I was with the king and now I was established as a top bass player in Chicago.

"And now Cab comes down and he listens to me play. He never said a word tc me, he just sat there—I saw him in the room—and a guy said, 'Cab is in.' He came in with a big coonskin coat and a derby and, man, he was sharp, people were like applauding. He sat at a table and listened to us play, and on the intermission he invit­ed Zutty over to the table to have a drink with him—not me, but Zutty. He said, 'Hey, I'd like that bass player, I heard he's pretty good.' Zutty was most beautiful and kind to me and he was only too happy to have me make some progress, and he said, 'You can have him,' in that long drawl, New Orleans accent he had. So Cab said, 'Well, thanks man, and if you ever get to New York and there's anything I can ever do for you, you just let me know,' and they shook hands. Then Zutty came upstairs— I'm playing pinochle with Art Tatum—and said, 'Well, kid, you're gone.' 'Where am I going, Zutty?' 'Cab just asked me for you and I told him he could have you.' I said, 'Don't I have to give you some kind of a two-week notice or something?' and Zutty said, 'If you don't get your black ass out of here this evening, I'll shoot you.'

"Cab finally comes up and sings a song with us, he hi-de-ho's and breaks up the house—and as he's leaving he says to me, 'Kid, the train leaves from LaSalle Street Station at 9 o'clock in the morning. Be on it.' That's all he said to me, no dis­cussion of salary or anything. I dashed to the phone, called my mom, and told her to pack that other suit I had and my extra shirt. I got my stuff—of course, there was no time to sleep—and I met the band at the station. It was quite an experience, because I had never been on a train except coming from Mississippi to Chicago, and you know I didn't come on a Pullman or any first-class train—we were right next to the engine. I'd never seen a Pullman in my life, and here all of these big-time musicians were on this train, on their own Pullman.

"There were these fabulous musicians: Doc Cheatham, the trumpet player; Mouse Randolph, another trumpet player; Foots Thomas, the straw boss, the assistant leader of the band, a saxophone player; Andy Brown, a saxophone player; and the drummer, Leroy Maxey. These guys had been working in the Cotton Club in New York and they were really professional: Lammar Wright was another great trum­pet player in the band; Claude Jones, a great friend of Tommy Dorsey's, was the trombone player; and there was my old friend Keg Johnson who had recommend­ed me.

"I must have looked pretty bad. I had the seedy suit on, a little green gabardine jacket with vents in the sleeves—we called them bi-swings in those days. Keg was introducing me around, and the great Ben Webster was in the band. He and Cab had been out drinking that night and they missed the train at LaSalle Street, but you could catch the train at the 63rd Street sta­tion. They were out on the South Side balling away with some chicks and they didn't have time to come downtown. So they picked up the train at 63rd Street and got on just terribly drunk. I was sitting there and Keg was trying to introduce me to the guys, and Ben Webster walks in ter­ribly stoned and he looked at me—I must have weighed 115 pounds soaking wet— and said, 'What is this?' and Cab said, 'This is the new bass player,' and Ben said, 'The new what!?' I remember thinking I would never like Ben, and he turned out to be one of my dearest friends.

"I hadn't asked anybody about the price, but I was making $35 a week with Zutty at the Three Deuces and that was one of the best jobs in town. Fletcher Hen­derson was at the Grand Terrace at that time with Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins and Chu Berry and they were making 35 bucks a week. I didn't know how to approach anybody about money with Cab, so finally I told Keg that Cab hadn't said anything to me about money. Keg [Johnson, a trombonist] said, 'Oh, everybody here makes $100 a week.' Well, I almost fainted—$100 I had never heard of; it was a fantastic amount of money. This is before Social Security—they only took out $1 for union dues and you got $99, and $99 in those days was like $9,000 today. Honestly, you could get a good room for $7 a week; you could get a fantastic meal for 50 cents and cigarettes for 10 to 15 cents a pack; bread was 5 cents a loaf; so you can imagine what the thing was like.

"Cab told me after we started making one-night stands that he was only hiring me until he got to New York and got a good bass player. I was quite happy even to do that for 100 bucks a week. We made one-nighters for three months before we hit New York, all through Iowa—Des Moines, Sioux City, everyplace, and I got a chance to really get set and all the guys liked me.

"Well, Al Morgan was not a reading man. He had been in the band so long he had memorized the book, so there was no bass book. And here I was quite academ­ic—I'd studied violin and I'd studied bass legitimately with a bass player from the Chicago Civic Opera and I never had a problem with reading—I was playing Mendelssohn's Concerto in E-minor so there was no problem. I said, 'Where's the music?' and there was no music, so Benny Payne, the piano player, said, 'You just cock your ear and listen, and I'll call off the changes to you.'

"Benny was most kind and we've had many laughs about this later; I'm about S'7" and Al Morgan was a tall man, he must have been 6'3". There was no time to get new uniforms so I had to wear his clothes, and when I put on his coat I was just drowning in it. His arms were much longer than mine so that you couldn't see my hands because they didn't come out through the sleeves. The guys said I looked like Ichabod Crane or somebody—I'm playing bass through the coat-sleeves and they were laughing.

"I had never really played with a big band of that caliber, and when they hit it that first night it almost frightened me to death. The black guys in those days used to wear their hair in a pompadour—it was long in front and we would plaster it down with grease and comb it back and it would stay down. Of course, when it got hot that grease melted and our hair would stand straight up. I had this big coat on and I got to playing and the grease ran all out of my hair and my hair was standing up all over my head and Benny Payne is calling out these chords to me—'B-flat! C! F!' The guys in the band told me later that they were just rolling with laughter, they could hardly contain themselves, because I was really playing good but I looked so ungod­ly funny.

"Finally Cab saw that the guys liked me and we were having so much fun that he said, 'We'll give him a blood test.' There was a special tune that Al Morgan did, featuring a bass solo, called 'The Reefer Man.' Cab said, 'OK—"The Reefer Man,'" and my eyes got big as saucers because I didn't know anything about this new music. I said, 'How does it go?' Benny Payne said, 'You start it,' and I said, 'What!?' He said, 'We'll give you the tempo but it just starts with the bass—just get into the key of F.'

I tell you, I started playing F, I chromaticized F, I squared F, I cubed F, I played F every conceivable way, and they just let me go on for five or 10 minutes, alone, playing this bass, slapping the bass, and doing all this on this F chord. Finally Cab brought the band in with a 'two... three... four' and they played the arrangement. Benny's calling off the chords to me, and after three or four min­utes the whole band lays out and Benny says, 'Now you've got it alone again,' and here I go back into this F. I must have played five or 10 minutes, and Benny comes over and says, 'Now you just act like you've fainted and just fall right back and I'll catch you,' and I did it and it was quite a sensation as far as the public was concerned, and the musicians were just out of their skulls they were laughing so.

"By the time we got to New York, Ben Webster liked me and Claude Jones liked me and the guys all said, 'This guy's going to make it,' so I was in. I stayed with the band 16 years, until 1951.”

Bill Perkins - "A Kind of Comet"

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

"Nobody could have been luckier" than to play with Herman and Kenton, Perkins told the Los Angeles Times."Though they were both very different, they were both forward-looking and never told you how to play. Stan especially gave me a “feeling of worth" -- a sense that "being a jazz musician was something of great value."

Here’s another “early-in-their-career” posting drawn from the same February 1956 edition of Metronome magazine as the recent “Bud Shank - Burning Brighter” feature. Not sure of the reason for the celestial references in the titles of these two pieces as Sputnik and the great space race wasn’t launched until the fall of 1957.

1956 was the year of my first exposure to tenor saxophonist Bill Perkins and it came in the form of his hauntingly beautiful saxophone solo on Bill Holman’s arrangement of Yesterdays on Stan Kenton’s Capitol LP Contemporary Concepts.

That LP also serves up alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano’s masterful solo interpretation of Stella By Starlight, another Holman arrangement.

Ironically, neither Bill nor Charlie cared much for their solos on these cuts, for as Michael Spake, the distinguished Kenton scholar, explains in his insert notes to the CD version:

“The solo pieces came along later, and because of a lack of rehearsal time, neither Mariano nor Perkins were satisfied with their recorded solos, both of which have come to be regarded as masterpieces of invention. …

"Yesterdays" is a dazzling mood piece, deep and brooding, with well-paced brass climaxes. According to Holman: "I wrote 'Yesterdays' with Perk in mind. I'd known him for several years, and I knew his playing. It was a good period for me." Perkins elaborates: "A lot of the music came in during the week we recorded, so it was cold. I mean, the first time I played 'Yesterdays' was on the record session, and I was totally befuddled by it - I was very unhappy with the way I played. But that record has done more for me than any other, so maybe people like it because I was just going on my instincts alone.

The secret of Bill's success is taste and voice-leading, but in addition 'Yesterdays' has the Holman mystique, the darkness, because Bill's personality is on the dark side - he's not the smilingest person." (Something reflected, perhaps, in Perk's own playing).”

Those of us who find Bill's solo on "Yesterdays" a classic may take comfort from [trombonist] Don Reed: "Whenever Perk got up to play, I listened, because I knew something creative and interesting was going to come out. And all the time I was on the band, I don't think I ever heard Bill play 'Yesterdays' the same way twice, and we played it every night, but none was as good as the original recording, in my opinion."

Here’s Burt  Korall’s piece on the ascendant years of Bill Perkins’ career at the conclusion of which you’ll find a video of Bill performing Yesterdays from the Kenton Contemporary Concepts album.

“Up until 1947, Bill Perkins had never planned on being anything but an engineer, and the idea had gotten as far as a few years in that course of study at Stanford University in California, where he was born. However, at this juncture in his life, the attraction for music in general, and jazz in particular, assumed grand proportions, and engineering with all its obvious long-term security was left behind for full expansion of time and mental resources on the less reliable, but more gratifying life of a jazz musician.

To sway a little from our course for a moment, it is essential to interject that this sort of move at the age of twenty-four took conviction and belief in himself, for the life of the itinerant jazz musician is not all it is painted in motion pictures and novels. The road gets mighty tortuous both on the road to the top, and on Greyhound buses between dates. The closeness of the unemployment office (two weeks notice away) plus the distance from warm, familiar surroundings becomes more than a passing thought after the glamor of the first couple of tours has worn the seat of your pants and patience thin.

For Bill, the step was taken with no reservations, and it was in his hands to prove that his course of endeavor was not mere whim or passing fancy. The formative stages were usual, but were approached with an intensity of concentration equal to making up for the lateness of his decision. (The factor of age is still a thorn in his side, for so many musicians start cutting their way through the forest at a very tender age.) He quickly acquainted himself with the main streams of influence in his field, and picked his point on the compass . . . toward individual modernity through the Lester Young School.

Development and native talent permitted him to join the Woody Herman band a few short years ago, and continual contact with other thinking musicians proved a definite incentive and catalyst for more pronounced expansion in outlook, and growth in individual self-expression. It was brought out in our pleasant get-together that association with serious minded musicians and the inspirational environment of a blowing band are indispensable spurs to this particular musician's ambition. Unlike some musicians who find peace and progress in a temporary respite from the scene, Perkins feels it can only serve to impede his development. (He has tried it, and has found it to affect him badly.) This closeness to the people who make progress in our music and thankfulness for same, was reiterated in our conversation with a special nod to a mutual favorite, altoist Davey Schildkraut, who gave much needed help and encouragement when Bill first joined the Kenton band. Happy words of admiration for many musicians permeated our talk, with unwarranted qualifications of his own talent. This very awareness of the value of others, in combination with a rare definition of purpose, are primary reasons for the great strides he has made in the last year.

A long low bow of admiration goes in the direction of the enigma for modem tenor players, Lester Young. Bill's reverence for Pres was brought to the conversational forefront when we returned to the hotel to revel in the recorded sound that was Pres at the peak of his powers. While these old Basic records were telling their story, Bill expressed his desire to be worthy of hearing them. For him, any sacrificing of time and energy would be worth the sacrificing for one night's approximation of Lester's consummate beauty of sound and idea. We shared the opinion that initial discovery of Pres for any interested person, is probably one of the most fortunate moments of jazz listening.

My first awareness of the existence and possible importance of Bill Perkins, one of Lester's most devoted disciples, came with a few airshots of the Herman band from the Hotel Statler about three years ago. This, in addition to some favorable comment about him from critic Ralph Gleason in Down Beat. It was not until the Ken ton orchestra came to town last June that I was permitted opportunity to hear Bill at length. At that time, my reaction was a forceful one, but rehearing him this trip convinced me that more people should be made aware of this musician. His shiny tenor vibrates with rhythmic vitality, and his is a playing of definitive fluency on selections of any temper or tempo.

Of course, time will give his individuality a chance for real completeness, but his position is already a strong one.”

—Burt  Korall