The Creative World of Stan Kenton - Part 3

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

I'm learning as I'm going, but fortunately with the help of many Kenton specialists, a decent bibliography-discography and the availability of many interviews with musicians who were on the band during this period, I'll develop a broader understanding and appreciation of Kenton 70's music to share with you in these continuing features on the subject. Along the way, I'll also share my "take" based on what I hear in the music from the last decade of Stan's "creative" journey in the world of big band Jazz.

In this regard, I wonder what influence the Don Ellis Bands of the late 1960s and early 1970s may have had on Kenton music during these later years?

Before delving more closely into the bands and recordings from the decade of the 1970s, let’s step back and trace the developments that led to the launching of The Creative World of Stan Kenton, itself.

With today’s compression, digitalization and self-production/self-publishing techniques, not to mention audio file sharing, the following may read like something from a science fiction novel, but it was really a big deal for those times. It’s a fascinating tale of what the recording world was like for a renowned Jazz musician 50 years ago.

The following excerpts from Dr. William F. Lee’s Stan Kenton: Artistry in Rhythm [1994] comes at this subject from a number of perspectives and a variety of sources. Collectively they are probably the most detailed description of all aspects of the early origins of The Creative World of Stan Kenton in publication. The take-away from this is that we are talking about much more than just a record label. 

Creative World

“I have long felt the need to reach those of you vitally interested in the music and activities of The Kenton Orchestra. Right now - because of our exciting plans for the future - I feel that need more strongly than ever . . . and that is why The Creative World of Stan Kenton has been formed - a new organization, a new means of linking the Kenton Orchestra and its fans.”

- Stan Kenton

“The Creative World of Stan Kenton came into being in 1960, to offset the lack of promotional interest by the record companies. Although originally designed to alleviate the sagging record-sales situation, it also achieved considerable success in promoting Stan Kenton as a man, creative artist and band leader, and the activities of the band.

Before this active merchandising campaign, the Kenton album promotions were restricted to consumer ads. The half-page on which they appeared was shared with at least four other artists, and was a one-shot promotion. In 1962, purchasers of Kenton albums found an invitation on the dust sleeves to join a new "club", and receive a newsletter published monthly with detailed information on the band's activities and, of course, advance notices of new releases.

As a first step, the new campaign set out to familiarize the public with the mellophonium, and with the band. Blowups of the mellophonium, with copy explaining its origin and the reason why Kenton was using it, were made up by publicity man Noel Wedder. Six feet high, these displays were placed in the lobbies of concert and dance halls where the band played, and were backed up by a 16-page program, entitled simply "Stan Kenton Orchestra." 

It had a photo of the mellophonium on the first page and was otherwise devoted to Kenton and his band: photos of recording sessions and rehearsals, and stories on the band's activities. The very last page had a list of Kenton records, and the selections played at the concerts.

An important part of the book was the back cover, where there was a coupon and an invitation to join the Creative World of Stan Kenton. Once the Kenton organization received the coupon - one was also printed on every dust sleeve as well as on the program - it knew it had reached a consumer who was definitely interested in keeping abreast of its many creative activities.

Registered fans were officially welcomed by the receipt of a personalized card and the newsletter. The latter, in addition to information concerning the band's activities, gave a list of all records. As a method of informing audiences about new releases, it proved very effective. The newsletter announced records three months before they were on the market, or at about the time their production started. This meant that by inquiries received, Kenton could accurately gauge how sales would go within royalty periods. Besides selling records, it also helped to determine which particular album would be the most successful in a given period.

Interest in the newsletter was so high that Kenton and his staff queried the readers as to what they felt should be the next musical venture. For instance, after the success of West Side Story, it was thought that they should try another musical, and a recording with Tex Ritter. Reader response to both ideas was favorable.

With its sales picture looking good, the orchestra felt it had broken the stigma long associated with being a big brass-oriented band. It found that it could utilize material other than jazz without changing the basic character of the orchestra, and for that reason it created a new library of music valued at $245,000. [About $2,210,433 today].

The members of the Creative World were quite diversified. They came from all walks of life and all ages. Perhaps the largest age group was between 25 and 35 and mostly professionals: doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects, engineers, actors and writers.

Kenton felt the public was definitely buying more of his records as a result of the advance information. He said proof of this was the success of a ballad album, The Sophisticated Approach of Stan Kenton, released on March 5,1962, which sold 27,000 copies. Over-all sales increased 32 per cent, and doubled within six months. Bookings for concerts, nightclub and TV appearances, and dances increased 25 percent and brought the band such choice dates across the U.S. as Basin Street East in New York, the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, and TV's Ed Sullivan Show.

In addition to the Creative World of Stan Kenton, which was aimed at the record buyer, there was a heavy publicity campaign aimed at every jazz and music editor in the U.S. and Canada. Copies of new albums were sent to key disc jockeys in radio stations across the country. The campaign as a whole served to enhance Stan Kenton's image as a creative man, and was only one of the vehicles he used to maintain that image.

By the late '60s Kenton had become disenchanted with Capitol Records and hammered out an agreement with them to establish his own record label. Ralph J. Gleason reported on this activity on Friday, January 9, 1970, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

KENTON'S SIGNIFICANT RECORD COMPANY

Stan Kenton is a musician who has developed a strong personal following, almost a cult, over the years and the Kenton people support and continue to support his music.

Now Kenton has just formed his own record label which he will use to sell Kenton albums from the Capitol catalogue back over the years. About half a dozen are being planned for release in the first six months of this year.

What Kenton is doing is going to be watched very closely by many people in the record business. If it works for him, it is going to be tried by other artists who have special followings. At least one other major artist is currently planning a mail order record business which would eliminate both the regular manufacturer and the middleman wholesaler . . .

The following day, January 10, Billboard gave even more information:

KENTON FORMS LABEL TO SELL MASTERS LEASED FROM

CAPITOL

Los Angeles - Stan Kenton has formed his own record label to sell via mail order his catalog masters leased from Capitol. The Creative World of Stan Kenton is the company name upon which the bandleader is offering albums which Capitol no longer stocks.

Three weeks ago, Kenton made available his first seven titles. Six more are planned in about three months. Of the 60 albums Kenton has recorded for Capitol since joining the roster in 1943, he feels 30 are of prime interest to educators and jazz buffs.

He pays Capitol a royalty on any product he sells via direct mail. Capitol's custom department presses the albums for him and he charges $5.50 per title. . .

By January 13, 1970, newspapers such as the Jackson Daily News, and The Cincinnati Enquirer brought different versions of the same story to their constituents:

KENTON SELLS OWN

In an unusual marketing move, one of the most innovative of the big bandsmen of 20 years ago has announced something called "The Creative World of Stan Kenton," through which he will offer, by mail order, selections of his Capitol masters which are no longer available. Mr. Kenton gives two reasons: rack jobbers are not interested in stocking product not catering to mass tastes and two, he has been receiving letters "from people all over the world" asking about availability of his LP's. . .

'CREATIVE WORLD' ALBUMS ISSUED TO PLACATE STAN'S DISAPPOINTED FANS

In my most recent chat with Stan Kenton - it was when he last appeared with his band at the Living Room, downtown - he talked at length about his recordings. Loyal Kentonites (he told me) had complained of the difficulty of getting hold of his earlier recordings; "rack jobbers" (as they are called) simply stopped stocking Stan Kenton items. . .

I have always admired Stan Kenton for his refusal to gallop off in all directions after the latest popular music fads. I was proud to be called a "Kenton fan" even though I spent, and still spend, 95 percent of my time listening to and writing about "serious" (so-called) music. Yet, no one is more serious about his role in music dom than Stan. He calls his music "jazz with dimension. .. music that I feel is an oasis in a wasteland of mass musical conformity.". . .

After eight months of maintaining his own record label with Capitol, Kenton made the decision to break away and form his own company, Creative World Records. Stan's public relations firm, JoeX. Price Associates, made the announcement in a news release dated September 21, 1970:

KENTON QUITS CAPITOL AFTER 27 YEARS; FORMS CREATIVE

WORLD RECORDS

In a protest move spurred by Capitol Records' failure to promote jazz among an estimated 1,000,000 devotees in this country alone, Stan Kenton has left the label with which he has been associated since 1943. Capitol was just a year old when Kenton cut his first four sides ("Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me," "Eager Beaver," his theme, "Artistry In Rhythm" and "Harlem Folk Dance") on Nov. 19, 1943.

In the 27 years Kenton has been with the label, he has etched 47 albums, beginning with "Artistry In Rhythm" and ending with "Hair" which he recorded late in 1969.

On severing his contractual ties with Capitol Records, Kenton issued a statement in which he noted he had exited the label "because of the company's lack of interest in and ability to promote my style of music. There are at least a million jazz buffs in this country but their tastes are bypassed by companies who cater to the rack jobbers who control the industry. They (the rack jobbers) tell the manufacturers what they want to sell and what records they want to handle. Capitol succumbed to their control, as did every other record company I can think of.

"We have some inkling of the tastes of the masses," said Kenton, who simultaneously announced the reorganization of his own production company, Creative World of Stan Kenton, and the formation of a new diskery adjunct, Creative World Records, through which he intends to fight the "control by rack jobbers" by producing and distributing his own product. Initially, distribution will be solely by mail order.

In addition to Kenton who is president of Creative World, Clint Roemer has been named vice president-secretary and Harold Plant is treasurer.

Before departing Los Angeles for a three-month tour of the U.S. and Europe, Kenton last week put finishing touches to his first CWLP which is now being pressed and which will be ready for distribution in October. Kenton's first stop in the tour was Albuquerque, New Mexico. He and his 19-piece orchestra are scheduled to return to the Los Angeles homebase on December 15.

Kenton has noted during all of his previous tours that jazz buffs are eager to listen to and absorb his style of music. Thousands have given him their names and addresses for two reasons. First, because they are Kenton fans and second, because they felt it was a link with the jazz world. These thousands of names will now be receiving announcements about the "list" available via Creative World, Inc. whose address is Box 35216, Los Angeles 90035.

AUDREE COKE: Creative World's mailing list today totals almost 100,000 names of fans of Stan Kenton and of big band jazz. The most successful promotion we ever did was through the little Creative World magazine — until postage costs became exorbitant.

On   September  25,   1970,   Variety  picked   up  the  story  and

released it this way:

STAN KENTON SPINS OFF CAP WAX AFTER 27 YRS DISGRUNTLED

Stan Kenton, bypassed lately because of the current trend by waxeries to exploit only those pop disks which loom quick sellers, has departed Capitol after 27 years to form his own Creative World Records. First album will be "Live At Redlands U," to be sold mostly through mail orders.

Kenton, just before leaving with his orch on a one-nighter tour, explained the big reason for exiting Cap was "lack of interest in and ability to promote my style of music. . ."

In his years at Cap, Kenton turned out 47 albums. Finale was his version of the "Hair" score last year. . .

The  Hollywood Reporter told  of the separation and newly-founded company on the same day:

KENTON ANGRY WITH CAPITOL; ON HIS OWN

Stan Kenton has severed his Capitol Records ties, simultaneously blasting the label for "its lack of interest in and ability to promote my style of music," and announced reorganization of his production and distribution companies.

"There are at least a million jazz buffs in this country but their tastes are bypassed by companies who cater to the rack jobbers who control the industry," Kenton charged. . .

He named Clint Roemer v-p and secretary of Creative World and Harold Plant treasurer.

By May 29, 1971, the word had gotten to Europe and was spread in England's Melody Maker:

CREATIVE STAN

So it's not just the young Turks who need to set up their own record labels in order to get their music heard. Even the venerable Stan Kenton has been backed into the same pen.

Apparently thwarted by Capitol, with whom he's been associated for more years then I've been alive, Kenton has procured all his old masters and has set up an organization called The Creative World of Stan Kenton (which exists as a kind of record club) to produce and sell through the mail Stan's records. . .

Don Lass discussed the Kenton determination in The Asbury Park Sunday Press on June 6, 1971:

THE CREATIVE WORLD

The Kenton Years: Stan Kenton has been making music for the masses since the war years. His bands have rivaled Ellington's as the most progressive in jazz, from the "artistry" sounds, through "innovations," "progressive jazz," and the Neophonic experiment to the current assemblage that is helping bring big jazz bands back to prominence. As Harvey Siders said in a recent downbeat article, "Kenton's bands have gone through more changes than a maternity ward."

But Kenton has been tragically overlooked at many points of his long career, which has been the fate of most great band leaders. In the main it's because of the nature of the recording business, the notorious rack jobbers, the archaic copyright laws, and the lack of promotion on the part of the record companies. Kenton has fought hard for the rights of the creative musician. 

His aim is to reach young America with good music and he has become a crusader, battling great odds. His recent success is turning heads.

Kenton is fighting the battle on his own. Last year he severed ties with Capitol records, for which he had made over 50 albums since 1943, and started his own label, Creative World Records, which is releasing the Capitol masters and bringing new Kenton sounds to a new generation of listeners. It is the first major move of its kind by an established leader and it is being done strictly by mail order. . .

AUDREE COKE: Mart Sahl, who sincerely loved and admired Stanley, also enjoyed kidding him. When Creative World was formed, there was a great deal of publicity about it. Mort, in the staccato Sahl fashion, immediately began telling his audiences: "When Stan Kenton spills his cup of coffee, he doesn't say, 'Somebody help me clean this up.' He says, 'Look, I have created a mess!'"

A superlative review of one of Creative World's early recordings was printed in the Stereo Review in August, 1971:

RECORDING OF SPECIAL MERIT

Stan Kenton: Live At Redlands University

Performance: Mighty Recording: Good

Something wonderful is happening in the record industry. The great talents, fed up with the dung shoveled at them from the major companies, are forming their own labels. Rod McKuen has already done this, and now Stan Kenton is not only recording new and exhilarating albums for people who do not think jazz is dead, but has also acquired rights to all of the out-of-print back issues of his recordings on the Capitol label for reissue on his own label, called the Creative World of Stan Kenton. These recordings have never sounded fresher, nor have been more welcome to tired ears. So far Stan has amassed a list. . . of twenty-one albums now offered to jazz collectors, albums that were previously only lamented memories of greatness. . .

Kenton's company, like the man himself, was prone to innovation. An article in Billboard on October 9, 1971 announced Creative World's move into quadraphonic recording:

KENTON LINE IN 4-CHANNEL BOW

Los Angeles - Creative World, Stan Kenton's label which distributes by direct mail and through a group of select retailers, will release its first 4-channel two-LP album in November, probably priced at $9.50, according to Clint Roemer, sales chief. The LP will probably be the first "live" discrete quadrasonic recording to hit the market, having been recorded during a five-hour free concert by the Kenton band at Dion Hall on the Brigham Young university campus, Provo, Utah. The concert was the highlight of the fifth annual Audio Recording Seminar, staged by the Electronic/Media department of the school. Bill Putnam of United Recording Corp., using equipment of the school, recorded the concert, while John Heal of Glen Glenn mixed. The LP will also be released in matrix. . .

AUDREE COKE: Creative World's best selling albums, in declining order, are KENTON ‘76 (CWST-1076), 7.5 ON THE RICHTER SCALE (CWST-1077), HITS IN CONCERT(CWST-1074), and FIRE, FURY AND FUN (CW ST-1073).

“After seventeen months of Creative World operations, Kenton reviewed the progress of the company in "A Message From Stan" in the February, 1972 issue of the Creative World Magazine:

Since the first communique from the Creative World was put into the mail some eighteen months ago, our membership has expanded to more than twenty times its original size.

Because of the band's constant activity during this period of time, I have had the opportunity to come into contact with great numbers of people, not only you of the Creative World, but also members of the press, radio and television mediums. All have shown great concern for the future of this unique organization. These meetings have rewarded me with the reassurance that my original concepts of the need for the Creative World were and still are valid.

Specifically, there are people all over the world who are searching for experiences within music which transcend the simple tastes of the masses. These same persons are involved in our activities to the extent that a great many travel far distances to be present at the band's personal appearances. 

The mail pouring into our office expresses satisfaction for what we are creating. The effort you have put forth to interest others in the Creative World by sending us names and addresses to be added to the mailing list is heartening. The response by the purchase of albums made available through Creative World makes it possible for us to move ahead by investing in more good music, new as well as old. The achievements of the orchestra in the past eighteen months in recordings, the field of music education and public performances of many types could not have been possible without all my friends - you who have supported the Creative World.

I believe it is time that I came to honest terms with the Creative World in regard to its relationship to myself and my goals. In truth, your support cannot really be measured. I sincerely believe that the orchestra, its existence and success are the result of your efforts more than my own.”

The National Observer, on March 4, 1972, printed a story by Robert Ostermann regarding the general dearth of recording opportunities for jazz musicians:

SPURNED BY STORES, JAZZMEN SELL DISCS BY MAIL

Dizzy Gillespie is a giant of jazz, but he's currently without a recording contract.

He's not alone. As the jazz market has shrunk, record companies have limited their production of the music. And when the companies do cut a jazz album, most distributors stock only a few copies or none at all. Even the work of such notable performers as Miles Davis is hard to find in many stores.

Result: a few stubborn entrepreneurs - some of them musicians, some of them producers-are attempting to find the jazz audience through direct-mail selling.

Pianist-bandleader   Stan   Kenton   is   among   the   most

determined. . .

A rather lengthy article by Kenton discussing the jazz market appeared in the Music Journal in May, 1972:

CONTROL YOUR PRODUCT

. . . The rapid success of the Creative World over the past two years has proven the original theory that a market does exist for something other than current selections being foisted on a passive public by the selling agents. 

However minor the jazz market may be in terms of monetary potential, it is our belief that this need must be filled, so that the educated, mature audiences will continue to be provided with the enjoyment they seek.

Harvey Steinman waxed enthusiastic about the new release in The Miami Herald on Sunday, May 14, 1972:

KENTON'S 'MAIL ORDER' RECORDS ARE A MUST FOR JAZZ COLLECTOR

Unless the proprietor of your favorite record shop has some dusty old copies floating around, the only way you can get a Stan Kenton record nowadays is by mail. . .

All this by way of introducing two outstanding contributions to jazz recording literature: Stan Kenton Live at Redlands University and Stan Kenton Live at Brigham Young University, doubtless the finest of recordings of the best of Kenton's current band. And the only way to get them is by mail.

By 1973, The Creative World of Stan Kenton was firmly established as expressed on April 20 by Tom Murtha in the Minneapolis Star.

GOOD FRIENDS GET TOGETHER: KENTON'S BAND, ITS

FOLLOWING

. . . Kenton's recently revitalized and fast-growing following feels a special kinship to the 61-year-old iconoclast who abandoned conventional record companies about two years ago to form his own mail-order organization, "The Creative World of Stan Kenton."

Maynard Ferguson and His Orchestra - Oleo

Sometimes I'm Happy (Live In Washington, D.C. / 1956)

Lester Young in Washington, D.C. "Swing, or I'll Kill You"

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

An absurdity perpetuated in Jazz literature is that in the final decade and a half of his life [he died in 1959], Lester Young was a shadow of his former self and was no longer the “protean originator” who changed the soloist art while a member of the Count Basie Band in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The Jazz fan can find evidence to the contrary in a 4 CD set on Pablo Records which were recorded in performance at Olivia Davis’s Patio Lounge in Washington D.C. in December 1956.

On any given night with the right rhythm section, “Prez” [vocalist Billie Holiday’s nickname for “the president of the tenor saxophone] could burn with swing and lyricism “to surpass his multitude of imitators and all but the most inspired creations of his youth.”

The Bill Potts rhythm section with bassist Norman Williams and drummer Jim Lucht was the right rhythm section for Prez when he worked at Olivia Davis’s nightspot in December 1956. Fortunately, too, Potts taped the gig.

More music from the December 1956 Prez gig at the Patio Lounge was subsequently found which included trombonist Earl Swope on four tracks and these were issued as a 5th volume in the set. “Swope was one of the first modern stylists and a section-mate of the great Bill Harris in Woody Herman’s Second Herd.”

The following article about this splendid Lester Young night club appearance in Washington, D.C. was written by Eddie Dean and published under the heading - “Swing, or I'll Kill You" in the August 8, 2003 edition of The Washington City Paper.”

© Copyright ® Eddie Dean and The Washington City Paper, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Before Bill Potts made his 1959 classic, The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess, he and his trio made musical history in a D.C. nightclub.

It was the winter of 1956, and Bill Potts had to talk to his boss. He had just finished a gig with the house band at Olivia Davis’ Patio Lounge when the club’s owner pulled the group aside. A regal, domineering woman, Davis could pass for a senator’s wife or a salty madam. First and foremost, though, she was a businesswoman, a survivor in the cutthroat downtown nightclub scene.

And just now, she had business to discuss with her employees, three musicians young enough to be her sons. It had been a decent year at the Patio Lounge, but things always dropped off around the holidays. “Well, gentlemen,” Davis said, “it’s so near Christmas I’m not going to spend a lot of money. So we hired a guy named Lester Young.”

Lester Young. That was a magic name to Potts and his bandmates.

With Count Basie’s orchestra in the ’30s, Young had changed the way the sax was played. Instead of blowing the roof off, he coaxed a lyrical, intimate tone from his tenor, like the sweetest soothsayer whispering secrets in your ear. His music had inspired an entire generation; all the current tenor men, from Stan Getz to Dexter Gordon to Zoot Sims, were disciples. And Young’s reach went well beyond musicians: His solo flights on such songs as “Lester Leaps In” had helped Allen Ginsberg find the rhythms for “Howl.”

At the time, though, the standard line on Young was that he was washed up. A stint in the Army during World War II had damaged him mentally and physically, and many dismissed him as a shell of his former self. In 1955, a nervous breakdown landed him in Bellevue. These days, he often worked gigs with whatever rhythm section a club offered. That was how Davis could hire him for a weeklong engagement at a bargain rate. After revolutionizing jazz, the 47-year-old Prez, as Young was known, was now a low-budget fill-in on a slow week during the holidays.

Potts and his group had heard all the sad tales about Young, but they didn’t dampen their spirits. Their hero was coming to town, and they were going to be his band. “We were flabbergasted when she told us Prez was going to be here,” remembers Potts, now retired and living in Florida. “Our mouths just dropped. We told her that he was God. Of course, she was happy that we were happy.”

Six nights with Lester Young. What more could anybody could ask for?

If Young was on his way down, Potts was headed in the other direction. At 28, he was already a veteran musician, not only as both leader and sideman, but also as a writer and arranger for the best-known big band in Washington, an all-star ensemble known as THE Orchestra. Earlier that year, his friend Norman “Willie” Williams, a 27-year-old graduate of Petworth’s Theodore Roosevelt High, had called him about an opening for a pianist with the Patio Lounge house band.

A bass player, Williams had never been in front of the microphone, and he asked his buddy to lead the trio. “I loved the way Bill played,” Williams says, “and I thought he was a nut because he’d eat lit cigarettes or I thought he was eating ’em. He’d act like he’d chewed it and swallowed it. He was just mouthing ’em, but he was pretty slick with it. I’d call people over and say, ‘Show ’em, Bill.’”

Potts had recently left the Army after a six-year hitch and was working a day job as a technician at the U.S. Recording Co. on Vermont Avenue NW. “There were a lot of pianists that played better than I did,” says Potts. “Piano playing was more of a sideline, because I spent most of the time writing. But Willie wanted me because I had led so many groups and I could kick off the tempos and call the tunes.”

Olivia Davis’ Patio Lounge it sounded classy and sophisticated, even if there was no patio and the lounge was a second-floor walk-up without windows. It was in a turn-of-the-century building on 13th Street NW, in the shadow of the neon strip of clubs along 14th Street known as the Block.

The Block was where you took your girl for a big night on the town: dinner and a show and some slow dancing to a champagne-bubble orchestra. But the Patio Lounge was where you took your mistress to hear some jazz. It was a hideaway, a low-lit refuge where you could catch Art Tatum taming a piano in a room so quiet you could hear his feet working the pedals. Davis wasn’t peddling sequined showgirls or pop singers; she was hawking jazz. Not the quaint trad jazz you could hear over at the Mayfair, or the retro Dixieland of the Bayou, or even the sort of pedestrian local jazz Davis had featured at the Merry-Land, the club she ran before opening the Patio Lounge in 1955.

No, this time Davis was more serious. She billed her new club as “Washington’s Only Showplace for Jazz” and brought in rising stars such as Chet Baker; acts in their prime such as Max Roach, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Art Blakey; and such future legends as a young Charles Mingus, who accompanied the Teddy Charles Trio in the summer of 1955.

The Bill Potts Trio worked the Patio Lounge six nights a week, mostly as the intermission band, sometimes backing the headliner. Davis paid top dollar to get the big names, but for the house band, the pay was lousy. It was union scale peanuts, really and the players’ bar tab often matched what they made. The house piano wasn’t in the best shape, either. “It was the worst piano in the world,” says Potts. “It was awful.”

But none of that mattered. Potts and his band were getting free lessons from the greats who came through town, and they were teaching each other, too. “Bill was always my idol,” says Williams. “I learned my harmony from him, more than anyone else.”

Potts, in turn, had found a bassist who complemented his “arranger’s-style” piano playing. “He was my left hand for a long time. And he was such a fast learner that I just forgot about using my left hand, because, in no time at all, Willie was playing all the right notes. He was a helluva bass player, and we were musically compatible.” It was a great time: Along with drummer Jim Lucht, Potts and Williams had a steady gig doing what they loved - playing 

It was Basie’s orchestra with Young that first captivated Potts. He grew up in Arlington, the son of a government worker who gave him a Hawaiian guitar, which was all the rage in the ’30s. But Potts didn’t take to the instrument, and he soon switched to accordion. Northern Virginia, like much of the area around Washington, was a hotbed of hillbilly music, and that’s what Potts was exposed to as a youngster, along with what he now calls “pop trash.”

At 15, Potts played a rendition of “Twilight Time” that won him first prize in a talent show sponsored by WWDC AM and MC’d by celebrity DJ Willis Conover. But Potts’ taste had already changed. “My sister got a phonograph, and she’d play Gene Autry 78s, some Bill Monroe,” he recalls. “That’s all there was in the house until one day on the radio I heard Count Basie and nearly had an orgasm. That’s when I flipped. Now, Bill Basie, the secret to his piano playing was simplicity. He’d leave open spaces and play one note, but exactly the right note at the right place was just a ding.”

Potts was hooked for life, and he was on the road with a jazz band before he had his driver’s license. Ira Sabin, founder of JazzTimes, was in Marvin Scott’s big band with Potts when they were teenagers, in the mid-’40s. “They had auditions in a studio around Thomas Circle, and we went down there,” says Sabin, a drummer at the time. “And the first thing [Scott] did was play a bebop tune way up, you know, and bam! We played and we had a fucking ball for about 15 minutes. Then he walked up to us and said, ‘Now, we will not play any of this kind of music, and if you want to come with me, you’re hired.’ He was booking a commercial band, and bebop was not commercially viable.” In the ’40s, Potts made several tours of the South.

It was in the Army that Potts received his most valuable musical education. At the start of the Korean War, he enlisted and got a position as copyist with the U.S. Army Band at Fort Myer. Potts had already started composing songs when he was a student at Washington-Lee High School (“The first chart I wrote was to ‘Hey Bop a Rebop’ - it was terrible”); his new job was the perfect apprenticeship to hone his craft. “Being a copyist was a great way to learn how to write,” he says. “You learn from the arrangers, because you copy their scores and hear them performed at rehearsals, and certain things you like, you take note of. You can examine how the man did it, how he voiced it.”

By 1951, Potts had joined THE Orchestra, a group of seasoned musicians who’d been on the road with top big bands. The leader was drummer Joe Timer. A veteran of the Elliot Lawrence band, Timer had played with John Coltrane when they were Navy men stationed together in Hawaii. Other members included the Swope brothers, Earl and Rob. An alumnus of Woody Herman’s legendary Second Herd band, Earl was regarded as the premier modern-jazz trombonist, the first to apply bebop stylings to the instrument. Rob was also a trombone player and had replaced Earl in Buddy Rich’s band. And there were saxophonist Angelo Tompros and two young trumpeters, Charlie Walp and Markie Markowitz.

Back in their hometown, they were itching to play for kicks, a break from their routine of saloon and society-dance gigs. On Sunday afternoons, THE Orchestra played Club Kavakos, a decades-old neighborhood joint at 8th and H Streets NE in a blue-collar section of town. Operated by Bill and Johnny Kavakos, it was a rough-and-tumble place for locals to blow off steam. Kavakos wasn’t strictly a jazz club at all. Most nights featured a couple of floor shows, with guest singers and comedians, tap dancers, and strippers such as Irene Boyd, “the Cream of Canada.”

The peak season for these Sunday-afternoon shows was the fall and winter months, when the games at Griffith Stadium boosted attendance. “Everybody would go to the Redskins games,” recalls Bill Mayhugh, a regular at Kavakos and a DJ at WMAL AM for 24 years. “And when the game was over, at 4 o’clock or so, all the musician-loving people would flock over to Kavakos to see Joe Timer and THE Orchestra.”

The group’s high profile was also in part due to the presence of Conover, who agreed to “present” THE Orchestra. Conover’s show, on WMAL AM, had made jazz converts of countless listeners; he had impeccable taste, employed artful segues of classic and modern jazz, and didn’t affect any pseudo-hip slang. And he seduced his audience with an ultra-mellifluous, made-for-radio voice, a mesmerizing blend of professor, raconteur, and elocution teacher. The late poet Joseph Brodsky, who heard Conover’s Voice of America broadcasts as a youngster in Russia, hailed it as “the richest-in-the-world bass baritone of Willis Conover.”

When Conover put out a call for arrangements for THE Orchestra in 1951, Potts contributed new material. Soon the 14-piece ensemble was showcasing such Potts compositions as “Pill Box,” “Willis,” and “Light Green.” This was bold, textured, polyphonic jazz full of nuance and sly humor, a far cry from the shrill, screaming brass of the big-band sound popular at the time. “Potts is an extremely creative writer in a lot of areas, and not just in the Basie bag,” says Mayhugh. “We always described Potts’ writing as ‘happy.’ It made you want to snap your fingers, shake your head, and tap your foot.”

At the Sunday matinees, Potts didn’t perform with THE Orchestra, but he was a constant presence. He set up the microphones and often recorded the shows with equipment borrowed from the U.S. Army Band. Along with Conover, Potts became synonymous with THE Orchestra. The two men helped the group gain a cult following among local jazz fans, but more importantly, they made THE Orchestra a band that other musicians clamored to hear and wanted to play with.

Conover exploited this situation to bring special guests to Kavakos. In February 1953, he invited Charlie Parker to the club, and the saxophonist’s unadvertised appearance stunned the Sunday crowd. THE Orchestra was onstage, working off its sheet music, and here came Parker, with no time to rehearse. “He showed up with a plastic saxophone,” says Potts. “He was always hocking his horn, and I think somebody gave it to him. It was clear plastic you could see right through it. Bird had no music stand, no guide, nothing except a great pair of ears. Everybody gave up their solos for Bird.”

Two years later, Dizzy Gillespie fronted THE Orchestra at Kavakos. Potts captured both shows on tape, and the subsequently released albums have garnered critical raves. In a snippet of post-concert dialogue from the Gillespie tape, Potts captured the camaraderie that was part of those Sunday afternoons:

Packing up, Gillespie yells to Conover: “How ’bout the bread, Willis?”

“Dizzy, when I make it,” intones Conover, ever the straight man, “you’ll make it.”

“I’ll make it upside your head,” shouts Gillespie.

Not long after, THE Orchestra dissolved, mostly because of the death of Timer. Billed as musical director, he had put more into the ensemble than anyone else finding new material, rehearsing the band at his house, preparing for shows. Though barely 40, he had been worn down by decades of hard living. After his wife ran off with another musician, he went into a tailspin.

“I was moving in with him because his wife had left him,” says Willie Williams. “He was very upset, and in frustration he kicked his foot through a glass door, and infection set in.” Timer checked into a VA hospital for surgery, and he succumbed to complications.

The Lester Young who arrived in Washington in December 1956 was an ailing man who reserved every ounce of his declining strength for his music. He had just completed a fall tour of Europe with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic. Despite some positive reviews, there were also reports of drunken shows, such as this one, from Stockholm: “The minutes he spent on stage were among the most embarrassing I have experienced in large public gatherings, and a man in the condition Lester was in then ought never be allowed in front of an audience,” wrote the Orkester Jornalen, a Swedish jazz magazine. “But he could still play!”

In 1956, Young was actually on the rebound musically. After Bellevue, he’d made some of the best recordings of his late years. And Young had come to prefer some of those local rhythm sections over the big-time revues he also still toured with. The small-combo setting allowed him some breathing room to relax and explore. “Give me my little trio and me,” he once said in an interview. “That’s happiness.”

It was this Lester Young who greeted Potts and the band at the Patio Lounge. He was wearing a dapper suit, and he carried a worn canvas bag that held his saxophone. He was warm and cheerful and looked to be in relatively good health all things considered without a trace of vanity or bitterness. And he had many reasons to be bitter: all those disciples mostly white who’d found success with the sound he’d developed. Getz, for example, could make $5,000 in a week at the Patio, and here was Prez, lucky to take home $500 and saddled with yet another bunch of white kids.

But the Bill Potts Trio turned out to be just the right fit. There were no rehearsals, just a talk-over in the band room. “He didn’t lecture us at all,” says Potts. “We knew all the tunes Prez wanted to play, and we knew how to play ’em in the key he played in. We had been working together a lot as a trio, and we idolized him. We were his cup of tea.”

The first evening went off beautifully, and the trio was in Dreamland. “We knew on the first tune,” says Potts. “It was heaven.” It was clear to everybody, including Young, that something special was going on. He would shout out “Cousin Willie!” or “Cousin Billy!” when something gave him particular delight. “It really seemed to fall in together very nicely,” recalls Williams. “He was very much in command, and he played very strong. All the sax players I was working with were disciples of his, and every now and then, I’d think, Oh, so that’s where that phrase comes from that so-and-so plays.”

The understated, workmanlike style of Lucht especially pleased Young, because he’d gotten tired of showboaters who bashed all over their kits. “He hated for a drummer to drop bombs behind his solos,” says Potts. “He just wanted a little bit of ‘tinkety-boom,’ he called it. Lester’s vocabulary was a world of its own. He had an expression for everything.” Lucht, naturally, became “Cousin Jimmy.”

As the week went on, the old master and his students bonded between sets as well. They would hole up in the third-floor band room, drinking and listening to Young reminisce about the old days. “He was such a nice man with such a great sense of humor the nicest man we’d ever met,” says Potts. “I don’t remember him saying anything to belittle anybody. Prez fell in love with us because he realized there was no bullshit there. We were so gassed at the privilege of playing with him. We were totally in awe, and we were bending over backwards to do everything we could to please him musically.”

“We were all tasting it pretty good all week,” says Williams. “It just felt so damn good. It was just like party time every night, and we were on a high all week. Everybody was smiling. We were a very happy little band.” It was going so well that the trio hatched a plan to make some home recordings of the shows; Williams had a portable recorder in the band room. “We said something like, ‘We’d sure like to tape some of this,’ and Lester shrugged his shoulders like ‘OK.’”

Potts’ day job at U.S Recording gave him access to state-of-the-art equipment. The young musician had befriended some German co-workers who’d stayed in Washington after coming here to assist in the 1949 trial of American-born Mildred Gillars, dubbed “Axis Sally,” who was convicted of treason for her Nazi propaganda broadcasts on Radio Berlin during the war. “These German girls, they were editors and technicians, and they’d take old tapes and put them through the bulk eraser and splice them together,” says Potts. “I told them what I wanted to do, so they gave some blank tapes to me. They were super nice; they did it as a favor.”

On Friday afternoon, Potts went to the Patio Lounge early to set up the rig: two professional Magnecorders, three microphones, a mixer, a set of earphones, and 1,500 feet of reel-to-reel tape. “I had two machines so we wouldn’t miss a note,” he says. “Lester walked in and saw all the recorders and microphones and said, with a very sad look on his face, ‘Oh no, Billy, no. Norman will kill me.’” Young was referring to producer Norman Granz, to whom he was under contract; he couldn’t afford to jeopardize his most important business relationship.

Young wasn’t going to budge, but the band wasn’t about to give up, either. “We had about a half-hour before showtime, so we put our heads together. There was a liquor store across the street. We got him the biggest bottle of Hennessy we could find and got it gift-wrapped and put a card on it and gave it to him.” The card read: “We thank you for the pleasure of working with the greatest saxophone player in the world.” Lester unveiled his gift and studied the message; after a couple of sips of cognac, he was still staring at the equipment. Then he smiled and said, “I don’t think Norman will really kill me.”

The next two nights’ performances, as well as a matinee, were captured on 13 reels of salvaged 10-inch tape. Earl Swope joined the band for several numbers, and he and Lester hit it off, trading solos like two old friends catching up. “They loved each other,” says Potts. “It wasn’t the first time they had played together.”

When the tapes were released, more than two decades later on Granz’s Pablo label, they helped rehabilitate the reputation of Young’s later years. Here was proof that he was not the “broken man” of jazz lore. “That time in Washington was one of the relatively few surprises for Lester toward the end and he seized it,” wrote Nat Hentoff. “These players in their mid-20s Potts, Williams and Lucht so palpably appreciated Lester that their affectionate respect kept coming back to him on the stand. And for this time anyway, he was able to put aside whatever specters of loneliness and fading powers hovered over him in these autumnal years.”

Critic Gary Giddins called Lester Young in Washington D.C. 1956: Volume Three “one of the best Lester Young albums ever….Young’s cool imitators in the ’50s frequently suffocated swing with an airless preciosity, but Young never sacrifices vitality for lyricism….Like Yeats, Lester found the strength to ‘wither into the truth.’”

During the week, the bandmates had dropped by the room at the black hotel where Young was staying. After the gig was over, several days passed and Young paid a surprise visit to the U.S. Recording Co. Potts had assumed that Young would have already left town, but there was Prez standing in his pressed suit looking bemused. Potts was working late, dubbing tapes. “I was surprised he knew where I worked. I said, ‘Prez, what in the world are you doing here?’ He said, ‘I just wanted to be with you, Billy.’”

It wasn’t the last time that Potts saw Lester Young. That spring, the trio drove up to Philadelphia, where Prez was playing at the Blue Note. On the way, they passed the bottle around, and by the time they arrived, they were all pretty juiced. Young was backed by a band including Slam Stewart on bass, but when he saw Potts and the boys at the bar, he asked them to sit in for the standard “Talk of the Town.” It was his way of thanking them for the good time he’d enjoyed at the Patio Lounge.

“He announced us as his rhythm section from Washington and invited us up, which was very nice of him,” says Williams. “We got started off wrong, and the drummer got the beat turned around. Jim was pretty bombed out; we were all drunk and that got me so goofed up I couldn’t think of the chords. It didn’t click at all. And we only had the one tune, and Lester politely closed it out and we got down from the bandstand and I was totally embarrassed. We left pretty shortly after that.”

A week after Young’s appearance at the Patio Lounge, the Bill Potts Trio suddenly found itself out of a job. Don Hearn’s column in the Washington Daily News, “Tips on Tables,” made the announcement to local night owls: “Demise Dept.: Olivia Davis’ Patio Lounge shutters tonight. Meaning, of course, D.C. loses its best showcase for top jazz names. Possibly the moral of it all could be: There is no business like the nightclub business. And where are YOU going tonight?”

“I remember being sort of surprised,” says Williams. “I know it was a slow time of year, but everybody goes through that. And then we heard she opened the Merry-Land Club.” Not far from the Patio Lounge, at 14th and L Streets NW, the Merry-Land was a smaller venue and definitely a step down for Davis; she had run the club before, in the early ’50s.

Williams and Lucht still worked the club scene and sometimes rejoined Potts. But a new version of the Bill Potts Trio was soon the house band at the Merry-Land. It included bassist John Beal and drummer Freddy Merkle, another Roosevelt High grad who’d been playing since he was a teen. “Freddy was a very funny guy,” says Potts. “He was great to work with. We did more laughing than swinging, we were so happy to work together. Everybody would ask him all the time where the men’s room was, and he got tired of it. He had a big bass drum, so he had painted on the front of his drum “MEN’S ROOM,” with an arrow.”

In May 1957, the trio, augmented by a horn section, cut a record at the RCA Victor studio in New York. The 11-piece band, featuring the Swope brothers, was called the Freddy Merkle Group, but it was a Bill Potts production all the way. He wrote, arranged, and conducted all 10 compositions, and he played piano as well. Many deem the result, Jazz Under the Dome, the finest big-band album by a Washington ensemble.

Ted Efantis, who played sax on the album, considers it the apotheosis of D.C.’s postwar jazz sound. “This was the ultimate Bill Potts. If you’re talking about the mid-’50s in Washington, D.C., we had our own little golden era. We were original, and we had our geniuses. Potts was an important figure, the most prolific arranger we had, and this town owes him a lot. And Earl Swope, he was the innovator of modern-jazz trombone; nobody played trombone like Earl.

“Washington, D.C., was never a Dixieland town; it was always a modern-jazz town, and it started with Lester Young with Basie. We didn’t dig Ellington, because his band didn’t swing worth a shit. He had great musicians, but it was more of an orchestra. Count Basie and the Woody Herman band the Second Herd, the one Earl played with, were the bands that this town dug. Basie’s band swung - the time was the thing with that band. It swung.”

Potts acknowledges the Basie influence, but he says that Duke Ellington was a crucial figure as well. “The town loved Basie. Nothing touched the Basie band. There were a lot of 'swing’ bands, if you want to use that word but none of them really came close to having the feel that the Basie band did. But this town loved Ellington, too. Christ, Duke was from Washington, you know? I remember one tune by Duke in particular - Clark Terry was in the band then. It was called ‘The Champ,’ and it swung so fucking hard it’s unbelievable.”

Jazz Under the Dome revealed a new maturity in Potts’ arrangements, which he wrote for the big band and also for quintet. A handful of the new tunes earned a permanent place in the Potts songbook: “555 Feet High,” “Shhhhhhhh!,” and “Pottsville U.S.A.”

Conover, by that time a worldwide phenomenon thanks to his program on Voice of America, which boasted 70 million listeners, penned the liner notes: “For a town where most jazz musicians work day gigs to eat, Washington D.C. raises a lot of awfully good musicians. Earl Swope was about the first one to make it nationally playing modern jazz, and before, well, there was Duke Ellington, of course, but there have been hundreds less famous. Drummer-leader Freddy Merkle, who caused this LP to happen, gives the impression of a man unwilling to resign himself to neglect. Under thinning wisps of blond hair, Merkle directs a detective’s quiet, hot stare into one’s eyes: ‘Everybody was in town at the time,’ he says. ‘I figured it was time to see if anybody would be interested in something from Washington again….This is like a diploma to some people. Just to be on this album!…You’ve got to find the right cats to play with.’ Among the cats one finds in Washington is Bill Potts, a craggy, frosted-black-wire-haired iconoclast and post-cynic whose writings for THE Orchestra showed him to be as good as any big band composer-arranger around, and better than most. His piano playing is as good as his writing.”

Potts’ work gained him the attention of Herman, who hired him as pianist for several cross-country tours. Herman’s was one of the last classic big bands still on the road, at a time when it was hard to break even traveling with such a large outfit. Potts bonded with Bill Harris, a veteran of the Earl Swope-era trombone section in the Second Herd and one of jazz’s legendary practical jokers.

“We were playing the Cherry Hill Country Club in Philadelphia, and one of the waitresses took a liking to us and we got free martinis,” remembers Potts. “They gave us dinner afterward, and everybody got a steak. And Bill took a sugar bowl and started pouring it on my head, and he took a glass of water and poured that over the sugar, and it was running down my face. We made such a mess of that country club that Woody made a speech afterward: ‘Thanks to Bill Harris and Bill Potts, we’ve been told that we’re never invited back to Cherry Hill Country Club.’”

Herman was one of the most beloved big-band leaders, a generous and fun-loving guy adored by his men. But once Potts, spurred by more free rounds of martinis, pushed him too far. “We were in Texas, playing some bar, and Woody said to me, ‘Play like Count Basie.’ And I said, ‘I am Count Basie.’ And he said, ‘You’re also fired.’ There was an awful lot of drinking going on, including his. But I went back with him a couple more times. We hit just about every state there was.”

Back in Washington, Potts continued to find steady work on the club scene. He sometimes played the Merry-Land with his first wife, Marge Potts, who backed him up on a bongo Potts had made out of a pickle barrel. He even briefly revived a new version of THE Orchestra with Shirley Horn on piano; the band appeared at the Spotlite Room on Rhode Island Avenue NE.

Leading her own trio, Horn had been a regular intermission act at the Patio Lounge. She eventually joined Davis at her new digs at the Merry-Land, but things weren’t the same. By late 1957, Davis didn’t have the budget or the venue to book national acts on a regular basis anymore. To survive, she finally did what many club owners of the era did when they needed to get customers in the door: She went burlesque.

The downtown scene was changing, and Davis was simply changing with the market. Vibraphone player Lennie Cuje is one of many jazz musicians who worked at the burlesque clubs. “Anything to pay the bills,” he says. “If you’re a musician, you learn to play anything.”

By the late ’50s, says Cuje, the downtown jazz scene was in its death throes. “The scene here crumbled. The rock ‘n’ roll took out the jazz. The titty bars with those topless dancers took out the strippers, the girls like Natasha and Trudine the Quiver Queen. Those girls were real performers. They had a real show, with expensive clothes. But that was the end of the strip scene, too. By the early ’60s, I moved to New York. Most of the cats left town, went to New York or on the road, because the scene here was gone.”

In the spring of 1958, Potts and his girlfriend, Barbara Kleinkopf, went to hear Billy Eckstine at a club on U Street NW. A secretary for a downtown law firm, Kleinkopf was a jazz fan. She loved Eckstine’s singing and she loved Potts’ music, too; she was soon to become Potts’ second wife. After the show, they walked over to Potts’ 1952 MG TD, and he gave her the keys. “I had a little too much to drink, and I had a couple of half-pints in the glove compartment,” he recalls. “So I asked her to drive.”

They headed back across the river to Arlington, where Potts lived. Not far from his house off Wilson Boulevard, Kleinkopf lost control of the convertible. “She had never driven an MG, and she didn’t realize how little you had to turn the wheel to corner,” Potts says. “She went around a curve and spun off the road and crashed the right side of the car, and it threw me out. I slid under the car, and it parked right on my chest.”

Though in shock, Potts managed to roll the car off himself; Kleinkopf emerged from the wreck unscathed except for her broken glasses. “The funny bit was,” Potts says, “it made a helluva noise when we hit the concrete embankment and all of the dogs in the neighborhood were barking, but not a soul in any of the houses came out. It was 2 or 3 in the morning. As soon as I got out from under the car, I told her to get those half-pints and throw them into the woods.”

Then Potts realized he couldn’t walk. The X-rays at Arlington Hospital revealed a crushed vertebra. He had also temporarily lost use of his right leg, the one he’d used to push the MG over. For the next three months, he wore a body cast.

During his convalescence, Potts got a call from New York. Producer Jack Lewis was looking for an arranger for a new version of Porgy and Bess. George Gershwin’s folk opera was in the midst of a large-scale revival. A big-budget Hollywood film starring Sidney Poitier and Dorothy Dandridge, and with a score by André Previn, was in the works, spurring a deluge of records, mostly interpretations by pop singers: Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Jr. and Carmen McRae, plus dozens of others.

Lewis wanted something different: a jazz treatment, fully orchestrated, performed by the best soloists in the business, a “completely musical version,” he later said. “Lyrically, the opera is so restricted. The songs have always been sung in the same way.” Potts’ fiery arrangements for Washington bands had impressed Lewis, and he knew he’d found the man for the job.

Thirty years old, with a broken back and newly grown beard, the body cast made shaving a chore, Potts embarked on the biggest project of his career. He had a pay advance, a copy of Gershwin’s score, and a stack of recordings of the opera that Lewis had gotten for him. “I wasn’t familiar with it at all,” Potts says. “So I really studied that score. I wore out the records. I listened and studied for six weeks before I wrote the first note.” Potts decided to follow the sequence of Gershwin’s story line. “I wrote from front to back,” he says, “because I wanted to preserve the feel of the opera.”

By the end of the year, Potts had finished his score. In January 1959, he was in New York, the reams of sheet music stuffed into a suitcase that Kleinkopf had bought him, to bring it to life. As chief jazz A&R man for United Artists, Lewis had a lot of pull, and he had assembled a 19-piece band that boasted some of the greatest jazzmen of the era. Some were Potts’ old buddies from Washington, such as Earl Swope and Markie Markowitz. Others were pals from the New York scene: Al Cohn and Zoot Sims and Phil Woods and Gene Quill, acclaimed sax players of the young generation. Then there were grizzled legends such as trumpeters Charlie Shavers and Harry “Sweets'' Edison, star soloist with Basie’s classic late-’30s band. The rhythm section was Charlie Persip on drums and George Duvivier on bass. On piano was Bill Evans, soon to make his name on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue.

The sessions for The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess were held three consecutive mornings at Webster Hall, a studio renowned for its acoustics. In later years, when Potts worked as a jazz instructor at Montgomery College, he’d often exhort his students, “Swing, or I’ll kill you.” No such threats were necessary at the Porgy and Bess sessions: These musicians could swing in their sleep, and they were accomplished enough to tackle the complicated arrangements. “It was a crackerjack band,” says Potts. “They were all five-star sight-readers and five-star improvisers. Those charts are hard. They’re very difficult to read, let alone play. That’s why we did it at 9 in the morning, when they hadn’t already done three other sessions that day, when everybody’s chops were fresh.”

Despite the ungodly a.m. hour, the sessions had a festive atmosphere. Shavers and Edison were always cutting up, keeping things loose between takes. “They were very funny,” says Potts. “I remember that the first person to get there every morning was Charlie Shavers, with a quart of Cutty Sark. He was feeling no pain.” After the morning’s work, the musicians would celebrate at a nearby bar, Charlie’s Tavern or Junior’s. It was like those magical nights with Young at the Patio Lounge: Everything seemed to be clicking.

“By holding his sessions at 9 a.m., Lewis broke the myth that great jazz can only be blown late at night in darkened studios,” wrote Don Cerulli, editor of the Jazz Word.

One of Potts’ greatest skills as an arranger was his ability to bring out individual voices in the big-band setting. For Porgy and Bess, he wrote with certain soloists in mind. He found a spot for Earl Swope on “A Woman Is a Sometimes Thing,” and for Shavers and Woods on “Bess, You Is My Woman.”

On the arrangement for the plaintive “My Man’s Gone Now,” Potts gambled on trumpeter Markowitz, an alumnus of THE Orchestra. It was a plum assignment, and it caused some grumbling. “I wanted Markie to do it, because I knew what he could do with it,” says Potts. “And all these name musicians, they were wondering why I had given that part to him. When we finished, we had a good take, but I said, ‘One more time.’ And he played it just as beautiful as he did the first time. I was trying to prove a point to the musicians in the band who had a much bigger name than Markie did. They all fell in love with him. He moved to New York after that and got very busy in the studios.”

Evans was another given the chance to shine. He lived in New Jersey, had no car and didn’t drive anyhow, and had no idea how to get to Webster Hall, which was on East 11th Street. “Jack Lewis had to go across the George Washington Bridge and pick him up and bring him over,” Potts recalls. “And he was absolutely amazing.” On the ballad “I Loves You Porgy,” Potts spotlighted Evans, and it is one of the most moving moments on the record. Later, on his 1961 classic Live at the Village Vanguard, Evans re-created this shimmering passage in homage to Potts’ arrangement.

From the opening romp Potts made of “Summertime,” it was gangbusters all the way. In fact, the band just barely beat the clock. “We got to the last tune, ‘Oh Lawd, I’m on My Way,’” says Potts. “This is a very, very hard chart, and it features solos for everybody in the band except the pianist. And we had seven minutes until we went into overtime. The president of United Artists is there, and he says, ‘No overtime we’re already over budget.’ So we did that in one take and finished right before the second hand hit.”

In the fall of 1958, with Potts still recovering and immersed in the work on his Porgy score, he was visited in Washington by Previn, who recounted their meetings in the liner notes. “[I]t was Bill’s habit to begin these musical discussions with me while seated in his small open sports car [Potts’ MG, which he had had rebuilt] and considering that I, as a Californian, have grown more and more thin-blooded, I can think of no better compliment to Bill’s ideas and opinions than to say that I hardly noticed the cold….Bill Potts is an originator in the truest and best sense of that word. It is impossible to hear more than eight bars of any of his arrangements without recognizing the man behind the pencil….The personnel of the orchestra conducted by Bill Potts is indeed a gleaming one…and the band plays with an esprit and a precision hardly ever encountered in a ‘one-time-together’ studio ensemble.”

When the recordings were released the next year, reviewers agreed with Previn’s preliminary assessment. The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess was hailed as an instant classic, in the same league as the 1958 masterpiece by Gil Evans and Miles Davis. Down Beat gave the record its highest rating, five stars: “An immediate and obvious comparison will arise between this album and Miles Davis’ Porgy album. It should be dismissed. All they have in common is that they are the two outstanding instrumental Porgy performances in the rash of recent releases of discs inspired by the movie….Their purposes are different and so are their final effects. This LP…is actually truer to the spirit of the Gershwin music than the Miles-Gil album was or was meant to be. And it establishes Washingtonian Bill Potts as a major arranger….This is a beautiful, beautiful album.”

The decades since have only reinforced the early acclaim. The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess has been reissued twice and has achieved cult status, especially among musicians. In 2000, Dr. John gave a testimonial in a column for the British music magazine MOJO: “This was the first real concept album I’d heard, a bunch of guys playing these songs, staying true to them but making a picture of it….This was a sound you could get into when you were loaded. It was a big band record but it didn’t have a real big band sound. It was real warm, a personal kind of record that didn’t sound like any other record at the time….A record like this meant a lot to us because it was a guy who’d slipped it through the record company bullshit.”

In last year’s Stardust Melodies: The Biography of Twelve of America’s Most Popular Songs, Will Friedwald wrote, “There have been other occasions when Gershwin’s lullaby has been reborn as an up-tempo…but the Potts version, with solos by Sweets Edison and the two-tenor team of Zoot Sims and Al Cohn, is a rare instance in which ‘Summertime’ can be said to kick butt.”

It’s a fitting remark, especially given that it was Edison who played alongside Young in the same Count Basie band that had first cast a spell on the teenage Potts. Using what he’d learned from his idols, Potts had taken one of the most familiar tunes in the American songbook that languid lullaby everybody has hummed at one time or another and found a way to make it swing. And swing hard.

Potts says he later realized that Young would have made the perfect foil for the sax section at the Porgy and Bess sessions. At the time, Young was living nearby at the Alvin Hotel, drinking heavily and seeing few visitors. “I was living at 52nd and Broadway, just a few doors down, but I didn’t know he was there,” says Potts. “I’m still kicking myself in the ass because I didn’t think of trying to get him to play for us.”

In the early spring of 1959, not long before The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess was released, Young died in his room at the Alvin. He had suffered an esophageal hemorrhage, the result of chronic alcohol abuse. “I read in the paper that he had died,” recalls Potts. “It was a very sad story. They were fighting about where the body was going to go. It just made me remember what a sweet man he was.”