White Bicycles (7 page)
At the promoter’s request, it had been agreed that Roland would close the show. This meant that Sonny Stitt, JJ Johnson, Howard McGhee and Walter Bishop Jr had spent the intermission making social plans with a crowd of girls. Everyone went off to party – except Kenny and Tommy. The extra $200 a week George was paying them for working with Roland was beginning to seem like chump change.
Roland cut a wild figure on stage. The tenor sax around his neck was flanked by a manzello and a stritch, reed instruments of his own invention. He was one of the first to wear African dashikis and brightly coloured hats, which, combined with his dark glasses and beard, made him look like the ceremonial priest of an exotic religion. He would bring one hand down sharply in a chopping motion to indicate a stop-chorus, where the rhythm section was supposed to lay out while he played a cappella, blowing continuous arpeggios in three-part harmony using his circular breathing technique. Kenny and Tommy had agreed to keep an eye out for this, and had even managed to respond once or twice in Berlin and Bremen, but in Zurich they sailed right through Roland’s red lights.
Anger fuelled his playing and he brought the house down. The audience were on their feet clapping, demanding more. Kenny and Tommy were accustomed to leading their sightless colleagues offstage at the end of a show, but on this occasion Roland angrily pulled his arm away and said something that couldn’t be heard above the din. Kenny said he took it as ‘fuck off’, so he and Tommy just shrugged and left the stage. Within seconds, they had on their coats and were out the back door heading for the bar, hoping for some as yet unclaimed chicks.
Roland had, of course, been trying to tell Kenny they were going to play an encore. First he turned to Tété, calmly seated at the piano, then to the empty drum kit and the spot where Tommy had been standing, announced the tune and the key and gave the downbeat. The horrified audience watched as, after a few bars, Roland and Tété realized they were alone onstage and stopped playing.
I spent the morning moving from room to room, getting different versions of the story and listening to musicians swear they would never again set foot onstage with ‘those assholes’. The shuttle diplomacy finally bore fruit in the form of a rehearsal before that evening’s concert in Geneva and a promise of better cooperation and understanding on both sides – plus a raise in Kenny and Tommy’s bonuses to $250 a week in return for a more respectful attitude.
I understood the gap in generations and attitudes that led to the rift, but I thought both groups were great and particularly loved the playing of Sonny Stitt and Howard McGhee. I had met McGhee in Los Angeles three years earlier during my semester off from university working for Contemporary Records. Les Koenig, the label’s owner, had been a Hollywood screenwriter blackballed during the McCarthyite era. When the ghost-writing work dried up, his hobby of recording jazz bands turned into a business. His roster of stars such as Art Pepper, Shelly Manne, Teddy Edwards and McGhee became a pillar of the West Coast sound. When Manne made an album of tunes from
My Fair
Lady
, he sold a quarter of a million copies and turned Contemporary into a success.
Bob Koester from the Jazz Record Mart in Chicago had suggested I look Koenig up during a summer visit to California. He invited me to stop by his office and hired me after a ten-minute conversation. It turned out he had been a student at Dartmouth when Count Basie came through to play a dance in the late ’30s. He talked his way into a job as a band boy and left on their bus that night.
There was a grand piano in the corner of the shipping room in the back of Contemporary’s office on Melrose Place (an innocent block of antique shops in those days). Once every week or two, I would take the cover off the piano and move it to the centre of the room. Our great engineers, Howard Holzer and Roy DuNann, plugged in microphones and transformed the area into a recording studio. A car would pull up in the alley behind the building and Philly Joe Jones or Roy Haynes would start unloading his drum kit. In these mundane surroundings, sublime music would go down on tape.
I usually worked in the front office next to the receptionist, Pat, a fount of gossip and opinion. She was having an affair with Frank Foster, Count Basie’s tenor sax player and a close friend of Quincy Jones. I heard daily accounts of the hip world she moved in after hours, told in hilarious stream-of-consciousness jargon as she buffed her nails between phone calls.
Now, after three years of American coffee houses and English pubs, I was back in the jazz world. More experienced men looked after Miles and Brubeck. My junior position meant that I worked the outer portions of the tour, the fill-in dates plugging geographical and financial gaps between the weekend festivals. After the first week, I found myself travelling with Coleman Hawkins and Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison.
Hawkins was one of my heroes. From the first time I heard his jagged, joyous solos on the Mound City Blue Blowers sides from 1929 and saw him in the faded photos of Ma Rainey’s touring vaudeville troupe, I viewed him as a paragon. Here was a man who had played with the earliest regional bands of the 1920s and ended up as an elder statesman of the tenor sax, revered by Coltrane and Rollins; a man who stood beside Ben Webster and Lester Young bridging the gap between swing and bebop. I couldn’t wait to sit next to him on a long journey so I could ask about the old days – a dream as futile, it turned out, as the one we had of our drive to Boston with Sleepy John Estes.
Coleman always required a bottle of brandy in his sax case ‘to cut my cold’. He locked his hotel room door every night and took the telephone off the hook. So wake-up calls went unheeded. I would sit in the lobby with Sweets, Sir Charles Thompson, Jimmy Woode and Jo Jones and wait for Coleman. No one would say anything: Coleman was beyond criticism. Hours were then spent begging for seats on flights packed with autumn business travellers and we were often forced to rush straight from airport to concert hall.
Coleman could walk more slowly than any man I ever met. When I shepherded him through an airport or a train station, I tried to concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other as carefully as possible, never taking long strides. Inevitably my attention would wander and Coleman would suddenly be twenty feet behind me. Or, on occasion, nowhere to be seen.
Changing trains in Toulouse, I was so obsessed with keeping track of Hawkins that Harry Edison walked far ahead down the platform and boarded the wrong train. He ended up in Perpignan while we played a concert in Marseille. ‘Sweets’ was a man of the world who spoke some French; when he rejoined us the next day in Bordeaux he seemed to have enjoyed getting away from the tour and having a quiet meal in a little restaurant with a good bottle of wine.
There was something positive for the rest of us, as well. Harry had spent the years after leaving Count Basie playing trumpet on Hollywood sound stages. He was a wonderful musician with a lovely clear tone, but he had lost some of the competitive edge that kept Coleman going. That night in Marseille, the All-stars shared the bill with the George Russell sextet. I had caught a few glimpses of them earlier in the tour and thought they were tremendous. Russell was one of the leaders of the avant-garde but retained a strong sense of melody. His recording of ‘You Are My Sunshine’ with Don Ellis on trumpet had impressed critics and sold a fair number of records the previous year. Ellis was an intellectual white player of great skill but little fire. For this tour, Russell hired Thad Jones to play the arrangements he had recorded with Ellis and the contrast was stunning. Jones, who normally played with mainstream big bands, tore into ‘Sunshine’ with a plunger mute and turned it into a show-stopper. His effect on the rest of the players – Tootie Heath, Joe Farrell, Barre Phillips and Garnett Brown – was equally dramatic: Russell’s band were the surprise stars of the tour.
In Marseille I asked Jones whether he would sit in with the All-stars. He came straight from playing the most controlled arrangements with Russell to letting rip on swing classics with Hawkins. He attacked the tunes with an aggressiveness that had Coleman on his toes more than at any other time on the tour. The chase choruses and exchanges between them were stunning, getting more and more intense as the night wore on. I sat in the front row, cheering with the rest of the audience as they played encore after encore.
On a rainy night in Limoges a few days later, I was watching from the wings as the concert began. After the theme was stated a couple of times, Coleman started his solo and Sweets walked off and stood beside me. ‘You know, I’m not used to all this,’ he said. I asked whether he meant the travelling. ‘Well, I haven’t done a tour like this for quite a few years, but it isn’t that, really. I’m just getting so worn out with all these missed trains and waiting around for Coleman. I think I might cut out early and head back to Los Angeles. Coleman can carry the show without me.’
I was staggered. ‘You mean you’re going to quit the tour?’
‘Like I said, I can’t really handle this disorganization. I love Coleman, but I just don’t think I want another ten days of this.’
I begged him to reconsider as Coleman finished his solo. Harry walked onstage to take the next few choruses, passing Coleman shuffling off to stand beside me in the wings. We were silent for a few minutes, as I pondered how to handle the situation. All the good diplomatic sense I had brought to bear on the Roland Kirk crisis deserted me in a moment of madness. I told Coleman that Harry was ready to leave the tour because of his, Coleman’s, lateness and disorganization and that I hoped he would make a renewed effort to get up in the mornings, meet the departure schedules and generally shape up.
Harry spotted us talking, quickly finished his solo and joined us. Coleman went straight to the point. ‘This white boy says you’re going to quit the tour because of me. Now, that isn’t true, is it?’ Harry gave me a look, as if to say, ‘Sorry, kid.’
‘Why, no, Coleman, I would never say a thing like that.’
Coleman turned to me with a look of lethal contempt. ‘Never, in all my years of touring, have I heard such
dog-ass
bullshit
as that! Don’t you
ever
pull any shit like that on me again, you
hear
?’ And with that they rejoined the band onstage. I was mortified, but Coleman’s time-keeping improved and Harry stayed to the end of the tour.
Later in the tour, I spent an afternoon in Copenhagen airport buying drinks for Scandinavian Airlines agents and pleading with them to hold Stockholm and Helsinki flights so that fog-delayed musicians could make their connections. On another occasion, I had to rent a car and drive halfway across France with the drum kit strapped to the roof so that the other band could start the concert while Coleman and the All-stars caught a later train. I sped past vineyards where the road was splashed with red and through towns that reeked of new wine. When the tour finished and I collapsed in Paris, I reflected on how many occasions had found us hundreds of miles from the gig, with almost no chance of getting the musicians onstage in time. Somehow, we made every date. I concluded that from here on in everything else would be, by comparison, a breeze. It didn’t quite turn out that way, of course, but it gave me the kind of confidence I needed to make my way in the music business.
WHEN I ARRIVED IN LONDON in the spring of ’64, I was as impressed as I had hoped to be. There was a refreshing heterodoxy about categories and the pop scene seemed open to all kinds of music. The folk world was a bit more narrow-minded – witness the famous cry of ‘Judas’ during Dylan’s UK tour in 1966 – but I found it all intriguing.
My image of British folk music was pretty limited: Ewan MacColl singing a sea shanty with his finger in his ear. That prejudice was blown away by a visit to a London pub to hear the Ian Campbell Folk Group. They performed traditional songs with slightly Weaver-ish harmonies but redeemed themselves by their exuberant rhythms, strong singing by Ian and his sister Lorna and the virtuoso fiddling of Dave Swarbrick. After I turned up at a second London show, Ian invited me to pay them a visit in Birmingham.
I stayed almost a week, sharing a pull-out sofa in Ian’s front room with Swarbrick, whose snoring was as spectacular as his violin playing. (Our prickly relationship lasted for many years: he became a key member of Fairport Convention when I managed and produced them in the late sixties.) I attended rehearsals, went to gigs and helped out by taking young Ali and Robin to the park, pushing the swings for them and holding their hands as we crossed the streets. Twenty years later, they would marry their father’s clear diction and nasal delivery to a reggae rhythm section and sell millions of records as UB40. (Around this time, I also met nine-year-old Chris, son of cockney singer John Foreman and later guitar player for Madness.)
Ian introduced me to a local TV producer who invited me to a pub in the middle of the architectural horror known as the Bullring to hear a local band. My initial exposure to British blues had come when a friend took me to the Central School of Art to hear The Pretty Things a few weeks earlier. I was impressed, not so much by the derivative music, but by the show. Lead singer Phil May had glossy hair reaching to his waist, pranced around the stage Jagger-style and seemed obviously queer (no one said ‘gay’ in those days). My friend laughed at my American naiveté and we watched as he was surrounded after the gig by girl fans. Time has given me two footnotes for this event: one, that Phil’s other talent was tennis (we became friends and in the ’80s he helped improve my backhand); and two, that he was always, in fact, bisexual. The Pretty Things still tour regularly and Phil’s hair is a good deal shorter.
I had also visited a Soho blues club with some of my charges on a day off from the Blues and Gospel Caravan. I noticed a strange creature listening from the doorway. He had extraordinary hair, all puffed up and fluffed about and dyed blond. His trench coat was gathered mincingly at the waist and he was wearing some very odd boots. I had yet to grasp that, unlike in America where rebels all wore jeans and everyone was too uptight to play games with gender, English kids rebelled by investing a great deal of effort in eccentric fashion. I asked about the stylish listener and was told he was quite a good blues singer with an easy name to remember: Rod Stewart.