It was too late for Eckstine to reclaim the crossover fame and fortune that he had begun to enjoy before the Life magazine story in 1950. Despite the confidence that winning a global war had given the country, America still felt threatened by a black man who was as commercially successful and seductive to white women as Billy had briefly proven to be. But it wasn’t too late for “Mr. B” to keep blazing new musical trails, or to offer reminders of the “don’t take no shit off nobody” demeanor that had inspired his bebop protégés and to which so many black entertainers would aspire from then on.
After Eckstine had made several recordings for Roulette, he discovered that Morris Levy had a habit of falling behind on royalty payments. When Billy went to confront the hard-nosed record producer, Levy pulled a pistol from his desk. Unfazed, Eckstine hand-rolled a cigarette. Levy fired the gun. The bullet clipped the end of the cigarette and tore a hole in the office wall. Without missing a beat, Eckstine calmly rolled another cigarette and lit it. Levy couldn’t help but smile with admiration at Billy’s undimmed confidence and cool. “Get my checkbook!” he shouted to his secretary.
• • •
IN THE YEARS AFTER World War II, as Billy Eckstine was climbing the white record charts, Bill Nunn decided that black America deserved its own music ranking. Using his baseball all-star game survey as a model, he created an annual “Pittsburgh Courier Band Poll” to allow readers to choose their favorite jazz orchestras, singers, and soloists. To celebrate the poll’s fourth anniversary in 1947, the Courier hosted one of the most star-studded concerts ever to be entirely conceived, booked, advertised, and sold by black promoters. On a nippy March night, a mixed race crowd of several thousand lined up outside Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Music Hall to see a show that rollicked for more than two and a half hours. Ella Fitzgerald scatted “Oh, Lady Be Good!” and encored with “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” Count Basie swung. Dizzy Gillespie bopped. The Mills Brothers harmonized and the Ink Spots serenaded. Eckstine showed up to croon his rendition of “Prisoner of Love.” Lionel Hampton’s orchestra, the winner of that year’s poll, kicked off the evening with the explosive “Air Mail Special,” brought the crowd to a frenzy with “Flying Home,” and sent everyone home shimmying to “Hamp’s Boogie-Woogie.”
Yet along with touting all the famous musicians in attendance that evening, the Courier reporter who covered the concert also took time to praise a skinny, twenty-one-year-old sideman who played the least glamorous instrument on the stage, the upright double bass. “Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet star, and Ray Brown, his bass find, gave out with ‘Hot Box,’ backed by Hampton on drums,” the reporter wrote. “Dizzy graciously gave Ray plenty of scope before entering into his bop exercises.”
What the Courier didn’t tell its national audience was that Ray Brown was another hometown boy. Like so many kids from black Pittsburgh, he had grown up in a family that revered the piano. His father introduced Ray to Fats Waller and Art Tatum records when he was still a toddler, took him to hear Count Basie at the William Penn Hotel, and started him on lessons by age eleven. But when Ray entered junior high, he was one of twenty-eight pianists on the school orchestra. He had to sit around all week just to get fifteen minutes of rehearsal time. Waiting his turn one day, he noticed an unused bass lying in corner of the room. “If I was playing that bass, I could play every day?” he asked the music teacher. “That’s right,” the teacher said. “We’re looking for another bass player.”
Like Ecsktine in his school days, Brown had a Courier paper route, and one of his customers was a well-known Pittsburgh bass player. Once Ray took up the instrument, the older musician invited him in to listen to recordings of the Duke Ellington orchestra showcasing Jimmy Blanton, the first bass player to play entire melodies and take improvised solos. Ray taught himself by playing along with Blanton records, and he quickly developed the remarkable versatility for which he would become known. Using his long, strong fingers, he could lay down powerful rhythmic licks he referred to as his “grits and gravy”; then he could vary his tone and pace to produce creative riffs and subtle accompaniments. By the time he was an upperclassman at Schenley High School, Ray was so good that a visiting jazz orchestra offered to hire him to replace a bass player who had been hauled off by military police for avoiding the draft. But his mother laid down the law. If Ray went on the road before getting his high school diploma, she announced, she would send the police to track him down.
After graduating in 1944, Brown tried his luck playing in Buffalo for a year, and then bought a one-way ticket to New York City. On his first week in town, he went to a jazz club on 52nd Street and was introduced to Dizzy Gillespie, who upon hearing that Ray played the bass offered him a job in his big band. The next night, Ray was rehearsing at Dizzy’s home with Charlie Parker, pianist Bud Powell, and drummer Max Roach. Two years later he was on the road with Gillespie’s band when Ella Fitzgerald joined them briefly. Despite their nine-year age difference—she was thirty, and he was still only twenty-one—Ella and Ray fell in love. On a tour stop in Youngstown in Ohio, Ray popped the question and they arranged for a hasty civil marriage before a local probate judge that same day. They began touring together before conflicting professional priorities pulled them apart and led to an amicable quickie Mexican divorce five years later. For Ray, one of those projects was recording an album with three fellow alumni from the Gillespie band—vibraphonist Milt Jackson, pianist John Lewis, and Kenny “Klook” Clarke, the Pittsburgh drummer—that marked the beginning of the phenomenon known as the Modern Jazz Quartet.
During those years, Brown was also a regular on the Jazz at the Philharmonic tours organized by promoter Norman Granz. In 1949, a young Canadian pianist named Oscar Peterson joined the tour and hit it off with Ray. It would be the start of a partnership that lasted for a decade and a half, as Brown joined Peterson in a series of acclaimed jazz trios. Finally tiring of life on the road in the late 1960s, Brown settled down in Los Angeles and became a session player and music producer. Over the following decades, he did everything from sitting in with the Tonight Show band and playing bass on the iconic “Mission: Impossible” theme to helping launch the careers of Quincy Jones and singer Diana Krall. When Brown passed away of a heart attack at the age of seventy-five—after playing a pre-concert round of golf in Indianapolis—Jones hailed him as “simply the best there’s every been” on his instrument. The leading bass player of a new generation, Christian McBride, was even more specific. “Ray Brown was to the bass what Charlie Parker was to the saxophone,” McBride said. “He took what Jimmy Blanton started to an entirely new level.”
Asked about his early musical influences, Brown would credit his parents but also the “ton of music” in Pittsburgh, from the competitive school scene to the theaters where the best bands in country could be heard virtually every week of the year. He remembered one peer in particular. While still at Schenley High, Ray formed his first ensemble with several other young musicians who practiced with him at one of their homes in East Liberty. Around the corner lived Erroll Garner, the self-taught piano prodigy who had just recently graduated from Westinghouse High. The Schenley students were so in awe of Garner that they would cut short their own rehearsals to go his house to hear him play. Erroll returned the compliment by showing up at the North Side Elks Club, where the youngsters played on Sunday nights, to jam with them after midnight. “It was a lot of fun when he showed up!” Brown recalled.
There was one place Erroll Garner couldn’t play in Pittsburgh, however: the musicians union hall. The local required its members to read sheet music, and because Garner played entirely by ear he couldn’t get a union card. So in 1944, at the age of twenty-one, he set out for New York City. He soon found work on 52nd Street, playing in a trio fronted by bassist Slam Stewart. For a while, he relocated to Los Angeles to gig at Billy Berg’s club, where he played with Charlie Parker after Parker was released from his famous dry-out stint at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital. But Garner was still viewed mostly as a supreme
ly talented ensemble player until, in 1950, he met a white female civil rights activist turned talent manager who would help make him one of the most successful and beloved jazz headliners of the next two decades.
As it happened, Martha Glaser also hailed from the Pittsburgh area. She was born in Duquesne, the mill town south of the city where Earl Hines grew up. Her parents, Hungarian immigrants, moved the family to Detroit by the time Martha was in high school, and she stayed there to attend Wayne State University. Motivated by the 1942 Detroit race riots, she threw herself into civil rights work, taking a job in Chicago with the city’s Human Rights Commission. A jazz lover, she helped Norman Granz organize the Jazz at the Philharmonic tours and moved to Manhattan to open her own management agency. When she first heard Garner play on 52nd Street, Glaser was so enthralled that she signed him to an exclusive contract and began devoting herself full-time to overseeing his professional and financial affairs.
As photos of the two illustrate, Martha lit up in Erroll’s presence, charmed by his joyous smile and teasing banter. (She wasn’t alone. Despite his diminutive five-foot-two stature, Garner was a discreet but busy lady’s man.) Yet Glaser was also shrewd enough to see that Garner represented something unique in the jazz world by the early 1950s: a dazzling virtuoso whose music was complex enough to impress fans of the new bebop style but accessible to those who missed the simpler swing era. It required an effort to appreciate the dissonant experimentation of Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, and even the relentless harmonic improvisation of Art Tatum. But enjoying Garner’s sound, rhythmically infectious and at turns melodically playful and romantic, was no work at all. It was an appeal summed up by Ross Russell, the head of Dial Records, who signed Garner to his first record deal. While jazz was becoming “progressively cerebral and nervous,” Russell wrote, “Erroll Garner’s music . . . springs from the heart rather than the head.”
The challenge lay in capturing Garner’s genius, which was like bottling lightning. He couldn’t write music, either, so there were no notations of his inventions. He also insisted on playing whatever came into his head, without warning, even to his accompanists. Shortly after signing Garner, Glaser moved him from the small Dial label to the pop music giant Columbia Records. George Avakian, the Columbia “artist and repertoire man” who oversaw recording sessions, recalled the first time he asked Garner to make a long-playing album. In Avakian’s experience, it usually took three hours to produce enough music to fill two short-play 78 rpm records, with their three-minute sides. For the LP, Avakian would need a full hour of usable music. Arriving minutes after his sidemen, Garner announced that he didn’t have a play list and had no need to rehearse. “Just start that tape going,” he said. Erroll took a sip of coffee, loosened his tie, lit a cigarette, and proceeded to play thirteen flawless numbers back to back, with no retakes. Avakian likened it to “running the hundred yard dash in eight seconds.”
In 1954, Glaser cut a separate deal for Garner to record for EmArcy, the jazz label of Mercury Records. Around that time, Erroll was flying from San Francisco to Chicago when his plane was caught in a thunderstorm. As it landed, he looked through the window to see a magnificent rainbow through a soft mist. All of a sudden he found himself fingering his knees and humming. Thinking Garner might be sick, the passenger in the next seat called a flight attendant. But he was just composing in his head, and as soon as he got off the plane he found a piano to work out the tune he would call “Misty.” At his next recording date, he slipped it into another marathon of first takes that produced an EmArcy album called Contrasts. A few years later, after lyricist Johnny Burke put words to the melody and Johnny Mathis made it a top 20 hit, “Misty” was on its way to earning its own place in the Great American Songbook.
The following year, Glaser accompanied Garner and his sidemen to an engagement in San Francisco. To earn a little extra cash, she arranged for the group to play a one-night concert in the town of Carmel-by-the-Sea on the Monterey Peninsula. After a sixty-minute drive along the Pacific coast, the musicians and the manager arrived to find a converted high school auditorium full of local jazz enthusiasts. As the trio set up, a man carrying a reel-to-reel tape machine approached Glaser. He was Will Thornbury, a disk jockey for Armed Services Radio who wanted to record the concert for soldiers at nearby Fort Ord. Glaser agreed—on condition that Thornbury turn over the tape and rights to its contents as soon as his broadcast had aired.
Garner proceeded to deliver one of the most delightful live performances he had ever given. Invigorated by the scenic drive and buoyed by the spirited crowd, he tore through fifteen classics in his first set, including “Night and Day,” “I Remember April,” “The Nearness of You,” “Lullaby of Birdland,” and “It’s Alright With Me.” After a short break, he returned with seven more, including “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “Autumn Leaves,” “ ’S Wonderful,” “Laura,” and ending with a seven-minute version of “Caravan.” Throughout the ninety-minute concert, he teased the audience with his long, elliptical introductions, keeping them guessing about which song was coming next. Gently humming and grunting as he played, he turned to smile and wink at them, showing just how much he was enjoying himself. By the time the concert was over, Glaser knew that something special had occurred. On the plane back to New York, she kept Thornbury’s tape in her lap for the entire flight.
Glaser had just signed Garner to a new exclusive deal with Columbia Records, so she took the tape to George Avakian. He recognized the genius of the piano playing, but he didn’t like the sound of the room and thought the bass was slightly out of tune. (The bassist had left his instrument in San Francisco and borrowed one from Fort Ord.) Avakian turned over Thornbury’s tape to Columbia’s crack engineers, who used special filters and boosters to bring out the sound of the drums and the bass and to compensate for the bad acoustics. When the results were issued as an LP the next year, Columbia chose a fetching title—Concert by the Sea—and a cover image of an attractive young woman walking along the Monterey cliffs, waves crashing against the shore, with her arms raised as if to celebrate the liberating spirit of the music.
Within one year, Concert by the Sea sold 225,000 copies. Within three years, it surpassed a million in sales, making it one of the most successful albums in the history of jazz up to that point. One buyer was a gentleman who employed Erroll Garner’s older sister, Ruth, as a maid. When she showed up for work one day, the employer told her that she looked a lot like the picture of a pianist on a record he had just purchased. Ruth had yet to hear of Concert of the Sea, but when the employer played it she recognized the sound immediately. “That’s my brother,” she said.
Propelled by the popularity of that album and by Martha Glaser’s ambition, Garner rocketed to worldwide fame in the late 1950s and 1960s. He became the first jazz artist ever to sign a concert promotion deal with Sol Hurok, the classical music impresario who represented Artur Rubinstein, Isaac Stern, Andrés Segovia, and the Bolshoi Ballet. He performed in the great concert halls of Europe, Asia, and South America—always sitting atop a Manhattan phone book provided for in his contract with Hurok. He became a favorite guest of TV late night and variety hosts, from Steve Allen and Andy Williams to Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson. During one Tonight Show appearance, Carson asked Garner what made his playing so special. When Erroll couldn’t explain it, Johnny called over to the pianist in the Tonight Show band, Ross Tompkins, for an answer. “Happiness!” Tompkins yelled out.
By the 1970s, Garner was back to playing in jazz clubs, but he still had an avid following. In February 1975, he was in the middle of a triumphant return engagement at Mister Kelly’s in Chicago when he collapsed onstage. Taken to the hospital, he was diagnosed with emphysema, brought on by his three-packs-a-day cigarette habit. It would be his last concert, and within two years he would be dead of lung cancer at the age of fifty-three.
Because he died so young; because his looks were so unusual; and because he was so famous for not reading music, Erroll Garn
er would come to be remembered as an inexplicable genius, as if he had come out of nowhere. But serious students of jazz knew where the music came from—how deeply Garner had absorbed and synthesized the traditions of stride and ragtime piano, of swing and bebop, of Broadway show tunes and polyrhythmic percussion that traced all the way back to Africa. And the many talented musicians from his hometown knew where he had first encountered those influences and developed the ambition to outshine them all—including, in the end, even great crossover heartthrob Billy Eckstine.
The year after Garner left Westinghouse High, another piano prodigy graduated from the school. He was a skinny boy named Frederick Jones, who was known by his nickname “Fritz.” As an adult, he became a member of the Nation of Islam and a leading light of bebop under the name of Ahmad Jamal. In a documentary film about Garner that came out twenty-five years after his death, Jamal had an answer for the critics who charged that Erroll was more of a gifted entertainer than a true artist. “He could make you laugh, and he could make you cry, and he could make you think,” Jamal said. “That’s what an artist is supposed to do.”
And where did that artistry come from? “What was different about Erroll was one word: Pittsburgh,” Jamal said. “Pittsburgh produced this kind of talent.”
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