White Bicycles

by Joe Boyd

  At Orly airport tears were shed, addresses and phone numbers exchanged. Everyone wanted to do it again in the States. I felt confident it could be arranged, but the following winter I discovered how little interest it held for American concert promoters. Brighton would never be repeated. In years to come, Muddy took his (full) band around the world, recorded with Jimmy Page and got hugged onstage by Mick Jagger. Brownie, Sonny and Gary plied the folk circuit until they got too old to carry on. Rosetta kept touring even after she lost a leg. Cousin Joe went back to his bar in New Orleans and occasionally toured Europe. An era in American culture was passing and I had only the barest idea of how lucky I was to have witnessed the flash of the sunset.

  The blues boom of the sixties marked the end of the natural life of the form. The British taught white Americans how to love their native music and the sudden enthusiasm of college kids seemed to be enough for most black audiences to decide it was time to move on. The black bourgeoisie was already ashamed of it and soul and Motown drew the rest away. By the end of the sixties, most blues artists were performing – if at all – for white audiences only.

  In the mid-sixties, love of the blues united much of the American folk and English pop worlds. Most folk singers’ repertoire included at least one song learned from a Leadbelly or Big Bill Broonzy record, while a large percentage of English pop groups started life as blues bands. Pink Floyd are named after Pink Anderson and Floyd Council, two obscure singers from rural South Carolina whose names appeared in the liner notes of a Blind Boy Fuller reissue. Every rediscovery of an old man whose name graced the labels of our treasured 78s from the ’20s or ’30s was greeted with huge excitement. With astonishing speed, however, blues became a cliché. By the ’70s, lurching, screaming – or, worse, polite – guitar solos poured forth from bar bands and heavy metal groups and decorated overproduced singles by mainstream pop singers. Blues phrasing now permeates most popular music: the ultimate postmodern artefact, complete with quotation marks.

  Thirty years after Brighton, I walked sadly away from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Fair. It was everything my twenty-one-year-old self might have dreamed of: 75,000 people packed into the Fairgrounds, with NPR-subscriber bags holding expertly marked programmes. America’s black musical heritage was on parade across two long weekends and eight stages. But the audience was almost entirely white. The performers had learned their lessons, dropping any modernizations or slick showbiz gestures and recreating the old-time styles the sophisticated audiences craved. On one level, it demonstrated respect for a deep culture and a rejection of shallow novelty. But removed from the soil in which it grew the music felt lifeless, like actors portraying characters who happened to be their younger selves. In two days wandering from stage to stage, I heard little I recognized as music.

  The festival’s big attraction, Aretha Franklin, left the ‘Who’s Zoomin’ Who’ spangles at home and sang her great sixties hits from a piano bench. For about thirty seconds, I was thrilled. But she and the audience seemed to know exactly what was coming next. Waves of self-congratulatory affection passed back and forth between them: she claiming credit for recognizing what they wanted to hear; the audience adoring themselves for being so hip as to want the ‘real thing’. The music was caught in the middle, lifeless and predictable. Nothing that weekend bore any resemblance to what I heard in the town halls of England in April 1964 or on those unforgettable nights sitting a few feet from great masters who were not yet savvy enough to be anything other than real.

  Chapter 6

  ON MY FIRST DAY AT WORK for George Wein in January 1964, I was assigned a spare desk in his Central Park West office, a large ground-floor room in an imposing building that no jazz promoter could afford today. Midmorning, the buzzer sounded and Thelonious Monk was admitted wearing his famous black astrakhan cap, a heavy woollen overcoat and gloves. Everyone greeted him and George waved vaguely in my direction, saying, ‘That’s our new kid over there, Joe.’ Monk turned and looked in my direction. Without taking off his coat, hat or gloves, he advanced slowly across the room. After what seemed a long time, he stood looming over me. I rose hesitantly. He took off one glove, gently clasped my hand, looked me in the eye and said softly, ‘How you feeling?’ Neither awaiting nor expecting a reply, he turned and started talking to Joyce Wein and I went back to phoning bass players in Chicago.

  I was as excited about jazz then as I was about blues. When George invited me to work for the autumn 1964 Newport Jazz in Europe tour, I borrowed money to last the summer in London until I went back on the payroll.

  The European jazz world had an aura of wealth and elegance in those days. Promoters lived expansively, their fortunes mostly inherited or earned elsewhere. I started moving in this rarefied world at the height of the post-war success of jazz. I crossed the Channel by ferry and motorcycle in early August, having spent the summer on friends’ sofas and floors. Arriving in Paris after midnight, I made my way to George’s home-from-home, the luxurious Hôtel Prince de Galles. The concierge regarded me with horror: I was covered in grease and my goggles were spattered with bugs. By the morning, I was scrubbed clean and ready to join this other world.

  At lunchtime we walked up the street to Fouquet’s on the Champs Elysées to meet Philippe Koechlin, editor of Jazz Hot, and tell him about the line-up of the autumn tour. It included Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, the Charlie Parker All-stars with Sonny Stitt, JJ Johnson and Howard McGhee, Roland Kirk, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Original Tuxedo Brass Band from New Orleans, the George Russell Sextet and the Coleman Hawkins/Harry Edison Swing All-stars: eight bands, six different itineraries and four tour managers. I spoke a reasonable amount of French but fearful of finding something unfamiliar on my plate I ordered ‘entrecôte bien cuit avec pommes frites’. On our way back to the hotel, George put his arm on my shoulder and said, ‘Kid, if you’re going to work for me, you gotta learn how to eat.’ Over the next three evenings, we went to Michelin-starred restaurants where George turned my palate around, ordering three courses for me with wines to match.

  George had to stretch a bit to put an arm on my shoulder. He is short, stout and balding, a caricature of the cigar-chomping promoter. In fact, he plays very much against type (and doesn’t smoke cigars). For a start, he is an accomplished jazz pianist. He horrified his clothier father by turning his back on the family business to pursue his musical obsessions. By the time he was thirty, he had opened the Storyville jazz club in Boston and married Joyce, not only not a Jewish girl, but black besides. His enthusiasm created the Newport Jazz Festival in the ’50s and his determination brought it back to life in the sixties after beer-fuelled riots had run it out of town. This was his first attempt to establish that franchise in Europe. His motivation was part economic, part egotistical and part gastronomic. George loved nothing more than eating his way through the Guide Michelin from Paris to the Riviera and back and this way there was a business justification for the trip.

  One of his partners in the venture had a Paris flat with a jumble of Degas, Matisse and Bonnard canvases on the walls. We went often to the Blue Note club off the Champs Elysées, where a couple of girls sat alone with champagne on ice and an empty chair extending an expensive invitation. You couldn’t have dreamed up an atmosphere more remote from an English pub – or, for that matter, a New York jazz club.

  When a crisis arose over the discount fares deal with Air France, George summoned me to meet him at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. We lay on the beach phoning travel agents and promoters from red telephones on forty-foot wires while waiters brought us drinks and lunch. One evening he took me into the hills to have a drink at the Colombe d’Or in St-Paul-de-Vence. George was explaining the history of the Matisse and Picasso sketches on the wall and toasting the huge photo of the latter behind the bar when I gave him a nudge. Pablo himself was seated on the terrace in the evening sun, holding court at a table with six beautiful women and one small boy. His shirt was off, he looked powerful and bronzed and the women never took their eyes
off him.

  From my hôtel particulier near the Trocadéro I ‘advanced’ the tour, booking hotels and local flights and arranging press interviews. In the evenings I would zoom around Paris on the motorbike, hanging out in the Café Seine off the Boulevard St-Germain with a crowd of expat jazzmen and would-be Bohemians. Those relaxed weeks were needed to build up a credit balance: once the tour started I would rarely get more than four hours’ sleep a night and found myself under constant threat of disaster.

  The problems began in Berlin on the first day of the tour. The European promoters had insisted on adding Roland Kirk to the line-up, but the budget was tight and George refused to book Kirk’s band as well. He packaged him on a bill with the Parker All-stars so he could share their rhythm section of Tommy Potter and Kenny Clarke. It was a great opportunity for Kirk, but he hated performing without his regular musicians. As a compromise, he was allowed to add a European pianist he had worked with before, the Catalan Tété Montoliu. We knew that Roland was blind and would be accompanied by his wife, but we didn’t realize Montoliu was blind as well and would thus require his wife to come along too. Tour budgets were on a knife-edge and this meant more air fares, double rooms and per diems.

  Roland’s group assembled for the first time on the afternoon of the opening show. Potter and Clarke were old-school bop musicians. They (like George) viewed Roland’s playing three saxes at once as a gimmick and they had even less use for his complicated time signatures. But Roland had spent the morning with Tété working out stripped-down adaptations of his arrangements. When they started to play them backstage, the other two just laughed. This was a one-night stand tour: ‘Just name a few standards, choose your keys, and tap your foot for the tempo,’ said Tommy.

  The first two dates passed without incident, but mutual frustration was building. On the third day, I put Rosetta and the Tuxedo Band on a plane from Hamburg to Zurich, then flew the short hop to Bremen, where I picked up the Parker All-stars and Roland. In Zurich, we met the Hawkins/Edison group coming in from Frankfurt and I put them on a plane to Geneva, where another tour manager would meet them. I got Roland and the All-stars to the concert hall then boarded a train with Rosetta and the Tuxedos to Berne for a concert that night. Back in Zurich after the show there was a mailbox full of messages, most of them reading, ‘Be sure to speak to me before you talk to anyone else…’

  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 w
as 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.