Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 5
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
September 1994 | Volume 45, Issue 5
My brother called me from Youngstown recently with a bright idea. Why not get up a three-piece band for a meeting of his musical club next month when I planned to be in town? Verne Ricketts was available to play the piano, and Hype Hosterman might be rounded up to play the drums.
The idea left me cold. My hand holding the phone was filled with arthritis, and I hadn’t touched a sax for about a half-century. And Verne Ricketts—he must be ninety. He played Idora Park when I was only eight. I was about to ask my brother why he didn’t play the sax himself. He could always cut the stuff better than I could, and his imitation of Ted Lewis was absolutely the best I ever saw. Then I remembered. He’d lost three fingers back in 1942.
So I told him maybe and let it go at that.
But his call tapped something in my brain, and memories gushed out, memories of those hundreds of nights during the Great Depression when I played sax for people who were trying to wring a little fun out of a ten-cent beer, a nickel bag of chips, and a few dances.
I had a union card in those days, but I’m not claiming to have been much of a musician. I had a card because the union boss (when sober) made the rounds of the joints, and it was wise to have a card even though he knew we weren’t making union scale, which was three dollars per night. I never had many lessons and knew as much about a cord of wood as a chord of music. When I ad-libbed, what came out was a matter of pure chance.
But I remembered playing one night at the Blue Crystal. The place was about empty, and we played “Stardust” mostly to pass the time. When the last notes died and the room was absolutely still, the drummer, Bob Grandmontagne, tapped me on the shoulder. “That was the sweetest music I ever heard,” he said.
Later on Bob was smart enough to get in the Air Transport Command, and last I heard he was a chicken colonel. Maybe he made general. I hope so, after he paid me a compliment like that. I’m not trying to put down all the stories you hear today about the patriotism of the World War II generation, but some of the guys I knew looked on the service as a business opportunity. The three hundred dollars a month they paid air corps lieutenants looked mighty big to us who were making anywhere from ten to twenty dollars a week.
But back to music. I had a hard reed on my mouthpiece, not like most sax men today, who use reeds so soft that all you’ve got to do is breathe into the horn. They get lots of execution that way, but the tone is a buzz, even a honk.