I was never afraid of a one-on-one situation boxing or fist-fighting, but when you get into gangs then you have to worry if someone’s got a knife or a gun or a piece of steel. We’d drive to this lot, the cars would stop, and out would jump Chris and all the guys and the guys from the other gang, and they’d meet and start fighting. I would have to get out and fight. We’d fight until one side or the other won, or, if we were losing, we’d jump in our cars and split. And afterwards, we’d go to this drive-in and eat and talk about the fight. They’d laugh and everything. That was, like, great fun. We’d strut around the school the next day. And we drank. We drank Burgermeister ale and Gilbey’s gin to get the nerve to go into these things. That was the trip and it wasn’t me.
Finally, during one of these fights, some guys brought out a chain, and a couple of knives came out, and a couple of guys got cut real bad, and I started thinking, “Wow, I don’t want this!” I thought, “If this is being part of society . . .” That was society for me. Now, if that was what I had to do to belong, I didn’t want any part of it. So that was when I started getting with Johnny Martizia and Jimmy Henson, musicians I’d met playing at dances. They were in their early twenties, and they had other friends whose thing was playing music, and it was a good thing. I got along better with them. I withdrew from the guys in school, and the gang ranked me: they thought I thought I was better than them, that I was stuck-up, that I had a big head, and every now and then I’d get challenged by one of these guys and have to have a fistfight, but it was better than being part of that gang. I quit the Cobras and that’s when I really got into the music thing.
(Johnny Martizia) I was about eighteen. I was playing with a little dance band, high school dances, and I kept hearing all these, you know, stinking saxophone players, out of tune, honking sounds, and I went to this rehearsal, and I heard somebody warming up, playing scales and so on, and my God! I said, “What is that?” It was such a gorgeous sound. It was like a real artist, and I looked, and it was this little kid! He looked about fourteen years old. It was Art. I couldn’t believe it. I said,” Who the hell are you?”
Art and I got real friendly. He’d come over to my house. I played him some records and I played some jazz myself. Not well. He said, “How do you do that? How do you jam?” That was the word—jam. I explained about chord progressions and I said, “You make up your own melody.” And boy, he got it right away. He’s got great ears. He’d hear something once and he’d have it. He must have had a good teacher, too. Art knew all his scales, and that’s very important.
I had started out playing cowboy songs, “Home on the Range,” things like that. Then, somehow, I happened to hear some Django Reinhardt. That was really incredible. I still have some of the records—78s. I listened to them over and over and tried to copy all his licks. I started taking down beat magazine, listening to all the big bands, and going with the other guys to hear people like Coleman Hawkins and T-Bone Walker when they were in town. We’d get friendly with them and they’d tell us, “Hey, man, we’re going to go down to this after-hours place and jam, do you want to come?” Of course we’d go. We’d stay all night.
Well, Art started going out with us, going to bars to play. We didn’t even have a car; we’d walk sometimes for miles. Zoot Sims was one of the guys then. We used to call him Jackie, Jackie Sims.
Art was a very clean-looking, Italian-looking kid, normal height, good weight, very, very healthy, good-looking. He was a very exciting kid, kinda naughty, you know, a raise-hell kinda kid. One night we went to a club to jam and all of a sudden I turn around and here’s Art having an argument with an old guy. Maybe he wasn’t so old; he seemed old to us. The next thing I know, Art’s rolling on the floor, fighting with this guy. Art was a very energetic kid. Always jumpin’ around.
WHEN I was nine or ten I liked the big bands that I heard on the radio—Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet. After I got my clarinet, I started buying their records. It became my goal to play Artie Shaw’s part on “Concerto for Clarinet.” Finally, after I’d been playing for a few years, Mr. Parry bought me the sheet music. I practiced all alone and with the record, and I was finally able to play it. It was a difficult piece.
Johnny Martizia was a guitar player; Jimmy Henson played trombone. I got together with them at their houses to play. Johnny would strum the guitar. He told me, “These are the chords to the blues, which all jazz emanates from. This is black music, from Africa, from the slave ships that came to America.”
I liked what I heard, but I didn’t know what chords were. Chords are the foundation for all music, the foundation jazz players improvise on. I said, “What shall I do?” He said, “Listen to the sounds I’m making on my guitar and play what you feel.” He strummed the blues and I played things that felt nice and seemed to fit. We played and played, and slowly I began to play sounds that made sense and didn’t clash with what he was doing. I asked him if he thought that I might have the right to play jazz. He said, “You’re very fortunate. You have a gift.” I wanted to become the greatest player in the world. I wanted to become a jazz musician.
I ran around with Johnny and his friends. We’d go into bars and ask if we could play. Sometimes they said yes. I was four-teen or fifteen. These guys took me down to Central Avenue, the black nightclub district, and asked if we could sit in. The people there were very encouraging.
I played clarinet in the school band in San Pedro but when I got to Fremont High I stopped playing in school and started working more jobs. I had been playing alto saxophone since I was twelve, and now I got a job playing alto with a trio at Victor McLaglen’s. I began going by myself to Central Avenue. I met a lot of musicians there. I ran into a bass player, Joe Mon-dragon, who said he was going with Gus Arnheim in San Diego. He asked me if I wanted to go with the band. I was still going to school but I wasn’t going regular. I went to San Diego and stayed for about three months.
Gus Arnheim was in a big ballroom down there. It was a very commercial band and I didn’t fit in because there were no jazz solos to play—you just read music. It was good practice, but it got tiresome, so I left, came back, went to Central Avenue again, and ran into Dexter Gordon. He said that Lee Young was forming a band to go into the Club Alabam; they needed an alto player. I auditioned and I got the job. I think I auditioned at the colored union. They had a white union and a colored union. I had already joined the union when I lived in San Pedro.
This was in the early ’40s and things were so different from the way they are now. Central Avenue was like Harlem was a long time ago. As soon as evening came people would be out on the streets, and most of the people were black, but nobody was going around in black leather jackets with naturals hating people. It was a beautiful time. It was a festive time. The women dressed up in frills and feathers and long earrings and hats with things hanging off them, fancy dresses with slits in the skirts, and they wore black silk stockings that were rolled, and wedgie shoes. Most of the men wore big, wide-brimmed hats and zoot suits with wide collars, small cuffs, and large knees, and their coats were real long with padded shoulders. They wore flashy ties with diamond stickpins; they wore lots of jewelry; and you could smell powder and perfume everywhere. And as you walked down the street you heard music coming out of every-place. And everybody was happy. Everybody just loved everybody else, or if they didn’t, I didn’t know about it. Gerald Wiggins, the piano player, Slick Jones, the drummer, Dexter Gordon, and Charlie Mingus—we would just walk out in the street and pee off the curb. It was just cool. We’d light up a joint; we had Mota, which is moist and black, and we’d smoke pot right out in front of the club.
The dope thing hadn’t evolved into what it is now, with all the police activity. I’d never heard of a narco, didn’t know what the word meant. Nobody wanted to rat on anybody