I remember when Buddy Rich first came here with Artie Shaw and Vido Musso; they used to always be down on Central. Harry James, he used to be on Central Avenue jammin’. That’s where everybody hung out. Everybody. They had so many little clubs. Next door to the Alabam was a Mexican restaurant, and she had a piano in the back, and piano players used to go in there, and I’m speaking about Art Tatum. Adjacent to that was the Downbeat. Within two blocks they had about six clubs where musicians were working, and so, like, we used to take long intermissions and go across the street and listen. We’d go next door and they’d come over to hear us play. It was like a west coast Fifty-second Street, but you never really heard of Los Angeles that much, then, where music was concerned. Everybody thought all the jazz and all the better jazz musicians came from the east. The writers for Metronome and down beat used to segregate it. They had what they called “West Coast Jazz”; they thought it would be different. I think that’s because the east wanted to really be up here and have the west down there, whatever that was. Music is music. Either you can play or you cannot play. And I’ve found that music is an international language. One of the best bands I ever heard was a band in Buenos Aires, in Argentina.
But let me tell you this about Art. At that time, I think everybody in the band was young, but, at seventeen, Art was the youngest. And about musicians, you can always tell when a guy is going to be great because the potential is there, and the only thing that needs to happen is for him to get out and play. It’s like my brother, Prez. I know how much he could play at seventeen, and I think that what happens is that they could play snakes at that age, but they just have not mellowed into the type of style they’re going to play. I think that’s all that happens after that. When a musician is young, every idea they have, they try to play at once. They’re not necessarily any better—Art probably wasn’t any better at twenty-seven than he was at seventeen; he probably didn’t know the instrument any better; but he knew what to do with it. He knew how not to overplay. You learn to pace yourself. But if he was not able to play all those notes and hear all those things, then he would never have been able to create a style. He was destined: nobody at that time was taking a seventeen year old and putting him into a band. The nearest I remember is when Harry James had Corky Corcoran. He played tenor. At that time he was the child wonder; I think he was sixteen or seventeen. But he was never destined to reach the heights as a jazz player that Art reached because you knew then, in hearing Corky play, that he wasn’t the instrumentalist, the technician, that Art was. Stan Getz was very young, too, but Stan, he copied a lot. Stan copied Prez. Now, I never did hear that in Art.
I lost track of Art for a long time, and then he did a lot of things on his own. When he went with Benny Carter, that’s understandable. He went from nine pieces to fourteen, fifteen pieces; he went from three saxophones to five. That was an education in itself. And then to go on and join Stan Kenton, that’s beautiful.
Art was talented, but let me tell you, I never would have hired him if I’d thought he didn’t have the right personality. If it’s going to be one of you and a lot of another race of people, you could have a problem. I didn’t just take Art blindly because I thought he played so well. I knew he’d be able to get along with the guys. And I knew the type of guys I had in the band. They would only judge him by his playing. He was quiet, the way I remember him. As a matter of fact the whole damn band was quiet! Hahahaha! That was a quiet band, but it was a good band. It could play.
The Club Alabam had had many names. When I came out here as a kid, you know, I used to be a singer and dancer, and it was one of the first places I worked. It was called the Apex. That was in the thirties, when all the movie stars used to frequent the club, so it was really a big business. And the same man who owned the Apex wound up owning the Club Alabam. How can I describe it? You had to buy your tickets at a ticket window, and then you’d go in, and they had tables all around the dance floor, maybe three deep, and they had a balcony, and right on the railing they had tables all the way around. I think you could get nine hundred people in there. And there was a long bar, maybe eighty, ninety feet, and all the hustlers and pimps, they stayed at the bar to fire their shots, so it was like something you see in the movies now, with the gangsters. But these guys were harmless, guys that gambled, no guns or that type of thing, and always shirt and tie and hats and coats. The dance floor was about fifty feet; you could get a lot of couples on the floor. And the show—they had eight or ten chorus girls. Oh yeah! That’s why I always took the job! Hahahaha! We always had a shake dancer, chorus, comics, and a headliner, and you couldn’t get near the place on Saturdays and Sundays especially. Most of the black people would be there on weekends, and all during the week the clientele was white.
That club was a nice place to work. But it all came to an end with the change of times and with the people moving out. I think it was the influx of transients; there was a lot of that. During the war, I went on the staff at Columbia Studios, but Central was really jumping then. It was almost like Broadway. After the war, the clubs started closing. I don’t know if it was hard times or what it was. I never really thought about it, but I observed it happening. As a matter of fact, it’s been years since I’ve been there because it was such a drastic change. If you’ve grown up used to something and it deteriorates . . . The Downbeat turned into a dump, a lot of winos hanging around. And they started holding people up and mugging people. It was just the times, I guess.
WHEN I went with Benny Carter I played all my jazz by ear. I was good at reading, but I didn’t know about chord structure, harmony, composition. Also, I had never played much lead alto, so with Benny I played second alto, he played lead, but in my book I had two parts written in most of the arrangements and sometimes, if there wasn’t a large audience, Benny would just get off the stand and let me play his parts. I’d get all his solos. I learned that way how to play lead in a four-man saxo-phone section. And I learned a lot following Benny, listening to his solos, what he played against the background. The guys in the band were all great musicians—Gerald Wilson, Freddie Webster, a legendary trumpet player, and JJ. Johnson, a jazz superstar. We played all over L.A. We did well. I was making fifty dollars a week, which was big money in those days.
The band went to Salt Lake City. I took Patti with me, and we stayed with Freddie Webster and his wife, with a colored family, on the outskirts of town. Freddie was a nice-looking, kind of a strange-looking, little cat. I had a strong affection for him. He was a little man who could back up the little man complex; his playing was incredibly beautiful. And he always carried an automatic pistol. He felt that because he was black and because of his size, somebody was going to push him into a corner and he’d need an equalizer. When we finished the job at night, I’d go stand in the street and flag down a cab. Freddie would hide. Then I’d go to get in the cab and hold the door open, and he’d run and jump in. Because they wouldn’t pick up a black guy. And I was always afraid the cab driver would say something and Freddie would shoot him. I was happy and comfortable with the guys in the band, but my dad hated blacks. He hated blacks and policemen and rats, informers; those were the things he raved about all the time, and he was angry that I hung out with “a bunch of niggers, a bunch of goddamned jigaboos.” The band was going down south and Benny told me it would be too dangerous from the blacks and the whites both for me to go along. I couldn’t understand why I had to leave the band and I didn’t know what I was going to do, but Benny talked to his manager, Carlos Gastel, who also managed Stan Kenton’s band. Stan had an exciting new band, very glamorous; they were from Balboa and all that. Jack Ordean, who played alto, had just left Kenton,