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In February 1956 I was fifteen years old and just learning about jazz. I had a handful or records and the previous Christmas had been given a portable three-speed record player that looked like a tiny suitcase. I was allowed to play the record quietly in my bedroom, away from my parents. I didn’t own any books or magazines that might have taught me anything about jazz; the little I knew came from listening, looking at the backs of LPs at the record store or reading at the Syracuse Public Library. I didn’t know much about what was going on but I was a pretty quick study.
Sometime that month I spotted an ad in the newspaper that announced a concert at the Syracuse War Memorial Auditorium that was called Birdland Stars on Tour. This was probably my first jazz concert, I can’t remember anything earlier, and it was a perfect eye and ear opener for an enthusiastic teenager. I was lucky that my first concert was so jammed up with already legendary performers that it provided me with a musical mini-history of jazz in three hours. This is who was there.
The Count Basie Orchestra with Joe Williams, Billy Eckstine and Sarah Vaughan, The Bud Powell Trio, Zoot Sims and a group and, most importantly, Lester Young, who played a couple of numbers with the Basie band. I think Rolf Kuhn was also on the bill, but I don’t remember much about him. What I do remember is that I’d missed the bus, was late and ran up the stairs to the top of the auditorium, pulled open the door, and the sound of the Basie band smacked me in the face. And what a smack; it was the best Basie band since before World War II and a great way to first experience big band jazz.
Frank Wess was 34 that night; Lester Young was an old man of 46. Today, Frank Wess is one of the last men standing from that era. Since I’ve been in the music business, I’ve crossed paths with Frank countless times, at festivals, concerts and recordings I’ve produced and most unusually, when he was part of a show I wrote entitled Billie and Lester that was performed for two nights at the Oslo Jazz Festival in 2006. He didn’t play the Billie part.
The first night was a sold out house, everything was going well and Queen Sonja, a long time jazz fan was in the audience, but one of the most charming things that happened during our two day run in Oslo was during the first intermission. I looked out the back door and saw Warren Vache standing on the fire escape smoking a cigarette. I went out and asked him how it was going. He said, “It couldn’t be better.” I asked him why and he said, “Because I’m getting to sit next to Frank Wess for two hours.” That pretty much sums up Frank’s stature among his peers.
Last week (June 10, 2010) there was an event at the Brooklyn Library structured around my book, The Ghosts of Harlem. The program called for an interview by Gary Walker of WBGO and a performance by 89-year-old Frank Wess, accompanied by a band of youngsters led by the rising guitarist, Armand Hirsch. If you added up the ages of the guys in the band, Frank is twenty years old than all of them combined, but it didn’t matter. He played three tunes, one of flute, two on tenor. As the years have passed his flute has remained the same, masterful in every way, but his tenor sound seems to me to be lighter, more Lester-like. Each performance was a little masterpiece and the audience knew it. Some guy down front taped the event and posted one of the tunes of YouTube. The guy will not get an award as a videographer, but I wish he’d been there in 1956.
Later that night going home, as we sped across the Manhattanville Bridge, we were talking about Lester Young. I said, “You know Frank, the first time I heard you, I also heard Lester Young, all on the same night, fifty five years ago, in Syracuse, New York.” He then told me what tunes Lester had played with the band and who had written the arrangements for that tour. He didn’t miss a beat. We crossed Houston Street and stopped for a light at Bowery, next to the Whole Foods Market. Frank glanced at the store and said, “They’ve got a picture of me in there that’s part of a big mural on the second floor.”
A couple of days later I checked out the store, and sure enough there was a large picture of Frank, maybe six or seven feet high, mixed in with an old sign for Kosher chickens and other signs and pictures about food on the Lower East Side through the years. Frank’s picture was captioned Jazz 1950. Based on the way he’d just played in Brooklyn it could just have easily read have Jazz 2010.
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Frank Wess, Dweck Center for Contemporary Culture, Brooklyn, New York, June 10, 2010
