JS37: 16 bars with photographer Nubar Alexanian

Posted on June 2, 2008
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“Ornette Coleman once told me: ‘Every living thing has something inside of it that does not want to die. Find out what this is and play that.” - Nubar Alexanian

In the introduction to his book Where Music Comes From, photographer Nubar Alexanian writes: “I’m not sure if you’re born with a musical ear or whether you develop one from your father constantly whistling into it. I can still see myself standing next to our old Magnavox hi-fi when I was eight years old.

“My father stood right next to me, keeping the beat with his finger and whistling the notes to Armenian songs. I ended up playing clarinet in an Armenian band with my cousin. I did my first solo gig when I was ten years old playing Armenian music in a night club in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Alexanian was born here in 1950. Continuing in the book with his early memories he says, “For a first-generation family trying to transmit its culture to their children, music was essential. But I was a second-generation kid growing up in America. One rainy Saturday morning, I walked down Portland Street in Worcester and purchased a copy of Meet the Beatles.

“In my family, this was a dramatic decision, taken with some risk. My father, an engineer, was working a second job, but he came home early that day. He walked over to the Magnavox, took the Beatles off, and made it clear he never wanted to hear that in his house again.”

Alexanian played the clarinet as a child. “I took lessons until my teacher found out that I wasn’t really reading,” he says. “He’d show me the lesson. He’d play it and then I’d remember it. I’d go home and practice it based on what I heard. If the pieces got more complex with 16th notes and 32nd notes and I left them out, I got nabbed.”

Still he got proficient enough to play to perform publically. “When I was 10 years old I played at the Peacock Club in Auburn,” he recalls. “My parents brought me. I felt like a mascot. I went up and did my little song and my parents were really proud. I didn’t really love the clarinet. What I really wanted to do was to play the piano. Both my sisters played so there was no room. I work around people in music a lot. So I have a fairly good pair of ears.”

Alexanian attended Burncoat High School and says he didn’t become passionate about photography until college. “I left town in 1968 and went to Boston University. That was during the Vietnam War-era. I needed a way to understand what was going on without committing myself. I picked up a camera. A camera lets you get close. You are photographing it. You are not committed. I left college after two years and started to take pictures, full time. I finished my degree at UMass a few years later.”

Today Alexanian is an internationally recognized documentary photographer whose work has appeared in LIFE, The New York Times Magazine, American Heritage, Audubon, GEO, The London Sunday Times, Premiere and others.

In addition to publishing a series of books featuring his photographs (including two on music and one called Jazz), Alexanian has presented numerous one-man exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, and his work is held by museums and private collections worldwide, including Polaroid, the University of Arizona, and the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris. In 1983 he was presented with a Fullbright Fellowship. His latest book is Nonfiction: Photographs by Nubar Alexanian from the film sets of Erroll Morris. It is a book about Abu Ghraib Prison.

For more than 25 years, Alexanian traveled to more than 30 countries focusing on long term personal projects. He is the co-founder of the Essex Photographic Workshop in Essex, Massachusetts. These days he directs and shoots films for Bose Corporation. He lives in Gloucester with his wife, Rebecca, and daughter, Abby Rose.

Where Music Comes From was published in 1996 by Dewi Lewis Publication, Manchester, England. In 1997 it was chosen by the New York Public Library as one of the best and most inspirational books for young adults.

Continuing with his comments about college in the introduction of Where Music Comes From, Alexanian writes: “I was assigned three roommates. The four of us shared a three-room suite. The first, the son of a United States ambassador, smoked opium every night and carried on about how people didn’t like him. The second, an orthodox Jew with whom I shared a room, prayed with tefillin every morning in front of our dorm window and wanted to be an opera star. The third, a tall, bearded guy from Chicago named Charlie, mainly stayed alone in his room. The music coming from under that closed door sounded strange and formidable.

“After a few weeks, my hair was well on its way to my shoulders. I’d lie on Charlie’s floor listening to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Pharoah Sanders. I don’t know how many copies of Kind of Blue we went through by the end of our sophomore year, but every note and nuance of that album is engraved in my musical memory. It was a long way from ‘Hava Nagila’ and ‘Never on Sunday’ duets with my cousin. Every so often Charlie and I would fly to Chicago on $29 student airfares and go to blues clubs. We’d sneak into the Newport Jazz Festival and sleep in the bushes. Jazz and the chaotic passions on campus during those times were my formative influences.”

On its website, Bose Corporation wrote about Where Music Comes From, stating: “For five years, he accompanied more than 25 captivating music makers of our time on their travels and in their daily lives. The result is a passionate celebration of the creative souls and spirit behind the harmonies and melodies that sweeten our lives.

“Alexanian’s photographs and interviews take you to Milan where Wynton Marsalis warms up in front of a bathroom mirror before a concert. They lead you to India with Philip Glass, immersing himself in the mystical roots of that ancient civilization, and to South Africa, where Joseph Shabalala absorbs the richness of his Zulu culture. Then they send you on a tour of the United States with Phish.”

Some of the other musicians included in the book are Bela Fleck, Aretha Franklin, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, The Mississippi Mass Choir, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Paul Simon and Jr. Wells.

Alexanian says in the planning stages of the book, he started out wanting to do only three musicians. “I didn’t know where I was going. It was a very expensive project to do. Magazines in New York were interested in it but it was so huge nobody could pay for it. It probably cost like $12,000 to do one musician and there are like 25 different musicians in that book.

“I thought I’d start slowly and I wanted to start with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Leonard Bernstein and Miles Davis. They all died in the first year. So I thought, I shouldn’t even think about anybody for their own protection.”

Alexanian did think of others and soon gave the names of people he wanted to photograph to editors that he worked with in New York. “Life magazine hired me to shoot a bunch of them. I wanted to do known and unknown musicians. I wanted to describe the process of where the music came from. I never really understood how important it was to me until I did that book. Now it is very alive for me.”

In the introduction Alexanian admits that though he rebelled against tradition, he noticed how much, as he grew older, like his father he had become. “To this day, before he begins a project, he turns to Armenian music,” the photographer says of his dad. “He always makes sure that music is in his immediate environment. So do I. Certainly our taste is different, but music is an indispensable part of our lives, and one day I found myself wondering why. I was standing in the gospel tent at the New Orleans Jazz Festival in 1981 trying to photograph how music made me feel. What was it about Coltrane, Miles and Billie Holiday that I found so extraordinary? What made music such a powerful force?

“In places like Egypt, people were often entombed with instruments because they believed that music came from another world and having an instrument there would be essential. Humans everywhere have relied on music, the medium created by the gods for dialogue. I understand why they believed this. Some music speaks to me so universally and powerfully, it does indeed seem otherworldly. It’s as if the greatest composers and performers are truly our intermediaries with a divine force. Where Music Comes From is my celebration of the spirit of music apart from the business of music. In these photographs I try to glimpse the process these soulful musicians engage in to produce their sound.”

In his other book of music, JAZZ, the text was written by Wynton Marsalis. In its introduction, an unidentified author writes: “Jazz is a conversation between word and image, and between Wynton Marsalis, one of jazz’s most charismatic and gifted artists, and his audience. Using inspirational quotes taken from lectures and workshops, which he conducts all over the world, Marsalis’s philosophy is emphatic: jazz cannot exist without communication, truth, respect, self control and wisdom. His appreciation of and reverence for each of these elements, combined with the lyrical images of award-winning photojournalist Nubar Alexanian, make this a compelling and inspirational view of America’s greatest music. For both Marsalis and Alexanian, jazz is a metaphor for the best kind of human interaction, and JAZZ illustrates all this beautifully.”

The photographs find Alexanian shadowing the trumpeter to workshops, lectures, performance, recording, composing and repose. There’s Marsalis with other band members, students and Seji Ozwa, Art Farmer and Marcus Roberts. The book also includes a hand written composition by Marsalis called “Buddy Bolden.”

On the back cover of JAZZ, there’s a quote that reads: “The vocabulary of jazz, the basic building blocks of the music, are metaphors for communication. These haven’t changed very much since the very early days. Call and response means, I speak and you answer. A break … I stop and let you talk or vice versa. Solos … we each get a chance to expound on the subject. Riffs … we agree. Improvisation … what we say and how we say it. And finally, swing, which means coordinating all this communicating with style and good manners.”

Opposite a photo of Marsalis talking with his bandmates is the quote: “The foundation of both jazz and democracy is dialogue, learning to negotiate your own agenda within the group’s agenda. Jazz is like a good conversation. You have to listen to what others have to say if you’re going to make an intelligent contribution.”

When asked if he plays any musical instrument at all these days, Alexanian says no, before launching into a story about his travels with Marsalis. “I am now 57,” he says. “When I was 46 I decided I wanted to learn how to play jazz piano by the time I turned 50. I was taking lessons and making my way, but I couldn’t separate my left had from my right. I could not improvise. I was on the road with Wynton at one point during that time and he was getting ready for a gig in his hotel room. In every one of his hotel rooms there was a tuned piano because he writes music constantly. While he was getting ready I was playing this really bad version of ‘Autumn Leaves’ and he came over to the piano and put his hands over mine and said, ‘Just keep playing what you are playing.’ He played under and over what I was playing and said, ‘Can you feel that?’ It was like the most amazing thing that I had ever felt. It was everything that I imagined what it was like when a jazz group is really hitting it. That’s what I was feeling. I stopped playing piano after that. It was like there was no way I would feel that again. It was an unforgettable thing.”

Here are some other Marsalis quotes from the book: “I don’t believe in the fad theory of art. ‘Now what? Now what” Now what”’ Being the favorite flavor of the month is interesting and I’m not against it. I mean, it could taste good. But I just don’t think it sustains a grand vision.”

– “Music is the art of the invisible. With some music, if we listen – really listen – we become more humane because it puts us into balance. Jazz music is designed to do this.”

– “My father once told me, ‘Son, those who play for applause – that’s all they get. If you want to distinguish yourself from others, you have to be willing to do what they don’t want to do (like practicing).”

Alexanian still has family in Worcester but admits, “I sort of fled Worcester. My parents and my younger brother and sister live there. I come back to visit them. I don’t get there that often. I should have a relationship with the Worcester Art Museum. It would be nice to have a show there. I used to love going there when I was young.”

Asked to describe his take on jazz, Alexanian compared it to photography, saying, “I recently had a show in New York and did a gallery talk. There were a couple of curators there that knew a lot about pictures and this one woman asked amazing questions. I said, “It is sort of like jazz and red wine, there’s just so much to know. You can spend a life time studying jazz and never know it all.”

JS36: Georgia on our minds

Posted on May 1, 2008
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She was born Freda Lipschitz in Worcester on August 17, 1919, and before dying in New York City at 87 on December 9, 2006, the singer would try on a closet full of names before wearing Georgia Gibbs to fame.

She is largely remembered as a white singer who, because of her skin color, was afforded the fortunes denied her people of color counterparts. Gibbs is accused of building a career out of tunes first recorded by R&B greats like LaVern Baker and Etta James. It’s all true. She did hit the charts with covers of “Tweedle Dee” and Dance with me Henry,” but Gibbs was so much more than a white version of these great American R&B artists.

As the Encyclopedia of Music (UK version) points out, Gibbs has been unfairly maligned by rock critics. Her story reaches way back before R&B and rock ‘n’ roll were even invented. “In reality,” the unidentified writer of the Encyclopedia article states, “she was a genuinely talented pop vocalist, whose jazz-tinged approach reflected years of experience in the big band era, a period when there was no stigma attached to covers.”

Gibbs first recorded for Brunswick Records in 1936 and would later record with Bing Crosby as well as with the bands of Frankie Trumbauer, Artie Shaw and Tommy Dorsey.

Gibbs was the product of Russian Jewish immigrants and the youngest of four children. Her father died when she was only six months old and young Freda was sent to the former Jewish Home for Aged and Orphans at 25 Coral Street. (The home was later moved to 1029 Pleasant Street.) It was owned by John and Charlotte Beller, who ran it for nearly 25 years before closing the orphanage in 1946. They converted the institution into a home for the elderly and operated that until the couple retired in 1962.

In a 1993 interview about the orphanage, Georgia’s brother Maurice Lipson said, “We were a family in spite of everything. The Bellers did a great many things. He was one of the most wonderful men I’ve ever known in my life.”

Though he didn’t mention them by name, Lipson noted that another sister who grew up to be an artist and a brother also played music and toured with big bands. Lipson was a noted sculptor himself. An example of his work, a bust of a rabbi, had been on display in the entrance way of the Jewish Home for Aged, 629 Salisbury Street.

In an interview in the November 3, 1957 edition of the Worcester Sunday Telegram, Gibbs told writer James Lee that she began singing in variety shows held by the orphanage. He said, “Many Worcesterites recall her as a small child appearing in their annual revues at the Auditorium.”

Gibbs would later reveal that being sent to the orphanage as a young child was a living nightmare. Evidently, in an unidentified New York paper account, Gibbs said, “the frustrated superintendent beat the daylights out of us.” The story was later reported in the local papers. In a July 19, 1952 letter to the editor of The Evening Gazette, Ethel Rosenberg of Worcester wrote a letter to the editor taking issue with Gibbs. Under the title of “Singer’s Statement Called Ungrateful,” Rosenberg said she found herself so upset after reading the item about Georgia Gibbs that she felt compelled to offer her own perspective.

Rosenberg said that Gibbs (“Freda, to all who know her.”) owes her stardom to the late Mrs. Bertha Beller, the former wife of the orphanage’s superintendent. “Freda was treated with every kindness, as every other child in the home was treated,” Rosenberg stated. “She was given the opportunity to develop her talent of singing, and as a matter of fact, she was given every encouragement by Mr. and Mrs. Beller; also their love, devotion, time and patience. The statement she is reported to have made is shameful, completely false and terribly ungrateful. It is a pity that when good fortune has come her way, she chooses this manner in which to repay her benefactors.”

The Jewish Home for Aged and Orphans housed some 200 orphans between 1914 and 1946. Gibbs said that she was separated from her siblings at the home and because of her working schedule her mother could only visit once a month. The young singer is said to have been left with only a radio for company.

“Some can’t get over they came out of an orphanage,” her brother Lipson told the Telegram. “But I’m a better man because of it.” Stating that he and two sisters also grew up in the home, he added, “All of us who’ve come out of the home have done well. I think it was the home that did it.”

Gibbs says she earned her first money singing at 11. “She got $1.50 for appearing with a Worcester orchestra, singing in a ballroom,” wrote Lee in a 1957 feature in the Worcester Sunday Telegram. “She was Frieda Lipson then. A few years later she was the house singer at the Plymouth Theater, running down from the High School of Commerce each noon at 1 to make the first show. Three times a day she sang a number with Don Dudley’s orchestra on the stage. She was Fredda Lipson then.”

Gibbs, née Lipson, also sang in the area with the Dol Brissette Orchestra at the Bancroft Hotel. At the Plymouth she also worked with Ed Murphy’s Orchestra. At the Rathskeller, she performed with Bud Goldman and his Orchestra.

In a December 10, 1952 issue of The Evening Gazette, she told writer Bob Thomas that she started her singing career at 13 years-old. “I had to go to work, so I lied about my age and toured with small bands,” Gibbs said. “It was back breaking work, travelling 400 miles between one night stands. I was singing 50 or 60 songs a night. If your voice can stand that, it can stand anything.

Gibbs also said, “It’s the best possible training for a singer. You find your range, you find out what songs you can sing and what songs you can’t.”

By the time she was in the eighth grade she was taking home $20 a week to help support the family. In addition to working local ballrooms and theaters, Gibbs was venturing out as far as the Raymor Ballroom in Boston.

In an interview with the singer at the Marguery Hotel in New York in August of 1946 local writer Douglas Kennedy talked about her transition from Worcester to Boston. “She landed a job singing in a dance hall from eight to eleven, from which she could just make it to the Theater Club for another vocal chore from midnight to three. It was a rugged existence for such a little girl.”

Gibbs quit school in 1936 and joined the Hudson-DeLange Orchestra, a great regional band led by Eddie DeLange and Will Hudson. Both leaders were also extraordinary songwriters. DeLange penned such hits as “A String of Pearls,” “Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans,” “Darn that Dream,” and “Solitude,” and Hudson is the author of “Deep in a Dream,” (w/Delange) “Moonglow,” (w/Delange) and “Organ Grinder Swing.”

In a book about 1950s singers, Gibbs told writer Karen Schoemer that we did the gig for “about six months, and it was the most unbelievably hard work in my life. Every night was 200, 300 miles. We didn’t have a bus. It was a broken-down car with the shift between my legs and bleeding, chapped thighs because there was no heater. It was marvelously horrible.”

Talking about her one-night stands on the road, Gibbs once told a writer for TIME magazine, “It was hell, honey: 18 men and me.”

Gibbs made her first recordings with the band as Fredda Lipson for the Brunswick label. One of the sides was the memorable, “I’ll Never Tell I Love You.” The studio experience, however, was regrettable.

She would later reveal that a record company executive assaulted her after she refused his advances. Frustrated, he then tried to kill her career. Trying to shed that horrible memory, Gibbs once again changed her identity. Writing her obituary for the Washington Post, Adam Bernstein wrote: “Recording periodically as Fredda Gibbons or Gibson, Ms. Gibbs had changed her name by the early 1940s because a music industry executive had raped her and threatened to ban her from the airwaves, according to Rochelle Mancini, the executor of Ms. Gibbs’s estate.”

Though the recording was a bad experience it led to more work.

TIME magazine picks up the story: “One night in Ithaca, at a Cornell prom, Fredda got a call from Orchestra Leader Richard Himber: he had heard her recording of I’ll Never Tell You I Love You, and wanted to try her out in a radio show. Fredda borrowed $10 from the band manager and lit out for Manhattan. The orchestra hasn’t heard from her since.

“Himber took one look at her plain little face and groaned. But she got the job, sang on Himber’s ‘Studebaker Champions’ program for 13 weeks. Then a song plugger told her about a big audition at NBC. Like the songstress in Frederic Wakeman’s The Hucksters, she was cautioned to sing “loud and fast. . . and on the beat.” About 150 other girls were trying out, too (”An acre of mink and silver fox, honey, and me in a little old suit”). But Lucky Strike’s late George Washington Hill liked Fredda’s hep style, and she got the contract. For the next two years she was the unsung singer for the ‘Lucky Strike Hit Parade.’”

In 1937 she first appeared on “Your Hit Parade,” then “Melody Puzzles” and “The Tim and Irene Show.” In 1940 she hooked up with the Frankie Trumbauer band. She was also heard with Joe Venuti and Hal Kemp.

In May of 1942, bandleader Artie Shaw caught Gibbs singing in the Music at Work show at the Alvin Theater in New York for Russian War Relief. He then hired her to record. She scored her first hit, “Absent Minded Moon,” with the band. It was Shaw who took her to the William Morris Agency. They changed her name to Georgia Gibson.

In October of ‘42, while still answering to the name of Fredda Gibson, Gibbs was called upon to fill in for Connee Boswell on the Camel Caravan program with hosts Jimmy Durante-Gary Moore. It was Moore who her tagged her with her famous nickname “Her Nibs.” The moniker is derived from her size. It means “important or self-important person.” Gibbs stood a whisper over five feet tall in stocking feet and weighed 99 pounds fresh out of the shower.

The rest of the Gibbs story is well-documented history – including how she became Georgia Gibbs. Go online, punch in any one of her many names and look it up. It should be noted that she was married to journalist Frank Gervasi, who was a WWII correspondent for United Press and the official biographer of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. He died in 1990.

Gibbs’ later years were spent working with her lawyer, Mark Sendroff successfully collecting royalty payments owed to her from reissues of her master recordings. At the time of her death in New York’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a family friend, Leslie Gottlieb, said she died due to complications from leukemia.

It should also be noted that after leaving Worcester, Gibbs returned to town from time to time, including a successful vaudeville show at the Plymouth Theater. The Worcester Sunday Telegram covered another one of the live shows. In the Sunday, July 11, 1954 edition, under the heading, “The Joint Really Jumps as Georgia Returns: Her singing sends ‘em, reviewer Jack Kelso wrote: “The brass section slashed into ‘Georgia on My Mind,’ putting plenty of beat in it, and every head in the crowd swiveled as the home town girl in the flouncy dress bounced onto the stage to punch out the lyrics of her first number.

“It was Georgia Gibbs in her first appearance in Worcester in 12 years. Since that time she has gone places – and it was easy to see. The blue-jean set rocked right down to their moccasins as the little singer with the big voice laced into ‘Somebody Stole de Wedding Bell.’

“And when she threw back her head and lost herself in her best-known hit, ‘Kiss of Fire,’ several teenage girls in the crowd – with dreams of their own – smiled softly and lifted their heads, too.

“Looking out over the crowd at White City Park from the open-air stage, ‘Her Nibs’ Miss Gibbs claimed she saw some classmates from Commerce High School. Even with the footlights shining directly into her eyes she pointed here and there – left, right and center – to the familiar faces. She told them it was nice to be back.”

JS35: The Black Elks on Chandler

Posted on April 16, 2008
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The Independent Benevolent Protective Order of the Quinsigamond Elks #173 is best known as the Black Elks. Back late 1960s and early ‘70s, the first Elks Club was on Summer Street. By the ‘80s, the order set up shop at 200 Chandler Street on the corner of Bellevue Street. Like its predecessor, the Black Elks held Sunday afternoon jam sessions. The house band was the Soul-Jazz Qt., featuring trumpeter Barney Price, bassist Bunny Price, drummer Reggie Walley and pianist Allan Mueller.

A pianist in residence with the Thayer Symphony and Chamber Orchestras today, Mueller is also an outstanding jazz pianist in the Oscar Peterson vein. A few years ago he sat down to recall his days at the Elks. The intent of the conversation was to document the club as part of an oral history section of the Jazz Worcester Real Book. Unfortunately, the section didn’t make the cut. Here is our conversation.

Tell me what you remember about the club?

It was the same type of thing we were doing at the Hottentotte [A former club on Austin Street]. We played a session. It was a Sunday, like 3 to 7 p.m. The music room was separate from the bar. I remember that the stage was tiny and not very deep. We had to spread across. If you are looking at the stage, Reggie was on the left. I was next to him. Then Bunny. The three of us would be in the back. Then the horns would be out front. Barney really liked being right out there with the people. There was some kind of soundboard and occasionally a deejay would crank something up on the break.

Who were some of the guys who sat in?

A lot of guys would come in and you wouldn’t even know their name. They’d say “Hi, I’m Bill.” There were so many. And of course you have all these guys lined up on the side. They would be holding their horns waiting to play. I can remember Bob Simonelli would come in and play. He would get so frustrated because you’d be playing a tune like, “I’ll Remember April” and somebody would be up there blowing and he might be three fourths of the way through the tune and stop playing and walk off. We’d be in the middle and this guy would start at the beginning. You’d go nuts trying to figure out where all these. If you were playing “How High the Moon” in G, they’d play in G, but they wouldn’t make any changes. Simbob would look at me. We just decided to keep the form no matter what. Reggie would be smoking his pipe and smiling. Everybody was drinking and having a good time. It was loose and relaxed. We’d set up, play and have a good time. It was fun. I can remember Teddy Blandin coming in. When I left, one of my students, Jim Heffernan, came in.

What was the audience like at the club?

It wasn’t just a black crowd. It was a good mix of white and black. Everybody was there to hear the old tunes and remember back when there were clubs where you could go out and hear that stuff. There were very few places where you could go once the Hottentotte closed. As those places died out you wound up with discos and deejays. Before you knew it there were not many venues for musicians to play.

Nobody seemed to bother us. I could never remember any instance of any kind of a racial thing going on. When I was there or Nat Simpkins was there it was just a crowd of musicians and a crowd of people that liked music. There was no, I’m black and you are white. No problems. It was a natural situation – we played and people appreciated what you did. Nobody would ever hassle you.

I taught at Clark [University] during that period and so just spreading the word that we were doing jazz on Sundays you’d get a lot of kids coming down sitting-in. I’d have students get up and play a little bit. That’s the name of the game, how you learn to play. Again, you had to be a little careful because the union was strict about people sitting-in. They weren’t supposed to unless that had a union card. They didn’t like the business of sitting-in anyway. We did it anyway.

[A partial list of other players to have played the jam include Bruce and Steve Thomas, Bill Vigliotti, Jim Robo, Charles Ketter, Jerry Pelligrini, Tommy Herbert, Sonny Benson and Willie Pye.]

Did you ever play at the club when it was on Summer Street?

You are talking about the original Elks, which was way over in the Laurel/Clayton neighborhood. I did a lot of playing over there with Barney and Reggie. This was in the 1960s. I remember going into the place. There was a big old upright piano in there. It was really beat, out of tune, but not ridiculous. The sustain pedal didn’t work. I can remember somebody went out back and found a broom handle. We were able to saw it off and stick it on the piano. We did a lot of stuff like that. We’d take the whole front of the piano off so you could hear it.

It was like a session. One time Larry Monroe was with us. He was studying at Berklee. I remember we rolled the piano right out of the club and down the street. Some of the local kids were riding it. We rolled it right onto a basketball court and we played an outdoor thing there. The kids were running and jumping all over the place. It was all-acoustic. Bunny played an old upright bass. There was a saxophone player name Al Pitts. He was great. It was fun to play blues with guys like that. They played the real stuff.

What it was like working with Barney? Not much is written about him.

Barney Price was a super guy. I played with him quite bit. He used to like to open with the theme song from the Burns and Allen TV show, “Love Nest.” That was a tune that he liked to play. He had a great voice. He used to sing a lot of things – actually sang more tunes than Reggie. He knew more tunes.

He was great with the crowd. Right off the top of his head he always had all kinds of stories, little anecdotes and stuff. The first concert I did at Clark University, I had Larry Monroe and Barney, Bobby Gould, Bunny Price and myself. It was when I first started to teach at Clark. We did a jazz concert. I remember Barney got on the mike and he said, ‘What town are we in? Oh, wait a minute this is Worcester.’ This was a typical Barney thing. He would always keep you laughing. He had a million stories. I think a lot of it was because he worked at the train station helping people with their luggage. He had a lot of personality. We did a lot of jobs together and he was an awful lot of fun to be with. Barney and Howie Jefferson were also a great pair to work with.

I seemed to recall him going from Louis Armstrong hits to modern stuff. Was he flexible like that?

He was open to doing anything. I mean, jazz-rock tunes, he’d get in and play it. Barney was good with the swing and the old time blues. He’d get in and do his thing, whether we were doing a Cannonball Adderley tune, “Walk Tall.”

I had a lot of respect for Barney. He may not have been a schooled musician but the guy was a real musician and somebody that I respected. It was for what he was able to do, his entertaining with the people. It’s certainly something I can’t do. Barney, Howie [Jefferson] and Reggie were the three guys.

You have to hear these guys back in their prime to really appreciate them. The problem is some people hear them when they are old and their chops are starting to go and they say, “What’s the big deal with these players?”

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