by Richard Vacca | Mar 26, 2023 | Boston musicians, Community organizations
Webster Lewis was a whirlwind on the Boston music scene in the 1970s. Fueled by seemingly inexhaustible energy, Lewis was all things at once: musician and bandleader, composer and arranger, teacher and administrator. He was a jazz man at heart, but his wide-angle view extended beyond jazz to incorporate all genres of Black music. It was all part of his musical conception.
Lewis, a Baltimore native, was already working as a pianist and organist while attending Morgan State College there. He played the popular Black music of the day in tenor saxophonist Harold Adams’s band—Harold Adams & the Soul Brothers. While still a student, in 1965, Lewis got his first taste of a recording studio, on sessions at Scepter Records in New York. He impressed Scepter’s resident producer-genius, Luther Dixon, who encouraged his growing interest in composing and arranging. For Lewis, the experience was revelatory.
The Adams band went on the road in 1966, touring as Judd & the Soulfuls, with Lewis on the Hammond B-3, and Judd Watkins, a powerful baritone singer, out front. Their Boston stop was at Estelle’s, on Tremont Street. Lewis probably liked what he saw, because after a year back in Baltimore, he enrolled at the New England Conservatory. He probably arrived in fall 1968. He studied piano with Jaki Byard, and composing and conducting with Gunther Schuller. George Russell joined the faculty in 1969, and became Lewis’s mentor.
Writer Ernie Santosuosso once noted that Lewis attacked projects with the aggressiveness of a bulldozer. So it was with his studies. He pursued two advanced degrees simultaneously—in Music Composition at the Conservatory, and in Social Psychology at Boston College. (He completed both in 1970.) That left him with too much spare time, so he formed a quintet in early 1969. Watkins had also moved to Boston, and the two continued to play with various combinations of drummers and horns well into the 1970s. With the quintet’s mix of jazz and R&B, they were favorites at Estelle’s, and at a new club in Cambridge, the Western Front, that opened in 1970.
(more…)
by Richard Vacca | Feb 24, 2023 | Boston musicians
Duke Ellington once said that when Johnny Hodges played a solo, he could hear the listeners’ sighs. I can relate. That’s the way I felt when Carol Sloane sang a ballad. Her intensity, her reading of the lyric, the intimacy of her performance—I’d listen, and I’d sigh. I doubt I was the only one, because Sloane was long a favorite among connoisseurs of fine jazz singing. Why she wasn’t better known will always be a mystery to me.
Carol Sloane, from Show Business Illustrated magazine, March 1962
Carol Sloane (nee Carol Morvan) was born in Providence, RI, on March 5, 1937, and raised in nearby Smithfield. She moved to New York in 1958 and split the next 28 years between that city and Raleigh, NC. She moved to Stoneham, in suburban Boston, in 1986, and resided there until her death on Jan 23, 2023.
Sloane started her professional career in 1951, at age 14, singing with Ed Drew’s dance band around Providence for nine dollars a night. She wasn’t Carol Sloane yet, though. She sang as Carol Vann, and even recorded a pop tune in that name in 1953, the obscure “So Long,” on Cadillac Records. But jazz was always on her mind. She learned by listening to late-night radio, to Jazzbo Collins on WNEW in New York, and Norm Nathan on Boston’s WHDH. The next day she’d take her nine dollars to the record shop. Providence deejay Carl Henry, behind the counter, got to know the teenager, and when she’d walk through the door, he’d be ready for her: “Have you listened to Art Tatum? Have you listened to Ben Webster?” She’d buy the records, learn the tunes, scat the horn solos.
Singing with Larry Elgart
In 1958, Sloane caught on with a name band, the orchestra of Larry Elgart. That’s when she moved to New York, working by day as a legal secretary. (She also found shorthand useful for capturing song lyrics.) Her daily walk to work took her past the showroom of W. & J. Sloane Furniture. She and Elgart thought it sounded right, and that’s how Carol Vann became Carol Sloane.
(more…)
by Richard Vacca | Jan 13, 2023 | Boston musicians, Boston nightclubs
The local folk music community holds dear the memory of the coffeehouse located at 47 Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge, between 1958 and 1963. Everybody played there, and it was the subject of a well-regarded documentary film in 2012. They were good days, to be sure. The oft-told tale of folk music at 47 Mount Auburn, aka Club 47, sometimes includes an admission that “oh, by the way, it started as a jazz club.” Sometimes it doesn’t. Let us review.
Sam Rivers, mid-1960s. Photo by Lee Tanner.
On January 6, 1958, Paula Kelley and Joyce Kalina, two recent Brandeis graduates, opened a coffeehouse at 47 Mount Auburn St. They promised music: the trio of pianist Steve Kuhn on weekends, and guitarist Rudi Vanelli on weeknights.
As Kelley told the Harvard Crimson, the pair opened the coffeehouse, which they called Mount Auburn 47, because “things were pretty dull” in Cambridge. Getting it all together wasn’t easy. “Our friends told us we were complete fools to try. It was difficult at first to convince solid, middle-class Americans that a new artistic endeavor could also be a financial success, but finally we got the backing we needed.” They rented a storefront and learned how to brew coffee from an Italian who’d lived in the mideast. He was identified only as “a poet, artist, and recluse.”
Kelley and Kalina’s musical direction pointed toward jazz. Said Kelley, “It is very popular with students, and we want to provide a place where they can hear good experimental jazz.” We might not think of Kuhn as “experimental,” but he was suitably modern, and he drew an appreciative crowd.
(more…)
by Richard Vacca | Dec 18, 2022 | News
It won’t be anything like the Christmas music you hear at the shopping mall! This Wednesday the 21st, I’ll be back on WETF, the station that streams jazz 24 hours a day, every day, to host another hour of Collectors Choice: Jazz from New England. It’s an all-Aardvark Jazz Orchestra Christmas show! We’ll hear familiar melodies, Mark Harvey originals, big-band arrangements of centuries-old carols, and a few tunes sung by Aardvark’s special guest, Sheila Jordan, to top it all off.
If you couldn’t attend Aardvark’s annual Christmas concert at earlier this month, do drop in for this one. Catch this holiday edition of Collectors Choice on Wednesday, Dec 21 at 12:00 noon EST. The show repeats on Saturday Dec 24 at 9:00 a.m. Hope you can listen in on jazzradiowetf.org.
by Richard Vacca | Nov 30, 2022 | Boston musicians, Jazz history
Golden anniversaries in jazz are a rare thing. Jazz clubs vanish long before they reach the fifty-year mark, which makes the presence of Wally’s, now in its 75th year, simply extraordinary. The road is no easier for working groups, and Boston is blessed with two fifty-year ensembles: the Fringe, and Mark Harvey’s Aardvark Jazz Orchestra. The AJO is celebrating with its fiftieth annual Christmas concert on December 10, 2022.
The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra at work in 2011
Reaching fifty puts Aardvark in select company. Lionel Hampton lead a big band from 1940 to 1991. The Vanguard Jazz Orchestra started in 1966, and still plays at the club every Monday night. The Duke Ellington Orchestra ran from 1923 until Duke’s death in 1974, and then continued under Duke’s son Mercer until his death in 1996. Now there’s Aardvark.
Aardvark is defined by its eclectic, adventurous music, but also by its social consciousness and community involvement. While their book includes politically charged commentary like “Waltz of the Oligarchs” and “Big Oil Tango,” their Christmas fare focuses on the more uplifting message of peace and good will.
(more…)
by Richard Vacca | Oct 22, 2022 | Boston musicians, Boston recordings
Tenor saxophonist Rocky Boyd left little behind to remember him by. There is, thankfully, Ease It, the album he recorded in 1961, so we can still sample his sound sixty years later. It was his first and only album, recorded for the obscure Jazztime label. Ease It was a hard bop recording that would have been right at home on Blue Note, and given the personnel, I wonder how Blue Note missed it.
Rocky Boyd’s Ease It :Jazztime Records JT-001, 1961
We can follow the Ease It story, but Boyd himself remains in the shadows. I can’t shed much light on him. The bare facts come from the capsule biography in the album’s liner notes. They tell us that John Erskine Boyd was born in Boston in 1936 and studied at the South End Music School, the Boston Conservatory and Berklee. He moved to New York in 1958, worked around town, and replaced Stanley Turrentine in the Max Roach Quintet. That summarized the life of Rocky Boyd to age 22.
Before that, though, he was active in Boston. Pianist Hal Galper was one who worked with Boyd before he moved. Galper organized his first band in 1957, his “pseudo Miles quintet,” modeled on sound of Davis’s group during the Prestige years. Rocky Boyd, already a Coltrane disciple, played tenor. (Others included trumpeter Wajid Lateef, bassist Benny Wilson, and Dick Banda on drums. A story for another time.)
(more…)
by Richard Vacca | Oct 10, 2022 | Awards and honors, Jazz history
On September 29, 2022, Boston’s Boch Center announced the reboot of the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame (FARHOF), an educational initiative housed in the Wang Theatre. According to its website, “the Hall of Fame will celebrate the history of Folk, Americana and Roots music through displays, memorabilia, artifacts, multi-media, lectures, concerts and special curated exhibits.”
Five of those exhibits opened in September, and one of them celebrates Boston’s decades-long place on the American musical map. “Boston: A Music Town” features a series of displays lining the third-floor hallways, spanning everything from folk and rock to the Boston Symphony Orchestra to hip-hop. Jazz too, and I hope you all can see it, but not only because of the subject. I also loaned the Hall of Fame items from my own collection for display, and I am pleased to share these treasures with the public. They look quite at home amidst the finery of the Wang Theatre. FARHOF’s own photographer snapped the photo shown here.
Jazz meets FARHOF. Photo courtesy of the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame.
The exhibit’s curators, Deana McCloud and Bob Santelli of the Museum Collective, picked some choice items for display. The earliest is a 1933 photo of Mal Hallett’s orchestra with Toots Mondello, Gene Krupa, Jack Jenney, and Frankie Carle (now that was a Boston band!). The most recent is the September 1986 calendar from the 1369 Jazz Club, welcoming Jack McDuff, a Steve Lacy/Roscoe Mitchell group, Hal Galper, and Joe Lovano among others.
(more…)
by Richard Vacca | Sep 12, 2022 | Community organizations, Jazz history
On April 1, 1970, the separate Boston locals for Black and white musicians in the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) merged to form Local 9-535 of the Boston Musicians’ Association. It marked the end of a long process.
Until 1988, the home of Local 9-535. The Musicians’ Mutual Relief Society Building. Photo by Daderot.
The story is a product of its times. In the early and middle years of the last century, numerous cities had separate AFM locals for Blacks and whites. In Boston, whites joined Local 9, while blacks joined Local 535. (New York and Detroit, in contrast, had a single integrated local.) “It’s still beyond my limited understanding why Boston, or any other city, for that matter, requires two locals—one for whites, the other for Negroes. Music is supposed to be the most democratic of the arts: what excuse, then, is there for segregation in that realm?” So wondered Nat Hentoff in his Counterpoint newsletter in January 1947. Nonetheless, the locals remained separate for another 23 years.
The work split along predictable lines. In general, the Local 535 musicians filled the nightclub jobs in the South End and downtown, including in most of the jazz clubs, through the 1950s. The Local 9 musicians worked in the hotel dance bands, studio orchestras, and theater pits. Local 9 also represented members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and other classical ensembles. It’s unclear to me how this patchwork of jurisdictions was defined and enforced.
(more…)
by Richard Vacca | Aug 3, 2022 | Boston nightclubs, Nightlife
Pundits and podcasters have been effusive in their praise of athlete and activist Bill Russell, who died on July 31 at age 88. He earned it. Russell was an inspiration and man of integrity who triumphed in spite of the racist crap that he endured in Boston in the sixties. You can find a hundred or more sites online that tell his story. But in all the tributes and appreciations I’ve read, I haven’t seen a mention of Slade’s. While he was winning all those championships with the Celtics, Bill Russell owned the fabled Slade’s Barbecue Restaurant, at 958 Tremont Street in Roxbury. I’m bringing it up here because for a time in 1966, Bill Russell ran Slade’s as a jazz club. It’s just a footnote in Russell’s remarkable story, but this blog is just the place for it.
Bill Russell: Shot blocker, jazz lover
Slade’s first opened for business in 1928. The story has it that Renner Slade grew up in a family that ran a backwoods barbecue joint down south someplace, and he brought what he knew to Boston and opened his restaurant. Through the 1940s and 1950s, people regarded the chicken as the city’s best.
Bill Russell purchased Slade’s in early 1964. Tremont Street was familiar territory for him. After he finished his work at the Boston Garden, Russell liked to stop by Slade’s for a late meal, and then relax a bit at the Pioneer Club. Russell’s love of jazz was well known. One of his first moves as owner was to fill the jukebox with jazz records.
(more…)
by Richard Vacca | Jun 14, 2022 | Boston nightclubs, Nightlife
If I ever assemble a top-ten list of “Boston Jazz Scene All-Time Good Guys,” Lennie Sogoloff will certainly be on it. Sogoloff operated his famous club, Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike in suburban West Peabody, from 1962 to 1972, and he made it one of the area’s elite jazz rooms. Ask anybody who played there or listened there.
Lennie Sogoloff, late 1960s. Photo by Jim Johnson.
Here’s a thumbnail biography of Lennie Sogoloff (1923-2014). He served in the army in World War II, and kicked around a bit afterward before going to work as a distributor for London and Mercury Records. Sogoloff partnered with his friend Phillip “Penny” Abell in 1951 and bought a roadhouse on Route 1 that they named the Turnpike Club. (It was on the northbound side, just shy of today’s Hwy 114 exit.) There was a jukebox for entertainment—a very good jukebox, because Lennie stuffed it with jazz records. Sogoloff bought out his partner, and in 1959 began offering live music for dancing. The first jazz groups arrived in 1960, and in 1962 Sogoloff renamed the club Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike and went all-in on jazz. He booked his first national act in 1963.
I’ve written about Lennie’s before. There’s a club history, and posts on some special nights there: Gretsch Drum Night, a Hines/Byard/Corea piano festival, and Jaki Byard recording his album Live at Lennie’s. This time, I’m letting Lennie tell a few stories himself.
It was my good fortune to interview Lennie Sogoloff at length twice. What follows are a few of Lennie’s recollections of artists who came through the club in the sixties. I’ve done a little editing and checked a few facts, but otherwise it’s all from the colorful storyteller Buddy Rich nicknamed “Lennie Turnpike.”
(more…)
