The Sabby Lewis band, Boston’s signature band of the 1940s, ended unceremoniously On December 18, 1949. But no one could foresee such an outcome at the beginning of the month. “Sabby Lewis (more on Lewis here and here) is really rollin’ at the Show Boat!” gushed George Clarke in his Daily Record column of December 7. “And with Jimmy Tyler back in the fold, plus a new and fabulous trumpeter, the band is hotter than ever.” That fabulous trumpeter was none other than Cat Anderson, late of the Duke Ellington Orchestra.
Sabby Lewis and Al Morgan, 1945
The Lewis Orchestra never had such punch, with Anderson joining longtime brass men Gene Caines and Maceo Bryant, and Tyler rejoining Bill Dorsey and Dan Turner in the sax section. Lewis, Al Morgan, and Joe Booker formed an unbeatable rhythm section, and Marilyn Kilroy handled the vocals. This was a formidable band.
Sabby brought the band to the Show Boat, at 252 Huntington Avenue, in late November, leaving his home base at the Hi-Hat. It was a questionable decision. The club had no established clientele, and certainly no jazz clientele, because it had cycled through numerous entertainment policies in the postwar years and none of them clicked. In fact, jazz fans’ impressions of the place were probably negative because of the bad feelings surrounding the closure of the Zanzibar Club there in 1948. Finally, the Show Boat was too far away from the cluster of clubs around Mass Ave and Columbus, where all the people were.
And there was this. The Lewis orchestra was the second jazz group hired by the Show Boat. The first was a Frankie Newton quartet, and as its drummer, Alan Dawson, later recalled: “We couldn’t draw flies.”
Nonetheless, on came Lewis, with his strongest lineup, and favorable press helping him along. And they couldn’t draw flies either.
Nor could Lewis pay the band. After three weeks, they told Lewis that if he could not pay them at the end of the week—on Sunday, December 18—they wouldn’t play anymore. Lewis could not make the payroll, and when the band left the stand that Sunday night, every last man quit. Sabby Lewis, the man who embodied jazz in Boston in the 1940s, ended the decade without a band.
All of this was the equivalent of an earthquake on the jazz scene. I am convinced Duke Ellington wrote a song in response to the breakup, “B Sharp Boston.”
Actually, the band didn’t break up, the members just moved on. They named Jimmy Tyler the new leader, installed Jimmie Martin in the piano chair, and opened as the Jimmy Tyler Orchestra at the Hi-Hat on New Year’s Eve. They stayed until April.
Lewis was bitter about these events, and the circumstances surrounding them, but he moved ahead quickly. He assembled a new Sabby Lewis band (Dawson was the drummer) and opened at Wally’s Paradise on January 6. For three months, listeners could hear both bands nightly just by crossing Columbus Avenue.
Cat Anderson stayed in Boston for the Hi-Hat engagement and then returned to New York and the Ellington Orchestra. The Tyler Orchestra spent the better part of two years on the road, arriving back in Boston with Larry Steele’s Smart Affairs show in April 1952. When that closed, Tyler broke up the band. Later that year Booker, Dorsey, and Morgan rejoined Lewis.
In 1952 Lewis became an announcer at WBMS-AM, but he was not the first African-American DJ on Boston radio, as the internet seems to believe; that was Eddy Petty, who had a daily show on WVOM-AM three years earlier.
Lewis never regained his place of prominence in Boston jazz, although iterations of his “new” band worked into 1957. Lewis made his last recordings, two singles for ABC-Paramount, in 1956. After 1957, Lewis led mainly led trios, until an October 1962 auto accident took him off the scene for about a year. When he began to play again, it was mostly as a single. In 1964 Lewis became a housing investigator for the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, a job he held for 20 years. During those years, he played infrequently. One notable appearance was at a Jazz All Night concert in May 1973, when he picked musicians out of the audience and played.
In the mid-1980s Lewis again worked as a single, often in upscale lounges—the Meridian Hotel, the Bay Tower Room, the Ritz-Carlton. He played publicly for the last time in June 1994, and died at age 79 on July 9 that year.
But that is far from the Show Boat in 1949. Two years earlier, Lewis recorded “Bottoms Up” on the Crystal-Tone label (CT-515A), notable for its fiery Jimmy Tyler tenor solo. It became Tyler’s calling card thereafter.