Johnny Brookfield's
Jazzsight Interview with Dan Levinson
© 2004 Jazzsight.com
During an active career that began in the 1980's, Dan Levinson has enjoyed working with such jazz luminaries as Dick Hyman, Mel Torme and Wynton Marsalis. A specialist in early jazz styles of the 1920's and 1930's, he often performs alongside many of the top names associated with that musical genre, including Dan Barrett, Randy Sandke, Vince Giordano, David Ostwald, Mark Shane, Howard Alden, and Cynthia Sayer, in addition to leading his own groups. His travels have taken him to every state in the U.S., as well as to Europe, Asia, and South America. He can be heard weekly at Birdland in New York City with David Ostwald’s Louis Armstrong Centennial Band, and bi-weekly with Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks at Times Square Grill, also in New York. Dan gives new life to old music, and the music in turn gives him new life. Dan Levinson’s calendar, as well as his complete discography and information on how to order his CD's, are available at www.danlevinson.com
Johnny Brookfield: Hi, Dan. Tell us about your most recent gig.
Dan Levinson: It was at a club right here in the Village called Terra Blues on Bleeker Street. I’ve been there for three years this month. The band is called the Apex Project, named after Jimmie Noone’s Apex Club Orchestra, a popular band on Chicago’s south side in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Jimmie Noone is one of my favorite clarinetists. His band had an unusual front line consisting of just two reeds—clarinet and alto sax—no trumpet or trombone. The great Earl Hines was on piano.
JB: How did the Apex Project come about?
DL: About six years ago a friend of mine turned me on to a young clarinet and saxophone player named Pete Martinez, who was then a freshman at Long Island University. Pete was into old jazz and looking for a teacher who had respect for the kind of music he wanted to play. I don’t generally teach, but when I heard Pete I recognized a great deal of potential in him. He studied with me for four years, while he was at LIU. For his senior year, I wanted to do something a little different—a “senior project.” Pete had a knack for doing transcriptions of old recordings, as did I, so I came up with the idea of doing a tribute to Jimmie Noone. He and I would do the transcriptions. We’d have a two-reed front line, like Noone’s band. So I called it the Apex Project.
JB: I think you lead another band at that club, don’t you?
DL: I’ve also played with a band at Terra Blues I call the Anachronists. I have a passion for old songs, especially old songs that have been neglected. Over the years I’ve collected dozens and dozens of these songs, and transposed them into my vocal key so people can hear what the words are like. I do these old tunes, alternating between clarinet, saxophone and vocals, accompanied by a rhythm section. Molly Ryan, a very fine young vocalist from California, does the first set with the same rhythm section, and I do the second set.
JB: Could you describe how you got involved in the New York jazz scene?
DL: I arrived in New York in September of 1983 to study acting at NYU, Tisch School of the Arts, and from there I was sent to Circle in the Square Drama School. From about the age of 17, I had an interest in jazz. Not all kinds of jazz—I was always into traditional jazz. When I say traditional jazz, I mean 1920s jazz—actually the teens, beginning with the first recorded jazz, through the Swing Era. I had an interest in that music and I nurtured it and began to go to jazz clubs here, places like Arthur’s Tavern, Eddie Condon’s, Cajun Restaurant, and the Red Blazer. I got to know the jazz musicians, but I didn’t play an instrument. I had learned a little bit of piano and a little guitar and taken music theory courses, but it wasn’t until 1985, when I was 20 years old, that I decided that I really wanted to be a part of the jazz scene. So I began learning the clarinet. I practiced ridiculous amounts of time—sometimes up to ten hours a day, but a minimum of five hours a day, over at the practice rooms at NYU, right across the park from here. I was there every day until closing—11 p.m.
JB: When was your first gig?
DL: In 1987 I certainly wasn’t ready to play professional gigs, but I was ready to do my own thing, and I launched my career appropriately enough with a tribute to a band called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, sometimes referred to as the ODJB, the band noted for making the first jazz records in 1917.
JB: How did your interest in the ODJB come about?
DL: In addition to the inspiration I had been deriving from records and the jazz musicians I had met in the clubs, there was one jazz musician in particular who was my hero, my mentor, and one of my best friends. His name was Rosy McHargue. I met him in 1984. He instilled in me a real passion for this kind of music. He was born in 1902, so he was then 82. He was around when jazz was new. He learned to play jazz when the first jazz musicians were making records. He heard those ODJB records when they first came out and he transcribed them. He learned to play clarinet by copying the solos of the ODJB’s clarinetist Larry Shields. He was a constant source of inspiration for me. I used to go over to his place and he’d play records for me, and that’s how I discovered a lot of music—the music that today is among my most treasured music—the most inspirational music in my life.
JB: So Rosy McHargue helped you focus your talents?
DL: What Rosy did for me was point me in the right direction. He helped me to distinguish good music from not-so-good music. He taught me what a good clarinetist should sound like. He was a clarinetist and saxophonist. He played in many of the big bands, including Ted Weems’ band and Kay Kyser’s band—even Benny Goodman’s band. Then he led his own band from the 1950s on.
In the 1920s Rosy freelanced around the Chicago area, so he knew all those guys. He knew Benny Goodman and Frank Trumbauer. In fact, he recorded with Trumbauer. He used to go hear Bix Beiderbecke with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra. He knew all those guys when they were young and making their names. He lived to be 97 years old, and he died in 1999. So he was a living relic of the Jazz Era, my direct connection to it. He introduced me through records to Benny Goodman. I’d heard the name Benny Goodman, but he was the first one who put on a record and said, “This, to me, is as good as the clarinet can sound.”
JB: Now tell us about that first gig.
DL: I produced the ODJB tribute concert on July 1, 1987. Right there across the park at the Eisner and Lubin Auditorium, at NYU’s Loeb Student Center. I led the band. I brought in some of Rosy’s band members from California, and we played this concert of transcriptions that I had done of the ODJB. I didn’t read the parts, I’d memorized them—and it was a sold-out performance. What a way to start! I got a review in the New York Times from John S. Wilson. I wasn’t even good enough to improvise a jazz solo on my own, but John S. Wilson came to the concert and gave it a really nice review.
In the months prior to my graduation from NYU, I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I had no contacts, and I wasn’t good enough to play professionally. I was about to go home to Los Angeles. But something happened. One phone call really launched my professional career.
JB: One phone call?
DL: It was a phone call I made to Max Morath, who’s still very active as a ragtime pianist and singer. I had been absolutely floored by some records he had made ten years before that in the 1970s. So in 1986 I was wondering if he was in New York. I got his phone number from information. I called him up and he said, “Listen, those records you’re talking about—they’re my favorites too. You and I seem to have a lot in common—why don’t you come see my show?” He got me the tickets; I went to see him and introduced myself.
I went to visit him a few times at his apartment, and on one occasion in March of 1987 he said, “You know, Dick Hyman has an apartment in the building, and I think he’s looking for an assistant. Would you be interested?”
JB: I can see how that one phone call opened the doors.
DL: I was going to graduate from college in May. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Dick Hyman! Anybody who’s remotely involved in jazz knows that name because he’s one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time. His main influence is Art Tatum, but he can play virtually any style—whether it’s jazz or classical or pop, and he’s been on hundreds of records, beginning in the 1950s. He’s also written film scores—including many for Woody Allen—and composed orchestral works.
Dick interviewed me and offered me the job. I began working for him in April of 1987. Besides being a great musician, he’s a great businessman. I learned as much about the business of music as I did about music from him. Great jazz musicians are not often great businessmen. He’s an exception. I continue to work for him, he’s now 77—and he’s still performing and sounding as great as ever. I work for him now in a different capacity. He has an annual concert series at the 92nd Street Y called Jazz in July. I’ve been fortunate to play many times at the Jazz in July festival. We’ve done tributes to Frank Teschemacher, Adrian Rollini, Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman. I’ve been able to play with a host of terrific musicians at these concerts, including some other clarinetists I admire, who I don’t have the opportunity to play with often—Kenny Davern, Bob Wilber, Allan Vache, Walt Levinsky, and Ken Peplowski, to name a few.
JB: What kind of work did you do as his assistant?
DL: Being Dick Hyman’s assistant entailed a lot of different responsibilities. I did things like filing stuff and cataloging his records and cassettes. But I also took care of his publicity. I sent out photos and bios. He stocked his records and I took care of record orders. I ran errands and took things to the post office and to FedEx and UPS. I also did some musical work for him. I did some copy work and some transcribing occasionally. His career was in full swing—he had so many things happening. He had film scores and other things. So he kept me busy. I could have worked 24 hours a day for him. He spent a lot of time at his place on Long Island, or at his home in Florida, and I held down the fort in New York. I worked for him in the daytime and played music at night, and made a pretty good living.
JB: Were you playing at all during this time?
DL: I got my first musical job in May of 1988, playing clarinet with a band called the On the Lam Street Band. It was at a soup kitchen on the Lower East Side. It paid 35 dollars.
For years I couldn’t match the success of that first ODJB tribute. I played at a restaurant called Cajun on Saturday nights for a couple of years, beginning in September of 1988. That was my first really steady gig—with the Red Onion Jazz Band, playing clarinet. And that was my only job for a long time. I practiced all week just for that one job. Gradually I began to get work with other bands.
JB: Didn’t you spend some time in Europe also?
DL: In 1990 a friend of mine, a cornet player named Dick Miller, invited me to Paris. He was the cornet player who did the first ODJB tribute. He had gone to Paris on a whim—just something he had always wanted to do. He put a little group together and was playing mostly on the street. The group started to get some real work, so Dick called me and asked if I’d like to come to Paris for a few months and join them. I thought about it. I’d built up a reputation here, and I knew I’d be throwing it away if I left town.
When I’m faced with a difficult decision, I’ve learned that if I sit quietly and ruminate, the answer will come. The heart always knows the answer.
Carpe diem. Seize the day. That was the answer I received. I left for Paris in August of 1990. I went for three months. I stayed a year. I could write a novel describing my adventures that year.
I ended up buying a Eurail ticket and visiting 17 countries—alone—just me, my clarinet, and my C-melody saxophone. I can remember the ones I went to: France, England, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Spain, and Portugal. I traveled at night and slept on trains. I stayed in youth hostels. I made my living playing on the street. I met a lot of people. I got arrested a few times. I found out the hard way that playing on the street—“busking,” as it’s called—is illegal in some places—Paris, Venice, Cannes. In Florence, the police threatened to confiscate my sax: “You feeneesha now ora we taka da pipe away.” One cop—in Nice, France—locked me in a cell and wouldn’t let me out until I played Sidney Bechet’s “Petite Fleur” for him.
When I came back from Europe, Dick Hyman, gentleman that he was, offered me my job back. But aside from that, I had to rebuild my career from scratch. The bandleaders that had been hiring me had found alternatives, and you can’t just fire the guys you’ve been using because Dan Levinson’s back in town. It took me months to rebuild my career. My first steady job when I got back was playing at a place in Queens with Arthur Grundig, “The Singing Bus Driver,” for 30 dollars on Saturday nights.
You were one of the few people who remembered me, Jack. I had a lot of fun playing in your band. I’d never played with a big band before, and I was a pretty lousy reader, so I took the parts home and practiced them. Eventually I got back on track and was making a decent living again.
JB: You spent some time in New Orleans. How did that go?
DL: In October 1992, just as things were rolling again, I received an offer to go to New Orleans to join a band called the Silver Leaf Jazz Band. The job was six nights a week at the Can Can Cafe in the Royal Sonesta Hotel on Bourbon Street. Ever since I had visited New Orleans in 1988, I had had a longing to live there. It seemed like a sort of Never-Never Land for traditional jazz players who didn’t want to have to conform to more modern styles of jazz—a place where I could play the kind of music I wanted to play without the stigma attached, without the “peer pressure.”
When I told Dick Hyman, he cautioned, “If you continue leaving town for long periods, bandleaders will think you’re undependable, and they won’t hire you because they don’t know if you’re going to be around. There will be plenty of time later on in your life to do these things. But,” he added, “if you decide to go, this job will be yours whenever you get back.” He’s a real Prince among men.
I thought about it carefully. I have always been a person who lives for today, and never takes tomorrow for granted. I decided to take the job in New Orleans.
My first few months down there were a dream come true. I was playing with a terrific band, to a large, attentive audience most every night who applauded after each solo. I was meeting people my own age that played the same kind of music. In New York, most of the people I played with were more than twice my age—I was always getting asked, “Which one is your father?” But New Orleans really was a Never-Never Land. I felt as though I’d found my home.
But things are seldom as they seem. Once I got inside the machine and saw all the cogs at work, it wasn’t such a pretty sight. It was like being backstage at Disneyland. Most of the jobs in New Orleans were steady engagements—five or six days a week. People who work together that often are bound to develop conflicts with one another. And many of the jazz musicians in New Orleans had specific viewpoints on how traditional jazz should be played—that’s why they moved there in the first place. Those that didn’t share their perspective were not part of their clique. So I became aware of the different factions that existed among musicians in New Orleans. This person wasn’t speaking to that person, and so on. I tried to remain neutral, but it seemed that to some, I was guilty purely by association.
Plus, now that I was playing traditional jazz all the time, I began to miss the diversity of the music in New York. I had enjoyed playing with different bands, in different styles—all within the traditional jazz and swing genre—and being called to play clarinet on this, tenor sax on that, alto sax on that.
After about three months, the bandleader of the Silver Leaf Jazz Band and I clashed, and he fired me. The only time in my life I’ve ever been fired. That was a real shock to my system. I tried looking for other work down there, but it wasn’t easy with so many musicians competing for the same jobs. Steve Yocum and Eddie Bayard gave me enough work to get me through the winter.
In April 1993, when I was offered a job back in New York, I took it. I had had my Peter Pan adventure. I was ready to return to reality. Looking back on my experience in New Orleans, it was the best of times…it was the worst of times. With all the partying I did and free booze I got everywhere I played, had I stayed down there I might not have lived to tell the tale.
JB: What was the job that brought you back to New York?
DL: Vince Giordano called and said, “I have an opening in my band on tenor sax.” Vince has had a band for about thirty years called the Nighthawks—it’s an 11-piece orchestra that plays 1920s and ‘30s music. I had wanted to play in that band since I first heard it around 1987, but I wasn’t ready at that point. You have to be an ace reader to play in his band, because the notes just fly by. So if Vince was ready for me, I was ready for him.
Also, during that period, I began working again with Leon Redbone, who I had worked for briefly in 1990. Leon is a singer and guitarist who does a unique kind of show—like a Vaudeville show or a minstrel show. I began working with him more often, especially after I moved back to New York.
JB: You also worked with the Flying Neutrinos, right?
DL: Yes. I began working with the Flying Neutrinos when I came back from New Orleans. They are another unique band—they play a lot of New Orleans music, but not just jazz. They play electrified blues and groove-oriented music. They play originals. They play a kind of swing—the kind that was popular starting in the mid-nineties during the “Nouveau Swing” craze. I think they were one of the bands that helped to launch that craze. Playing with that band was a different kind of thing, because they were all very young musicians—the trombonist, who also tap dances, was 17 when I first met him. When we played the standard traditional jazz numbers, they approached them from a fresh perspective. I had been playing those tunes the same way with every band, but the Neutrinos breathed new life into them.
Ingrid Lucia, the singer and leader of the group, has a unique style. We played Atlantic City and Las Vegas—you can tell from that we were a show band, at least in those days. We went to Germany. We had a lot of fun together. I really enjoyed playing with that band. Ingrid moved to New Orleans a few years ago, but she still comes up here periodically and puts the band back together.
JB: Tell us about the illness that nearly claimed your life.
DL: In 1998 my career was in full swing. But then something happened. The first sign was a very small bump on the side of my neck. I didn’t pay much attention to it, but as it got larger I became concerned and went to see a doctor. It turned out to be a lymph node. I was diagnosed with throat cancer.
All of a sudden everything changed. For the first time, I had to look at my life as finite. I had to confront my mortality. Those were some dark times. I didn’t know if I was going to be around for my 34th birthday.
The first surgeon I saw was going to perform something called a median mandibulotomy. That is the standard surgical procedure for eradicating throat cancer. It involves splitting the lip and jaw in order to make the affected area accessible. The doctor told me he’d never performed the surgery on a clarinetist, and didn’t know if I’d be able to play again.
I have a cousin who is a pathologist, and fortunately, through her connections, she was able to get me in to see the man who ultimately saved my career and my life: Dr. Mark Urken. Urken is the chairmen of the Otolaryngology department at Mount Sinai, and one of the top surgeons in the world. He and his colleagues, Dr. Jack Dalton and Dr. Richard Meyer, gave me a second option: surgery on the neck only, and treatment of the primary with radiation, chemotherapy, and a relatively new treatment known as Brachytherapy, a type of radiation involving small tubes implanted directly into the neck. They told me my chances of survival were roughly the same with both options. Naturally, I chose the latter option.
I began treatment in January 1999. First they did surgery: they removed most of the lymph nodes in my neck and a large muscle—the sternoclydomastoid muscle—which was in close proximity to the cancer. I actually returned to playing a week after the surgery, and was doing jobs. I had 112 stitches in my neck—I looked like the Frankenstein monster—but at least I could play.
The next phase of the treatment stopped me. In February they began doing radiation and chemotherapy. The side effects were almost unbearable. First, food began to taste like cardboard, and then it became painful to swallow. My mouth felt like a war zone. At the worst point, I couldn’t swallow at all, and couldn’t speak. I lost thirty pounds.
In April, when they finished with me, the cancer was gone. I was a different person, both physically and mentally.
I started playing again in May, slowly at first. There was a long road ahead. The side effects of the treatment lasted for months. They’d go away and come back again. I had become addicted to Percocet, a pain killer. Breaking that addition was by far the most unpleasant part of the recovery process. When I performed at your Gene Krupa Jazz Festival on July 4th, I was still in bad shape.
Those were some rough times, but they really gave me an opportunity to reflect on my life and figure out what I wanted out of it. The illness was a wake-up call. People don’t believe me when I say this, but my experience with cancer was probably the best thing that has ever happened to me. It made me get off my ass and get to work.
JB: In what ways did you “get to work?”
DL: For most of my musical career I’ve had my own projects. But in the months preceding my illness, I was so busy working for other people that I became creatively stagnant. It’s easy to become a mercenary. You end up playing music just to pay your bills. You get on a job and start looking at your watch constantly, counting down the minutes. When I returned to work following my illness, I began working on my own projects again. I believe every artist should have his or her own projects, because that’s what keeps the creative juices flowing, what keeps you stimulated and inspired.
I also made a promise to myself that when I got well I wasn’t going to do jobs that turned me against music. Music is what keeps me interested in life. It’s the fiber of my being. It’s the stuff that runs through my blood. If something turns me against music, then I have nothing. I had gone down that road before I got sick. Maybe, in some indirect way, that’s why I got sick. I wasn’t enjoying a lot of the work I was doing. I was making a good living, but it wasn’t fulfilling.
JB: Will you describe the Roof Garden Jass Band?
DL: Sure. The Roof Garden Jass Band is the name I eventually gave to the band that did the ODJB stuff. I had produced one CD in 1998 with that band called “Salutes the ODJB and the Beginning of Recorded Jazz.” That CD contained all of the ODJB transcriptions we had done eleven years earlier, plus a few more I had added. One of the ways I improved the quality of my life when I got well was to begin working on recording projects. In 2000 I made a second CD with the Roof Garden Jass band, “Blue Roses of Far and Near,” which came out on the Stomp Off label. By this time we had exhausted the potential of our sixteen ODJB transcriptions, so I decided we needed to diversify ourselves. We expanded our range to incorporate the music made by the “Fabulous Fives” and other bands that recorded during the early days of jazz—roughly 1917-1923, the year King Oliver made his first records.
JB: What are the “Fabulous Fives?”
DL: The term “Fabulous Fives” refers to a group of bands—usually five-piece bands—that rode in on the coattails of the ODJB. Among these were the Original Memphis Five—who made hundreds of records under a dozen or more pseudonyms for at least as many labels—the Georgia Five, the Louisiana Five, the Indiana Five, and so on. These bands played primarily ensemble—very little in the way of solos. It’s a sound that’s unique and different from what King Oliver was playing a few years later. In its early years, jazz still held on to many characteristics of ragtime, in terms of syncopation, song forms, and even in the way eighth notes were played. We have a word we use for it: “Rag-a-jazz.” So the Roof Garden Jass Band became a band that focused on this neglected era of jazz history.
JB: Why do you think that era of music has been so neglected?
DL: Well, partially because it was recorded acoustically—those were the days before microphones were used in the recording process. Bands used to have to play into a huge tin pickup horn, and the resultant sound was extremely thin—no low or high frequencies. People who are accustomed to hearing music the way it’s recorded today have trouble listening to early recordings. But if you can teach your mind to fill in the missing frequencies and hear what’s on those records, it’s really exciting music.
A few years ago we did a concert for a group of record collectors. I was ambivalent at first. But I found that even people who are used to the sound of acoustic recordings enjoy listening to us. I like to think we are helping them understand how those bands really sounded. We avoid recreating bands that were recorded electrically. Music became a lot more listenable in 1925 when the electrical recording process was introduced. Microphones made a tremendous difference in the sound quality. When somebody asks me, “Why haven’t you recorded your Jimmie Noone band?” I say “Because Jimmie Noone recorded the Jimmie Noone band.” The sound on those 1928 records is wonderful, and no matter how well I did it as a recreation, it would never be as good as the original.
In listening to music, I try to get as close to the source as possible—that’s where the real excitement is. The innovators in music and art are the true geniuses. There may have been more technically proficient clarinetists than Benny Goodman, but Goodman did it first. The people who copy him, and I’m one of them—no matter how good they are, they don’t deserve the credit. It’s one thing to be able to copy someone; but to develop a style that’s all your own—that’s genius. Goodman took the sounds he was hearing—guys like Noone, Larry Shields, Teschmacher—and synthesized them into a sound that was one hundred percent pure Goodman.
Getting back to the Roof Garden Jass Band, we made a third CD last year called “Echoes in the Wax,” which also came out on Stomp Off. “Echoes” is sort of a continuation of “Blue Roses,” reproducing the sounds of more bands from jazz’s early years. The focus of our third CD was the Frisco Jazz Band, an obscure band that made some very rare rag-a-jazz sides for the Edison label in 1917. Bob Erdos, Stomp Off’s producer, had been looking for a band to recreate the Frisco Jazz Band for years, and asked me if I wanted to take on the project. As it happens, those Frisco Jazz Band records were the very first made by my personal hero of the saxophone, Rudy Wiedoeft, so I jumped at the opportunity.
I asked my friend Dick Sudhalter to write the liner notes. Dick’s book Lost Chords details the early stages of jazz very well, so I knew he’d be able to write some interesting notes for the CD. In spite of already being one of the world’s foremost authorities on the music, he did a thorough amount of research in preparation for his notes—he even made a trip into the city to interview me. The title of his essay is “Terra Nova Incognita (A New Land Yet Undiscovered): Dan Levinson in the Land of Rag-a-Jazz.” I like his notes because they deal not only with the what and the who, but the why: why we do what we do, and the importance of preserving this period in the evolution of jazz.
Another reason the earliest period in jazz is neglected is that it’s controversial. Jazz is generally considered to be African-American in origin. The bands that recorded jazz from 1917 until 1922 were made up of white musicians.
JB: Why were all those bands white?
DL: That’s what’s controversial. In 1917 Victor Records decided it wanted to record a jazz band. It has been claimed that Victor offered the contract to the ODJB purely because they were white, and that Victor and other recording companies were reluctant to record black jazz bands. Opponents of this theory maintain that Victor asked Freddie Keppard [a black trumpet player] to record his [jazz] band before it asked the ODJB, but Keppard turned down the offer because he didn’t want other musicians to steal his “licks.”
I don’t deal with those issues when I play this music. The music is what matters to me. It’s good music and it doesn’t matter what color the men were who played it. There are a lot of great black bands from that period that I enjoy listening to—bands like Jim Europe and Wilbur Sweatman—but these larger bands didn’t have the loose, freewheeling sound that the ODJB and the Fabulous Fives had.
By the time black jazz bands began recording a few years later, the music had evolved into something different: there was less emphasis on ensemble playing and more emphasis on improvised solos. The soloist gradually became the focal point. You can’t be a jazz musician and not acknowledge the contributions of pioneers like King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Noone, Johnny Dodds, and Jelly Roll Morton. These were great, great jazz players, and I have been heavily influenced by Jimmie Noone. So there’s no racial element about it. When we play the Roof Garden Jass Band music, we’re just dealing with one era of jazz—an era which I feel would otherwise be all but forgotten.
JB: Benny Goodman has had a big influence on your career. Will you talk about your tributes to the King of Swing?
DL: Sure. The first one was in 1998. I did a tribute with the Stan Rubin Orchestra on January 16, the 60th anniversary of the famous Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. We recreated that concert at a restaurant called the Red Blazer in Manhattan. It was such a tremendous success that we had to repeat it for several months to accommodate everybody. That was the beginning of my association with Stan Rubin, which has continued to this day. Over the years we have done periodic tributes to Goodman at the Red Blazer and at a place called Swing 46. They’ve all done very well and most of them have been sold out.
Two years ago I began playing with a pianist and bandleader named Andrej Hermlin. He has a band in Germany called the Swing Dance Orchestra. It’s a terrific band. The musicians really understand the style. It’s hard to find guys who improvise in a stylistically appropriate manner, but the members of the Swing Dance Orchestra are all dedicated to the music. They’ve listened to the records and studied them extensively. Andrej and I met here at the Cajun when I was playing with Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks. First we did some concerts here in town, and he featured me on a few Benny Goodman numbers. Then he organized a couple of concerts in Germany, one in Hamburg and one in Berlin. Like the Stan Rubin concerts, these were recreations of the Goodman Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert, but Andrej was very concerned about authenticity—right down to the vintage tuxedos his band and I wore. The concert in Berlin took place at a beautiful old concert hall called “Konzerthaus Berlin,” and we filled every seat. 1,700 people came out to hear the Benny Goodman Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert we recreated in April of 2003. What a rush I got when I walked onstage in white tie and tails and saw the entire house filled to capacity, and saw everyone in the front row also wearing white tie and tails. It must have been just how Benny felt in 1938.
Based on the success of those two concerts, Andrej booked some more. This past December I went back for two weeks and we did five more concerts. We sold out most of the places we played.
Coincidentally, after those concerts I came back here I did another recreation of the Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert—this one at a 600-seat theater in Bridgewater, N.J. with the Stan Rubin orchestra again. The concert promoter is a gentleman named Bruce Gast, for whom I’ve done many, many concerts over the years. Bruce has three different venues and has built up a following of dedicated jazz fans.
JB: What are the three New Jersey venues?
DL: One is called the Somerset County Vocational-Technical School—that’s the one in Bridgewater, N.J. The second one is the Bickford Theatre at the Morris Museum in Morristown, N.J. The third one is the Watchung Arts Center in Watchung, N.J.
JB: How did the concert in Bridgewater go?
DL: In Europe, Benny Goodman and jazz in general have an exotic appeal—there’s an enormous market for American jazz musicians. Over here, swing music is more difficult to market. I never thought we’d be able to fill 600 seats, but we did. To hear those Goodman arrangements played—you begin to understand why the Benny Goodman Orchestra was such a success and such a major part of the Swing Era. It wasn’t just Benny Goodman. He is the clarinetist—I consider him to be the greatest jazz clarinetist of all time. But beyond that, he had great arrangers working for him—Fletcher Henderson, Jimmy Mundy, Eddie Sauter, Mel Powell. And he had great musicians in his band, many of whom went on to lead their own bands—Gene Krupa, Harry James, Lionel Hampton, Teddy Wilson, and others. Goodman had a great band, and to hear his music played live is just unbelievable.
I began the concert in January by playing the opening track from the recently reissued CD of the Carnegie Hall Concert, “Don’t Be That Way.” As the number played in the background, I made a short speech, during which I read off the names of the musicians who were there in 1938. Then I said, “But had you the good fortune of being in Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938, this is not what you heard…” The CD music faded, and I said “This is what you heard.” Then the band soared into “Don’t Be That Way.” That sound to me is just such a great sound—you really begin to understand why Benny’s band was such a success and why that concert was so memorable. “Don’t Be That Way” was a brand new arrangement—they had never performed it before. Edgar Sampson wrote it just for that concert.
JB: You also did a live tribute to Bix Beiderbecke recently.
DL: Yes, last month. That one was also at the theater in Bridgewater. Here’s how that came about: Doug LaPasta, David White and I co-produced a CD called “Celebrating Bix,” which came out on the Arbors Jazz label last year in honor of Bix’s 100th birthday. I was the musical director, but Doug was really the creative genius behind the project. He was with me at all the recording sessions and at most of the mixing and editing sessions. He wanted to do something special for Bix’s 100th birthday, so he decided to take what he felt were Bix’s greatest solos, and have them harmonized for three cornets. Peter Ecklund transcribed and harmonized most of the solos, and then he and I wrote new arrangements around them. The idea was not to recreate the original records—most of which were recorded electrically, by the way—but to get the best musicians and just have them play the way they like to play.
JB: So it’s sort of like Super Sax for Bix?
DL: Yeah, or Prez Conference. Exactly—for Bix. We had Mark Shane on piano, and Joe Ascione on drums. Vince Giordano and Greg Cohen played bass—not at the same time, of course. Howard Alden and Matt Munisteri played guitar. The cornet team consisted of my three favorite cornet players—Randy Sandke, Randy Reinhardt, and Jon-Erik Kellso. In addition to having three cornets, we had three C-melody saxophones. The C-melody saxophone was Rosy McHargue’s main instrument and it’s because of Rosy’s influence that it’s become one of mine. I wrote a couple of arrangements on the Bix CD to feature the three C-melodies—Pete Martinez, Scott Robinson and myself. So the concert we did last month was a live version of that CD. We had almost the same band.
JB: Tell us about the Eleven Sons of Rosy.
DL: Ah yes. When Rosy passed away in 1999, he left a trunk full of arrangements to me and his trombonist Keith Elliott. Keith was Rosy’s right hand man for most of the last 20 years of his life. He played everything from trombone to cornet to piano. He did handy work around Rosy’s apartment and drove him from place to place. Keith and I have this trunk, which contains hundreds of arrangements Rosy wrote during his eighty-year career.
Rosy never had the opportunity to record most of these arrangements. In Rosy’s day, making records was a big deal—it wasn’t like today, when producing a CD is so economical that virtually anyone can do it. My idea was to record some of his unrecorded arrangements.
I sorted through the trunk, picked out a bunch of the arrangements, and put together a little rehearsal to play through them to see which ones were the best. I did this all in California, because I wanted to have a band full of Rosy’s favorite musicians. They were all players who knew Rosy and often accompanied him. They have the kind of respect for him that I have. I wanted guys who shared my vision. Can you imagine what it would have been like if I had done this with a bunch of guys who didn’t know who the hell Rosy McHargue was? The recording session was amazing—we did everything in one or two takes. It all came together so perfectly, so flawlessly. The amount of love for this one man was phenomenal. We had that recording session just about a week before 9/11.
I had to adapt many of Rosy’s arrangements to accommodate the instrumentation I was using. I rewrote a few of them to feature a three-C-melody saxophone section—that’s becoming my trademark. I wrote some completely new arrangements as well, borrowing phrases Rosy used to play in his solos. Rosy had a knack for unearthing old songs that had been forgotten—many of them weren’t even successes when they were new. He had an amazing mind. To his dying day he had a repertoire consisting of hundreds of songs, to which he knew the lyrics, melodies and chords.
Floyd Levin and I wrote the liner notes. When we assembled the booklet, there were 38 pages—and that was after reducing the fonts and spaces to the smallest legible increment. The booklet just barely fits into the jewel case. We love that man so much—we just couldn’t stop writing about him!
The CD came out in time for Rosy’s 100th birthday, in 2002. It’s called “Where the Morning Glories Grow,”—which is one of the tunes on the album—“A Centennial Tribute to Rosy McHargue.” I’m very proud of that CD—I can honestly say it’s my favorite of all the ones I’ve done. It’s not at all like the Roof Garden Jass Band. There are even barbershop harmony vocals. That was something Rosy liked to do—arrange barbershop harmonies for his musicians to sing.
We’re going to be doing the Rosy tribute live at the Hot Steamed Festival in Essex, CT on Sunday, June 27 [2004] and at the Bickford Theatre in Morristown, NJ on Monday, June 28 [2004]. I’ve put together a band of some musicians from the East Coast, including a 17-year-old cornet player named Brett Boyd. I’m flying Keith Elliott in from California for those concerts. He’ll play trombone and double C-melody, as he did on the CD. I’ve got Pete Martinez, also on C-melody and clarinet, Herb Gardner on piano, Brian Nalepka on bass, and Kevin Dorn on drums.
JB: What else have you been up to lately?
DL: Well, let’s see. I was in Hungary last week with a group from California called the Boondockers. They’re a lot of fun. They call themselves a “skiffle band” because of the instruments they play—they have a washboard and a washtub bass. The pianist is Bob Ringwald, Molly Ringwald’s father.
I’ve also done some recording with Jeff Healy recently. Jeff Healy is a guitarist and trumpet player in Toronto. He’s a Blues/Rock superstar up there. He’s so famous that everywhere we go, people seem to throw themselves at his feet. He’s blind, and he is such an incredible performer—watching him onstage is like being in the presence of a god.
The most interesting thing about Jeff is his “other side”—it doesn’t earn him much money, but it’s his real love. Jeff has a collection of about 25,000 78-rpm records. He’s got them all lined up against the wall—sleeveless—in his listening room. He knows exactly where each one is—he can go right to the record. He knows which side is which because he has memorized which side is the shorter side. He can run his fingernail along the groove and tell you what condition the record is in. He can feel the label and tell you what the label is. It’s unbelievable! He is dedicated to the music of the ‘20s and ‘30s. His goal is to own every jazz and dance band record from the ‘20s and ‘30s, and he’s getting closer and closer all the time.
I have also performed onstage with Jeff—a couple of times with his blues band—on clarinet, no less—that’s an experience!—and two or three times with the band he calls “Jeff Healy’s Jazz Wizards”—that’s a band that plays 20s and 30s jazz. He’s got some hot players in that band. Jeff usually plays trumpet.
JB: You do a weekend in Meadville, Pennsylvania every year around this time. I understand that’s one of your favorite gigs.
DL: Yes, in fact I just did it this past weekend. This was our sixth year. That’s such a good, swingin’ little group—it’s so easy to play with a good band. This year we had Duke Heitger on trumpet—his first time with us. The rest of the band hasn’t changed. Dan Barrett—my favorite living musician—was on trombone. He’s got great melodic and harmonic sense. I often find his solos to be superior to the songs they’re based on. Mark Shane was on piano—he has a wonderful, relaxed style—like Teddy Wilson at his best. Vince Giordano was on bass, tuba and bass sax. And my old buddy Kevin Dorn was on drums. Playing with those guys helps me to remember why I became a jazz musician. Everyone has a great time, and the music swings from start to finish.
JB: I heard through the grapevine that you recently had dinner with a very famous clarinetist.
DL: (laughs.) Two months ago a friend of mine, Geoff Miller, invited me to join him for dinner with Artie Shaw. Geoff and his wife Katherine have been friends of Artie’s for about 15 years. Needless to say, Artie Shaw is one of my heroes on the clarinet. And the fact that he’s still living—he’s going to be 94 in May—is almost inconceivable because he was one of the prime exponents of the Swing Era. I have a great deal of respect for him. I was a little bit apprehensive about saying yes because I know Artie doesn’t like to talk about music—especially where the clarinet is concerned. He stopped playing 50 years ago this year. He’s very much into books and literature, which I’m not, and I was afraid I wouldn’t know what to say to him.
But I accepted the invitation—who wouldn’t, right? I just decided I wasn’t going to bring up music at all. We met him at his house, and decided to go to a restaurant in his neighborhood. Artie’s in a wheelchair because his dog tripped him a few years ago and broke his leg. But he’s very independent. He wouldn’t let anyone help him. He insisted on doing everything himself. He has one of those hybrid cars, and we rode in that. Geoff drove. Artie rode in the passenger seat, and the whole time I was sitting there in the back seat thinking, “Oh, my god…I’m sitting next to Artie Shaw.”
We entered the restaurant, and the maitre d’ and all the staff come over, saying “Hi, Artie!” “Great to see you again, Artie!” Geoff and Katherine put Artie at the head of the table, and me right next to him. For about twenty minutes, I couldn’t say a word. Then Geoff said, “Tell us about the time you came to New York with Bunny Berigan.”
Uh-oh, I thought, Music.
To my surprise, Artie responded cheerfully, with a faint smile on his face. “Oh yeah—we didn’t have any money. I think we had a nickel and a joint between us.”
We all laughed politely, even though we’d all heard the story before—even me—Geoff had told me in the car on the way over.
We weren’t finished laughing politely when Artie interrupted, “Did I ever tell you about the time I ran into Benny Goodman?”
“No,” Geoff said. “Tell us.”
“Yeah,” Artie said. “It was when he was making that movie with Tommy Dorsey.”
“’A Song is Born?’” I asked, recklessly.
“Yeah. Benny comes over to my table and he says ‘Did you hear Tommy Dorsey hit me?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I heard about that. What happened?’ and Benny says, “He hit me…I thought that went out!”
Then Artie looked at me and said, “What part of the music industry are you in?”
I froze, smiled nervously, and didn’t say anything.
Then Katherine finally broke the uncomfortable silence. “Artie, Dan is a wonderful clarinet player from New York.”
I thought, "Now I'm in for it." I wanted to run away.
“But, Mr. Shaw,” I said, hoping to salvage the evening, “I’m not going to talk about the clarinet—I promise.”
Artie just stared at me for a moment.
Finally, he said, “What kind of reeds do you play?” I took a deep breath and said, “Well…I play Fibracell reeds—it’s a plastic reed. Arnold Brilhart told me you used to play plastic Enduro reeds—is that right?”
Artie answered, “I only used those for the ‘Stardust’ session. The rest of the time I played regular wooden reeds.”
At this point, I'm wondering "Am I actually having a conversation about reeds with Artie Shaw?"
“What strength did you use?” I asked.
“Well, they didn’t grade them by strengths back then. You just bought a box of reeds and they all had different strengths and you had to go through the whole box to find the right strength. I used to find three good reeds in a box of fifty.”
I said, “Mr. Shaw, I have a Vitaphone short of you from about 1932 or so with Roger Wolfe Kahn’s Orchestra. Do you remember making that?
“That was a century ago. I remember they had a dancer who could kick up to her nose.”
I asked him which of his bands was his favorite, and he answered politely, “I liked them all.”
By now I was feeling relatively comfortable with him—comfortable enough to discuss music with him freely.
“When you quit the music business in about 1940 and moved to Mexico, did you play the clarinet at all during that time?”
He said, “No. I didn’t touch the clarinet for a year.”
“Some of your solos are so perfectly constructed that it seems almost impossible that you improvised them. Did you ever work out your solos in advance?”
“No. I improvised everything. It’s the only way I knew how to play”, he answered.
“You know, I was listening to your last recordings from 1954 recently—the ones you made with Tal Farlow and Hank Jones—and I was really impressed by how much your playing had changed. You were playing in a much more modern style. You really seemed to have reinvented yourself. Who were you listening to that influenced your playing so much—Charlie Parker, maybe?
“No, not really. I put that group together because I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to play the kind of music I wanted to play.”
All evening, Artie Shaw was very cordial, very polite to me. As we were getting ready to leave the restaurant, I asked my friends to take a picture of me with him. Suddenly all these flash bulbs were going off, and Artie said, “What is this—a press conference?”
We went back to his house after dinner and sat down with him at his coffee table. But first my friends gave me a tour of the house, the highlight of which was his office. Artie doesn’t see very well anymore, which is a tragedy because he loves to read. It’s also nearly impossible for him to write. So he doesn’t go up to his office. We went up there and, as you can imagine, it’s full of books, from wall to wall and from floor to ceiling. I tried to take in everything I could. In the center of the room there was a long table stacked with records and CDs. I saw some of his own records there—those Bluebird two-Record sets that came out in the 70s. One record I saw was the Carl Reiner-Mel Brooks “2000-Year-Old Man” record.
We went back downstairs and talked with him more. At one point, one of my friends said to him, “Artie, in all of your years, what’s the most amazing thing you’ve seen?”
He thought for a moment and said, quoting Mel Brooks from the “2000-Year-Old Man” routine, “Saran Wrap.”
I couldn’t help but respond with the line Carl Reiner uses to respond to Mel Brooks on the record: “You equate that with man’s discovery of space?”
And Artie, right on cue, said “That was good.”
He told us Mel Brooks was a friend of his, and that he had just spoken with him a few days earlier. It’s funny he should quote Mel Brooks, because that reminds me of another story. Mel Brooks and his daughter Stefanie used to come in to the Cajun when I was working there with Vince Giordano’s Nighthawks. The first night they came in, I was standing outside during a break, and one of the other saxophone players came up to me and said, “The woman at Mel Brooks’ table just asked me if Dan Levinson was here tonight.” I said, “How does she know me?” “I don’t know,” he said.
So I went over to her table and sort of hovered there, waiting for her to say something. She didn’t. Finally, I said, “Excuse me. I’m Dan Levinson.” And she said, “No you’re not.” And I said, “Yes, I am.” And she said, “No, you’re not!”
I took out my driver’s license, but before I had a chance to show it to her, her father grabbed it out of my hand and looked at it, looked at me, looked at it, looked at me, and said, “He’s Dan Levinson.”
She said, “You’re not the person I remember as Dan Levinson.”
I said, “Well…where did you see me before?”
She said, “I went to a concert you did, a Benny Goodman tribute…a few years ago.”
I realized she was referring to a concert I was supposed to do for Bruce Gast in January 1999. That turned out to be when I was undergoing cancer treatment, so I ended up sending Dan Block as a substitute. She thought Dan Block was me.
Mel and Stefanie invited me to sit down at their table, and I said, “Mr. Brooks, my father is Art Levinson, who worked with you on a film called ‘My Favorite Year’ about twenty years ago—my father was the associate producer.”
Mel said, “Sure, sure—I remember your daddy! How’s he doin’? What’s he working on now?”
From then on, every time Mel came into the Cajun—there were about five or six times—he would invite me to sit at his table, and he’d say, “How’s your daddy doin’?”
Stefanie is an avid jazz fan and comes to most of my concerts in New Jersey and some of the ones here. We’ve remained in touch, and I’ve stayed in touch with her father a little bit as well. When I was in L.A. last summer, I called Mel at his office and he invited me over for a visit. I brought my “daddy,” and the two of them had a nice reunion.
JB: What do you have coming up?
DL: Well, the Jimmy Dorsey tribute I’m doing at Birdland on June 23 [2004] for the JVC Jazz Festival is what’s on my mind most of the time. I’m leading the Stan Rubin Orchestra again for this one. This year Jimmy Dorsey would be celebrating his 25th birthday—yep, he was born on February 29th, 1904, a hundred years ago. I’ve been working on some of the arrangements for the “Early Jimmy Dorsey” portion of the program, and boy, is it a kick in the pants. Jimmy Dorsey was a hell of a saxophonist and clarinetist. You don’t get to hear much of him on those later records—“Green Eyes,” “Tangerine,” “Amapola,” and such—but his earlier records are clear examples of his virtuosity.
I’m also going to be doing some more work with a Benny Goodman-style quartet: Mark Shane on piano, Kevin Dorn on drums, and Matt Hoffman on vibes. Matt is 17 years old, and he’s a virtuoso on the vibes if ever there was one. We’re doing a Benny Goodman Quartet tribute on August 23 [2004] at the Bickford Theatre. All of us are dedicated to the music and the musicians. Kevin is a big Gene Krupa fan. I don’t have to tell you how much I’ve been inspired by Benny Goodman. Mark’s greatest influence is Teddy Wilson. And Matt Hoffman’s into Lionel Hampton. That’s the Benny Goodman Quartet right there.
I’m at Birdland many Tuesdays with David Ostwald’s Louis Armstrong Centennial Band. We usually have Jon-Erik Kellso on cornet and Wycliffe Gordon on trombone. George Avakian, the legendary record producer who just turned 85, got us the job there four years ago.
JB: What have you learned through your work that you could pass on to other musicians?
DL: I’m sure you’ve heard this said before, but it’s always a good idea to play with musicians who are better than you are. I used to wonder why bandleaders let guys play in their bands who made them look bad by comparison. Then I learned that having good musicians around you makes you sound better. So as a bandleader, I always hire the best I can find. It’s better to be pulled along by better musicians than to be stuck in the position of having to pull others along.
I’ve made a study of determining the variables that can wreck a performance. The room you’re in may have terrible acoustical properties; you may be playing with musicians who are dragging you down; if you’re a saxophonist or clarinetist, you may be having trouble finding a good reed—a bad reed can destroy everything. I’ve walked away from many a performance wondering how I could possibly call myself a professional musician. But then I witness a genius who miraculously transcends the worst of these musical situations, and I remember that it can be done. When I find myself in such a situation, I try to hear the sound I want to hear—play with the rhythm section that’s in my head.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to do what you love, and love what you do. Find your passion. If you do what you love doing, sooner or later you’ll find a way to make money at it. I’m working almost every night of the week someplace. That’s the way I like to live my life. In the daytime I’m working on my projects, and at night I’m performing. If things go as I hope they will, I’ll be able to do this for many, many years to come. I don’t ever want to retire.
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