Audiobook Anyone?

 

After a year of pleading, I finally acquired five tunes from

Adams’s November 16, 1985 gig from the Bassment (yes,

that’s the correct spelling) in Saskatoon, Canada. Already

deep into his cancer, Adams sounds tremendous. That

further suggests to me that he played superbly throughout

at least February, 1986, after which his illness and

medical treatments appreciably wore him down. Unfortunately,

there are precious few Adams audience recordings after that

time, though the few that exist suggest a lessening of his

powers in his last eight months of life.

Earlier in the month, I decided to pour through one last box of

notes, sorted as “Analysis,” that I had been saving. I wondered

if I made any observations that might be germane to the

biography, whether overtly or even obliquely. I turned out that,

yes, I had a few scraps of paper with notes on them that I could

actually use. Some regarded comments I scribbled about certain

recordings. I also discovered at long last three missing pages from

my Adams interview transcript in which he talks about his fondness

for Francis Poulenc and William Walton. I was able to add that, as

well as some notes about the diminished scale and Clark Terry’s

comment to me about Ellington’s “Jack the Bear” and how that’s

the likely source for Pepper's composing for bass and baritone as

two voices. 

Lastly, I received from one of my final readers a few minor corrections

regarding the biography's front matter. I’m awaiting his critique of

Chapters 1-4 (1930-1955), plus another reader’s critique of Chapters

5-12 (1956-1986). Work still continues on the book’s directory of 450

tunes. It’s really incredible to have a kind of “Best of” collection all in

one place, without having to scramble for tracks on an LP, cassette, or

CD. I think you’re going to be amazed by this addition to the eBook.

I’m still on track for a September, 2021 release.  

To that aim, in the last week I tightened up my Prologue and first

chapter with some editorial improvements. I’ve also decided (I had

forgotten about it) to produce an audiobook version of the biography.

Perhaps that will take away some of the sting of it only at first being

released as an eBook? Can anyone advise me on how to go about

this? Is iTunes or Amazon the preferred vehicle? Any idea on pricing? 

I’ve got some upcoming Zoom lectures at Ball State University, the

University of Wisconsin, Appalachian State, and the University of

Missouri. If any are recorded, I may share them at pepperadams.com.

All the best!

 

Chapter Five of the Bio

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

My apologies for missing the February post. My work schedule has shifted since
December. I now work all day Friday through Sunday. I’m just too beat to write
over the weekend. Mondays will now be the new posting day.

It’s been a very productive few months of 2019. Chapter Five of the biography is
mostly done. Currently, I’m working through my last fifty or so interviews,
tweaking things here and there. The interviews will take me through the summer.
Then I can wrap up the chapter and move on to the Listener’s Guide, 1963-1977.
Hearing all of that music, and writing about Pepper’s best solos from the period,
will take the rest of the year to complete. Once done, I can move on to the final
chapter, covering the period 1956-1963. I’m expecting the finish line to be
Christmas, 2020.

Here’s an amusing excerpt from Chapter Five, spoken by the writer Albert
Goldman:

“At that time,” said Goldman, “I always had a 4th of July party.”

I always had a lot of jazz musicians to it, because those guys don’t go out of town on that day and they don’t
know what to do with themselves. I’d always have Zoot, and I’d always have Elvin, and I’d always have them
at my apartment. This year, I did it bigger. I took the whole restaurant. A lot of weird people came: Buddy
Rich. . . . I had this friend at the time who was a real hardcore drug criminal, a wonderful character. He said,
“Al, let me cater the drugs for the party.” I said, “O.K., man, go ahead.” So, they had all these drugs out on
bronze platters that they were passing around, the [chargers] that they put down before they serve you the
meal, then they remove it and put down the plates. They filled all those up with drugs. Some of the Indian
waiters are going around, saying, “Hashish! Hashish!” This is the atmosphere of the party in the afternoon.

The guy who ran the restaurant was a weird cat named Samsher Wadud, who claimed to be a nephew of the
Prime Minister of Bangladesh. He went over to the U.N. that day to demonstrate. He said, “I’m going to leave
you in charge of the restaurant, O.K?” I said, “Fine, don’t worry about it. These are all my people. We have no
problem. If anybody else comes, I’ll just take care of them.” In the course of the afternoon, I think only one
couple turned up who weren’t from the party. It was some big, blonde, buxom English lady and her spinster
daughter, or niece, or something, and they didn’t know what was going on. They just walked into this
restaurant for an Indian meal and people are passing these plates of drugs. I remember they reached into a pile
of marijuana and just put it in their mouths, like it was some seeds they were going to eat, like alfalfa. When
they got through, they asked for the bill. I said, “Oh, no, it’s all on the house. You’re here for the first time,
aren’t you?” And they said, “Oh, you’re so gracious! We’ll have to tell everyone in England when we get
home. . . .”

All my crazy friends were there. Drug dealers. Of course Bob [Gold] was there with his old lady at the
time, and Zoot and Elvin. I remember Zoot passed out completely. He never even got to play. Pepper played
this great musical afternoon — we were going to make an album of it, actually. What it was was mostly a lot
of Duke Ellington stuff in a very icy, cool mode, like the frost on a bucket of champagne. It was so beautiful!
I would love to hear him in that mode. I told him, “Play all that cool Ellington stuff.” It’s an afternoon party.
We’re up in the penthouse there, all high as a kite. I said, “Let’s really do it. Do all those Billy Strayhorn
tunes.” It was a very cool, frosted-champagne afternoon.

That afternoon always stuck out in my mind as the kind of thing that Pepper should have been doing a lot
because he loved it. He was just functioning as a musician. He wasn’t an assertive guy. He didn’t want to be a
star. He just wanted to do his own thing, but he wanted to do it under the right auspices. He didn’t want to be
in some shithouse with a bunch of nitwits. And this was a very cool audience. I remember there was a very
hip Brazilian guy who came up with his girlfriend, who was just in from Rio. (I know a lot of people, and the
kind of audience he loved, who could really dig him.) Jack Kroll of Newsweek was there. I remember Jack just
sat there, with his drink, in front of Pepper for about an hour and dug him.

I thought to myself, “This is the kind of gig that guys should always be playing.” But nobody knew
he existed! That’s the tragedy of it. This great talent. I’m telling you, after years and years in the
jazz scene, I’ve heard all the famous, so-called “underground” stars. There’s a lot of these people.
One of them is Zoot’s brother, who played trombone for years in bands in Vegas. He’s a very good
trombone player. There are a number of people; they dropped out of the business because they had
to make a living, they had to put their kids through college, they lived in some weird town, or
something. But over the course of years, you get to hear them all, and, believe me, none of them
were in a league with Pepper. None of them. There wasn’t anybody. Pepper “walked away” from
all these people. He was the hippest, he was the coolest, he was the greatest technician, he was the
most sophisticated, the one who integrated more references.

Because my co-author, John Vana, is teaching a graduate level course this Spring at Western Illinois
about “the big three” (Bird, Trane, Pepper), it seemed like a great time to visit with his students, and
organize a few college lectures in the Midwest around the trip. Accordingly, I’ll be lecturing this coming
April at the University of Wisconsin- Lacrosse, Winona State University, Beloit College, and the
University of Northern Iowa. I’m also taking some vacation time in the Twin Cities.

The baritone saxophonist Anders Svanoe invited me to speak to his students at Beloit. Ultimately, we
decided to put on a concert of Pepper’s music in Madison, Wisconsin. His quartet will perform, and I’ll
read a few passages from Joy Road. It takes place on Wednesday, April 17 at 8pm. Here’s the
announcement:

https://artlitlab.org/events/the-life-and-music-of-pepper-adams-reading-and-concert

New Pepper Adams Archive

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

I'm pleased to tell you that I've decided to donate all of my Pepper Adams materials to William Paterson University. How can I not make these important materials available near New York City, where so many researchers and musicians can use them? Moreover, how can I not add Pepper's materials to the archive where Thad Jones' materials are held? That's almost as silly as establishing a Harry Carney archive apart from Duke Ellington.

I've been in touch with curator David Demsey, and I've already boxed up twelve cartons of Pepper's material from his estate. All of the packed stuff is material that I eagerly scooped up after Pepper's death to protect it from destruction, when his widow was disposing of the contents of his house in Canarsie, Brooklyn. Much of my own materials that I've collected over the years, such as my many audience recordings, will get there eventually. The trick is figuring out a way to transport these things from Atlanta to West Paterson, New Jersey. The plan is to move everything there in phases as I finish the biography.

Some of the things that I saved from destruction that amazing day in late 1986 were Pepper's copies of alternate tracks that he recorded for Reflectory, The Master, Urban Dreams and Live at Fat Tuesday's. I've just gotten them digitized for posterity. Pepper's original cassettes will be going to William Paterson.

David Demsey and I have been discussing the provenance of the charts on the Ruth Brown/Thad/Mel date. In a private interview that Pepper did with Albert Goldman (discussed last month in this blog), Pepper mentioned that not all of the charts on the date are Thad's. Pepper affirmed that his feature on "Trouble in Mind" was written by Thad. Demsey told me that "Bye, Bye Blackbird" is Thad's too. They have the score in Thad's hand. Judging from the intro, does anyone have any doubt? We're still figuring out who wrote the other charts. Does anyone have any input on the matter?

I'm also excited to report that I've finally finished Chapter 1 of Pepper's biography. For over a month, the period 1900-1947 was a gaping hole in the chapter. Now it's been closed. It was my overarching aim to contextualize Pepper's experience by writing about the socio-political history of Detroit. Two sections (1701-1899) were done already, but writing about the first half of the Twentieth Century, so important to Pepper's sensibilities, lingered for quite some time. So much happened in Detroit then that affected the course of American history. Furthermore, Pepper worked in the auto plants, and was an impassioned advocate of social unionism. I needed to explore that to understand that part of him.

That led me to the Reuther Brothers. If you haven't seen the extraordinarily moving documentary Brothers on the Line, I urge you to watch it. Although I knew something about Walter Reuther before I watched it, I left with the strong conviction that Reuther was one of the towering figures of the Twentieth Century. If anyone should be designated for sainthood, it's Reuther. He and his two brothers' courageous work to raise the standard of living of American auto workers, in the face of all sorts of hostility, physical beatings, and assassination attempts, is the thing of legend. Do you know about his work with Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King in helping them advance their struggles for human rights, or his work with the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson? Now almost fifty years after his death (which I suspect in 2020 will be celebrated), Reuther is far too little known. Please check out the film. Here's the trailer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=i5x5VEtZ9xk

Now it's time to finish up Chapter 3, essentially the period 1954-1955 but with some intentional twists and turns added. This will conclude the first half of my part of the book. Part II is being written by alto saxophonist John Vana. He's making great strides with his analysis of Pepper's playing.

For those who like to hear Pepper Adams speak about his life, a whole crop of new interviews with him have been posted at pepperadams.com: http://www.pepperadams.com/Interviews/index.html

Pepper Gets His Selmer and Berg Larsen

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

Welcome back to the Pepper Adams blog. The reason I moved to a once-a-month posting schedule is because I started a new gig in early July with a steep learning curve that demanded a great deal of my time. It's a challenging sales job that requires quite a bit of travel. Now that my acclimation process is over, I'm happy to be back in the saddle, writing about Pepper Adams again. I hope this new schedule hasn't inconvenienced anyone. Again, postings will be the first Sunday of each month for the foreseeable future.

With the little free time I had left over this month I did manage to get some Pepper Adams work done. Just last night I finished a new draft of Chapter Two of Pepper's biography. It basically covers the period 1930-1947. I say "basically" because I jump around thematically, not adhering to a chronological narrative.

It's now time to turn my attention to Chapter Three, Pepper's experience in the U.S. Army. From June, 1951 until June, 1953 Adams was in the Special Services, a group of musicians that performed nearly every day for troops in Korea to improve morale. Although it sounds like a cushy gig, it was fraught with danger. Typically, they performed near the front lines. Traveling around in convoys in some sense made them a moving target. At least once, Adams' jeep was strafed, flipping his vehicle over on its side. Adams found the entire war experience to be harrowing and wouldn't generally talk with interviewers about his time in Korea. When I interviewed him he did explain some aspects of it. Most of my research is with his  fellow soldiers. I'll report on my progress in September's post.

I had a fascinating email exchange a few weeks ago with a baritone saxophonist friend of mine. He told me that he had done some research on his horn at the Selmer office in Paris, getting a copy of the production log that showed when his horn was built. Some time after that he went to the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University to take a look at Pepper's Selmer, the instrument that Pepper's widow asked me to deliver soon after his death. It turns out that the serial number of Pepper's horn is nearly identical to his, only seven numbers away, meaning that both were produced within a few weeks of each other.

Due to their near identical production date, information about Pepper's horn was on the log sheet that  he was given! It turns out that production on Pepper's horn began on October 14, 1949 and finished four days later. Knowing this necessitated me to go back and change around a few parts of Chapter One of the biography (and it's going to require me making some changes to the Chronology at pepperadams.com). I originally thought that Pepper got his horn about a half year after he first started playing the baritone sax in December, 1947 because that's the way Pepper remembered it. That led me to research Ellington's Detroit gigs in 1948 because Pepper brought Harry Carney with him to the shop to vet the instrument. My friend's startling discovery changed the timeline that all of this happened and shows how a person with a crystal clear memory can still very easily reorder facts 35 years later.

It now looks like Pepper bought his horn sometime in the period January 20-28, 1950, when Ellington played Detroit's Paradise Theater. The instrument was already destined for the USA upon its completion and it would have taken about six weeks by boat. Adams had almost twice that time to get it and that would have given some extra time for it to move from the distributor, probably on the East Coast, to Detroit. The reason it wasn't purchased later in the year at two other Ellington gigs (Sept 1-3 or Nov 30-Dec 6) is because my co-author, alto saxophonist John Vana, doesn't think that a Bundy could have given Pepper the warm sound that he gets on a recording he made in the summer of 1950.

Once I put all of that in order, I then had to figure out when Adams got his Berg Larsen mouthpiece. Pepper told me that Wardell Gray returned to Detroit with the mouthpiece after his European tour with Benny Goodman. According to research done by Leif Bo Peterson, that tour (BG's only one when Gray was in the band) was cancelled due to labor issues in England. Gray still went east with the presumption that a tour of Europe was in place. I suspect BG's band got stranded in NY; only Goodman, it turned out, went on to London. While Goodman went to London, Gray returned to Detroit and recorded live at the Blue Bird on July 20, 1949. I can only assume that around this time Pepper sat in with Wardell and fell in love with Gray's Berg Larsen when they switched horns on the bandstand. If he ordered it around August 1, then he might have gotten it as early as mid-September, 1949, some four months before the Selmer. Maybe getting the Berg Larsen impelled him to get the new horn? Could it be that he wasn't able to get as good a sound as he wanted on the Bundy that he heard on Gray's tenor and that finally compelled him to buy a new horn?

The end result is that Pepper played his Bundy for two full years before he fully committed to the instrument by purchasing a professional model. Moreover, he did get his Berg Larsen within only a few months of getting his new horn. Learning that Adams got his new horn and mouthpiece by early 1950 makes sense in light of my interview with Detroit baritone saxophonist Bean Bowles. He told me that Pepper came to him a few months later, still struggling to get a big sound on the instrument. Bowles advised him to change his reed set-up and a few other things you'll discover when you read my book.

                (Where Pepper Adams bought his Selmer.)

Pepper Biography News

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

Somehow this past week I wrote a complete first draft of Chapter 2 of Pepper's biography. I had so many pages of notes from other times that I wrote about him or prepared college lectures. The chapter covers the period 1930-1947 and also dives into (as I discussed last week) Adams' parental genealogy. On the genealogy, I added more details about the derivation of the Adamses, all the way back to the Eleventh Century, and some more information on just how tough a dude his sixth great-grandfather, James Adams, was: how he survived the Battle of Dunbar, his march and incarceration, the voyage to the New World and his servitude. James Adams' grit and determination is part of Pepper Adams' DNA.

Here's how the chapter falls:

1. Father's history

2. Genealogy

3. Family music history

4. History of Rochester, New York

5. The move to New York, 1931-1935

6. Pepper, 1935 to his father's death in 1940

7. Rochester war effort

8. 1940s Rochester jazz scene

9. Pepper, 1941-1944

10. Duke Ellington and Rex Stewart at the Temple Theatre; its many implications

11. Raymond Murphy taks about Pepper

12. Jack Huggler talks about Pepper

13. The Elite

14. Isolation

15. John Albert talks about Pepper Adams

Here's an excerpt from the chapter (without footnotes):

Although Adams was still playing in the New Orleans style, his taste in music was already very well developed in 1944.

I was studying more classical music at the time. Although I enjoyed jazz, which I listened to on the radio, which is what you did in those days, it was really classical music which interested me first. Then, when I started to hear Ellington and all those chords and voicings I knew immediately: . . . Debussy, Ravel, Elgar, Delius, the tonal palettes of twentieth-century music were all there. You know, the rough kind of excitement of the Basie band could be a lot of fun and I certainly liked them as soloists but Duke’s band was an entirely different ball game.”63

“Don’t put them next to nobody else,” cautioned Skippy Williams about the Ellington band.

That band, you couldn’t touch them! [Duke] would go back and get some old tricky things like “Caravan” and those kinds of things. He could put some chords on you. They would put some double augmented chords on you, six-note chords, and they would stretch it out in such a way, man, it would sound like five bands were swinging. He would change the chords and make them much heavier. Say, for instance, if you’re making C double augmented it would be C-D-G flat-A flat-B flat and he knew just where to put them to broaden the sound.64

“I was at a restaurant next door to the theater there downtown in Rochester,” said Williams. “Pepper came in and he told me he had heard me play and he liked my playing. He said he played tenor sax. . . . Back when I met him,” Williams continued, “I had taken Ben Webster’s place in Duke’s band. He was very enthused about that.”

I spent as much time as I could. He was working at a shoe store or something. . . . He was asking me about my tone and I told him some certain tricks, how to build his chops up. Well, see, a lot of guys, they try to use their lip a certain way. They don’t let the horn get the right, true sound. You got to let the reed do more vibrating. You have to know how to blow and how to use your belly. . . . He said, “Can I bring my horn by?” I said, “Sure. You can come by any time. . . .” He asked me, “How do you memorize all those things? I never see you looking at the music.” I said, “Next time, come up and look.” He looked up there. They had comic books. We carried about thirty or forty comic books at the time. People think, well, we’re reading Duke’s music but we’d be up there playing like hell and everybody’d be reading comic books.65

Heaven Was Detroit, Part 3

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

I hope everyone is getting in the holiday mood. This will be my last post in 2016. I'm heading out of town for a few weeks. To all my readers out there, a very merry Christmas to you (or whatever it is you celebrate), and a healthy and very happy New Year!

The fourth jazz piece included in Heaven Was Detroit is about pianist and arranger Teddy Harris. Harris, for me, was the glue of the great Butterfield Blues Band ensemble (with a horn section) that I saw do several exciting concerts in New York City when I was a teenager. It was Harris' charts, his thing. What a great fusion of jazz and blues! I knew nothing about Harris until I read the piece by Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert. It turns out that Harris, apart from his jazz roots, was the Music Director of the Supremes for more than a decade. The authors point out that Harris functioned as an elder to younger musicians, continuing the longstanding Detroit practice of mentorship:

"Nurturing musicians essentially forfeited their chances for national exposure and recognition. A city's reputation is made by those musicians who leave; it is sustained by those who remain. Musicians who remain are special, and they form the backbone of our jazz community. Louis Cabrera, Barry Harris and Marcus Belgrave were among their number."

Born in 1934, Teddy Harris went to Northern High School, another Detroit secondary school with a great music program. The program was run by Orvis Lawrence, who played with the Dorsey Brothers and Glenn Miller big bands. Also at Northern at that time was Tommy Flanagan, Sonny Red and Donald Byrd (before he transferred to Cass Tech).

In c. 1950, before Frank Foster joined the U.S. Army, said Harris, Foster would meet with the budding Northern High musicians:

"Frank Foster used to help me. . . . He was becoming a pretty astute arranger. He would come over to [Northern]. We got out of school at 2:30. He would get Donald Byrd, Sonny Red, and myself and Claude Black and take us to his house where he would teach us how to read his arrangements."

                             (Teddy Harris, 1970)

Bill Harris' short piece on drummer Roy Brooks mentions that Brooks attended Northwestern High School. Brooks and alto saxophonist Charles McPherson were regular listeners at the back door of the Blue Bird Inn. Too young to be admitted, they listened to Elvin Jones, Tommy Flanagan, Pepper Adams and all the other greats that were playing there nightly. In late 1959, Brooks replaced Louis Hayes in Horace Silver's group.

Though outside the purview of this blog, those interested in post-1950 Detroit developments, should read Farooq Bey article and Larry Gabriel's two pieces.

As a sprawling anthology covering the entire breadth of jazz and vernacular music in Twentieth Century Detroit, much of the work will not excite Pepper Adams listeners who are narrowly focused in jazz up to 1956. Nevertheless, three other tidbits that caught my attention: R.J. Spangler's piece discusses the 1940s, around the time when Pepper Adams came back to town: 

"Clubs like the Flame Showbar, the Club 666, and the Club Congo all had house bands, chorus lines, shake dancers, ballad singers, blues singers, and more. These were big productions. The auto plants were humming round the clock. People had a few bucks to spend and clubs were full. There was work for musicians and entertainers."

John Sinclair's piece on bluesman Johnnie Bassett includes a surprising blurb about the great after hours jam sessions that took place at the West End Hotel:

"My sister was a waitress there in Delray--Louise, she was a waitress out there at the West End Hotel for a long time. Those guys used to have that session out there every weekend. It started at two o'clock in the morning and it'd go from two to seven a.m. Kenny Burrell, Tommy Flanagan, Paul Chambers, Yusef Lateef, all the guys used to come through that was playin' down at the Flame [Show Bar], and the Rouge Lounge, used to come out to the sessions."

Lastly, in John Sinclair's piece on blues in Detroit, he describes the Hastings Street scene:

"Except for a couple of raggedy blocks straggling south from East Grand Boulevard, Detroit's Hastings Street is gone now. The Motor City's major African American entertainment thoroughfare was gouged out in the late 1950s to make way for the Walter P. Chrysler Freeway. . . . But for twenty years before that, Hastings Street swung all the way from Paradise Valley downtown for fifty or sixty blocks north. . . . In its prime years, Hastings Street throbbed with music, from the elemental blues of John Lee Hooker [and others,] to the swinging jazz of the Teddy Wilson Trio [with drummer J.C. Heard), Maurice King and His Wolverines (with vocalist LaVerne "Bea" Baker), Paul "Hucklebuck" Williams, T.J. Fowler, Todd Rhodes and His Toddlers, and the Mathew Rucker Orchestra. Jazz stars like Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billy Eckstine, and Cootie Williams played the Forest Club or the Flame Show Bar as well as the Paradise Theatre on Woodward Avenue, sharing the stage with rhythm and blues recording stars like Dinah Washington, Wynonie Harris, Amos Milburn, B.B. King, and T-Bone Walker."

Cass Tech

© Gary Carner. Copyright Protected. All rights reserved.

This post marks the return of my weekly Pepper Adams blog after one full year of forced inactivity. The lay off was due to a day job that I began on November 2, 2015 and resulting compliance issues that controlled what I did apart from work. Happily, those restrictions have been lifted. For the next year or so I will be posting mostly pieces here about the music culture of Detroit and Pepper's place within it. It's that part of the forthcoming Adams biography that I'm working on through 2017. 

Today, my interest is Cass Technical High School, the renowned Detroit institution that spawned so many great jazz musicians. Pepper Adams didn't attend Cass, nor attend any school in Detroit, for that matter, until he enrolled at Wayne (now Wayne State) University in 1948. Many of his mentors and colleagues, however, did attend Cass and the school exerted a strong influence on Detroit's musical culture that invariably shaped Adams. There's reasons why Detroit produced so many great musicians and Cass Tech is one of them.

For context, here's a list of notable jazz musicians (from before Adams' time up through his generation) that attended Cass: Gerald Wilson, J.C. Heard, Al McKibbon, Howard McGhee, Lucky Thompson, Wardell Gray, Billy Mitchell, Major Holley, Doug Watkins, Paul Chambers, Donald Byrd, Hugh Lawson and Ron Carter. Yes, that certainly leaves out a large number of great Detroit musicians--Kenny Burrell, Barry Harris, Tommy Flanagan and Yusef Lateef, to name but a few--who attended other schools, such as Miller, Northeastern, Northwestern or McKenzie High. And admittedly each of these schools had very good instrumental programs, at least up through Adams time in Detroit (1947-55). Nevertheless, Cass was different.

                                         

Cass has a long pedigree as an experimental secondary school. It first began in 1860 on the third floor of the Cass Union School. It was named for General Lewis Cass, who donated the land where the building was erected. Cass served as Territorial Governor of Michigan, Secretary of War under Andrew Jackson, U.S. Minister to France and also made an unsuccessful run for President in 1848. In 1908, Cass' Principal, Benjamin Comfort, expressed concern that only 35% of Detroit high schoolers were graduating and 10% were attending college. He felt that graduation rates would increase if students were given vocational training so they could acquire jobs in Detroit's quickly expanding industrial base. Acting on that impulse, Detroit School Superintendent Wales Martindale visited Europe to study its technical schools. Impressed with what he saw, upon his return he decided to establish Cass as Detroit's first technical school. Enrollment soon increased to such an extent that a new school was built in 1912 on the site of the old Cass Union School. It was renamed Cass Technical High School. Enrollment continued to swell, commensurate with Detroit's population explosion that was expanding to service the consolidating American auto industry based in the city. In response to the growing need for more classroom space, a brand new eight-story, 831,000 square-foot Cass Tech was dedicated in 1922, with 50 classrooms serving almost 4,400 students. The structure was incredibly ambitious, one of the largest high schools in the U.S. at the time. With its brick and limestone exterior, and marble-lined hallways with "light courts" to flood natural light inside it, the school boasted a gymnasium with an indoor running track, several swimming pools, a teacher's lounge with fireplace, and a magnificent auditorium with superb acoustics. The school had it all: a pharmacy, a foundry, machine shops, chemistry and physics labs, mechanical drawing rooms and a cafeteria able to feed 1,000 students at one sitting.

                                        (c) Sean Doerr. Cass Tech in 2005.

                            (c) Sean Doerr. Cass Tech's acoustically brilliant auditorium.

As Dan Austin wrote in his book Lost Detroit (p. 33), "From its humble beginnings with classes in pattern-making and drafting, Cass would grow to offer everything from bacteriology to chemical biology to metallurgy to nuclear physics. As technology changed, so did the school's curricula. When airplanes seemed the limit, Cass added aeronautics." Cass became "an institution virtually unparalleled in American secondary education, wrote the Detroit News in 1962. As one Cass graduate, Marshall Weingarden put it, "Cass Tech has a history of being an engine that drove this city. It stand for the highest level of achievement." Weingarden was involved in the effort save Cass' magnificent 1922 building from demolition. Unfortunately, the school was razed in 2011, six years after a brand new Cass Tech was built directly across the street. 

                              (c) Sean Doerr. Cass Tech classrooms before demolition.

Cass was a magnet school, quite unique for its time. "In its early years," as described in an unattributed piece at detroit1701.org, "Cass Tech trained students for skilled industrial jobs. But in the years after World War II, it was the premier high school for the city and its graduates increasingly went to colleges for advance training." According to pianist Clarence Beasley, "You had to have excellent grades to get into Cass." Moreover, you had to pass difficult entrance exams. As a magnet school, it drew many of the best and brightest students from metropolitan Detroit, some who traveled as much as 90 minutes by bus to get there. 

As bassist Al McKibbon told me in 1988, "Cass was downtown, in the heart of town. It really wasn't where I lived. I had to go all the way cross-town to go there. I used to go back Saturdays for the all-city orchestra. I also belonged to a select group from that orchestra that all the teachers played in." McKibbon chose to go from junior high to Cass, "a school," said McKibbon to Anthony Brown in 1993, "that teaches 'finished courses' in Music or Business or whatever you choose--Arts and Crafts." McKibbon began at Cass at age 15, in 1934. "I was taking String Bass and Piano, and Music History and Geometry and English," he said. "As long as you were in the school, until you graduated you had to play piano. You had to have your own instrument--your major--and a minor had to be another instrument from another instrumental group. . . . They always stressed classical music," said McKibbon. "The horn player from the school played with the Symphony, Mr. Hellstein." In fact, many if not all of the first chair players from the Detroit Symphony were teaching at Cass, at least in the 1930s. J.C. Heard, Wardell Gray and Gerald Wilson were in McKibbon's class. Another schoolmate was Flourney Hocker, who was studying bass since he was eight. He showed McKibbon that the instrument was more than just for rhythm. He was tremendously adept before Jimmy Blanton emerged on the scene with Ellington, but committed suicide as a young adult. McKibbon said Hocker would have been a sensation in New York. At that time, too, there were no black musicians in the symphony orchestra to emulate. 

"At Cass Technical High School," McKibbon told me in 1988, "you could take a music course, but that meant that you also had to take academics along with music. The guy that headed the Music Department, Mr. Byrne, taught brass so well that people passing through town would go to him for counseling. His son, Bobby, left high school and went to play with Jimmy Dorsey. He played trombone, harp and cello. You had to take your own instrument and you should take an instrument from each of the choirs. I played bass, so I played tuba. You had to have piano and you had to have Harmony and Music History, along with Math. I had Geometry I and II. It was that kind of school. The only way I could afford that school, they furnished instruments. My people couldn't afford to buy an instrument for me in the Depression. It was a godsend to me." 

As bassist Paul Chambers told Valerie Wilmer in 1961 (see Before Motown, p. 150): "The curriculum took up a whole day of music. That's why it took a few more years to graduate. For example, we'd have the first period Chamber Music; second period Full Orchestra, third either Harmony or Counterpoint and Rudiments; then came Piano and the academic classes." While a student at Cass, Chambers used to play during rest periods with Donald Byrd, Hugh Lawson or his cousin, Doug Watkins, and was gigging at night with Yusef Lateef and Kenny Burrell. Chambers' high school experience was the kind of total immersion in music that others have described in postwar Detroit of the 1940s and '50s. More next week . . .