JazzWax

Interview: Bill Crow, Part 3

In the ealry 1950s, Bill Crow began to develop a style and prominent sound on the bass while playing and recording with some of the era's finest East Coast jazz musicians. Yesterday, Bill and I talked about his year with Stan Getz. Today, Bill talks the evolution of his career working with Al Haig, Jimmy Raney, Marian McPartland, Jackie Cain and Roy Kral, Phil Woods, Sal Salvador, Sam Most and Gerry Mulligan. Along the way, he developed a reputation for being a warm, straight-up muscular player. His sound was thick, punchy and pronounced, making him a forceful time-keeper for both the ensembles he was in and the tapping feet of audiences. As you listen to Bill's recordings, you'll find that the activity of your foot is actually motivated by his swinging bass lines. [Photo above of Bill Crow in Greenwich Village in 1958]

Here's Part 3 of my interview with Bill Crow:

JazzWax: Why did Stan Getz let you go in 1953?
Bill Crow: The band had evolved two or three times. And by '53, we had pianist Johnny Williams, drummer Al Levitt, Bob Brokmeyer on valve trombone, Stan and me. That particular rhythm section had never gelled. We played some hot things that you can hear on those early records, but Johnny wanted to be up on top of the beat all the time. He was constantly like, "Come on. Come on. Come on," and "shuffle, shuffle, shuffle." His rhythmic feel was very forward. Al liked to lay back and smooth things out. And I was kind of in the middle of their tug of war. I didn't know which way to go.

JW: Too tough to be where Johnny Williams wanted you?
BC: I tried to move up but I never seemed to satisfy him and never felt that the rhythm section was as tight as some of the others we'd had.

JW: How did it go down?
BC: After a job in Philadelphia in ‘53, Stan came up to me and said, "Look, we're going out to the West Coast and I want to get [bassist] Teddy Kotick to come back with the band. I don't have the two weeks’ notice to give you, but I hope you'll see what my problem is, that I don't want to take you out for two weeks and then send you home."

JW: What did you say?
BC: I said, "No, that's cool. Just let this be the end of it." I drove back up to New York that night and went into Charlie’s Tavern feeling very glum. There, I ran into Winston Welch, who was with Claude Thornhill's band at the time. I said, "What's happening, Winston?" He said, "Oh, we just lost our bass player." I said, "Teddy Kotick’s going with Stan Getz." He said, "Oh, does that mean you're open?" I said, "Sure." He called the band’s manager, and I went right onto Claude’s band.

JW: That was a nice band.
BC: Oh, it was a wonderful band. Trumpeters Dale Pierce, Sonny Rich and Dick Sherman were in there, Billy Ver Planck was on trombone, the saxophones were Gene Quill and Ralph Aldridge on altos, Red Norman and Dave Figg on tenors, and Dick Zubak on baritone. I was there on the road with the band for about seven months doing one-nighters. I loved Claude. He was a bizarre man, but he was a darling guy.

JW: Why bizarre?
BC: He didn't like the limelight. If the band had a hit record, Claude would go fishing for a couple of months until things died down a little bit. He hated all of the attention that accompanied good press.

JW: Thornhill is the father of mood music, Claude and Paul Weston. Was he influenced by Gil Evans?
BC: Claude loved Gil Evans's writing, including his lush stuff. Claude had a way with the piano. No matter how rotten the pianos were on those road trips, he'd come in and run a couple of chromatic scales and find all the notes he never wanted to hear again. By fooling around with the soft pedal, He would get some little chime notes that sounded beautiful. He’d tuck those into the arrangements and not play too much when the pianos were bad.

JW: In 1954, you recorded one of the great piano trio albums, what originally was called The Al Haig Trio and became Jazz Will-O'-the Wisp, with Al Haig on piano, you on bass and Lee Abrams on drums. Extraordinary music. How did that come about?
BC: I lived in Greenwich Village at the time. One day my phone rang and it was Jerry Newman, the recording engineer. He said, "Hey, this guy from Paris is in town with some money and wants to record Al Haig for the French Swing label. Can you come up tonight?" I must have been the first bassist who answered the call. I said yes because I admired Al, but I'd never met him or Lee before that date. We all went up to Jerry’s studio. Jerry was into some kick of wanting to record everything with one microphone.

JW: What did he do?
BC: He placed the mic over the topless piano and stood me on a box in the curve of the piano so I’d be as close to the mic as possible. Then he kept moving Lee back until Lee ended up sitting in the doorway across the room

JW: The album sounds great.
BC: I was still just playing by ear. Al would play three or four bars of some standard tune and say, "You know this?" I'd say, "Yeah." We would record it with no run-throughs, nothing. I never got a chance to find out what chord substitutions Al was going to use or how he was going to do the tune. And every one of those things was one take. We recorded nine songs for Swing. And as I'm playing, I'm hearing notes all the way through that I wish to God I hadn't played. But I didn't get a second chance. 

JW: But many more songs were recorded that night on March 13, 1954, yes?
BC: Well, we got through the nine-song date so quickly that Jerry said, "Hey, Jesus, we still have a couple of hours left. Why don't we do an album for my Esoteric label in the States?" Al said, "Sure." He sat down and we did another 13 tunes. Eight of them were originally released in the U.S. on Jerry's 10-inch Esoteric label. Jerry eventually released all 13 of the songs recorded for the U.S. portion of the session on a 12-inch LP for his renamed Counterpoint label. Al had recorded three solo songs, which were included. 

JW: You're right: Don't Blame Me, April in Paris and My Old Flame.
BC: Even though we wound up recording two albums, I only got paid for the one French date. Jerry slipped one in there.

JW: In the summer of 1954, you wind up with the Jimmy Raney Ensemble. That’s another unbelievable group.
BC: That was wonderful. We rehearsed down at Jimmy's apartment in Greenwich Village. Sal Salvador came down and took the photo that's on the cover of the album. Then we went over to Rudy Van Gelder's parents’ house in Hackensack, N.J., where he had his studio then. He didn't have a piano then, which was perfect since we didn't have a piano in the group. That was the first time I played with trumpeter John Wilson, alto saxophonist Phil Woods and drummer Joe Morello. I knew Phil through Joe, because they were all from the Springfield, Mass., area.

JW: How did that group sound compared to the Stan Getz Quintet?
BC: It was much more aggressive because of Phil. He had that strong, lead-player's edge. And John was more laid back on the time, but they worked well together.

JW: Without a piano in there, did more rest on your shoulders?
BC: I just followed Jimmy Raney. I figured if I could match his chords, I was all set. Joe was an interesting drummer. I was working with him and Marian McPartland around this time at Manhattan’s Hickory House. It was easy for people to drop in there. We were in the middle of a big oval bar and people would come and have a drink and listen to the jazz. It was an audition for Joe and me to see how we worked as a rhythm section. We got hired by people that would come in and listen to us and think that we played well together. We wound up doing albums with Jimmy, Jackie and Roy, and others. [Photo above of Marian McPartland at the Hickory House with Bill Crow on bass and Joe Morello on drums, courtesy of Bill Crow]

JW: What were Jackie Cain and Roy Kral like to work with?
BC: Wonderful. I knew them because when I was in the Army in 1948, I went to see Charlie Ventura's band with Jackie and Roy several times when stationed at Fort Meade, Md., between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. My Army buddies and I got friendly with the guys on the band just because we were hanging around so much. Charlie Ventura's brother, Benny, was very kind to us. He was playing baritone sax. We also got to know Jackie and Roy and drummer Ed Shaughnessy, mainly.

JW: Speaking of Jackie and Roy, you record with guitarist Barry Galbraith on Jackie and Roy's Storyville album in 1955 that included Mountain Greenery. How did Galbraith differ from Jimmy Raney?
BC: I got to know him in the studios as a very good sight reader, but I didn't really think of him as having a particular style of his own, because the job was to figure out the music and get it played during the time you were in the studio. But I always felt he had really solid rhythm and a nice selection of voicings for chords.

JW: What did Marian McPartland teach you?
BC: She modulated all over the place. She liked to play in all the sharp keys. I was scuffling with my technique at that time. I didn't know what the fingering system was on the bass other than what I'd figured out for myself. So sometimes, you'd get into keys with her that didn't have many open strings in the scale, like D-flat and F-sharp. But it was really good for me because by the time I got off of that group and joined Gerry Mulligan, my technique had improved tremendously.

JW: Is that because of things that other musicians showed you or because you worked hard and figured it out?
BC: I figured it out. When I went with Gerry in 1956 and found out that there were parts he had written that started in the upper register, I had no idea how to find those notes accurately without working my way up to them. As long as I was able to pick out my own lines, I could construct something musical that was within my technical grasp.

JW: How did you wind up with the Gerry Mulligan Sextet in '56?
BC: Bob Brookmeyer recommended me. Which was weird, since he was the one who recommended that Stan fire me. Three years earlier he felt the rhythm section wasn't hot enough and complained to Stan. Stan said, "Well, what do you think we should do?" And Bob said, "Well, maybe we should go back to Teddy Kotick." [Photo above, from left, of Bill Crow, Gerry Mulligan and Bob Brookmeyer]

JW: Then why would he turn around and recommend you to Gerry?
BC: When he was on the West Coast, Gerry had established that he wanted guys who were more interested in the company of others on the bandstand rather than just soloing. He found Chico Hamilton, who was good that way, and two or three bass players who he had played with out there. So when he came back to New York, his original sextet was Idris Suleman, Zoot Sims, Bobby Brookmeyer, Peck Morrison and Dave Bailey. Idris didn't stay too long, so Gerry got John Edley, and then Peck had a chance to go with Johnny Hodges or somebody. Gerry and Bobby were wondering who they shoudl get. Bobby said, "Well, Bill Crow's there. And he may be the kind of bass player you're looking for. He has good ears, and he’s an an accompanist."

JW: What happened?
BC: Gerry or Bob reached out to me and I gave Marian my two weeks’ notice. I said to her,, "I loved this job with you, but I can't pass up the chance to go play with Gerry, Bobby and Zoot." She understood. In fact, after I'd been with Gerry for six or eight months, we had a disagreement about something that didn't have anything to do with the music, and I quit.

JW: And?
BC: Marion immediately hired me back at the Hickory House and I stayed.

JW: What was the disagreement with Mulligan about?
BC: About me not giving the group enough attitude on the bass. Many of Gerry's originals were based on another song that I knew. So most of his originals were lyrical and easy. They didn't usually give me anything written out to follow. Once in a while, Gerry would have a lead sheet.

JW: How was Zoot in that group? What made him special?
BC: It's Zoot's certain spirit. Besides the years and the technique under his belt, he had a spirit for swing that he tried to inject into everything he played. In fact, I was with him on some pub crawls in Europe where he would end up so drunk he couldn't articulate what he wanted to say but he could still swing. 

JW: In 1956, you recorded Musically Yours with flutist and clarinetist Sam Most. Nice player, yes?
BC: Yeah, Sam was a sweet guy. He didn't stay around New York too long. He went out to the West Coast, and I didn't seem him again. But we did get that one album made.

JW: You also recorded with Sal Salvador on Shades of Sal Salvador for Bethlehem in October 1956. Then you went back with Mulligan?
BC: I did. I stayed with the sextet until the sextet became a quartet. And then I left. I was only away for couple of years when Gerry called me up. He said, "I'm putting together a new quartet with Art Farmer. Do you want to be on it?" I said, sure. So we got ready for the Newport Jazz Festival. That was a nice stretch. We did some European tours with that quartet.

JW: You guys recorded for World Pacific in Septeber 1958.
BC: Oh, yeah. Owner Dick Bock was really an amazing guy. Gerry told me that when he had his original quartet at the Haig in L.A. in the summer of 1952, Bock came in and told Gerry, "Oh man, I love this band. Where can I buy a record?" Gerry said, "We haven't recorded yet." Gerry said, "How much does it cost to make a record?" I think they did it for $300 or $400. That quartet's 10-inch record \Dick's Pacific Jazz label off the ground.

JW: Backing up to Boston in December 1956, when you recorded live at Storyville as a quartet. That's an amazing album. Incredible collaboration between the four of you.
BC: When Dick Bock came up there to record us, he was really grateful to Gerry, who had created a career for him. He paid us for the album and gave us bonuses because it was near Christmas and he took us out to dinner. He brought Bill Clarkston along to do the cover shoot.

JazzWax tracks: Here are a bunch of Bill's recordings covered in this post:

Here's Bill with the Al Haig Trio on the full Jazz Will-O-the-Wisp...

Here's Marian McPartland live at the Hickory House with Bill on bass and Joe Morello on drums...

Here's Bill with the Jimmy Raney Ensemble playing Stella by Starlight...

Here's Bill with Jackie and Roy on Mountain Greenery...

Here's Two Sleepy People from Shades of Sal Salador with Eddie Costa (p), Sal Salvador (g), Bill Crow (b) and Joe Morello (d)...

Here's the Gerry Mulligan Sextet playing Elevation, with Don Ferrara (tp), Bob Brookmeyer (v-tb), Zoot Sims (ts), Gerry Mulligan (bar), Bill Crow (b) and Dave Bailey (d)...

And here's the entire Gerry Mulligan Quartet Live at Storyville...

Interview: Bill Crow, Part 2

Bill Crow came to the bass accidentally in 1950. But he was ready for the challenge. Within two years, he was recording with Claude Thornhill and then Stan Getz. But Bill was no ordinary bassist. Listening to the Stan Getz recordings today. he's the second loudest instrument after Getz, his right hand driving the band and keeping firm time with those strong thump-thump-thumps. [Photo above of Bill Crow with Bob Brookmeyer]

In Part 1 yesterday, we learned where and how Bill grew up, and why he kept switching instruments. Today, I talk with Bill about his year with Stan Getz in 1952 and '53. Hanging on by his fingernails, as Bill put it, he managed to hold his own with Getz's groups. We also learn about Getz's unfortunate dark side. While we'll never know why a musician who played as beautifully and soulfully as Getz could be as cruel as he was, Bill shares stories about the tenor saxophonist's puzzling behavior and actions.

Here's Part 2 of my interview with the legendary bassist Bill Crow....

JazzWax: When and how did you switch from the valve trombone to the bass?
Bill Crow: In the summer of 1950, I went up to Tupper Lake, N.Y., to play with Buzzy Bridgeford, the drummer from Olympia, Wash., who brought me to New York. He had a gig up there, and the owner of the summer resort wouldn't pay to hire a bass player. Buzzy went out and rented a bass for the season for $20 from some kid. He put it on the bandstand and said, "Anybody not taking a chorus has to try to play bass. I can't stand playing without a bass player." We were a quintet— Marty Bell was on trumpet, I was on valve trombone, Fred Greenwell was on tenor sax, John Benson Brooks was on piano and Buzzy was on drums. I quickly became the bass player by the end of the summer.

JW: Wait a second, Bill. You make it sound too easy. How do you put down the valve trombone, pick up the bass—a completely different instrument—and learn it by the end of the summer?
BC: By trying not to sound bad. My learning curve on the instrument happened on the bandstand. I picked the thing up and I knew how to tune it and where the notes were. I could hear when I put my fingers on the strings where the next note was supposed to be. I would just play up the E-string to where the A-string started and then up the A-string to where the D-string started and up the G-string maybe as far as the neck, to a D or an E flat. I was OK. I could find the appropriate bass notes within that range as long as I had to. I had a great ear for bass lines. That was the thing. I'd been listening to bass lines all my life.

JW: And by the end of the summer of 1950?
BC: I could find my way around on tunes by ear sufficiently enough to start taking club dates. Back in New York, I was at Charlie’s Tavern looking for gigs but didn't have a bass. The one that I used in Tupper Lake remained there. If I got a gig, I’d run over to an instrument-rental store off Sixth Avenue and lease a bass for $5 for the weekend. Then I’d rush down to Jack Silver's and rent a tux for $5 for the weekend. The job paid $15 or $20, allowing me to live on the surplus. I also went to a lot of jam sessions where I could practice on somebody else's bass. It was usually pretty easy to get some time to play because on these jam sessions, there would be a piano player, a bass player and a drummer backing 15 tenor players. They would all line up and play 15 courses each and the bass player would get tired. I volunteered to play as soon as that happened.

JW: Strong hands?
BC: I developed a strong right hand at the time. My left hand was a bit disabled because I had run it through a glass door accidentally when I was a kid and cut the tendons and some nerves. Fortunately, I had a brilliant doctor in Seattle who put everything back together and had me go through a little rehab to get it working. My little finger was numb and weak, so I wasn't using it too much when I first started to play bass. Actually, it was bass playing that got that hand back around to being normal again.

JW: How do you wind up with Stan Getz in 1952?
BC: Through the jam-session connections I’d made. Vibraphonist and producer Teddy Charles got me the gig. When those first piano-less Gerry Mulligan Quartet records on Pacific Jazz hit in late '52, I was with Stan down in Baltimore. He was just changing the quintet by bringing on valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer. But Bob hadn't joined yet, so Johnny Mandel was subbing for him for two weeks. When we heard those Mulligan Quartet things, Johnny wrote a couple of them out for Stan's group. So we were playing songs like Line for Lyons. I remember Stan saying something like, "Oh, wouldn't it be great to put these two groups together?" A jazz journalist misunderstood his remark and published it as a possibility. When Gerry read it in Downbeat, he said, "Tell Stan to go get his own band." [Photo above of Stan Getz in the early 1950s]

JW: But it wasn’t inconceivable, right?
BC: Right. That's what Gerry wound up doing later with his sextet that included Zoot Sims and Bob Brookmeyer.

JW: Stan was ahead of the curve on that sound, yes?
BC: I was there when that all went on. On the East Coast in '51, he had Al Haig on piano, Jimmy Raney on guitar, Teddy Kotick on bass and Tiny Kahn on drums, Then he went out to the West Coast alone in the late summer of '52 and his East Coast group was inactive for a while. So everybody went their own way. Jimmy ended up with the Red Norvo Trio. At the time, I was still with Teddy Charles.

JW: What happened when Stan came back East?
BC: He called Jimmy Raney and said, "I’ve got a week in Boston. Roy Haynes is up there, so we'll use him on drums. And I got a piano player. Why don't you get a bass player and come on up?" Jimmy asked me if I wanted to do it. I said, "Sure." That was my introduction to Stan's new quintet.

JW: Was Duke Jordan the piano player?
BC: No, that week in Boston it was Jerry Kaminsky, a wonderful player from Pittsburgh. Sadly, Peter wound up drinking himself to death. Stan always had good piano players. Even though Gerry Mulligan dropped the piano, that didn’t stop Stan from using one. Gerry's decision to drop the keyboard was partly out of logistics. The piano at the Haig, where they played in Los Angeles, wasn’t very good. And the club could only afford four guys. Gerry wanted to be able to harmonize and do the contrapuntal things that he was doing behind other people's solos. He thought that he could do without the piano to get the sound he wanted, and his approach really changed the jazz world.

JW: When you get up to Boston and you’re playing with Stan's new quintet, how do you feel about what you're hearing?
BC: I hadn't been playing bass very long, and I was just trying to learn what everybody was doing. Jimmy was very helpful. He showed me chord substitutions that he'd learned from Al Haig that were smoother. As soon as Stan wanted to play Stella by Starlight and other standards that Norman Granz wanted for his Clef label, Stan showed me the chords he wanted. It was like going to school for me. I had no critical point of view. I was just hanging on by my fingernails trying to make the gig and keep up with these guys.

JW: Stan could really take off. Everything was very uptempo.
BC: He and Jimmy Raney had a fantastic blend there. Jimmy brought in a new tune and Stan sight-read it. They were playing in unison and sounded like one horn. When Jimmy left, Brookmeyer came on the band, Stan changed his sound slightly to blend with the trombone where before he'd been blending with the guitar. It was fascinating.

JW: How was Stan to work with?
BC: Musically, he was very generous. It was funny, I always felt that Stan was under some kind of a personal cloud as a tenor player. He felt that Al Cohn was the genius of composition and invention as far as solos went. And he thought Zoot could out-swing anybody. In fact, somebody once asked him, "Who's your ideal saxophone player?" He said, "Zoot's time, Al's ideas and my technique." But he told me once, "I never had any trouble playing anything I could think of. The problem is trying to think of things." So the struggles were the ideas rather than the technique or sound.

JW: Did he improve in that area over time?
BC: He didn't upgrade his ability to invent. He knew he could play anything he could think of, but he thought that Al Cohn's improvised inventions were the best thing around.

JW: Any frustration about that on his part?
BC: I felt that when he talked about playing and how he thought about himself as a star soloist, he felt he didn't deserve to be more important in the jazz world than Al Cohn. And yet he always was, as far as the public was concerned, because of that smooth sound and probably his good looks.

JW: Wow, I never thought I'd hear the word humility and Stan Getz in the same sentence.
BC: Stan was a complicated guy. My take on him was that Stan saw himself as a good boy, the way he presented himself to his parents and all that. But behind that image, there was a lot of complicated anger, frustration and unrestrained compulsion. That side often came out when he got high. He was one of the few evil junkies I ever knew. Most junkies got very passive when they got high. Stan’s dark side would come out and he’d do mean things to people.

JW: For example?
BC: In early 1953, he hired Dick Sherman to join the quartet on trumpet at Birdland. He knew Dick was a sometime junkie who was trying to kick his habit. Stan paid him for the gig in heroin. That's just evil. I also know he came on to other musicians’ wives to try to prove to those musicians how bad the women were. He was a misogynist.

JW: Any idea why someone like Getz would behave that way? Or is it just ambition combined with frustration?
BC: Reality problems, maybe? I don't know. It would take a psychiatrist to figure it out. But the way it manifested itself was that you'd see him do a lot of really crappy things to people. There was a druggist in Washington, D.C. who loved Stan and would give him anything for free except hard drugs. He also would see to it that Stan got to the right doctors if he got sick. He even took care of Stan's cars when Stan was on the West Coast. Stan ended up burning him some way. He was just trying to show people how it could be. Or maybe he didn't want people to like him because he didn't like himself. That all came out of his junkie side. I was lucky. I was single at the time and in way over my head on that band, musically.

JW: Did Stan ever lean into you?
BC: Sometimes he'd take advantage of me. Like the time he was too drunk to drive home to Levittown, N.Y. He asked me to drive him home in his car, inviting me to stay overnight. But then he had me take the subway home. That didn't hurt my feelings. He had a lovely family at the time. I didn't mind, because I didn't have anything else to do. And I liked him, and I liked his family, so he never did anything really bad to me, except fire me without notice. I sort of expected that all along because I figured at some point he was going to want a better bass player.

JW: I'll ask you about that in a minute. How did you know when Stan was high?
BC: His pupils would be pinned, and he had a certain look around his mouth that looked a little kind of restrained and dry. It was a different expression. Jimmy Raney and I always knew when he was using. Stan had promised him that he wasn't going to get high anymore. And when Jimmy saw that he was loaded at this record date at the end of 1952, Jimmy called Stan into the men's room and gave him his notice. That was the end of Jimmy on that group. None of us in the studio that day knew what had gone on in the bathroom, since Jimmy came back, picked up his guitar and played beautifully. Jimmy called me the next day and told me what had happened and that he was going to work with Jimmy Lyons at the Blue Angel on Manhattan's East Side. So that was the end of Jimmy in the group.

JW: Who was left?
BC: The remainder of the group was Duke Jordan, me and Kenny Clarke. We worked some gigs just as a quartet for a couple of weeks. Then Duke and Klook [Kenny Clarke] got a gig somewhere else and left. I don't think they were too happy with Stan because they felt adrift. Stan was not kind. I don't really know how to say this. I know Clark Terry used to always freeze when you'd mentioned Stan, and I got the feeling that it was about race. And even though Stan admired those guys and loved their playing and all of that, he wasn't easy around them. And they certainly must have felt it.

JW: So strange.
BC: He gave off bad vibes to an awful lot of people, even Zoot.

JW: Do you think Stan knew he was cruel or did he feel he was just being his unfiltered self, take it or leave it, because his ego was so large due to public and media admiration?
BC: He was an equal-opportunity harasser. Everybody was on edge, especially if he had any power over you. If he could hire or fire you or if he could get you busted, he knew he held that power. I know there was one incident where he came up out of Birdland on his break, jumped in his car and drove up to 110th Street to buy drugs and came right back down. Two detectives were waiting for him and got in the car with him and found the junk he'd bought and were ready to run him in. He gave them his innocent plea. He told me about this, but said it was the baby shoes hanging on his rear-view mirror that really got to them, and they let him go.

JW: So he positioned himself as a family man?
BC: Yeah, and he said that what he did was just a childish mistake, a youthful error.

JW: That was a close call.
BC: It was a close call. But there was an even closer call. As soon as the detectives left with his junk, he went right back up to 110th Street to buy again. Word traveled fast by pay phone in that world. The guys selling him the junk got word that detectives had talked to him and must have thought he was returning to rat them out. Otherwise, why would the detectives have let him go, they thought. Keep in mind, the retaliation for that sort of thing was quite often to put something lethal in the junk, and that's the end of you. One of the dealers surely was ready to do just that, but someone must have talked him out of it. Otherwise, Stan would have been dead. That was the word on the street, anyway. As an addict, Stan took those kinds of reckless chances. I'm not sure what compelled him, whether it was the junk or just the thrill of escaping another terrible situation or both.

JW: Sounds like he was a prisoner of the addiction and himself.
BC: In that world, a lot of guys were caught up in it. Not all of them got second and third changes like Stan, though.

JW: Those Stan Getz Quartet recordings, the live ones and the studio stuff, are so swinging and pretty. It must have been a lot of fun.
BC: Oh, it was. I was thrilled to death. I tell you, on some of those little intros that Duke Jordan would play, we would stand there holding our breath because they were so gorgeously constructed, and you almost hated to come in. When Miles Davis published his autobiography in 1989 and trashed Duke, I couldn't imagine what he had in mind. Duke was such a beautiful musician

JW: You were still so new to the bass. Did you ever have imposter syndrome—fearing that Stan or someone in the group was going to realize it?
BC: I felt like I was scuffling with the instrument, technically, because I hadn't had any lessons. I just figured it out for myself. But I had good ears. I could really hear the notes I wanted to play in advance. Sometimes, I couldn't find them quickly enough, but I knew what would sound great. As a soloist, it wasn't an issue for me because Stan could see I wasn't ready to play on their level. He'd occasionally throw me eight bars to solo on or something like that, and I would do my best. But they liked the fact that I could play hard solid rhythm and that my lines were good.

JW: Did the group have a following with younger jazz fans?
BC: Stan enjoyed a particularly good position at that time. His rep had been built on his solos with Woody Herman and the relaxed records he made with guitarist Johnny Smith. New York radio DJ Symphony Sid was playing all that stuff. The seductive Lester Young-influenced style was true of a number of guys, like Allen Eager and Zoot Sims. But the fact that Stan was so handsome just charmed everybody he dealt with. That's true of both his audiences and the people who hired him. They gave him the kind of freedom as an artist that none of his peers had at that moment. He could get up on the bandstand and play anything he wanted to, including a set of awful pop tunes and nobody would complain.

JazzWax tracks: Here's Strike Up the Band live at Carnegie Hall in November 1952, featuring Stan Getz (ts), Duke Jordan (p), Jimmy Raney (g), Bill Crow (b) and Frank Isola (d)...

The first album Stan Getz recorded for Norman Granz was Stan Getz Plays in December 1952. The session featured Getz (ts), Duke Jordan (p), Jimmy Raney (g), Bill Crow (b) and Frank Isola (d). Here's Stella by Starlight. Listen how nice and big and in the pocket Bill's bass playing was...

Here's Time on My Hands. Again, dig Bill...

Here's The Way You Look Tonight...

Here's Moonlight in Vermont live at Boston's Hi-Hat club in March 1953, with Bob Brookmeyer (v-tb), Stan Getz (ts), Duke Jordan (p), Bill Crow (b) and Frank Isola (d)...

And here's Rustic Hop for Clef in April 1953, featuring Bob Brookmeyer (v-tb), Stan Getz (ts), John Williams (p), Bill Crow (b) and Al Levitt (d)...

Bonus: Want the entire Stan Getz Plays album with Bill on bass? The tracks are Stella by Starlight, Time on My Hands, 'Tis Autumn, The Way You Look Tonight, Lover Come Back to Me, Body and Soul, Stars Fell on Alabama, You Turned the Tables on Me, Thanks for the Memory, Gigi Gryce's Hymn of the Orient, These Foolish Things and How Deep Is the Ocean. Go here...

Interview: Bill Crow, Part 1

About 10 years ago, I interviewed legendary bassist Bill Crow at length for JazzWax. Then the tapes went missing. Naturally, I was mortified and distraught. We had a wonderful interview and, sadly, our conversation seemed to be lost to history. My workload steadily increased and I forgot about the interview and lost recordings. [Photo above of Bill Crow]

Then a week or so ago, Paul Brown in Maine begged me to interview Bill. Paul's note jarred my memory. Frustrated with myself, I took time out from my day and searched my cassette tapes and hard drives for the Bill Crow sessions.

While combing through my computer, I found the two interview files, which fortunately had been captured with a digital recorder over the phone, not an analog cassette. I had the digital files transcribed and, today, I'm starting a multipart, 10,000-word interview. For long-time JazzWax readers, this presentation will be like old times, since I'm spreading our conversation over multiple days. It's simply too long to serve up in one shot.

My apologies to Bill for the long lost tape files, which apparently I wound up misfiling originally. In our interview, I decided to focus on the time span from childhood to 1962, when he was part of the notorious Benny Goodman tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. This will include a wide range of spectacular groups, including ensembles led by Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan and his unusual and surprising road to the bass.

Here's Part 1:

JazzWax: Why did you play so many instruments growing up?
Bill Crow: I was just trying to get into music any way I could. In grade school, I thought trumpet would be a great instrument. I had tried piano and that kind of hit a wall.

JW: What do you mean?
BC: I couldn't seem to get past John M. Williams and Shaylor Turner’s Second Grade Piano Book. I started when I was 4, and by the time I was 6, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a piano player. In my grade school, they offered musical instrument lessons, so in fourth grade, I decided on becoming a trumpet player. But by the time I reached sixth grade, I was bugged that I didn't have the chops to play the first parts in the school band.

JW: What happened?
BC: The music teacher said, "Well, let's try a bigger mouthpiece." He gave me the school baritone horn, which I fell in love with immediately. I played it very well, right through high school. The problem is that by the time I became interested in jazz in high school, nobody was interested in listening to the baritone horn. I tried out on the alto saxophone to see if I could get into the high school jazz band. Then the drummer graduated, so I played drums.

JW: Do you attribute jumping around to a short attention span or just the fact that you weren't happy with how you sounded on instruments?
BC: Well, it was just what was happening, what was available. I would've stayed with the alto longer, except a whole bunch of new alto players came into the high school the next year and I was last in line in terms of skill. The band needed a drummer, and I was willing to try that.

JW: Then came another instrument after high school, yes?
BC: Yep. When I went into the Army in 1946, somebody told me there was something called the valve trombone. I took to it right away and became a jazz player.

JW: How did you manage to learn these different instruments so quickly?
BC: I had started out with good ears. My mother taught me to sing at the same time she taught me to talk. Mom was a professional singer. In those days, during the Depression, nobody's profession made anybody much money. Mom sang on the local radio programs in Seattle to generate some income and in church, of course.

JW: What did your father do?
BC: He took a hard hit during the Depression. He did whatever he could do. We lived in Kirkland, so he was a purser on the ferry from Kirkland to Seattle for a period. He also worked in a knitting mill until it burned down. Then he went in the Civilian Conservation Corps to support us after FDR’s New Deal was passed in 1933. Then Dad started working for the town of Kirkland and ended up being manager of their sewage disposal plant.

JW: How many siblings did you have?
BC: Just one older brother. So there were two kids to support plus my mom. But we never felt poor. Except for two families in town that had some means, everyone in my class had families in the same boat. We didn't feel unhappy about it. I knew my dad worried now and then, but he always figured out a way to make ends meet.

JW: Did you listen to music on the radio?
BC: A lot. I remember when we first got a radio—a little table model that my dad bought secondhand from the local druggist after the druggist got a new one. The choice of station was always up to my mother. She loved opera.

JW: How did you get interested in jazz?
BC: By the time I really got into it in high school in the early 1940s, pop music was close to jazz. In fact, I didn’t realize I was becoming a jazz fan. I was simply listening to bands led by musicians like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington. If you went into the soda fountain in Kirkland, there was a jukebox that had something like seven selections on it. Four of the choices featured music I was interested in. Now when you go into a place that has a jukebox with 4,000 selections, you don't want to hear anything.

JW: Did you have a piano at home?
BC: Yes, because my mother gave lessons, we had an old upright. We also had an Edison phonograph that played wax cylinder recordings. My dad had bought it secondhand somewhere. Until we got the radio, that phonograph was our only source of musical entertainment at home. I learned the songs sung by vocalists, like Harry Lauder, a Scottish singer and comedian.

JW: What was your first radio experience?
BC: My brother was mechanical and built a crystal set, where you stuck a little wire into a galena crystal, put on earphones and hunted around the dial until you found a radio station. At night, when clear channels would come in, he and I heard jazz broadcasts from California and even New Orleans sometimes. Then finally, I got a little table radio of my own and listened to the stations playing the music I loved.

JW: So for you, did that mean the big bands?
BC: Yes. The leaders of those swing bands were the Beatles of their day. When I went into the Army, I played the baritone horn in a military band until my discharge in ‘49. Then I returned to Seattle and studied for free at the University of Washington under the G.I. Bill, where I was a drummer and valve trombonist. In Seattle, I ran into all these musicians in a jazz world I didn't even know existed in Seattle while growing up in Kirkland. We only got to Seattle maybe twice a year.

JW: What’s the the turning point?
BC: One night, I was jamming after hours at the university music building when I ran into Buzzy Bridgeford, a drummer from Olympia, Wash. He had been out here and worked with Randy Brooks and quite a few other bands. Then he was in an auto accident and went back home. He had just come up to Seattle to see what was happening.

JW: Did you become friends?
BC: Yes, we fell in together, and he couldn't believe how innocent I was. He was hipping me to the whole jazz scene and playing me records I hadn't heard before. He even taught me what swing was, which I will be eternally grateful to him for. We gigged around a bit in Seattle, with me on valve trombone. When he was ready to return to New York, he said, "Man, if you want to be a jazz musician, you got to go where the music is. Why don't you come to New York with me?" I said, "OK." I had $50, a valve trombone and a suitcase full of clothes that I'd picked up after I got out of the Army. That was it.

JW: How did you get to New York?
BC: We rode a Greyhound bus and just scuffled in the city until we started get something going. During this period, Dave Lambert befriended me at Charlie’s Tavern, the midtown bar where all the best musicians hung out between record dates and gigs.

JW: How often were you there?
BC: Every day. I didn't know where else to go. I went to Charlie's and hoped I’d be introduced to one or two people who, in turn, would introduce me to others. That’s how it was before the cell phone and affordable answering services. I couldn't even afford to nurse a beer at Charlie’s. I'd just stand around. The musicians union had an open exchange floor three days a week, usually between 1 and 3 p.m. That meant guys would come hire musicians who were hanging out. 

JW: How did it work?
BC: Contractors would go around with their little books and book musicians on record dates and gigs. Then after you had work lined up, you’d stand out on the sidewalk if it was a nice day or musicians with some money might buy you a beer inside. It was always a big social scene there. I got to know people just from listening to their stories. Dave Lambert was one of the guys I met there. By then, he was an in-demand bebop vocalese singer,

JW: Did he just come up to you and say, "Hi?"
BC: No, somebody said, "Hey, Bill, this is Dave Lambert. Dave, this is Bill Crow." I knew him from his records. He and Buddy Stewart had made records with Gene Krupa, like What’s This, and Deedle and Boplicity on their own.

JW: Were you playing bop then?
BC: I was interested in bebop singing at that time. Dave and I struck up an acquaintance. I went downtown and met his family on the Lower East Side. He had a little cold-water flat on Monroe Street. By this time, I’d found a day job at a print shop to cover my expenses. I had learned to be a printer in high school. I was making 30 bucks a week. We printed small stuff, like business cards, envelopes and letterheads. I'd hand feed the press.

JW: Were you studying music in New York?
BC: Yes, with Lennie Tristano. I looked him up because I didn't know anybody else who was teaching jazz. He was out in Flushing, Queens.

JW: What instrument are you playing at this point with Lennie?
BC: Valve trombone. He taught me basic-harmony things to work on.

JW: That must have been exhausting given all you had going on.
BC: I went to Lennie's after my printing day gig in the Bronx. I’d take the subway back into Manhattan and change for the line out to Flushing, where I’d catch a city bus to Lennie's house. Sometimes he’d have me sit outside his bathroom door while he took a bath and got ready for his gig at Birdland. He'd listen and then holler, "Okay. Play the next section.”

JW: What was Lambert like?
BC: He was a jack of all trades. He’d been in the paratroops, I think. He came from Malden, Mass., and was a tree surgeon for a couple of years. Then he spent summers playing drums for a piano-playing singer. He became interested in vocal-group writing. He wasn't really a schooled arranger, but he could hear good vocal lines. His arrangements were easy to sing because the lines all led well. In fact, during the second musicians’ union recording ban in 1948, he did a thing with just singers, who weren’t affected by the ban because they didn't play instruments and weren't in the union. He had a tape of it that he played for me for an auto show where he had about six voices, one of whom was just singing bass lines. It was beautiful music.

JW: Was it a jingle for an auto show?
BC: No, they were just singing "Oohhhs and ahhhs." It was like string writing. The auto show would have music in the background while you looked at the new cars.

JW: Was Lambert generous with you?
BC: Very. He taught me how to scuffle. He was living in a cheap place, and he knew where the cheap good food was. His attitude was, being poor doesn't mean that you have to be miserable. There were a lot of inexpensive places to eat around Midtown. There was a place on the corner of the Brill Building called the Turf Restaurant. Or you could get a decent bowl of lentil soup and bread for 15 cents at Jimmy the Greek’s lunch counter. If you had 50 cents, you could get London broil with Macedonia sauce, a real dinner. There also were a few cheap spaghetti houses in Midtown.

JW: Did Lambert ask you to become one of his singers?
BC: Yeah, he hired me on some gigs. That was nice. I met some really good singers and I had a low voice, so I came in handy. I also could read music and hear what needed to be played the first time around. On Dave’s gigs, there were four or five singers. In 1951, I recorded a few songs with singers Dave put together. The A&R guy had called Dave and said, "I've got a record here that I want to do with Mary Lou Williams. She’s written this vocal arrangement, and I can't find singers who can sing it." Mary didn't know how to write to lead the voice.

JW: Meaning?
BC: Each part is like a melody that's easy to follow if you can hear the music. If you write for horn players, they push down valves and know a specific note is going to come out. Singers have to be able to hear the music to bring out notes in key. The goal was to have Dave bring in musician-singers who could play horns. We did that. One of the tunes was called Cloudy. In those days, everything was a 78 record. Mary Lou had four tunes—two sides of two 78s—and we sang. It was recorded but they were never released commercially. One of the other singers was Norma Carson, the trumpet player, and maybe Bob Newman, her husband and tenor saxophonist.

JW: How did it work out?
BC: Dave wrote an intro on songs and we sang what Mary Lou had written. Dave's intro was so much easier to sing. It sounded much better than the rest of it, which is probably why they went unreleased.

JazzWax clips: Here are what I believe are three songs recorded with four vocals behind Mary Lou Williams, featuring Dave Lambert, Bill Crow, Norma Carson and Bob Newman on June 15, 1951:

Here's Walking...

Here's Cloudy...

And here's I Won't Let It Bother Me...