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...
