Lew Tabackin is a jazz legend but less well-known than he should be. A tenor saxophonist and flutist, Lew came up in the mid-1960s and played and recorded with dozens of jazz stars, including Maynard Ferguson, Duke Pearson, Donald Byrd, Frank Foster, Frank Wess, and most famously with pianist Toshiko Akiyoshi. They began fronting small groups before forming their celebrated big band in 1973. More recently, Lew has fronted a trio and toured extensively abroad. [Photo above of Lew Tabackin courtesy of Wikipedia]
Lew will be making a rare live appearance on New York's Upper East Side at 92NY on Saturday, July 19, at 7:30 p.m. You can attend in-person at the cultural institution (starting at $40 per seat) or purchase an online ticket (starting at $20) and stream from anywhere in the world. His appearance is part of 92NY's annual Jazz in July Festival.
He will be part of the Tenors of Our Time concert, featuring saxophonists Melissa Aldana, Chris Lewis, Walter Smith III and Lew Tabackin, backed by pianist and artistic director Aaron Diehl, bassist Yasushi Nakamura and drummer Kush Abadey. For tickets and more information, go here.
Last week, I had an opportunity to interview Lew for JazzWax. Tomorrow, Part 2 of my interview:
JazzWax: Lew, where did you grow up?
Lew Tabackin: In South Philadelphia. My family lived in a nondescript two-story row house. I think my parents paid $6,000 for it in the early 1940s. The area wasn't a slum, but we lived in a lower economic reality.
JW: What did your parents do for work?
LT: My father, Isadore, worked at a company that made greeting cards. He did gold-leaf and filigree work on the cards. He didn’t earn much. My mom, Sarah was a homemaker, and my sister, Bette, was five years younger than me. My grandparents had emigrated in 1910 from the area near Minsk, which back then was in Belarus, a part of the Russian Empire. Many Jews who escaped the pogroms and Belarus wound up in Philadelphia. Tabackin was a proper Russian name.
JW: Did your parents listen to music?
LT: No. I came from a totally unmusical family. The only thing I remember is an old-fashioned Victrola that you’d wind up to play shellac 78s. For some reason, there were a couple interesting records in the stack. One was by Sonny Stitt and the other was the Woody Herman Band playing Bijou in 1945, with a trombone solo by Bill Harris. Both caught my ear.
JW: How did your interest in music emerge?
LT: At a certain point, I thought it would be nice to play an instrument, just for something interesting to do. The school system in Philadelphia let you borrow an instrument and they provided an instructor. I wanted a clarinet because I knew what a clarinet was. Benny Goodman was famous. But when I went to get the clarinet at school, all that was left was a flute. Three of us wanted it.
JW: Did you draw straws?
LT: Each of us had to blow into the flute’s headjoint. Whoever got the best sound got the flute. One guy had a strong sound, the girl didn’t have any sound and I had a moderate sound. The guy with the loud sound won, but he didn’t want it. So I was stuck with the flute with no idea how to play it.
JW: What did you do?
LT: The good news is the school gave me an instructor. The bad news is the guy taught me every possible wrong thing about the instrument. It took me many years to undo his instruction. I didn't even know how it was held and wound up playing it by resting the end on my shoulder. That was the start of my musical experience. I was in the dark moving in the wrong direction.
JW: Did you listen to records of flute players?
LT: I didn't have the ability to play records, except on the Victrola. Anyway, that was my life. I didn't know what I was doing. And yet, I eventually developed an ability to produce a good sound.
JW: You must have heard music somewhere, no?
LT: Eventually I did. I looked up to the guy who lived in the next house who was a bit older than me. He was into jazz and had a record collection. He let me listen to his 78s, and I started to get an idea about how jazz worked, at least a little bit. By high school, there were jam sessions held after school. Even though I didn’t know what I was doing on the flute, it felt nice to play with others. Around this time, when I was 14, I finally got a clarinet and learned to play it before switching to tenor saxophone at 15.
JW: What inspired the switch to the tenor?
LT: By the mid-1950s, most of the white tenor saxophone players in Philly were big fans of Al Cohn. So that was the first sound I had in my head, from listening to Al Cohn records. My first saxophone was a Conn 10M. The mouthpiece was a hard rubber Brilhart #4, and the reeds, which no longer are made, were called symmetric cut. I assembled the horn and started to play. Within a few hours, I approximated the sound of Al Cohn that I'd heard in my head. Which was a valuable lesson: You have to have an idea of what you want to sound like before you pick up a horn. Otherwise, you can practice forever and nothing will really happen.
JW: Where did you get the saxophone?
LT: At that point, I had a teacher. I was playing the clarinet and he found me the saxophone. It wasn't too expensive. I raised money to get it. Almost immediately, I started to do little gigs. I’ll never forgot my first, playing an Italian serenade.
JW: Which is what?
LT: It’s a pre-wedding tradition in the Italian community of South Philadelphia. The groom serenades the bride-to-be outside her home the night before the wedding, often with music, dancing, and a street party. I was hired along with an accordionist to accompany the crooning groom on I'm In The Mood For Love. If her family liked what they heard, they gave you the wedding gig. The serenade paid $5. The wedding gig paid $12. Anyway, since I could get a sound that was respectable, I could facilitate these little simple little gigs. Then I started to get other little gigs and played the blues and stuff like that.
JW: Were other friends serious about turning music into a career?
LT: Not many. When I was in high school, I went to jam sessions. There were lots of them in Philadelphia, at bars on the weekend. The good players would play first and they'd play for a while. Then they'd let schmucks like me get up on the bandstand and make fools of themselves. But it was really interesting. I’d listen to the guys who could play and try to pick up things. When I finally got up there, I played the blues in B-flat. I learned on the job that after the fifth bar of a blues, something else happens and you can't play certain notes. It was a trial-and-error system of performance.
JW: How was your tone?
LT: My tone was pretty good from the start. I had an ability to get a rich sound. I kept on doing that and got better and was soon good enough to get a gig in a strip club playing blues and songs like Harlem Nocturne and Bill Doggett's Honky Tonk. This is around 1956.
JW: How did you wind up at the Philadelphia Conservatory?
LT: In high school, I was playing the flute, but not great. I was playing the clarinet, but not great. I was more interested in the saxophone. I auditioned for a scholarship at the conservatory because my mother wanted me to go someplace. By then, I had been playing three instruments. After my audition, I was accepted on a full scholarship.
JW: And then you found out college was about formal training, not jazz.
LT: [Laughs] Yeah, that’s right. It was a drag to be honest because all I wanted to do was learn to play jazz saxophone. They didn't have a saxophone program let alone anything to do with jazz, of course. I had to study classical flute. I wasn't interested in the flute, to be honest. Fortunately, one of my instructors was a wonderful composer by the name of Vincent Persichetti. He was very hip, and I picked up stuff from him.
JW: How long were you there?
LT: For four years, from 1958 to 1963. At the end, I was more seasoned but I don’t think I played any better. Attending the conservatory was something I did to keep my parents happy. I wasn't that interested. I found a lot of contradictions in the stuff I experienced. I came to the conclusion that "classical institutions" try to make things more difficult than they are.
JW: But you certainly had better training, yes?
LT: In my senior year, I finally had a really good flute teacher—Murray Panitz, the newly named principal of the Philadelphia Orchestra. When I showed up for my first lesson, I sounded terrible. The great thing was he showed me the most fundamental stuff that I’d never learned before. He taught me about overtone series, his concept of embouchure, placement and so on. Every week I'd show up, and I was getting better and better and better. He probably thought he was a genius.
JW: How good were you?
LT: By the end of that school year, I actually became respectable. I took his concept and worked on it by myself. And then I started listening to recordings of mostly classical flutists and became enamored with the instrument’s sound. I also started to lose interest in playing bebop flute. I was more focused on playing the tenor. I went through a lot of influences, like Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. Around this time, I also heard records for the first time by Lester Young, Ben Webster and Don Byas, who freaked me out. I thought, "Nobody can play the tenor like that. It's totally amazing." When I finally heard Coleman Hawkins, I couldn't understand what he was doing. It was much too difficult for me. Then I realized Hawkins was the root of everything. He was the father of all this stuff and he, too, became an influence.
JW: After you graduated from the Conservatory?
LT: I was inducted into the Army in ‘63. For basic training, I was sent to Fort Jackson in South Carolina. I wound up in a band training unit. But first, they sent me to signal school, which meant learning Morse Code. I couldn’t understand why I was there.
JW: Did you ever find out?
LT: Apparently, if you had a specialty, the base wanted you around, not sent elsewhere. They could come up with many different ways to hold onto you. After I played a dance on the base for these generals, the warrant officer called everyone into his office, pointed at me and said, “Don't mess with this guy." When my orders came in, the base changed my orders from flute to saxophone, which kept me there, which was good. I might have wound up in Vietnam.
JW: Did the higher-ups ever figure out what was going on?
LT: Yes, and when they did, they sent us all out. I wound up at Fort Monmouth, in New Jersey, which wasn’t too bad. I was in a concert band of about 20 guys, mostly brass players. I was the entire woodwind section, given that I could play multiple instruments. The band was so sad that the Army decided that instead of sending us out to play events, they'd whittle us down to a jazz quintet.
JW: What happened next?
LT: We had a really good bebop trumpeter. The only thing, we didn't have was a bass player so they found one who also played the tuba. We had to write out the chord changes, and he just played the root positions. We’d be dispatched to small events in the area, like at community centers.
JW: When were you discharged?
LT: I got out in '65. I didn’t have much so I stayed in New Jersey to save up enough money to move to New York. I went to local clubs and sat in, and I started doing gigs in the Asbury Park area with an organ trio. Which wasn’t as sexy as it sounds. In those days everybody tried to play the organ, and most weren't really organ players. They played the bass line with their left hand and it was really terrible. If I had stopped playing in our group, the band would have fallen apart. But at least I had a steady gig off the books, which allowed me to collect unemployment.
JW: Gig with anyone special in New Jersey?
LT: Guitarist Tal Farlow and pianist Don Friedman. At the time, Tal had come out of retirement and started playing at this restaurant called Bill Green’s. I asked if I could sit in. Tal was cool. The bass player was Vinnie Burke, and the drummer, Art Magyar, was really good.
JW: How were you?
LT: Not bad, but I had a lot of gaps. I tended to overplay because I came up in the age of 20-minute tenor solos by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. One day, I wrote out a composition that I thought Tal might play. He said, "Oh, sorry, man. I don't read music." Anyway, he was really a good guy.
JW: Audiences like you?
LT: One day, after I was sitting in with Tal, I got off the stage and this guy came over and virtually attacked me. He said, "Hey, man, you play good but I came from New York to hear Tal Farlow, not you." He turned out to be guitarist Attila Zoller. I met Don Friedman at Bill Green’s, too.
JW: When did you finally move to New York?
LT: In late 1965. I’d saved up $400 and moved into the city to an apartment on 93rd St. between West End Ave. and Riverside Drive. I had to pay one month in advance and had my own pet mouse. It was cool.
JW: How did you get started in New York?
LT: I made an intellectual decision. I said to myself, "Look, I have to go against my natural inclination, my natural personality, and I have to force myself to go sit in with people. Otherwise, I'll wind up in my room practicing.” On the first night I was in New York, I went downtown to a club called The Dom on St. Mark's Place. Clarinetist Tony Scott was running a jam session. I asked to sit in. He said, "Who are you, man?" I told him and added, “Don Friedman suggested I could maybe play." Tony let me up. After I got up on the stand, he switched to the piano, which he played with a heavy hand. He called for But Not for Me.
JW: Challenging gig?
LT: Interesting. As I'm trying to play, I look out on the front row and realize there’s a lineup of judges sitting there. I recognized trumpeter Kenny Dorham. As I’m playing, I hear him talking, saying, "Sounds like he practices a lot." I did the best I could and got the nod that I could go there and play whenever I wanted. Philly Joe Jones was the drummer in the session band. Imagine playing with Philly Joe on your first night in New York. Another night I sat in with Elvin Jones at a club called Pookie's Pub across from the old Half Note. Joe Farrell was his regular tenor player at the time but was off that night. For some reason Elvin liked me and I became Joe Farrell's sub.
JW: Did other musicians pass you along?
LT: Yes, Don told a guitarist about me. The guitarist called one day. It was Attila Zoller. He asked me to play in his group. He knew I was the same guy from the Bill Green's gig. Over the years, we became good friends, and every time I saw him on our many projects together, I’d tell everybody about the time he came into the club to hear Tal, not me.
JW: Bassist Chuck Israels also hired you around this time, yes?
LT: Yes, and later, in the 1970s. In 1965 and ’66, he had just come off playing with the Bill Evans Trio. He wanted me because I played the flute. I had been working really hard on trying to learn the flute and unlearn all the that stuff I had learned in the beginning. Chuck’s writing was a cross between Bill Evans and Stefan Wolpe.
JW: How did you wind up with Les and Larry Elgart?
LT: While I was playing the jam sessions at The Dom, one of the saxophone players said, "Hey, Les Elgart is going out on tour. I can't make it. Would you do it?" I’d never played in a big band before but took the job. I learned how to sight-read through trial and error. I could read the music well enough. And Les, a trumpeter, really liked me. He didn't like his female singer, so he let me perform a couple of songs with just the rhythm section. I was on the band for two weeks. Then I was hooked up with his brother, Larry, an alto saxophonist with a totally different kind of a band.
JW: How so?
LT: With Larry, you had to read carefully. I had to sit next to him and play. The music was taut and precise, especially for the reeds. His band had a specific sound. That year, I wound up recording on Les and Larry Elgart’s Warm and Sensuous, playing Bill Finegan’s arrangement of Soon, which Larry had ordered up 15 years earlier. It was really difficult but quite beautiful. Larry was kind of academic. Interestingly, our relationship began with him not liking my playing to him becoming a fan. I knew what he wanted as far as solos and style were concerned.
JW: And then on to Cab Calloway?
LT: One day, I got a phone call to show up and check out the Cab Calloway Reunion Band. Alto saxophonist Eddie Barefield was the straw boss. He wanted me for a tour. Calloway was a bit of a jerk. He was mean and played all over the place. There were many greats in there, though, including Doc Cheatham.
JW: Good experience?
LT: Not bad. What I loved about the experience was Eddie Barefield. Whenever we played our last set, some of the people in the audience would leave, and so did Cab. Eddie would take over and dig deep into the band’s book, calling for the most magnificent charts. They were big band arrangements by Buster Harding and Benny Carter. That’s how I learned how to play in a big band. As a saxophonist, you listen to the first alto player and you create a communication.
