With "Record Shops & Old Masters," we present the first in a series of five articles by trombonist, author and teacher James Leigh, who reminisces on more than 55 years in the Traditional Jazz Scene in the SF Bay Area and beyond...

I was born and raised in Southern California. For Christmas, 1942, I was given a copy of "American Jazz Music" by Wilder Hobson. As a result, I began collecting jazz records before I turned 13. That meant patronizing the Jazz Man Record Shop, then on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood.

A dark, beautiful, unsmiling, formidably knowledgeable young woman ran the place. This was Marili Stuart, née Morden. There, in the smoky after-noon light, the shade on the glass front door half-drawn and the 78 rpm collector's items sleeping in their stiff tan sleeves, the religion of the place was impossible to miss: framed blow-ups of Kid Ory, Papa Mutt Carey, Buster Wilson (and a young Turk Murphy) lined the walls. On these premises the New Orleans masters, living or dead, were the gods; everybody else was just a musician.

"Tell Ory I Sent You..."

Even before he had come all the way back from Post Office work and chicken farming in East L.A., Marili told me one afternoon that I "ought to go hear Ory." With huge excitement I had listened to his all-star band on Orson Welles' radio program, but that band was still nowhere else to be heard, and had it been I would have been much too young to get in. I made this excuse to Marili, who shook it off: "Go on, they won't care. Tell Ory I sent you."

I took the long streetcar ride out to Watts and the Tiptoe Inn, where Ory had a quartet gig on weekends. I sneaked in fast past the cop at the door, feeling thin, white, scared, and foolishly underage. The place seemed vast, the large crowd half-black, half-Latino. On the bandstand in the middle of the dance floor, Ory and the pianist, L.Z. Cooper, were eating a little intermission supper out of a blackened saucepan, New Orleans style, just as described in the book "Jazzmen," my new bible.

Told I was a friend of Marili's, Ory gave me an avuncular smile and promised the cop, who'd pursued me, that he wouldn't let me "make any trouble." The cop vanished, and I gaped at this lively little yellow man who had given Louis Armstrong his first job as a musician, had recorded with the Hot Five and with Jelly Roll Morton's very best Red Hot Peppers. Fifty years hence, who can recall all the details of an encounter with a historical figure? Not I. I stayed for a set. The dance floor was packed. Ory doubled on alto saxophone. The only tune I'm positive I heard was "My Gal Sal."

The drummer was Alton Redd, the bass player a big strong kid just out of his teens — Charles Mingus, barely old enough to vote, and still a couple of years shy of meeting Charlie Parker. Styles differ, but any working musician will tell you that a gig is a gig. Riding the streetcar home that night, I felt as if I had just celebrated a rite of passage — my first live jazz. The music had its hooks in me for keeps.

Exploring Jazz Clubs Around LA

That night nerved me to try the same trick elsewhere. Jimmie Noone was at the Streets of Paris on Hollywood Boulevard, sounding very much as he had with the Apex Club Orchestra in 1928, which is to say breath-taking. But the Streets were mean and impenetrable: the basilisk-eyed doorman was the first person who ever unmistakably sneered at me.

Then one night he was gone; an indifferent waitress let me in and served me an overpriced Coke. It lasted almost a set, until another bouncer struck. By comparison, the Swanee Inn on La Brea almost had the welcome mat out. Zutty Singleton had a trio gig there. Noone was much too imposing to approach, but Zutty was affable and more than willing to answer my questions. I'm just as glad that I can't remember what I asked him.

Working at a supermarket in the summer of '43, I made enough money to invest in a $25 set of drums. Of course I couldn't play a lick, other than timidly accompanying records with my wire brushes. When I confessed this to Zutty, he actually said that if I would come in early some night he would "show me a few things." The impingement of reality on my fantasy life scared me to death. I never went back to the Swanee Inn, and soon unloaded my drums, at a $5 loss, to another fantasist.

At the Jazz Man Record Shop I met Bill Colburn, a somewhat furtive man but a thoroughgoing and well-connected New Orleans fanatic. He took me with him a number of times to hear the full Ory band in its glory at the Jade Café on Hollywood Boulevard, where Bill hypnotized doormen and waitresses with the claim that I was his nephew. I've never heard a better band; still, the truth is that I hardly knew how to listen yet.

"New Orleans Brass Men Knew How to Blow..."

Bill told me that New Orleans brass men knew how to blow so that you could hear them a block away; yet you could stand a foot from the bells of their horns without discomfort. I tested the claim. It was true.

I'd become a sort of insider, junior grade. But high school and puberty were distracting my attention, and I took a holiday from jazz for a few years. I think I knew it would be waiting.

By the late '40s I was working full-time as a reporter for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook, and with some brand-new money in my pocket I checked out the Record Shack in West L. A., a new operation closer to my Santa Monica home than the Jazz Man. The fever hit me again, immediately and hard. I was playing city league basketball on Friday nights when the Ory band began playing dances at the ballroom on Santa Monica Pier. Still wet from my shower, I would rush the few blocks from gym to pier, hoping not to miss too much. It was 1948. Papa Mutt had died earlier that year, and Andy Blakeney was playing trumpet, but the band was storming; in the 50 years since, I've never heard a better rhythm section than Buster Wilson, Bud Scott, Ed Garland and Minor Hall. Ory kept the dance floor full, and placated the listeners by filling requests for "Do What Ory Say" almost every set.

I started buying records again, and hanging out at the Record Shack. In the back room, the proprietor, Ellen Hertel, had installed a piano which she herself played in a two-fisted, bare-bones manner, and over the months a kid band formed around her. (Using the ukulele chords I'd learned at the beach, I whanged away at a four-string guitar.)

The rankest of amateurs, we still attracted a couple of inspiring, if irregular, guests: one was Russ Gilman, a semi-mythical barrelhouse pianist with a penchant for working in mines. Even more mysterious was a dazzling clarinetist named Rowland Working (or Dr. R. W. Working, as he sometimes gave himself out). An enigma with a well-trimmed mustache, he would now and then join the boys in the back room. We found him aloof, but his play soothed any irritation, with its traces of Dodds, Bechet and Bob Helm but a sound all his own. He and Russ were much too good for us, but we forgave them.

Turk Murphy and Good Times Jazz

Being in a band improved my listening. At the time I was listening hardest to the San Francisco contingent. By then Hambone Kelly's was on its last legs, but even before it closed, Turk Murphy was leading, and recording with, his own band. His first LP for Good Time Jazz, with Bob Scobey and Burt Bales adding considerable swing, was the first LP I ever literally wore out. It is still my favorite Turk record.

A habitué of the Record Shack named Jim Harwood owned a red-gold Olds trombone, which no one had ever heard him play. When Jim was drafted he left the horn with Ellen. He could have been no more than a few hours into Basic Training before I grabbed it, justified by nothing but my own yearning. I kept puffing at it until l could play, in a fashion, the little Jim Robinson solo from Sam Morgan's "Short Dress Gal." When no one actually protested, I became the de facto trombonist in the back room band.

Other changes followed all too quickly. Rowland was drafted, the Record Shack went out of business; I quit my newspaper job and began driving a Yellow Cab. We went on rehearsing at another store, Ray Avery's Record Roundup; we even found a replacement for Rowland in 16-year-old Bill Carter, fresh from the California All-Youth Symphony and armed with his own transcriptions of Johnny Dodds' solos.

Practice, if it doesn't make perfect, usually generates progress. Most of our little gigs around Southern California are lost to failing memory, but I can't forget Coot Grant and Kid Wesley Wilson, whom Ellen found living in L. A. Headliners in black vaudeville, they had recorded famously with a septet which included Louis Armstrong. We rented a hall, spread what publicity we could, and presented Grant and Wilson. Knowing better than to try to back them, we settled for warming up the crowd — 40 people tops. Then Coot and Wesley took over and knocked everybody out.

I was excited and restless. When the Turk Murphy band came to the Beverly Cavern for six weeks I hardly missed a set, thus getting to know Turk and Bob Helm, who told me one night after the gig, bless his heart, that "you learn to play jazz by playing jazz."

By then my imagination was already living in San Francisco. In September, 1952 my body followed. It was perhaps the only time in my life when I have believed that destiny was calling me.

Part Two: Becoming Turk Murphy...

Reprinted from The Frisco Cricket, courtesy of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation.