With "Mister Leader Man," we present the third 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 had still been sharing Turk Murphy’s flat on Chestnut Street when my search for like-minded and unaffiliated musicians took me to the greeny orchards of the Santa Clara Valley.

There, at a garage session in Campbell, I heard an astonishingly energetic skiffle band anchored by a powerful twelve-string guitarist named Danny Ruedger, who also sang Leadbelly tunes with great conviction in a big hot voice.

There was as well an impassioned homegrown piano player named Robert Emmett (Pete) Fay: his line was chiefly blues and Southside Chicago boogie woogie. They sounded to me like more than enough of a rhythm section to build a band on, and they were willing. Sure he could play banjo, Danny said. It had only four strings.

In the spring of 1953 I moved into Pete Fay’s comfortable house in San Jose, and at the upright piano in the back room began putting together a "book," not of arrangements, or even lead sheets, but of chords: Pete had no trouble reading them, and Danny could hear them, which was all he needed. Clarinetist Rowland Working, with whom I’d played in Southern California, came down from Berkeley as often as he could, which left us only a trumpet player short of the instrumentation of the Louis Armstrong Hot Five. The lack didn’t keep us from rehearsing.

In Search of a New Trumpet Player

We tried out a trumpet player. His heart was in the right place, but we were underwhelmed, mainly because he generated so little in the rhythm department. When we heard Jim Borkenhagen we had our trumpet player. Not only did he play well and unselfishly, in a hot, swingy, compact style, but busy as he was, with a full-time job and a big family getting bigger, he was willing to take records home with him and learn the tunes — hard ones like "Mabel‘s Dream" and "Steamboat Stomp."

Carol and I had married two months previously, and I was halfway through my first year at San Jose State as a music major — though that would change. We both had part-time jobs, but our real lives focused on the band, of which Carol was the women’s auxiliary and fan-in-chief (as well as playing a mean washboard whenever given the chance). Her dreams of becoming a singer were already gestating.

I was taking lessons from Allyn Ferguson, a modern jazz trumpeter/pianist who later in the ‘50s would lead the Chamber Jazz Sextet which accompanied poet Kenneth Rexroth at the Blackhawk. I had so many bad habits, Allyn said, that I must quit trying to play in a band for six months to a year, while I started from scratch. I promised to obey, but of course I did not. San Jose State got rid of Allyn at the end of the school year: he cared too much about music. I went ahead along the Turk Murphy Trail with all my bad habits, and for 40-odd years I’ve been trying to cure them.

At Last... The Hot Breath of the Big Time

As self-elected leader, I took it upon myself to name the group. The El Dorado Jazz Band: perhaps I was thinking of us as a treasure waiting to be discovered. We gigged as often as possible up and down the San Francisco Peninsula, at joints like Smitty’s and college beer gardens like the Oasis in Palo Alto. Luck came our way only in November 1954, when Turk’s band went East for a month. Charles Campbell and Bill Mulhern hired us for two weekends in the Italian Village basement, and an early version of the Bay City Jazz Band for the other two. We felt the hot breath of the big time and began rehearsing feverishly.

There are tapes which survive from a couple of those nights, and four decades later they are not too embarrassing. Wherever he happened to be playing, Danny was Danny: naturals are like that. Rowland sounded beautiful, all flowing rhythm in the ensembles and impressive in his rare solos. Bork’s lead was intense, warm and relaxed. Pete’s right hand hardly blundered at all, and his left hand gave us all the bottom we required. As for Mr. Leader Man, if there was raw material in the band he was it. Raw but sincere.

Our two weekends at the Village did not bring a storm of offers, and I was next to worthless at hustling bar owners for work. Still bachelors, Danny and Pete were not averse to bar-trotting, luckily for us. In the spring of 1955 they found the Kerosene Club, on San Jose’s Cannery Row.

The El Dorado band tried out there, and was hired for Friday and Saturday nights. There was so little night life in San Jose that before the worst heat of summer we had become a minor rage. Despite the lack of a dance floor, and the rumors that the place was named for the substandard liquor poured at the bar, the place was packed. Despite my increasing skill at accumulating griefs, I was having the time of my life.

Nothing tones up a band like a regular gig. Our "book" grew steadily until we had some two hundred tunes, including as many as possible played by no other band in the area, ranging from Ade Monsborough’s "The Dormouse" to Washboard Sam’s "Life is Like a Book." Then our luck got even better: the jazz gods sent us a bass player, and not just any old bass player, either.

Make Way for the Squire

Eino William (Squire) Girsback, widely known as Squire Gersh, had been a professional musician for more than 20 years, and played with Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz band before the war, and after it with Turk’s band, and that of Bob Scobey, they being the first two Watters alumni to go out on their own. During the last years of the war, when Bunk Johnson was leading a band in the Bay Area, Squire had been his bassist of choice. Nor was Bunk the last New Orleans trumpet great who would hire him. More important to us was that he thought us worth playing with.

Before joining us officially, Squire rented a hall one Saturday afternoon, to give us the most memorable single lesson — of my lifetime, at least — in how to play jazz in the manner of the New Orleans masters.

At his direction we played one simple tune, "Just a Closer Walk with Thee," over and over, but never the same way twice. Employing the full-body gestures of which he had such expressive command, his unique way with words, and his string bass, Squire proved to us that rhythmic variety was not, as we’d imagined, merely a matter of tempo; that you could make half a dozen different "motions" at a single metronome setting. In a given tempo he would "go after it" almost wildly, or "just open it up," or "lay back on it — broadly," or "let it lie down flat," or any of several other unverbalized ways of "addressing the circumstance." There was no room for doubt, because he showed us.

When Squire joined us at the Kerosene Club, the band took off. With a new family and a new mortgage, how could he afford to play with us for $11 a night? He was a gifted, imaginative, subtle man, and one who enjoyed life. He must have enjoyed playing with us. Certainly he was one gift horse into whose mouth none of us wanted to look. Amazingly, another one was headed our way.

Through that summer and into the autumn, the Kerosene Club was roaring. Ecstatic with the business we were doing, our boss, Russian George, proposed that we expand the schedule with Sunday sessions from 4 to 8 pm.

More Trials and Tribulations

Rowland was already pushed to the limit with his weekend commutes: his course load at UC wouldn’t let him play Sundays. We were in despair until Squire prompted Bob Helm to "cover Sundays for Rowland," and those Sundays, from the moment Jim Borkenhagen and I shed our misgivings about sharing the front line with someone of Bob’s stature, were unadulterated pleasure. Those were some great moments.

They passed, naturally. Russian George fell into the habit of cleaning out the till and heading for Las Vegas with one of the available nightbirds who had begun decorating the place; at length a lean cocquette named Suzy got her scarlet hooks into him and he began coming up short on the band’s money. Because they were the real musicians in the band, we went on paying Bob and Squire for as long as we could, but after a few weeks even that was beyond us.

In the spring of 1956 Squire went to Vegas with the Delta Rhythm Boys. We stopped playing on Sundays. The U. S. Labor commissioner’s office helped us get the back money George owed us, but the Kerosene Club closed, and the band had nowhere to play.

Louis Armstrong heard Squire in Vegas, liked what he heard, and hired him for the All Stars, who at that point included Edmond Hall, Trummy Young, and Billy Kyle. Fast company, but not too fast for Squire, we thought proudly. I tried it on for size, the preposterous idea that Louis Armstrong had hired away my bass player. I could only focus on it in functional form.

"Hey, man, how’s it going?"

"Not bad. You know, Louis Armstrong hired away my bass player."

Even in that form it wouldn’t fly. The truth was that Louis Armstrong — or, to be precise, Louis’ manager, Joe Glaser — had hired the Delta Rhythm Boys’ bass player, who had once played for most of a year with something called the El Dorado Jazz Band. That way I could absorb it.

Some months later, the All Stars came to the Bay Area, and Squire threw a barbecue at his house in Cupertino, to which we were all invited for major league chicken and ribs and red beans. The great man himself, with a big plate of food, made himself comfortable in the lotus position and talked cheerfully with all comers, very much at ease and one-of-the-boys. He used the word "shit" constantly, and it crossed my mind that he made it sound wonderful. And why not? It was a little trick he had with music, too.

For all this hobnobbing with jazz royalty, the El Dorado band seemed to be at the end of its rope. However, it would stay alive through two or three more incarnations, thanks mainly to the energies of Danny Ruedger.

Jumping Through Hoops: Musical and Academic

Not sufficiently deluded to think I could earn a living with the trombone, I had to give some thought, if unwillingly, to staying alive once I had cleared academia. In the spring of 1957, I won a graduate fellowship at Stanford — tuition plus walk-around money — and jumped at it. Carol and I moved north to a tiny house near the campus on the last functioning farm in nearby Menlo Park.

I also jumped at a musical job offer in San Francisco. The trumpeter Robin Hodes, then called Bob, had been one of a number of visiting firemen at the Kerosene Club. A fairly recent immigrant from Ohio, where he had played with the Red Onion Jazz Band, Robin at that time was very much in a Lu Watters bag, playing in a somewhat perpendicular manner, but with a bristling hot tone. The band he assembled that spring included Helm and the great Don Ewell on piano. Their presence gave me the feeling that I was about to arrive, as well as a great unease, knowing that I was not remotely in a class of those two heroes. Bill Dart of the Watters band would be on drums, and Charles Odin, who had played bass with Kid Ory, would complete the sextet.

With that and much else happening in the City’s jazz netherworld in the late ‘50s, it wouldn’t be long before Carol and I were irresistibly drawn back to living, once again, in San Francisco.

Part Four: Open That Golden Gate...

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