With "Open That Golden Gate," we present the fourth 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...

The school year of 1957-58, doing graduate work at Stanford, I was happy to be offered a place in trumpeter Robin Hodes' new band in San Francisco. On piano would be Don Ewell, on clarinet Bob Helm; Bill Dart would play drums, and, from the Kid Ory band, Charles Odin on string bass. After warm-up gigs in a couple of small clubs, Robin hustled us a stand at Peggy Tolk-Watkins’ Tin Angel on the Embarcadero, where I had often gone to hear bands led by Turk or Kid Ory: six nights a week, 9 to 2, union scale. For me this was the big time, for sure, with none of the grief of being leader.

Hodes favored black suits, so that was our uniform: ties and jackets at all times. My only black suit would have served me well above the Arctic Circle. I began coming home from the gig three or four pounds lighter than at supper time, and had to start having the suit rush-cleaned every second or third day. Never mind, I was living the life, even if it left me comatose in morning classes. As an undergraduate I had learned to look wide-awake while brain-dead.

The Tin Angel attracted a fairly sporty crowd, including one local manager of available young ladies: he carried one on each arm whenever he went out in public. One night at the Angel he ordered a pair of his Rent-a-Girls onto the bandstand, where, in plain view and brightly lit, they subjected Helm and me to a rapid-fire series of unsolicited intimacies — groping, probing, fondling — to the vast amusement of everyone there, except for Bob’s wife, my wife, Bob and me. Apart from this brief humiliation, the Tin Angel was surely the high point of my tenure with Robin’s band. As well as I can recollect, the band usually smoked.

After-Hours Clubs in the Tenderloin

If there was a low point — and with such talent in the band there were few — it must have been our run at an after-hours club at Pat Kelly’s 181 Eddy Street. It was one of several such joints in the Tenderloin in those years, across the street from Bop City, which had long been the late spot for modern jazz players. Such operations opened shortly before 2 a.m. and ran until 6, ostensibly obeying the liquor laws by serving only coffee cups full of ice cubes. But I never saw anyone bring in a bottle, maybe because the place was so dark.

Dark enough, at least, to render uncertain the gender of the working girls and boys trolling for customers there. The tables which ringed the permanently deserted dance floor were just big enough to accommodate two coffee cups and a candle in a wine bottle. The professionally lonely would sit with a candle lit until company arrived: then the flame would go out, and it would be almost dark enough to turn tricks there, while the band played on. On a slow night, of which there were many, candles would burn at every table, with single occupants at perhaps three-quarters of them: an indelibly desolate scene.

If someone had told me before the 181 that I would ever find a night of play in the company of such as Don Ewell and Bob Helm to be tedious, I would have scoffed. But some gigs are so bleak that even the energy of great players can’t always redeem them entirely. But I realized that I was experiencing the ennui of the professional musician: that gave it a certain value of its own. You’re never too old for a rite of passage, and they’re all precious.

After the end of my year at Stanford, and the breakup of that Hodes band — there would be others later — the music scene slowed for me. Still, any musical future I might have seemed to lie in San Francisco. We were moving back there, anyway, since by then I had my M.A. and had lucked into an entry-level teaching position at San Francisco State.

Clarinetist Bill Napier and his wife Marilyn had taken over Bob and Kay Helm’s old apartment at 1335 Grant Avenue, across from The Place (one of the most celebrated venues of the Beat Generation). The Napiers had two cats, named Scobey and Jim Leigh. It was only when I got drunk there one night and fell into a staring match with the latter that I saw the startling resemblance. I was as much flattered as I was spooked. When Bill and Marilyn could no longer stand the day-and-night racket of the Beats and Beat-watchers in full cry outside, they left the place to Carol and me. We lasted only a month there before giving up and moving to Water Street, a quiet alley a few blocks away.

Then Ev Farey hired Helm and me for his Bay City Jazz Band. Before long Helm rejoined Turk (once again!) and was replaced by Rowland Working, by then a graduate student in architecture at Berkeley. Ev’s gig was at the Sail N (at the corner of Broadway and Front Street) on Friday and Saturday nights only, but it was a fine place to play, with good acoustics, a big dance floor, and an enthusiastic crowd, many of them ex-followers of the Lu Watters band at Hambone Kelly’s in El Cerrito. I was soon locked into a serious struggle with the Watters book, which formed the major part of the Bay City repertoire. I got away with a good deal, thanks to a fairly good ear, and a speaking acquaintance with most of the 200 or so tunes the band played. Gradually, my reading improved a bit, and I still know many of those parts by heart.

A Tangled Web of Memories

The autumn of that year was darkened by the accidental death of Rowland Working, who drowned while he and Bay City pianist Art Nortier were swimming with their wives near Tracy. Since we had become the closest of friends, in or out of music, it remains for me an extremely painful memory: not one I can deal with here, even after 40 years.

But the Sail N gig went on, first with Bill Carter on clarinet, then with Ellis Horne, both of them excellent. As someone hard at work in the world of words, I was especially grateful for my two nights a week of non-verbal relaxation with the Bay City band.

In attempting to sort out the next few years, which were unusually busy and more than a little tangled in my memory, I’m indebted to Carol, then freshly embarked on a singing career which would lead to many recordings, tours of Europe and Asia, a Grammy nomination, and most recently a victory in the Jazzology poll. Her jazz diary, beginning in 1959, has been an invaluable corrective to my faulty memory.

I mean neither ingratitude nor disrespect when I say that to imitate a single player for too long is to paint yourself into a very tight corner. There is a Sail N tape from winter 1958–9, with Carter, Farey, Nortier, Walt Yost on tuba and Lee Valencia on banjo. By its own lights the band was relaxed and energetic, but if I listen to it today I’m dumfounded by how Turk-like I’d come to sound. There are missed high notes which Turk wouldn’t have missed, and the tone is not quite his, but the similarity is overwhelming. I was a Turk Murphy imitator, period.

Haunted by Turk Murphy's Ghost

The Sail N changed hands, became Mr. Z’s, and the gig ended in April 1959. With no steady gig, I began getting around town more on weekends, and even weeknights (when I had no early-morning class the next day). I often heard Burt Bales and anyone who might be sitting in with him at Pier 23 (across the Embarcadero from the Tin Angel). Bob Mielke had a good band at a deadfall on Broadway called Burp Hollow, whose terrible-tempered proprietor, Emilio, armed with a leather-covered blackjack, tended bar in a wheelchair. Even closer to home was a club called Easy Street, where Turk’s band was holding forth. One night Turk let me sit in — not on washboard as I had done many times before, but on trombone. Did this mean I had arrived? I stood behind him, playing Bay City as he did his good-nights, after which he turned and said, "Sounds like a ghost, Jim."

I was flattered, God knows, but I was even more unnerved. I had always meant to become Turk Murphy, but not Turk Murphy’s ghost, following him insubstantially around without a soul to call my own. I had given up my imitative stuttering, but this awakening had me talking to myself, and I didn’t like what I heard myself saying.

During the academic year of 1958-59 I had begun getting acquainted with the exotic colony of players in Berkeley and Oakland. Pianist/trumpeter Bill Erickson, trombonist Bob Mielke, and banjoist Dick Oxtot were the band leaders among them (all three hired and played for one another), along with Peter Thomas (P.T.) Stanton on trumpet, bassist Peter Allen, clarinetist Bunky Colman, and, most importantly to me, trombonist Bill Bardin, who would be my next musical role model. They headed a cast of dozens.

Hearing Bardin for the first time live, several months earlier, with the Marty Marsala band, I had gotten a hint on how much ground he had covered since the recordings made while filling in for Turk at the Dawn Club, and into what an elegantly spare and rhythmic style he had compacted it. Now I heard him again, on Dick Oxtot’s gig at the Bagatelle, a beer joint on Polk north of Broadway, and this time he blew me away entirely. That band included, besides P.T. Stanton and Peter Allen, another new face to me: Frank (Big Boy) Goudie, whose name I knew from the records he had made in Europe during the 30s, with the likes of Django Reinhardt and Bill Coleman. Had I known that afternoon at the Bagatelle how many gigs I would get to play with Goudie in the next few years, I would have been happier, but for the moment I was riveted on Bardin, which is to say on how the band was swinging. Joe Dodge, who had been one of Dave Brubeck’s first drummers, was whaling away to good effect; Oxtot and Allen were in solid with him; Stanton, Goudie and Bardin blazed away in the front line: it was the most ordinary little gig in the world, and probably paid $10 a man — if they were lucky — but its effect on me was catalytic.

An Ocean of New Music Pouring In

Bardin and I went out for a cup of coffee at the first break, and I recall that we hit it off from the word go, comparing various youthful foolishnesses and talking trombone players. It turned out that his first idol had been not Turk, but Dicky Wells. Curiouser and curiouser. What I heard that Sunday afternoon excited me intensely: it was a way out of my corner. According to Carol’s diary, it was April 12, 1959, one day after our gig at the Sail N/Mr. Z’s had closed. Each of us gets lucky every once in a while.

The way I played didn’t change dramatically. Such chops as I had were formed over ten years of not quite becoming Turk Murphy, and they were surely insufficient to becoming Bill Bardin. Besides, I had had enough of becoming someone else. It struck me with the force of revelation that I would have to be myself, or nobody. The thought that I could be both of those at the same time was too frightening to contemplate. But the following Sunday I got to sit in at the Bagatelle. So did one of my very favorite San Francisco musicians, the beautiful trumpeter Jack Minger. I had my nerve, to presume to stand in for Bardin, and next to Minger. But within a year I would be in a great deal further over my head, and loving it.

I think that may have been the first time I ever got to play with any of the Berkeley contingent. They were not a snobbish lot, but they did have their standards. I must have just squeaked by, because I went on to play quite often with them (always with the understanding that I was third in line behind Bardin and Mielke, or Mielke and Bardin, depending on who was doing the ranking. Mielke got a lot of work as leader of his own band, the Bearcats, and in those days Bardin worked long hours at a cannery in Alameda, so I did get the occasional call).

But there was more going on. That winter I had begun listening to previously-taboo sounds. Carol’s diary reminds me that the Friday after the first visit to the Bagatelle I went to the Jazz Workshop on Broadway to hear Sonny Rollins. I went there a lot that year, catching Thelonious Monk’s quartet twice, and the quintet of J.J. Johnson (whom a witty jazz critic friend of mine described aptly as "playing like an electric typewriter"). Ellis Horne took me there one night to hear the great Chicago tenor saxophonist Johnny Griffin. The band I enjoyed the most, along with Monk’s, was the Cannonball Adderley Quintet. Their LP, Live at the Jazz Workshop, was one of the first modern records I played until I knew it by heart. Do I really have to explain myself to traditional jazz lovers? In the words of the great country singer Waylon Jennings (Yes! That too!) "The Devil made me do it the first time, the second time I done it on my own."

I had quit saying No, and it was if someone had opened up the Golden Gate: a whole world of music was pouring in on me like an ocean. My only regret is that it took me so long to get the mental cotton out of my ears—out of my brain, really. I never stopped being a true believer in jazz, but my field of audition expanded in what amounted to a quantum leap. Amid the welter of new stimuli, my own playing would take a lot of testing and sorting out in the next half-dozen years. Luckily for me, there was a bar on the waterfront where I would get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do that. It was called Pier 23.

Part Five: Playing at the Pier...

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