With "Playing at the Pier," we present the fifth 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...

By early 1959 I was dropping by Pier 23 regularly. Havelock Jerome, the boss there, was said to have been a bookie in a previous life: he certainly gave off powerful intimations of what used to be called "the sporting world."

I don’t know when he began operating the Pier, or when Burt Bales started playing solo piano there. Before long I was among those being asked to sit in. A fine band pianist, Burt loved to play with other musicians. He drank a lot, but in the years when I knew him it rarely seemed to harm his playing much. He had a drinker’s temperament: morose one minute, cheery the next, bitingly critical the one after that.

You learned to take Burt all-in-all, but he wasn’t someone you could stay mad at. "Shut up and play," was his basic philosophy.

It was during Burt’s tenure at the Pier that I learned Havelock’s repertoire as a bar singer, consisting of two songs: "Many Happy Returns of the Day" and "I Had Someone Else Before I Had You (And I’ll Have Someone After You’re Gone)." Every night around midnight, he would step up to the piano and hold forth, in a quite professional manner, with a few utterly traditional hand gestures, the right arm swinging halfway open at waist height, and the song delivered with many dramatic pauses to underline lyrical points.

He always reminded me of George Jessel as an entertainer; he even resembled Jessel. I once asked him if he sang Jessel’s anthem, "My Mother’s Eyes." When he’d shaken his head and returned to the bar, Burt snapped at me, "For Christ‘s sake don‘t encourage him!"

Burt’s life could be somewhat disheveled, but he rarely lost a certain astringent humor. He didn’t drive, and when I got to know him better, I often gave him a lift to and from the Pier. One night he opened the front door of his flat on Lily Street in the Haight perfectly naked. Even more strikingly, his cheeks, lips, jaws and neck were covered with tiny cuts, bleeding through little bits of toilet paper. "Whatever you do, don’t ever borrow a razor blade from your wife," he said. "I think Jeanie must have got this one from her dad."

One night early in 1960 Burt was knocked down by a car and seriously injured. Havelock hired Bill Erickson, Frank Goudie and Dick Oxtot so that the show could go on at the Pier. But Burt had no insurance, and on March 22, reedman/jazz critic Richard Hadlock organized a benefit at four clubs. Nearly a hundred musicians played for Burt that night. The benefit, referred to by some as ‘bailing out Bales," raised more than $2000 -- not a trivial sum in those days. That was what his colleagues in the Bay Area thought of Burt. By September he was back at work.

But he and Havelock came to a parting of the ways in 1961. I don’t know the exact reason, but I have a strong hunch that Burt failed to show up for work a few times, and Havelock wouldn’t put up with it. In any case, Erickson came back in with a trio: Goudie again, and a fine drummer from New Orleans, James Carter. That would be the basic group there for the next few years, during which the Pier would become my home away from home.

Across the Embarcadero, Kid Ory had taken over the Tin Angel, re-naming it On the Levee. Even during Bales’ days at the Pier, the regular sit-ins had provided competition which Ory didn’t care for, to put it mildly. He protested to the union, but even when there might be a full band at the Pier (with only Burt getting paid), Business Agent Eddie Burns of AFM Local 6, the equivalent of the cop on the beat, could never seem to catch anyone in the act. When Erickson took over the gig, with a good drummer and clarinetist in place, the Pier became even more of a magnet for musicians looking for a place to work out.

Of those regulars whose appearance was hoped for nightly, two stand out in my memory: the trumpeter Ernie Figueroa and the tenor saxophonist Dave Clarkson. Though perhaps as different as any two men could be, they loved playing together. Fig had played with the Charlie Barnet and Stan Kenton big bands, and he was a great fan of Clifford Brown (to whose music he introduced me), but he was quite at home in more traditional groups, and played marvelously with small bands led by Earl Hines and Ralph Sutton, among others.

Clarkson was an amateur, but of the very highest order. He played tenor in the classic Hawkins-Webster-Young vein, out of which he had synthesized his own ferociously swinging way of playing by the time I heard him. For me, playing with the two of them was an honor, an education, and -- even when I was teetering dangerously at the far edge of my ability -- an enormous pleasure.

Erickson was particularly fond of string bassists, and the list of those who played at the Pier, if the big names were included, would impress all but the terminally blasé. The two who showed up most often at the Pier were Squire Girsback, of whom I have already spoken at length, and a skillful, if saturnine, escapee from Southern California named Harry Leland.

As far as I could tell, Harry still had the sort of chops which had allowed him to play in L.A. with such as Kenny Drew and Hampton Hawes. Once he accepted the fact that the Pier band was not going to play "Night in Tunisia" or "Anthropology," he seemed pleased enough to go along with the program.

Whenever he was in town, Squire would drop by, early or late, once or twice a week, and he always came to play. But if another bassist was in place he was happy to sit at the bar and listen. That other bassist might have been Bob Marchessi, or Ray Durand or Jim Cumming.

If there was a resident jazz aristocracy in San Francisco during the early 60’s it would have to have been the Earl Hines All-Stars, who had a long stand at the Club Hangover on Bush Street. Hines himself never came in, but the great New Orleans bassist George (Pops) Foster showed up several times, was always invited to sit in (usually by whoever was playing bass at the time), and never said no.

He might play only half a set, and never more than a whole set, but he made his presence instantly felt: playing with him was like catching a ride on a hurricane -- a hurricane with perfect time. (He also wrote – dictated, really, to Tom Stoddard -- his autobiography, one of the great jazz books of all time. Pops doesn’t mention the Pier in the book, but, trust me, he was there.)

A scarcely less memorable guest was another great New Orleans bassist, Wellman Braud, for many years a mainstay of the Duke Ellington Orchestra. In 1961 he showed up at Sugar Hill, Berkeley blues singer Barbara Dane’s new club on Broadway, in the company of a formidable pianist/trumpeter named Kenny Whitson. Back in the 1950’s Paul Lingle had brought word of a blues pianist in Honolulu -- the name slipped his mind -- who played the trumpet simultaneously. We imagined some sort of vaudeville freak.

It had been Whitson, and we were dead wrong. He was one of the best blues pianists I ever heard in my life, black or white. (Whitson was the latter.) The trumpet playing was plenty good enough, but still it seemed a sideline. And when we heard Whitson sing, we all thought it was a crying shame that Mose Allison had made it big while he hadn’t.

Still, when he was healthy, he and Braud made up no doubt the finest two-man trio any of us had heard. To my knowledge he never showed up at the Pier; perhaps -- like all the other pianists in town -- he knew better than to trespass on Erickson’s turf. For it had become his turf without anyone ever having to say so.

Erickson never showed off, had no dazzling specialties; he always played very, very well, and always served the band in all respects. As a soloist he was neither greedy nor shy, and he rarely if ever repeated himself. If he had a single model it must have been Teddy Wilson, but he admired pianists ranging from Jelly Roll Morton to Horace Silver. (The record of Bob Mielke’s band at the Sail ‘N, on Chris Strachwitz’s Arhoolie label, shows Erickson in his Mortonesque mode.)

Over several years at the Pier, Erickson’s philosophy of how to play such a gig had gradually become the unspoken code which we all tried to obey.

Rule No. 1: If someone knows the melody and someone knows the chords, we can play any tune we decide to play.

Rule 2: With regard to tunes or keys we do our best to accommodate guest vocalists, and we never try to make things difficult for guest musicians. ("This isn’t some kind of fraternity initiation," Erickson said -- though in fact for me it was just that, of the most benign sort.)

There really were no other firm rules. The rest was up to Erickson, whom everyone trusted. Now and then, without hesitation, he would quietly but firmly corral someone who had gotten momentarily lost in space. One night, after listening to the Miles Davis record of "But Not For Me," I had been foolhardy enough to start my solo on the same A-natural as Miles, a flatted fifth. Erickson turned around instantly, looked at me, said, "No," and went on playing. He was right. In our context the note was a pretentious disaster. I didn’t even think of arguing with him.

Erickson was one of the best leaders I have ever played for (another is Clint Baker). He led by example, he led by temperament. He never tried to embarrass, let alone humiliate, anyone. He wanted to play music in a relaxed and congenial environment. He enjoyed pleasing listeners regardless of their level of jazz expertise. Theories and critical judgments were for after the gig, if, indeed, they were necessary at all. What’s more, he believed that almost any tune could be made fun to play and a pleasure to listen to. If he had any passionate beliefs about the history of jazz, I never heard them. Another one of the blessed "shut up and play" breed.

We didn’t play ragtime at the Pier, and we didn’t play bebop, but anything in between was considered fair game. Most important for me was the tacit expectation that anyone playing there would be trying his best at all times to get with and reinforce whatever sort of "motion" was on the table.

This meant a great deal of learning-by-playing; it meant that one set you might be playing Bunk Johnson tunes with Jerry Blumberg, who had taken lessons from Bunk, and could demonstrate any trumpet style from Bunk to Miles; the next set, if the wonderful rhythm guitarist Edd Dickerman showed up, you would be on a steady diet of Basie and Ellington tunes.

The set after that, if Erickson was feeling frolicsome, you might be doing all Shirley Temple tunes, or half a dozen selections written in honor of Charles Lindbergh’s Transatlantic solo flight. It was all fun, even if in the course of the evening, pardon the expression, I got my ass kicked by Jimmy Archey or Bob Mielke or Jerry Butzen, or someone else with more chops than I possessed.

If, over the years, I developed a firm notion of what a professional was, I think I learned the first half from Squire Girsback and the second half from Bill Erickson. A good friend once told me: "Musicians have quite a lot in common with real people." So I also learned a good deal about how to be a halfway-decent human being, from too many people to name here, though I dare not leave out Jim Borkenhagen, Squire Girsback, Bob Helm, Ellis Horne, Wally Rose, Norma Teagarden, or Rowland Working.

And there are the stories, but hardly room to tell them. Like the night that Ernie Figueroa lent his car to someone, who brought it back, parked it, left the keys with Fig, and vanished. At 2 a.m. several of us spent more than an hour looking for it in vain. We finally gave up, and decided to wait for daylight to resume the search. Fig and I both lived in the Mission district, so I drove him home. The next morning we found his car parked on the Embarcadero almost in front of Pier 23. "I thought I saw it there last night, you know," Fig said. "I just liked seeing all you guys out there looking for it. To me, that’s real friends, man."

The Pier was really a kind of dive, albeit a colorful, atmospheric and non-violent one. (In maybe 250 nights there I never saw a blow struck in anger, though once or twice I did watch Havelock, though an aging welterweight, giving someone the bum’s rush -- expertly.) He doubtless made some money from the place, but nobody else did, certainly not Erickson, who seemed contented enough living hand-to-mouth.

It was never a case of the money not mattering: Erickson lived from it, Goudie and Carter relied on it, and when I occasionally got paid for a night or two I never turned it down. But the music, and the mostly pleasant company of those gathered to play it and listen to it, were the point, and that’s all there was to it. Pianist Pete Fay, my old friend from the El Dorado band, had put it best: "Oh, we don’t make very much money but we have a lot of fun." (He would do a fast vaudeville soft-shoe routine as he sang it.)

I left the Pier scene in 1965 and went to Europe. I haven’t lived in San Francisco for quite a while, but I never miss a chance to visit, and if the reason is playing music -- as it almost always is -- it always feels like a kind of homecoming.

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