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School Grooves: The Glory Days of Memphis High School Music

Paul McKinney, director of student success/alumni relations at the Stax Music Academy (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)

The young student knew how far the guidance of a good music teacher could take him. “It was assumed that you would play jazz,” he wrote many years later. “Memphis’s young musicians were to unwaveringly follow the footsteps of Frank Strozier or Charles Lloyd or Joe Dukes in dedicating their lives to the pursuit  of excellence.” The young man had a jazz combo with his friend Maurice. “Because he cosigned the loan for the drums, loaned us his car, and believed in us, Maurice and I were both deeply indebted to Mr. Walter Martin, the band director. You could hear a reverence in his voice when he spoke Maurice’s name.”

Yet he gained more than material assistance from his high school education. “I took music theory classes after school. Professor Pender was the choral director at Booker T. Washington, and like the generous band directors, Mr. Pender made an invaluable contribution to my musical understanding.” Pondering his lessons on counterpoint, the student thought, “What if the contrapuntal rules applied to a twelve-bar blues pattern? What if the bottom bass note went up while the top note of the triad went down, like in the Bach fugues and cantatas?” And so, sitting at his mother’s piano, he wrote a song.

He had only just graduated when the piece he composed came in handy. Though it was written on piano, he suddenly found himself, to his amazement, in a recording studio, playing a Hammond M-3 organ. He thought he’d try his contrapuntal blues on this somewhat unfamiliar instrument. Why not? 

That’s when the magic went down on tape, and ultimately on vinyl. It was an unassuming B-side titled “Green Onions.” To this day, the jazz/blues/classical hybrid that sprung from a teenager’s mind remains a cornerstone of the Memphis sound. The teenager, of course, was Booker T. Jones, co-founder of Booker T. and the MGs. As he reveals in his autobiography, Time is Tight: My Life, Note by Note, his friend, so revered by the band director at Booker T. Washington High School, was Maurice White, future founder of Earth, Wind & Fire. Their lives — and ours — were forever changed by their high school music teachers. 

It’s a story worth remembering in these times, when the arts in our schools are endangered species. And yet, while you don’t often hear of band directors cosigning loans or handing out car keys anymore, they remain the unsung heroes of this city’s musical ecosystem. The next Booker T. is already out there, waiting to take center stage, if we can only keep our eyes on the prize.

Mighty Manassas
The big bang that caused the Memphis school music universe to spring into being is easy to pinpoint: Manassas High School. That was where, in the mid-1920s, a football coach and English teacher fresh out of college founded the city’s first school band, and, right out of the gate, set the bar incredibly high. The group, called the Chickasaw Syncopators, was known for their distinctive Memphis “bounce.” By 1930, they’d recorded sides for the Victor label, and soon they took the name of their band director: the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra. They released many hit records until Lunceford’s untimely death in 1947.

Paul McKinney (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)

Nearly a century later, Paul McKinney, a trumpet player and director of student success/alumni relations at the Stax Music Academy (SMA), takes inspiration from Lunceford. “He founded his high school band and took them on the road, with one of the more competitive jazz bands in the world, right there with Count Basie and Duke Ellington. And I’ve tried to play that stuff, as a trumpet player, and it’s really, really hard! And then one of the best band directors in Memphis’ history, after Jimmie Lunceford, was Emerson Able, also at Manassas.”

Under Able and other band directors, the school unleashed another wave of talent in the ’50s and ’60s, a series of virtuosos whose names still dominate jazz. One of them was Charles Lloyd, who says, “I went to Manassas High School where Matthew Garrett was our bandleader. Talk about being in the right place at the right time! We had a band, the Rhythm Bombers, with Mickey Gregory, Gilmore Daniels, Frank Strozier, Harold Mabern, Booker Little, and myself. Booker and I were best friends, we went to the library and studied Bartok scores together. He was a genius. We all looked up to George Coleman, who was a few years older than us — he made sure we practiced.”

Meanwhile, other talents were emerging across town at Booker T. Washington High School, which spawned such legends as Phineas Newborn Jr. and Herman Green. It’s no surprise that these players from the ’40s and ’50s inspired the next generation, like Booker T. Jones, Maurice White, or, back at Manassas, young Isaac Hayes, yet it wasn’t the stars themselves who taught them, but their music instructors. Although they didn’t hew to the jazz path, they formed the backbone of the Memphis soul sound that still resounds today. As today’s music educators see it, these examples are more than historical curiosities: They offer a blueprint for taking Memphis youth into the future.

Paul McKinney with his father Kurl, a retired music teacher, and his brother Alvin, a saxophonist (Photo: Yuki Maguire)

Making the Scene
And yet the fact that such giants still walk among us doesn’t do much to make the glory days of the ’30s through the ’60s within reach today. For Paul McKinney, whose father Kurl was a music teacher in the Memphis school system from 1961 to 2002, it might as well be Camelot. And he feels there’s a crucial ingredient missing today: working jazz players. “All the great musicians that came out of Memphis in the ’50s and ’60s were a direct result of the fact that their teachers were so heavily into jazz. The teachers were jazz musicians, too. We teach what we know and love. So think about all those teachers coming out of college in the ’50s. The popular music of the day was jazz! And the teachers were gigging, all of the time.”

Kurl, for his part, was certainly performing even as he taught (and he still can be heard on the Peabody Hotel’s piano, Monday and Tuesday evenings). “Calvin Newborn played guitar with my and Alfred Rudd’s band for a number of years,” he recalls. “We played around Memphis and the surrounding areas.” That in turn, his son points out, brought the students closer to the world of actual gigs, and accelerated their growth. In today’s music departments, Paul says, “there are not nearly as many teachers who are jazz musicians. As a jazz trumpeter and a guy who grew up watching great jazz musicians, that’s what I see. Are there a few band directors who play it professionally? Yes. But there aren’t many.

Trombonist Victor Sawyer, who works with SMA and MMI (Photo: Victor Sawyer)

Trombonist Victor Sawyer works with SMA but also oversees music educators for the Memphis Music Initiative (MMI). Both nonprofits, not to mention the Memphis Jazz Workshop, have helped to supplement and support public music programs in their own ways — SMA by hosting after school classes grounded in local soul music, MMI by helping public school teachers with visiting fellows who can also give lessons. Sawyer tends to agree that one important quality of music departments past was that the teachers were working jazz musicians. “All these people from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and before have stories of going to Beale Street and checking out music and having the opportunity to sit in. I feel like the high schools in town today aren’t as overtly and intentionally connected to the music scene. So you’re not really seeing the pipelines that you did. When you don’t have adults who will say, ‘Come sit in with me, come see this show,’ you lose that natural connectivity. So you hear in a lot of these classes, ‘You can’t do nothing in Memphis. I’ve got to get out of Memphis when I graduate.’ That didn’t used to be the mindset because the work was here, and it still is here; it’s just not as overt if you don’t know where to look.”

Music Departments by the Numbers
A sense of lost glory days can easily arise when discussing public education generally, as funding priorities have shifted away from the arts. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls the years after the 2008 recession “a punishing decade for school funding,” and Sawyer contrasts the past several decades with the priorities of a bygone time. “After World War II, there was a huge emphasis on the arts. Every city had a museum and a symphony. Then, people start taking it for granted, and suddenly you have all these symphonies and museums that are struggling. The same for schools: There’s less funding. When STEM takes over, arts funding goes down. The funding that the National Endowment of the Arts provides for schools has gone down dramatically.”

Simultaneously, the demographics of the city were shifting. “Booker T. Washington [BTW], Hamilton, Manassas, Douglass, Melrose, Carver, and Lester were the only Black high schools in the late ’50s/early ’60s. So of course people gathered there,” Sawyer says. “You’d have these very tight-knit cultures. Across time, though, things became more zoned; people became more spread out. Now things are more diffuse.”

Not only did funding dry up, enrollment numbers decreased for the most celebrated music high schools. Dru Davison, Shelby County Schools’ fine arts adviser, points out that once people leave a neighborhood, there’s not much a school principal can do. “What we’ve seen at BTW is a number of intersecting policies — local, state, and federal — that have changed the number of students in the community. And that has a big impact on the way music programs can flourish. And more recently, it’s been an incredibly difficult couple of years because of the pandemic. Our band director at Manassas, James McLeod, passed away this year. So we’re working to get that staff back up again, but the pandemic has had its toll on the programs.”

Davison further explains: “The number of the kids at the school determines the number of teachers that can work at that school. So at large schools like Whitehaven or Central, that means there are two band directors, a choir director — fully staffed. But if you go to a much smaller school, like BTW and Manassas, the number of students they have at the schools makes it difficult to support the same number of music positions. That’s a principal’s decision.”

A four-time winner of the High Stepping Nationals, Whitehaven High School’s marching band plays at a recruiting rally. (Photos: Justin Fox Burks)

The Culture of the Band Room
Even if music programs are brought back, the disruption takes its toll. One secret to the success of Manassas was the through-line of teachers from Lunceford to Able to Garrett and beyond. Which highlights a little recognized facet of education, what Sawyer calls the culture of the classroom. “When you watch Ollie Liddell at Central High School or Adrian Maclin at Cordova High School, it’s like, ‘Whoa! Is this magic?’ These kids come in, they’re practicing, they know how to warm up on their own. But it’s not magic. These are master-level teachers who have worked very hard at classroom culture. The schools with the most thriving programs have veteran teachers who have been there a while, so they have built up that culture.”

In fact, according to Davison, that band room culture is one reason music education is so valuable, regardless of whether or not the students go on to be musicians. “I’m just trying to help our teachers to use the power of music to become a beacon of what it means to have social and emotional support in place. As much as our music teachers are instilling the skills it takes to perform at a really high level, they’re also creating places for kids to belong. That’s been something I’ve been really pleased to see through the pandemic, even when we went virtual.” Thus, while Davison values the “synergy” between nonprofits like SMA or MMI and public school teachers, he sees the latter as absolutely necessary. “We want principals to understand how seriously the district takes music. It’s not only to help students graduate on time but to create students who will help energize our community with creativity and vision.”

Kellen Christian, band director at Whitehaven High School (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)

And make no mistake, the music programs in Memphis high schools that are thriving are world-class. By way of example, Davison introduces me to Kellen Christian, band director at Whitehaven High School, where enrollment has remained reliably large. With a marching band specializing in the flashy “show” style of marching (as opposed to the more staid “corps” style), Whitehaven has won the High Stepping Nationals competition four times. (Central has won it twice in recent years.) Hearing them play at a recruiting rally last week, I could see and hear why: The precision and power of the playing was stunning, even with the band seated. Christian sees that as a direct result of his band room culture. “Once you have a student,” he says, “you have to build them up, not making them feel that they’re being left out. So we’re not just building band members; we’re building good citizens. They learn discipline and structure in the band room. That’s one of the biggest parts of being in the band: the military orientation that the band has.”

Lured into Myriad Musics
But Christian, a trumpeter, is still a musician first and foremost, and he sees the marching band as a way to lure students into deeper music. “Marching band is the draw for a lot of students,” he says. “When you see advertisements for bands from a school, you don’t see their concert band, you don’t see their jazz bands. The marching bands are the visual icons. It’s what’s always in the public eye.” But ultimately, he emphasizes, “I love jazz, and marching band is the bait. You’ve got to use what these students like to get them in and teach them to love their instrument. Then you start giving them the nourishment.”

As Sawyer points out, that deeper nourishment may not even look like jazz. “Even with rappers, you’ll find out they knew a little bit about music. 8Ball & MJG were totally in band. NLE Choppa. Drumma Boy’s dad is [retired University of Memphis professor of clarinet] James Gholson!” Even as Shelby County Schools is on the cutting edge of offering classes in “media arts” and music production, a grounding in classic musicianship can also feed into modern domains. True, there are plenty of traditional instrumentalists parlaying their high school education into music careers, like David Parks, who now plays bass for Grammy-winner Ledisi and eagerly acknowledges the training he received at Overton High School. But rap and trap artists can be just as quick to honor their roots. “Young Dolph, rest in peace, donated to Hamilton High School every year because that’s where he went,” notes Sawyer. “Anybody can do that. Find out more about your local school, and donate!”

Reminiscing about his lifetime of teaching music in Memphis public schools, Kurl McKinney laughs with his son about one student in particular. “Courtney Harris was a drummer for me at Lincoln Junior High School. He’s done very well now. Once, he said, ‘Mr. McKinney, I’ve got some tapes in my pocket. Why don’t you play ’em?’ I said, ‘What, you trying to get me fired? All that cussin’ on that tape, I can’t play that! No way! I’m gonna keep my job. You go on home and play it to your mama.’

“But I had him come down to see my class, and when he came walking in, their eyes got as big as teacups. I said, ‘Class, this is Gangsta Blac. Mr. Gangsta Blac, say something to my class.’ So he looked them over and said, ‘If it hadn’t been for Mr. McKinney, I would never have been in music.’” Even over the phone, you can hear the former band director smile.

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In Memoriam: Nokie Taylor, Trumpeter for Isaac Hayes and Others

CREDIT: Shawn M. Carter

A lifetime ago, I was a cook at a deli/market called the Squash Blossom. Isaac Hayes and Alex Chilton were regular customers. Behind the scenes, the whole place bustled with the energy of would-be artists working their day jobs. But there was one person on the payroll who was neither a would-be nor a has-been, someone who had stood shoulder-to-shoulder onstage with both Hayes and Chilton, someone who brought dignity and a mischievous grin to his role as a dishwasher: Nokie Taylor.
courtesy Ditto Taylor

Nokie Taylor

Like most of us, he loved the soul-heavy oldies station that played as we worked, but few of us suspected how many of those hits Nokie had actually contributed to. Amused by my name, he’d walk in to work and say, “Hey! It’s the other Al Greene!” Later, that was shortened to, “Hey! It’s The Other!” Finally, that became, “Hey, T.O.!”

As 1989 drew to a close, I was slated to join Alex Chilton and a facsimile of The Box Tops, playing New Year’s Eve in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And who should appear in the horn section but Nokie on trumpet. Even then, I hardly guessed what a master of the instrument he was. It turned out his contributions to Chilton’s solo records were many and substantial, and he could often be seen in the local jazz scene. This guy was a player. Later I discovered that he had been a regular member of the Isaac Hayes Movement, playing on Black Moses, Shaft, Joy, Truck Turner, and Three Tough Guys, not to mention a slew of albums Hayes released with ABC after Stax was kaput.
courtesy Ditto Taylor

Nokie Taylor

This Christmas grew a little darker when I heard that Nokie had passed away on December 19th. It was not entirely unexpected — he’d resided in an assisted living facility for six years, under hospice care for the past two of those, and the isolation of quarantine had been hard on him. Above and beyond that, his close friend and colleague Herman Green had died in November.

Both had played pivotal roles in FreeWorld, those stalwart funksters of Beale Street for over three decades. When Nokie died, FreeWorld co-founder Richard Cushing wrote:

Where Herman became my musical father, Nokie became more like my cool musical uncle – no less influential, but in a more casual & roundabout fashion. Just a few years after that, Nokie & I were sharing an apartment together & he graciously agreed to be the horn section leader for our new, all original band “Mosaic”, and I can remember many late nights in a variety of CK Diners after our gigs, with Nokie intently listening to us dissect the show while he dispensed his own unique brand of wisdom & perceptions about both the music we were writing & performing and our personal & professional goals.

You see, we knew that Nokie had already been to the musical mountaintop, having played on MANY Top 10 R&B Hits that came out of Stax Records in the 60s & 70s (like Sam & Dave & Eddie Floyd, etc.) and had also toured with Isaac Hayes for many years – not to mention playing on Cybill Sheppard’s “Vanilla”, Big Star’s “Third”, and several Alex Chilton & Tav Falco – Panther Burns LPs – so his vast musical knowledge & experience were invaluable to a young, aspiring musician like myself. But Nokie was always quiet about his professional accomplishments, and was never one to boast or appear grandiose about whom all he’d played with, where all he’d been, & what all he’d done – even though his discography was broad & impressive.

He often played with FreeWorld throughout the years and was always a
showstopper with his circle breathing prowess on the cornet, his smooth vocal
style, and his frequently overt sexual innuendos insinuated into both his lyrics and his playing. (Too many stories to go into here, but trust me… Nokie was ONE BAAAD DUDE!!)
Shawn M. Carter

Nokie Taylor receiving a Beale Street Note in 2012

Trying to further grasp the passing of this life that touched so many, I reached out to his son, Dwayne “Ditto” Taylor, now living in Arkansas.

Memphis Flyer: Was Nokie a native Memphian?

Ditto Taylor: He was born March 6, 1941, in Orange Mound. His dad, William Taylor Jr., was a professional singer.  (My dad was William Isaac Taylor III). His father was affectionately known as “Billy” or “The Voice” … a baritone and a perfectionist. My mom said that he sounded like Billy Eckstine.
courtesy Ditto Taylor

William Taylor, Jr., father of Nokie Taylor

Nokie told me his dad would leave the house before him. And my dad had to find his own way to the gig, and find his way back. I don’t know if he was trying to get him away from the music business, you know, making him fend for himself.

Now Mickey Gregory was friends with my dad. And a week before Nokie’s father passed away, he told Mickey to look after his son. Because he was going away. Mickey said, “Where are you going?” And he just said, “Look after my son.” And a week later my grandfather passed away. 
Mickey was the stage manager for Isaac Hayes, so Mickey got Nokie hooked up with Isaac.

How old was Nokie at the time?

My dad had to have been around 25. He met my mom in college in Arkansas, at what is now called the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff.

He studied trumpet there?

Well, my dad was so good that he didn’t want to play in the band. He started his own band. He was too cool for the marching band. And that’s where he met my mom.

And then they settled in Memphis?

Yes, sir. They got divorced when I was five, and my mom and I moved to Arkansas. So I would go visit during the holidays or in summertime. He was traveling with Isaac all the time, doing his music. He sent me postcards from all over the world. Africa, Rome, and he even sent a picture from when they went to, at the time, Cassius Clay’s [Muhammad Ali’s] training camp.

I wasn’t an Isaac Hayes fan. I couldn’t understand his music. ‘Cause he was talking about love. I wanted to dance! My cousins in Memphis had to tell me, “Man, Isaac Hayes was the shit in the ’70s.” And then I found out that Maurice White wanted Nokie to join Earth, Wind & Fire, but Isaac was too hot back then.

Did he ever mention what his proudest moment as a player was?

Well, he mentioned that he and Miles Davis were good friends. I guess because of the trumpet. You know, Miles wasn’t an easy person to get along with. But my dad, being himself, they fell in love with each other. Maybe it was a trumpet-to-trumpet thing.

I could see how your dad could lighten Miles up a little. Nokie was so fun.

Right. Exactly. He loved to make people laugh and smile. He wanted everybody around him to have a good time. To enjoy themselves, enjoy life. It’s like, when he walked into a room, even though he spoke real cool, like a pimp, he could captivate an audience. Especially the women!

When I reflect on all the people that he touched, if he had stayed with my mom, he might have moved to Arkansas and never would have been who he became, affecting all the lives he impacted. It shocked me when Kirk Whalum called me and said, “Your dad really inspired me.” Nokie had to do his musical career. I was fortunate enough to be raised by four women who did an excellent job with me. But the times that my dad and I did share were … Ooooo weee!

How recently was he still actively playing?

The last time I saw him perform was maybe 2006, 2007. Down there on Beale Street. And he did that circular breathing, that little trick where he’d blow his trumpet for, like, three minutes straight. Which is normally not humanly possible. But after 45 seconds, I started clapping. I had never seen him do that before. I’m like, “Wow!” And everyone else was, too. He played that note for a long time, so they were calling him “One Note Nokie.”

One interesting thing: I was home on leave from the military and I drove up to Memphis, and he didn’t know I was coming. But I knew he was playing down on Beale Street. So me and my cousin and one of my good friends snuck in, and the singer saw me and she knew exactly who I was. She said, “We’ve got a very special guest tonight. Dwayne, would you please stand?” And Nokie wasn’t paying attention. He was over there playing with his trumpet keys, licking his lips, getting ready to start the set. But when I stood up and they threw the spotlight on me, the singer said, “Nokie, play for your baby.” Nokie turned around and it was the first time I ever saw tears come to his eyes.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Nokie Taylor’s family will not host a memorial service for him at this time.

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Jazz City: The Once — and Future — Sound of Memphis

CREDIT: Jamie Harmon

“Before I left New York, I had had tryouts for the band and that’s where I got all these Memphis musicians … I wonder what they were doing down there, when all them guys came through that one school?” — Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography

Sometime in the late 1940s, Herman Green, a teenaged saxophone player, found himself playing a show in Kansas City, and wound up speaking with another reed man. “How long you gonna be in Kansas City?” the older musician asked.

“Well, we just up here for the weekend. We gotta go back to Memphis,” Green replied.

“Oh, you from Memphis?” said the other player. “That’s why you’re playing the way you’re playing. ‘Cause you had some good teachers down there.” Green had never heard of the older fellow, but he would remember his name all his life: Charlie Parker.

Herman Green passed away recently, at 90, “at home, surrounded by family, listening to Coltrane,” according to a close friend. He was a revered figure in the local music scene — just as he was taught by “some good teachers,” he taught and mentored many here. And his life, crossing paths with the likes of Sonny Stitt, Lionel Hampton, and John Coltrane, was emblematic of Memphis’ place in the history of jazz, a place honored and treasured by a few, yet unknown to most. Tourists think of Memphis as a blues town. But these days, assuming the onslaught of a mismanaged pandemic is brought to heel soon, that may be changing.

Jamie Harmon

Kirk Whalum

For starters, the blues/jazz distinction doesn’t mean all that much to many musicians. Recently, renowned jazz saxophonist Kirk Whalum, a Memphis native, told me about the transcendent playing of organist Andre Stockard, whom he happened to see at B.B. King’s Blues Club. I asked him if what he heard that night was jazz. “As far as I was concerned, yes,” said Whalum, “but it was in the context of the blues. It’s all kind of mixed up, right?”

And that may just be the key to the unique qualities of Memphis players. Long before Sun or Stax, “the Memphis Sound” was a topic among music aficionados, beginning in the late 1920s, when Jimmie Lunceford, the city’s first public high school band director, put Memphis music on the map by transforming the Manassas High School band into “the Chickasaw Syncopators.” Eventually becoming the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, they were a crack ensemble that ultimately toured the country and cut scores of records. That may have marked the first time that the distinctive, bluesy soulfulness of the city’s players caught the public ear. But it wasn’t the last.

As the Miles Davis quote above suggests, Memphis players have long been sought after. The most obvious examples include George Coleman, Harold Mabern, and Frank Strozier, who played with Miles personally, but also include such 20th century luminaries as Phineas and Calvin Newborn, Booker Little, Hank Crawford, and Charles Lloyd. Later examples include pianists James Williams, Mulgrew Miller, and Donald Brown, all graduates of what was then Memphis State University, all of whom played with Art Blakey’s famed Jazz Messengers. And the list goes on, to this day (thoroughly explored in the locally produced podcast and WYXR radio show, Riffin’ on Jazz, which dedicates two episodes to the Memphis-Manhattan connection).

Jamie Harmon

Joe Restivo

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

A common influence shared by this multi-generational roster is the two-headed beast of Saturday night/Sunday morning, aka, Beale Street and the church. As Stephen Lee, an accomplished jazz pianist who founded the Memphis Jazz Workshop, notes, the two styles rely on their heavy use of two chords in particular, most commonly associated with the “Amen” that ends nearly every hymn. “We get it from playing the blues on Beale street, from playing those same ‘one’ and ‘four’ chords. And it might not be the blues, but that one and four is in all gospel, the old gospel. There’s something in that one-chord to the four-chord change that stands out and has so much soul in it. Memphis is right there, between that one and four chord! It has a lot of meaning. You get it in blues and you get it in church.”

Joe Restivo, guitarist with the City Champs, the Love Light Orchestra, and his own quartet, tends to agree, adding that young players learn more than just notes from the blues/gospel milieu. “The really developmental gigs are in the R&B scene, and that’s gonna be on Beale Street. Preston Shannon [a Beale Street fixture] had so many great musicians run through his band and learn how to play a gig. Some of those people became jazz musicians. Like Anthony Crawford, Hank Crawford’s grandson, who went to L.A. and became a big time fusion jazz bassist. He went through that Preston Shannon school of learning how to play gigs and learning your instrument.

“To me, that’s the same thing as Herman Green and George Coleman and Charles Lloyd going through the B.B. King and Bobby Bland bands. They’re not necessarily playing jazz, but they’re learning their horn, they’re playing a gig, they’re learning the language and the repertoire, they’re learning how to act. You gotta show up on time, dress in a certain way, be professional. Learn the songs. Learn how to get house. Learn how to entertain.”

Courtesy Ed Finney

Ed Finney

Restivo is quick to point out that these same musicians are technical masters of their instruments as well. Memphis players, he notes, “were sought after and they were known for how soulful they were, and how hard they swung, and how funky they were. But also how virtuosic they were. That’s something people don’t realize. A lot of these musicians are also widely known for their technical acumen, not just their feel. Phineas Newborn was a virtuoso. Booker Little was a virtuoso. MonoNeon is a virtuoso.”

How It Began

The history goes back to the 1920s, as University of Memphis music instructor Sam Shoup notes. “If you’ve ever seen footage of the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, it’s incredible. It’s like James Brown times 10! When I first started one of the big bands at U of M, we did a tribute to Jimmie Lunceford and played three or four of his songs, and they were hard as hell! We had to work and work and work on them.”

Shoup sees the benefits of the city’s strong music education game every day at the U of M. “We’re getting some really good players. A lot of that has to do with the school system. Schools like Central, Overton, Briarcrest, and White Station have excellent jazz programs. The Stax Music Academy and the Memphis Music Initiative are doing some great things. They’re involved in all types of music, and they’ve been big supporters of jazz. Another big help is the Memphis Jazz Workshop that Stephen Lee is doing. There are middle school kids there that can really play, and now, since we started doing that in 2017, I’m starting to see high school kids who’ve done that coming to college, and they’ve got a leg up on everybody else.”

The University of Memphis has produced some downright legends. The Jazz Studies program there, founded by Tom Ferguson in the 1960s, has long been a beacon for those aspiring to professional jazz chops. Sam Shoup was inspired by the U of M student bands when he was in high school. A short while later, he was accepted there himself. “The best jazz scene I was ever around was in the 1970s, and the center of that was James Williams. At one time, we had James Williams playing in the A band, Mulgrew Miller playing in the B band, and Donald Brown playing in the C band. We all went to school together. These guys were just walking around in the hall every day. Mulgrew and Donald were in my theory class.”

Donald Brown went on to return the favor to posterity, ultimately becoming an instructor at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, where one of his students was Stephen Lee. More recently, he taught and mentored the up-and-coming Maguire Twins, a drum and bass duo, and appeared on their debut album. Though neither plays piano, Lee points out that some of the wisdom gained from a veteran like Brown transcends technical instruction. “Some of my best lessons with Donald Brown,” he says, “were just conversations. Talking about other jazz musicians and their approach to music.”

James Williams exemplified another form of paying it forward. According to the hosts of Riffin’ on Jazz, he was “a conduit” for other Memphians seeking their fortune in New York. “They’d go up there, they’d look for James, and James would help them find gigs, help them get recordings. James was like the guru of New York.”

And he paid it forward when back home for the holidays as well, right around this, the most wonderful time of the year. “James would have that jam session at the North End around Christmas every year. So I’d go down and talk to him and Mulgrew Miller and Tony Reedus,” says Lee.

Jamie Harmon

Daru Jones and MonoNeon of Project Logic

The Mentorship Tradition

Guitarist Ed Finney, aka Jupiter Skyfish, who until recently could be seen almost every week accompanying singer Deborah Swiney, graduated from R&B to jazz thanks largely to the mentors he met along the way. Introduced to music by his father, who led the Harmonica Hotshots, Finney began performing with an R&B band at the Flamingo Club in 1964. “We played about six months and they became the Bar-Kays, without me,” he recalls. “And then I played at a club where the band leader, my first real mentor in jazz, was Floyd Newman. He was a great baritone sax player, and he was also writing horn charts at Stax; that was probably ’65 to ’67. So I got exposed to jazz. We were a rhythm and blues group, but we had a jazz bass player. And Isaac Hayes would come in and play piano with us.”

True to the process Restivo and Lee describe, simpler, groovier music was Finney’s stepping stone to jazz, as he plied his trade in clubs on Beale and throughout the region. “I played more in the rhythm and blues scene,” recalls Finney. “At that point, guitars were really rhythm instruments. And I played a lot. We were playing five, six nights a week, nine to three every night. And if I traveled with a band, I had to play as an ‘albino.’ It was illegal for me to play in a white club with a Black band. The thing about it, all those clubs had red lights in them, they were dark, and full of cigarette smoke. And I had kind of an afro. At the Tiki Club, the owner found out I wasn’t Black and said, ‘Well, you’ve been faking it for a year. Just come in the back door.'”

Gifted with both talent and indefatigable curiosity, he soon fell in with Herman Green. “He’d been in New York,” says Finney. “He sounded a lot like ‘Trane when he first came back, into that ‘sheets of sound’ kind of thing. He was a great, great tenor player. Obviously one of the best that’s ever come from this city. He was a mentor to me. I played with him for three or four years, off and on. I traveled a lot. I went to New York and played with some great musicians there. Jack DeJohnette, Bob Moses, and Insect Trust.”

The fact that Finney is still playing and composing to this day (still working with pioneers like Bob Moses) is a testament to the through line of inspiration and instruction that carries the Memphis jazz legacy forward. Herman Green, educated first at church, then at Booker T. Washington High School, then mentored by Rufus Thomas on Beale Street, goes on to travel the world, playing with some of the greatest innovators in jazz. Inspired by Coltrane’s radical approach, the cascading cacophony of “sheets of sound,” he returns home and mentors Ed Finney, among many others, who in turn goes on to make a name in the world of free jazz, and continues to do so, even as his mentor passes on.

Courtesy Stephen Lee

Stephen Lee

The Memphis Sound

Thus history reveals the ever-evolving forms of jazz, in which a thread of “the Memphis Sound” can still be discerned. Restivo, whose Where’s Joe? album proffers an edgy take on classic jazz and jump blues sounds of the ’50s and ’60s (even as the City Champs mine funkier, boogaloo-rooted territory), tends to take the long view on all the avenues open to today’s jazz pioneers, once they’re grounded in the Memphis experience. “You’ll see some players take it in a certain direction, a more modern jazz sound, like Booker Little or George Coleman,” Restivo says. “Or maybe it’s someone who wants to pursue a smoother contemporary jazz sound, like Kirk Whalum. Or maybe they want to be more R&B or hip-hop. It all comes from that same place. And the community’s very supportive. Everybody knows everybody. I’m seeing a whole new, young crop of songwriters and players and singers and instrumentalists. They’re all very impressive.

“I think it’s individual. Some people tend to look backwards and explore their voice through older aesthetics, and some people are more futuristic. Like MonoNeon. But even he has that classic approach in there. Once you have that foundational stuff, you can go anywhere you want with it. Do you want to focus on Charlie Parker and Bud Powell’s music, or focus on Herbie Hancock, or maybe take it in the direction that guys like Robert Glasper are going now, synthesizing hip-hop and jazz. That guy’s music is amazing, drawing from both Duke Ellington and J Dilla. He was at the New School when I was there. He’s a huge titan in the current jazz world. Whatever you want to do with it, if you’ve got these foundational elements, you can do that.”

IMAKEMADBEATS, hip-hop producer and founder of the Unapologetic collective, is an unlikely champion of this inclusive, pioneering spirit of the music, and, along with the youth making such strides under Stephen Lee’s guidance, may be paving the way for a Memphis jazz Renaissance. “Memphis is very blues and soul oriented,” he says, “but if you’re willing to dive into the underground, it’s definitely there. Even in stuff that’s more electronic, that jazz influence is definitely there and appreciated. I’ve found some really great jazz musicians who I work with. I like to defy and disrupt. To me, that’s the heart of jazz. That’s why hip-hop samples jazz; there was no ‘classical music era’ in hip-hop. The most sampled music in hip-hop is jazz, because jazz disrupts.”

It’s that unpredictable quality that draws even hip-hop artists to jazz of all eras, but also makes it a tough sell in tourist-dominated sectors like Beale Street. Yet all the artists I spoke with long for a space they can call their own, once live performances become possible again, a place where the spirit of adventure meets a respect for living history: a bona fide jazz club.

“It’s been talked about for years, ever since I was a teenager,” says Restivo. “Joyce Cobb had her club briefly. I remember seeing Herb Ellis there, and it was a very formative experience for me. I wish we had a club like Rudy’s in Nashville. Or Snug Harbor in New Orleans. A jazz room, where jazz is what you’re coming for. Kansas City has a couple; that town has really fostered and maintained its history. An art space built on the nonprofit model, like the Green Room at Crosstown, is important. But it would be awesome to have a real jazz club.”

It’s hard to believe that Finney launched his career, so representative of all that is untethered and pioneering in jazz, on Beale Street. But his memories of that era may yet point us to the future. “There was probably jazz in Memphis before there was jazz in New York,” he reflects. “Beale Street was not a blues street. It was a street for Black elites. People that were movers and shakers in the Black community. Like writers, journalists, owners of shops, whatever. When you went to Beale Street, you’d walk in the club and you’d hear something more like Duke Ellington’s band. Everyone was all dressed up. Yes, blues is important, and I love blues. It’s the mother of it all. But I am a little sad that Beale Street is only a blues street now, because that’s not what it was.”

Having seen the next generation firsthand, Stephen Lee is hopeful. “The youth will have to bring the scene back. There are a lot of kids in Memphis, really good musicians, all under 30, with no gigs. And this is even before COVID. They’re practicing, rehearsing, and a couple are teaching. There’s a scene here, just waiting to be cultivated.”

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Cover Feature News

Seventh Heaven

CREDIT: Christian Patterson

Now that Beale Street has been renovated, and neon warms its coldest nights, it’s hard to conjure up the feeling that must have greeted 37-year-old Calvin Newborn when he returned there after making his name in the jazz world.

“I came back to Memphis in 1970,” he told author Robert Gordon. “Beale Street was being torn down. I couldn’t find no place to play. … [I was] playing with Hank Crawford every six months in California. And when I came back to Memphis, I would stay inebriated. It broke my heart, you know, to come on Beale Street and it wasn’t there. So I just went to the liquor store. When they finally tore it completely down, I thought that was the end of Beale Street, you know. But they started to rebuilding, you know, slowly.”

Christian Patterson

Calvin Newborn

Newborn had dealt with heartbreak before, over the years, in many forms. Happily, he did eventually resume his rightful place as one of Beale’s star attractions. Now the heartbreak’s all ours, since he passed away on December 1st in his adopted home of Jacksonville, Florida. And for lovers of music history, his death marks the loss of more than one man and musician, great enough in his own right. Calvin was the last of the epoch-defining Phineas Newborn Family Showband.

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Herman Green

Family Ties

“When I hear stories about Elvis going and hearing [Calvin’s] dad’s band in the Flamingo Room, and borrowing Calvin’s guitar and sitting in with their family band, I think that Elvis probably got a lot of his feel from their family band. I can see how that was an influence on Elvis,” reflects musician and producer Scott Bomar, who worked with Calvin. “It was quite a band. I think Calvin and his family are that missing link between Sun Records and Stax. They were playing on Sun sessions, and you look at all the people that came through that band. William Bell, George Coleman, Honeymoon Garner, Fred Ford, Charles Lloyd, Booker Little. That whole Newborn Family Band was a cornerstone of Memphis music. It’s a chapter that I don’t think has gotten its due.”

Saxophone legend Charles Lloyd recently tried to give the Newborns their credit, when asked to recall his formative years in Memphis. “I was also blessed that Phineas Newborn discovered me early and took me to the great Irvin Reason for alto lessons. Phineas put me in his father — Phineas Senior’s — band. Together with Junior and his brother, Calvin, we played at the Plantation Inn which was in West Memphis. Phineas became an important mentor and planted the piano seed in me. To this day he still informs me.”

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Calvin with brass note on Beale honoring the Newborn family.

Of course, Phineas Newborn Jr., or just “Junior,” was Calvin’s older sibling, who some would later call “the greatest living jazz pianist.” Their parents, Phineas Sr., or “Finas,” and Mama Rose Newborn, raised them to love and play music, always hoping to carry on as a family band (with Finas on drums). And, for a time, they did. But, ultimately, Junior was too much of a genius on the ivories to be contained by such ambitions. Indeed, Calvin grew up in the shadow of Junior’s gift, something he apparently did not mind one bit. Though the brothers won their first talent show early on as a piano duo, that moment also brought home Junior’s genius to Calvin, who soon after began guitar lessons on an instrument that B.B. King helped him pick out.

Beale Street held a fascination for the whole family, who would initially make the long trek on foot from Orange Mound just to be there, until they moved closer. Finas turned down opportunities to tour with Lionel Hampton and Jimmie Lunceford just to be near his family and the promise of playing music with them. At that time, a flair for music was often a strong familial force. Dr. Herman Green, master of the saxophone and flute, went to Booker T. Washington High School with Calvin. “We grew up together. We been knowing each other since we were babies,” Green says. “The Newborn family, and the Green family, and then the Steinberg family. We had a lot of families together at that time that were musicians, you know? So we came up together, ’cause we had to go to the same school.”

Steve Roberts

Calvin Newborn, Chuck Sullivan, Richard Cushing, Robert Barnett (back). Dr. Herman Green & Willie Waldman (front) in FreeWorld. ca. 1990.

Though both brothers were soon proficient enough to tour with established acts (as when Calvin hit the road with Roy Milton’s band), by 1948, their father landed the family group a residency at the Plantation Inn in West Memphis. Green, too, joined the band, as did a young trombonist named Wanda Jones. For a time, Finas’ dream flourished. “Oh, we all was good, man!” recalls Green. “We was playing with his daddy. We had some good singers, like Ma Rainey.” Before long, they moved to the Flamingo Room in Downtown Memphis, and then collectively hit the road with Jackie Brenson, who was touring behind his hit record, “Rocket 88,” recorded (with Ike Turner’s band) by Sam Phillips.

If the family band was tight, Calvin and Wanda were getting even tighter. As Green remembers it, “Wanda, yeah — I’m the one that put ’em together. She was the vocalist with Willie Mitchell. I heard her, and I told Finas Sr. about her. And then we ended up using her for quite a while there. Now, Calvin was my right-hand buddy, man. Junior was in and out of there, you know, but me and Calvin were very close. He told me he was getting ready to get married to Wanda. I said, ‘Well, congratulations.’ He said, ‘Well, you ain’t heard the rest.’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ He said, ‘I want you to be my best man.’ And then we lived together in my daddy’s house, when he got married.”

The Phineas Newborn Family Showband was the toast of Memphis, with a plethora of future jazz and soul greats rotating through. And Calvin was distinguishing himself with a talent that his gifted brother did not have: showmanship. As Calvin told author Stanley Booth, “You’d have guitar players to come in and battle me, like Pee Wee Crayton and Gatemouth Brown, and I was battlin’ out there, tearin’ they behind up, ’cause I was dancin’, playin’, puttin’ on a show, slide’ across the flo’.” And flying, as captured in an iconic photo of Calvin in mid-air, his eyes fixed with fierce determination on his fretboard, his legs angled high in a mighty leap.

The Elvis Connection

As their reputation grew, the family band began to notice a young white kid at their shows, watching Calvin’s moves like a hawk. As Calvin recalled to Gordon, “I would see him everywhere, he used to come over to the Plantation Inn Club when we was over there.” That kid was Elvis Presley.

“Elvis used to be there, show up every Wednesday and Friday night to see me do Calvin’s Boogie and Junior’s Jive. I’ll be flyin’ and slidin’ across the dance floor [laughs] and I think that’s when he … started to flyin’, too.” Almost as a footnote, Calvin adds, “but he went on and made all that money, made millions of dollars, and I went to the jazz mountaintop and almost starved to death.”

But through it all, Presley remained close to the Newborns. It went far beyond studying their moves and their sounds at the club, as Calvin’s daughter, Jadene King, tells it. In describing her father’s prolific writings, she notes that he penned an as-yet unpublished volume with “a lot of the history between him and Elvis in it.” Titled Rock ‘n Roll: Triumph Over Chaos, “there’s an enormous amount of unspoken-of history of my dad and Elvis’ relationship. Actually, Elvis’ relationship with my entire family,” King says. “A lot of people think he was a prejudiced kind of human being, and from a very bigoted family, but that’s not true. He spent a lot of his life with my father and my uncle, at my grandmother’s home. They were very close. He ate many meals with my dad and my uncle, and my dad was the one that was responsible for a lot of his moves and a lot of his musical talent, as far as teaching him a lot of what he knew. They were very close.”

The Jazz Mountaintop

Family and Elvis aside, Calvin was more concerned with climbing to the jazz mountaintop, especially once the extent of Junior’s deep genius on the piano became widely known. After brief stints in college and the army, Junior was back in Memphis when Count Basie and the great talent scout John Hammond happened to visit, and heard him play. In that moment, the ring of opportunity became the death knell for Finas’ dream of a family band. By 1956, Junior and Calvin had moved to New York, playing in a quartet with two legends-to-be, Oscar Pettiford and Kenny Clarke, and recording for Atlantic and RCA.

Before long, Junior would go his own way, and deal with his own demons, leaving Calvin to deal with his. At first, the jazz mountaintop offered an escape from the South’s rampant racism. “I think that’s the main reason why I left Memphis, you know,” he told Gordon, “to play jazz. Because jazz seemed to have put it on an even keel, because a lot of white people respected jazz. And that was the bebop era, you know, and I admired Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday and all the jazz artists, so I was, that’s one reason I was so glad to get away from Memphis.”

But he also fell into the traps of bebop life, as did Wanda. As Booth writes, “Calvin began working with Lionel Hampton, then joined Earl Hines. His wife, who had become a narcotics addict, had convulsions and died in her sleep, and Calvin began using heroin himself.” And yet, he managed his addictions well enough to keep playing, building his reputation every step of the way. As the 1960s wore on, Calvin ended up working with Jimmy Forrest, Wild Bill Davis, Al Grey, Freddie Roach, Booker Little, George Coleman, Ray Charles, Count Basie, Hank Crawford, and David “Fathead” Newman.

Meanwhile, Junior’s eccentricities were turning into full-blown mental anguish, and he spent time here and there in mental institutions, recovering from his alcoholism in hospitals, or simply convalescing in the family home. Still, he would perform and record.

In 1965, Finas, now suffering from heart problems in spite of his then-clean living, ignored his doctor’s warnings against performing and joined his eldest son onstage in Los Angeles. It was the closest he’d come to recapturing the Newborn family band’s glory days. And he died of a heart attack as soon as he walked off stage. Still, Mama Rose kept her home in Memphis, and Junior stayed there more and more.

Thus was the state of his life and his family when Calvin returned to see Beale Street in ruins. He was once again based in Memphis, but toured often. As his daughter recalls: “The first thing I remember as a little girl was him being in the Bubbling Brown Sugar tour. That had him over in Europe for several years, and he lived in Holland, London, Paris.”

King, whose mother was an Italian immigrant whom Calvin met at Coney Island, but who grew up in Jacksonville, goes on: “That’s my first memory of daddy being gone for a long period of time. That was in the mid-1970s. And he did that for a while. He was constantly gigging and touring during most of my childhood, but he would always come to Jacksonville to see me, or I would go to Memphis and spend time with him at my grandmother’s house. Mama Rose’s.”

Staying at the family home or on his own, Calvin would help with Junior’s care and began playing more with his old classmate, Herman Green. The quartet recordings they made as the Green Machine still stand as some of the finest jazz that Memphis has produced. As the 1980s went on, Calvin joined Alcoholics Anonymous, cleaned up his act, made the occasional solo album, and began working with younger musicians. When Green fell in with the funk/rock/improv group FreeWorld, Calvin was not far behind. “Calvin was a member of FreeWorld for about two years, and his guitar virtuosity brought us all up several levels, musically speaking,” says FreeWorld founder Richard Cushing. “Herman and Calvin would occasionally start playing off each other in the middle of a song, pushing each other, cutting heads as only two old-school masters can do.”

Mike Brown

Working in the studio.

New Born

Memphis musician and producer Scott Bomar also treasures his time with Calvin, first as pupil and then as the producer of his phenomenal album, New Born. “I had to put a band together to back Roscoe Gordon, and I asked Calvin to play guitar. That was the beginning of our friendship and the beginning of us doing gigs together. Some of the most amazing musical settings that I’ve had the good fortune to be part of were with Calvin. At one Ponderosa Stomp show, the Sun Ra Arkestra actually played with Calvin and me. That’s one of the most intense audience reactions I’ve ever seen at a concert. And every time I’d talk to Calvin, he would still talk about it. The last time I spoke to Calvin, he was still talking about that performance. It was a tune of his called ‘Seventh Heaven,’ and that was a very, very special performance.”

Even as the next century approached, Calvin had a flair for showmanship. Bomar goes on: “When he got on stage, he had this energy that not many people I’ve ever played with have. He was electric. He could hit his guitar in a way that got people’s attention. His tone — I love his rawness. Of course, he had this deep musical knowledge and was very melodic, but he also had this kind of raw, rock-and- roll edge to his tone and his playing. His tone was always on the edge of distortion.”

By 2003, there was less to keep Calvin here in Memphis. Junior and his mother, Mama Rose, had left this mortal coil behind. And so he settled in with his daughter, adapting to the Sunshine State and a more contemplative life. “My dad had various levels of spirituality, and he studied every religion known to man. He studied Islam, he studied Jehovah’s Witnesses, he studied Judaism, he studied Hinduism. My father was just a brilliant individual. He’s read the Koran three or four times. He’s read the Bible many times. He was just a very well-versed man, and I would say the last 10 years of his life he completely went over to Christianity.”

Calvin also continued to perform at the Jazzland Cafe and the World of Nations festival in Jacksonville, not to mention many area churches. And he remained as feverishly creative as ever. “He has several unpublished compositions that I have,” notes King. “I have several plays, several books, and tons of lyrics and scores for new music, new songs. He had just finished scoring a musical project that he wanted to take to New York and record.”

And then, in the spring of this year, romance came back into his life, in the form of one Marie Davis Brothers, who he had known for decades. “I’ve known her my whole life, for over 43 years,” says King. “Originally, they were together for 12 years, and they separated and were apart for 20 more years. In 2017, they started communicating again. They’d been talking over the phone for a little over a year, and then in April she moved here from Memphis. And in May they got married and they moved into their own apartment.”

Photo Courtesy of Jadene King

Calvin Newborn at the Memphis Music Hall of Fame induction of his brother Phineas.

The Final Chapter

No one expected Calvin Newborn to die this month. “He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) from the years and years and years of smoking and drinking and just the jazz life, but he’d been sober and clean for over 35 years, and he was doing very very well,” says King. “Just in the beginning of November, his oxygen levels weren’t what they needed to be, but he just went from not having oxygen to wearing a little Inogen [portable oxygen] machine. And then toward the end of the month, that stopped giving him the levels that were needed, and here we are.”

Just before the end, he was still giving his daughter new writings to type up. “In my father’s last couple of months, he wrote a poem called ‘Seventh Heaven.’ It was based on a dream where he saw his great-granddaughter, who he called Bliss, looking out into what he called seventh heaven, and everyone was at peace. There was no more hatred, there was no more racial divide. There was no more poverty. Everything had been leveled out. It was a beautiful world. I guess if my father had an epitaph, it would be ‘Seventh Heaven: There’s no race, just the human race.'”

In Calvin Newborn’s heaven, there’s room enough for everyone to fly.

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Music Music Blog

Dr. Herman Green: 88 Years Young, Still Blowing the Blues

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

Justin Fox Burks

Herman Green

Dr. Herman Green, the saxophonist supreme who started out on Beale Street in the 1940s, and who, after travelling the world playing his horn with giants from John Coltrane to Lionel Hampton to Stevie Wonder, became a Beale Street institution in his own right for the past 40 years, turns 88 on May 27th. It’s a Sunday, a day when, for over three decades, he’s been reliably playing with the funk/soul/jam outfit FreeWorld on Beale. So naturally, it’s party time!

“It just so happens,” says FreeWorld co-founder Richard Cushing, “that we play Blues City Cafe every Sunday anyway. It really dovetailed together nicely.” Cushing adds that, although Green’s health has been less than ideal lately, he’ll be there and “he’s really looking forward to spending this special birthday evening with all his friends, family, fans & loved ones.”

Cushing adds that “we have a bunch of special musical guests lined up to join us on stage to honor Herman that night,” hinting that the guests may include super fans such as Jim Dandy or Carla Thomas. Seeing the Queen of Memphis Soul will no doubt resonate deeply with Green, who got his start in show business thanks to her father, the late Rufus Thomas.

Such a celebration also resonates with the location, which had a specific mission under its previous name. “Blues City Cafe used to be Doe’s Eat Place,” notes Cushing. “And they envisioned the band box there to be kind of like Preservation Hall in New Orleans: a place where the old players always had a home, at least once a week.” Certainly it has served that mission well with Green, who’s been a fixture there. But, Cushing adds, “Under doctors orders, Herman hasn’t had a thing to drink in over six months, so please refrain from buying him his formerly beloved shots of vodka.”

While Green has not been playing as much lately, he still blows on occasion, and on May 12th, he carried out a tradition of 25 years by playing at the Memphis College of Art graduation commencement, marching the new graduates in to the ringing sounds of his saxophone. It was MCA that granted Green his honorary doctorate. (Read more about Green’s life in our 2017 profile of him, below).

So it’s likely you’ll hear his legendary tone at some point, depending on the doctor’s health. Either way, it’s a perfect way to ring in Memorial Day, honoring one of Memphis’ greatest living players, who’s held his own among the titans of jazz, blues and soul for nearly a century.

Dr. Herman Green’s 88th Birthday Party, Blues City Cafe, Sunday, May 27, 9 pm – 2 am.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Musicians Go Back To The Source With Mr. Handy’s Blues at Indie Memphis

Joanne Fish was in Florence, Alabama with her documentary about rockabilly queen Wanda Jackson when she had the idea to make a movie about W.C. Handy. “Music and history are my favorite subjects, so it just made sense.

Doing justice to the origin of the blues was a task that had frustrated many other writers, but Fish, a veteran producer and director for the History Channel and CMT, figured she was up to the challenge. “The history of the blues is a deep subject,’ she says. “You can go down a rabbit hole. The trail led me to Memphis, which is the heart of the Handy story.”

Fish worked on Mr. Handy’s Blues for almost a decade. She made repeated trips to Memphis, where she had the help of Mark and Cathy Caldwell, who she calls “my boots on the ground.” She says her favorite memory of the shoot is arriving on Beale Street for an early morning shoot. “Beale Street at 7 in the morning is completely different from Beale Street at midnight. I would soak up that feeling. It took me back in time.”

Her subject was every bit as deep and fascinating as she had hoped for. “What I learned about Handy was his positive attitude and his brilliance. He was a visionary…He heard something in the music. It’s like he had a vision of where this could go. He wanted to be part of that movement…He studied classical music. He was very aware of what composers were doing around the world. All of the big, classical composers were taking elements of the folk music in their country and incorporating it into their music. He was trying to classicalize blues with his arrangements, and his thinking about what should be done with the form. He took it from its raw form and, in his words, ‘put it on a silver platter.’ Little did he know how much he would influence the future of the city.”

The film features performances by Memphis musicians like Ruby Wilson, Dr. Herman Green and Low Society, the Stax Choir Street Corner Harmonies, and Eric Hughes “He’s a Memphis treasure,” she says of Hughes. “He plays quite a prominent role in the film…The musicians are so generous and kind. We have so many Memphis musicians performing and interviewing in the film.”

Fish hopes Mr. Handy’s Blues brings the composer’s work into the new century. “I feel like his legacy is getting lost,” she says. “I wish the film could be shown all the time on Beale Street. I think it would enhance people’s experience, to see what was going on a hundred years ago.”

Mr Handy’s Blues screens at 1:00 PM on Saturday, November 4 at Playhouse On The Square. For tickets and more information, go to the Indie Memphis website.

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Music Music Blog

FreeWorld: A Jam for the Ages

In a town like Memphis, buzzing with so much talent that players lend their chops to multiple bands, ensembles that retain their name and personnel for many years are rare. Jeffrey and the Pacemakers, just celebrating their ten year anniversary, are notable for their longevity. Yet FreeWorld leaves all the others in the dust where longevity is concerned: for 30 years, they have been a fixture on the local scene, and show no sign of slowing now.

The group was jump-started when young bassist Richard Cushing met saxophonist Herman Green back in 1986-87. The veteran jazz man, now in his 87th year, instantly took a liking to the youngster. To his credit, Green needed no coaxing to step out of his jazz/soul wheelhouse and work with a generation of players who grew up admiring the Grateful Dead or Frank Zappa. As other players were added to the line up, FreeWorld grew into what one writer described as “the best of Memphis, New Orleans, and San Francisco.”

Of course, other players have circulated through the band over the decades, but the core and vision of the band has remained constant. One reason is that their particular blend of influences has played very well on Beale Street, which has served as ground zero for most of their tenure.

Justin Fox Burks

Herman Green

This week will witness celebrations of that longevity. Tonight (Wednesday), they’ll be hosting a listening party for their latest album, What It Is, at Ardent Studios, where it was recorded. Dedicated to longtime drummer David Skypeck, whose ill health has interfered with his ability to play lately, the album is as tightly arranged as anything they’ve done, with an emphasis on their funk influences. The outliers might be the Beale St. boogie of “Another Sunday Night,” which name checks Herman Green and the street where he first played professionally; “Dinja Babe,” which evokes ’70s power pop and includes Big Star’s Jody Stephens on drums; and “Eve Waits,” which evokes Indian tonalities. For the most part, the group’s latest dispenses with the Dead-influenced jams and conjures up more raucous nights of funk with powerful horn and synth blasts.

They’ve seen plenty of those, and Memphians can hear them celebrating their many years together this weekend. They’ll be the featured group in the Levitt Shell’s Orion Free Music Concert Series this Friday, with guest artists joining them. And the next night, they’ll throw down at The Bluff on Highland, with members from every period of the band joining them onstage as the night rolls on.

The FreeWorld listening party will be at Ardent Studios, tonight (Wednesday, Oct. 11) at 8:00 pm.

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Cover Feature News

Memphis Musicians’ Worst Gigs Ever II

On any given day, dozens of Memphis musicians are crisscrossing the country, bringing the diverse sounds of our city to audiences large and small. It’s a fun life, but things don’t always go as planned. It’s a tradition for musicians to swap stories of disaster, humiliation, and stiffed payments. Here are some prime cuts from Memphis musicians who were willing to go on the record about their worst gig experiences.

Dead Soldiers

Krista Wroten Combest — Dead Soldiers

We were on our way from Asbury Park to Brooklyn, and then to Staten Island. The guy at the toll booth told us the wheel on our trailer was smoking. This wasn’t surprising to us, because on our last tour, the wheel had fallen off as we were attempting to leave Sister Bay, Wisconsin.

That’s why we weren’t surprised when it happened again in New York. We pulled over and called a bunch of auto places, but no one was open, so we decided to take it easy and just get to the show. We limped into New York and somehow made it through the Staten Island tunnel, which is more than a little terrifying when you’re hauling a broken trailer behind a conversion van.

We finally made it to the venue and had a great time and got to party with a bunch of our Memphis transplant friends. Loading out after the show, Clay [Qualls] accidentally broke the key off in the lock on our trailer. It ended up being easier to just tear the trailer door off rather than deal with the locks and load all our stuff into the U-Haul we rented for the rest of the tour. All the while we were being harassed by a junkie who looked like an extra from The Nightmare Before Christmas. We had to make the tough choice to abandon our trailer there in the Big Apple. Another victim of the road. R.I.P. trailer, I hope you’ve finally found peace in some scenic New York junkyard — or as a Brooklyn hipster’s apartment.  

Joey Killingsworth — Joecephus and the George Jonestown Massacre

I got so many bad stories…

We drive to the middle of Georgia to play a car show. And to get there, you had to get walkie-talkied in. One car at a time on this little gravel road in the middle of nowhere. Once you got down to it, there was a field with all of these cars and stage in front of a dirt track. We start talking to people, and these rednecks are scary even for white folks. Dave said, “You took me to a Klan rally where they don’t bother to wear hoods.” These motherfuckers were crazy. These guys were showing us their gun wounds, their knife wounds. I was like, this is a little too much for us.

There was a guy in a blue gorilla suit playing upright bass, doing ‘White Wedding”, and some ‘80s songs. He was cool. But then we got on stage, and the wind started blowing towards the stage. Whenever the cars would drive behind us, the dirt would blow up on us. It was covering my pedals, my guitar, everything.

As soon as we got done, we were like, we gotta get paid and get the hell outta here. But they were like, hang on, we have an emergency. Somebody broke their foot. We’re waiting on a helicopter. We were like, why don’t you just get the ambulance? No, he was some drunk redneck on a quad runner, and his foot actually broke off, like, it came off. So they had to airlift him out. And that was Dave Wade’s first show with us. He said, ‘That was the day I said, ‘I’m never going to do this again.’ That was six years ago.

My personal worst was the Hogrock festival in Illinois. It’s in the middle of a field that they used to use for the Gathering of the Juggalos. There are three big stages. You gotta follow trails in the middle of nowhere to get to them.

At first it was awesome, but it turned out that was the night the cicadas came out. Like, they were literally emerging from the ground. We were in an open area in the middle of the woods. Me and Brian [Costner] were not wearing shirts, and Daryl [Stephens] from Another Society was playing drums. The cicadas were swarming all over us. They stayed on us the whole time. They were swinging on the bill of my cap, hanging off of my guitar. It was like somebody throwing softballs at you. I would kick a bunch of ’em out of the way to get to a pedal. Daryl said he was just playing and cringing, watching these cicadas climb on our backs. We did an hour and a half set. It was like that the whole time.

Marco Pavé

Marco Pavé

I was 15 years old and auditioning for a talent show in the Frayser High Gymnasium. I had downloaded the beats from a site called Soundclick, and at the beginning of the beat, there was an audio tag that said I didn’t purchase the beat. I downloaded it from the internet so I could perform! I was 15 years old! I didn’t know!

So I came, I had my songs ready, I performed them, I rocked the songs. Then the guy was like, “Yeah, man, you had the tag on your beat. That means you’re not serious. We would have picked you if you had used a professional beat or a beat that you owned.” Basically, they took my $50 submission fee as a 15-year-old and told me to go home.

Booker T. Jones

Booker T. Jones

I drove from Memphis to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, not long after we had recorded “Green Onions.” I think they told the people that I needed an organ, so they went to the church and got a pipe organ. They didn’t tell them it needed to be a Hammond B3 Organ. It was a simulated pipe organ with stops — a spinet. It was like a church organ — the notes didn’t make a sound right away. It wouldn’t work. I ended up trying to play “Green Onions” on a pipe organ in this club in Baton Rouge. That’s got to be the weirdest sound I’ve ever heard.

Richard Dumas

Lorette Velvette

Lorette Velvette — Tav Falco’s Panther Burns

It was 1986. We’d been up in NYC. “The Starvation Tour.” Bob [Fordyce] would just write “FOOOOOD” in his sketch book. So we were crowded in the car, and we had no money. George [Reinecke] was sent into a country store somewhere along the way, and he bought white bread and some head cheese nobody else would touch. So all I was eating was white bread.

We went down to the Metroplex in Atlanta. We started our show, and I was on stage playing tambourine. During “Tina the Go Go Queen,” two policemen came up and told me to come off stage. And I said, “No! Wait till the end of the song!”

Then I went off stage into this other room with them. The Panther Burns kept playing. And so the policeman wrote me up and said, “I’m giving you this ticket for playing tambourine without a permit.”

I was so mad I snatched the ticket from his hand, but he didn’t let go. He held onto the ticket. I just turned away from him, just looking at the heavens, going, “God, this is bullshit!” Then he grabbed me from behind in a big bear hug and ran me out the door, several yards, onto the sidewalk.

By then, the Panther Burns had gotten out there. Tav was begging him to not arrest me, but they said I had “resisted arrest.” This was the police officer who had bear-hugged me and his senior sergeant. The two of them conferred: “Well, should I take her in?” And the sergeant said, “Well, you’ve already laid your hands on her.”

Immediately, the paddy wagon was there. Back doors open, I get shoved in. And Tav was begging him, he was like, “Please, please, don’t arrest her!” And before the doors shut he said, “She’s been eating white bread for a week!”

They took me to the downtown jail, and I had to stand in line. I was dressed in my pink vinyl miniskirt, with a black half top and go-go boots. They all thought I was a prostitute, so they put me in the cell with a bunch of other ladies. When I walked in, they all wanted my cigarettes, so I gave out my cigarettes to make friends. There was a telephone in the room, and they’d get on the telephone and call their husbands and tell them not to press charges. Like, these women had beaten up their husbands. Several of them.

My bail was $1,500. Around daybreak, the Panther Burns came and I was like, “How did you make bail?” It turned out, the people in the club had chipped in, the club had chipped in, and the pizza place at Little Five Points had chipped in a bunch, and they got the money together and got me out. I had to go to court literally the next day. A lot of people came from the club, saying, “They’ve been trying to shut us down for a long time.”

There was a lawyer assigned to me who said, “Let’s try to settle this out of court.” He made a deal, that they would drop the charge of resisting arrest — and I probably weighed 105 pounds — if I agreed not to sue them. Of course, I couldn’t, because we didn’t have any money. And I didn’t want to ever go back to Atlanta again.

Marcia Clifton — The Klitz

The worst one, probably, was the one that should have been the best, when we went to New York to open for the Mondo Video film. Remember Mr. Bill? And Michael O’Donoghue. He was a writer for Saturday Night Live. We opened for his movie, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video. Sept. 23, 1979 at the Times Square Tango Palace. Elizabeth Johnson was a girl from Memphis who went to Harvard, and she got in, like, a cool crowd and suggested us to play for this. And of course they heard the name and they were like, “Oh yeah, the Klitz!” It was perfect.

And so we were just kinda like…we weren’t really tight, because we were nervous, and I think we had had too much to drink. Rolling Stone was there, and we got a review in Rolling Stone and it said, “The only thing worse than the Mondo Punch was the entertainment.” That was a quote from the actress Sylvia Miles, who appeared in Andy Warhol’s Heat. They flew us up there, put us in a hotel, we went to all the parties, and then, when it was time for the gig, we just kinda fell apart. It was kinda sad.

Stephen Sweet

The Grifters

Tripp Lamkins — The Grifters

I think it was 1992. We were on a month-long tour with Flaming Lips and Codeine. We were in Atlanta at a club called The Masquerade, which was split into three levels. You entered mid-level into Purgatory. The bands played upstairs in Heaven. The sub-level was a red-lit, S&M-themed bar called Hell. Of course, we went down to Hell.

The bar was just opening, and the only other person in there besides the bartender is a guy playing pinball. Shirtless, muscular, black leather pants, black boots, black policeman’s hat, handcuffs. We ask if he’s a regular. Bartender says, “No, that’s Frank, the bouncer.”

Later, we play our set. Good show — hard not to have a good show on that tour. It was the biggest crowds we’d played to up till then. We’re sitting backstage having after-show beers. There’s a knock on the door.

This guy peeks his head in and asks, “Grifters?” We’re like, “Yeah.”

He creeps in with two friends in tow. He tells us how glad they are we came back to Atlanta and that we killed it out there. Of course, we’re grateful and invite them to hang.

They sit down, and dude continues to blow smoke up our asses. “You guys are blowing up! Every song was killer! I bet you’re blowing Flaming Lips off the stage every night! Mind if we grab a beer?”

Dude grabs three beers, hands two off to his friends, and continues to ramble. “This new record man. It’s friggin killer!” Kills his beer. Grabs another one. “Man, you guys are gonna be fighting off the majors!” Kills that beer, grabs another.

Then I see him give a sideways glance to his friends and he asks, “Man, what’s the third song off of side two on the new record?” I say, “Encrusted?” He says “YEAH MAN! ‘ENCRUSTED’! The guitar solo on that song is friggin’ DOPE!”

I say, “Okay, this has been fun. Time for you guys to go,” and they leave. I turn around and Scott and Stan are like, “What’d you do that for?” and I’m like “There isn’t a guitar solo on ‘Encrusted’! We don’t have guitar solos on any of our songs!” And it sinks in. We’d been grifted for backstage beer.

Stan says, “We’re not gonna let him get away with this are we?” I say, “Hell no!”

The club was packed, and the Lips were raging loud. We didn’t know what we would do. After casing the place, we decided to wait by the men’s room. It worked. Almost immediately, dude walked right by us, swigging beer and laughing and — I’m not kidding — he actually says, “I stole this beer from the Grifters! Haw Haw Haw!”

So we’re thinking, “This guy’s going down!” But we only have moments to formulate a plan. We decide we would appear to be fighting each other when dude comes out of the bathroom, and then Stan would hurl me at him and I would either knock him down or knock the beer out of his hand.

Stan and I start shoving each other around and cussing at each other for what seemed like five minutes when finally the guy comes out of the men’s room. Stan grabs me by the lapels and throws me at the guy—who casually sidesteps me! As I’m falling backwards, I reach out and just knock his beer to the ground. It shatters on the floor, and he flies into a rage.

He screams, “That was MY beer!” Stan jumps to my side and points in his face and says, “A beer you STOLE from the Grifters!” He looks all kinds of confused and then goes into a Three Stooges, Curly kind of wind-up. Stan and I plant ourselves, then suddenly Frank the S&M bouncer comes from behind us and hurls the guy into the wall and says, “GOD-DAMN-IT, BILLY! HOW MANY TIMES WE GOTTA DO THIS?”

Frank shoves the guy’s arm into his back and gets him in a headlock and then drags him backwards down the stairs literally kicking and screaming. We looked down over the banister and Stan yells, “This is what happens when you fuck with the Grifters!”

Herman Green — B.B. King

I played with B.B. King a couple years. He saved my life, man, ’cause he didn’t have a car, and I had a car. And so we’re coming back from Blytheville. They had those narrow bridges in Arkansas, and we was following this truck with a trailer. And he signaled, another one coming toward us, some kinda way they had a signal, and told them to come on, don’t stop. And it had been raining. I wasn’t driving, the piano player was. And he hit the brakes … no brakes. We hit that bridge and knocked up three concrete posts, and as fast as we were going, we couldn’t stop.

I felt something go across my chest, like someone was fighting me. It was B.B. and the way he did it, he took his left arm and went that way, and he balanced himself on the bench. So he wasn’t going no where. ‘Cause they didn’t have seat belts back then. That was back in the late ’40s, early ’50s. And he saved my life, because I’d a went through the windshield.

And then, you’ve heard of Ford Nelson at WDIA, haven’t you? He’s a disc jockey. He was with us. He weighed about 240 pounds, and after we hit those concrete posts, the car was laying right on the edge of the bank, teetering. Ford got out one way and the car went the other way. And we slid down and the hood got right in the mud down there. And I told Ford, I said, “Man, don’t you ever move! I don’t care where we at, just sit still!”

Kelley Anderson — Those Darlins

Those Darlins played the 2009 Americana Music Festival in Nashville and were scheduled to play before John Fogerty. Creedence Clearwater Revival was one of Jessi [Zazu]’s favorite bands, and she was excited to get to see him.

At the last minute, Fogerty decided he wanted to play earlier. The festival organizers accommodated his request (because he’s John freakin’ Fogerty) and shifted our scheduled time to be after his. All performers were supposed to play around 45 minutes, and he rocked for almost two hours. At one point, there were three guitars on stage — there were so many guitars.

After he completely rocked everyone’s faces off, we set up our ragtag equipment in front of theirs on the stage they just destroyed and basically played outro music for the waves of people filing out of the Mercy Lounge.

Their drums were still set up on a giant riser, so Linwood [Regensburg] set up his kit in front of theirs, and the rest of us kind of filled out to the side, with me playing behind a large column. With no soundcheck and a “Here goes nothing!” sigh, we took it in stride and played a good show for the 20 or 30 diehard Darlins fans who remained up front. So maybe it wasn’t the worst gig ever, but it was a little embarrassing to be playing to such a large room of people leaving. But hey, not everyone can say that John Fogerty opened up for their band!

The Reigning Sound

Jeremy Scott — Reigning Sound

The day after opening for the White Stripes at the White Blood Cells album release in Detroit, the Reigning Sound rolled into Columbus, Ohio, for a gig that night.  It was at Bernie’s Distillery, a long-running local institution. We were under the impression, probably from the guy who booked the tour, that Bernie’s had a kitchen. The key word here is “had.” In fact, the whole place looked like it had been closed for at least three years. (Bernie’s soldiered on until the end of 2015, incredibly.) When we asked to see a menu, the dude behind the bar said, “Um, our kitchen closed a few weeks ago, but hang on a sec,” and headed where we couldn’t see him.  When he returned, he informed us, “Well, there’s a whole ham back there. The top part is green, but I could shave off the bottom for you and make sandwiches.” We all looked at each other and said “Nah, we’re good.” Add in the thoroughly disgusting bathroom which gave ’70s-era CBGB a run for its money, and a bunch of out-of-place Ohio State grads, and you have a fairly disorienting experience. That’s life, though. One day you’re playing with the White Stripes, the next day a random bartender is trying to kill you.

The Masqueraders

Harold Thomas — The Masqueraders

[In 1968, the Masqueraders hit the road to support their hit “I Ain’t Gotta Love Nobody Else.”]

Our first engagement on that tour was at the Apollo Theater. This was the craziest experience we ever had in our life. We got up there, we were just ol’ country boys. We didn’t know. We really came from a capella, to the studio, and now we gotta have music. We didn’t know we needed charts!

We get to the Apollo Theater, and the bandleader goes, “All right, Masqueraders, let me have your charts.”

We go, “Charts? You know, we always just go, ‘Well, the music goes like this, dowmp dowmp dowmp!'”

They go, “Oh no, man … we need some charts.” Okay.

So one of those guys says, “Hey, I tell you what, I know the song. You all give me $50, and I’ll write the charts for ya. Tonight, when y’all come back, I’ll have ’em ready.”

That night, they call us, “Masqueraders, Masqueraders, you’re up next!”

We run out on the stage, waiting for them to play our song. They didn’t play nothing like it. It wasn’t nothing like it! We was looking at each other going, “What the … hell?”

And the people in the audience, they were starting to mumble, getting ready to throw tomatoes and eggs. You know how they did back in the day.

So one of our guys said, “Hold it, hold it, man, we don’t need no music! We don’t need no MUSIC. Stop right now!”

And then he headed out on that melody [a capella], “Up in the morning …” and we were like “Wooo-ooh.” “Out on the job … ”

When we got through singing that song, they were standing up, you hear me?