Learn How to Play the Blues (rock, folk, etc.).

Beginners Welcome.

Patient and Encouraging Teacher.

Topics include:

• Harmonica Technique,
• Musicianship,
• How to improvise,
• How to play well with others (at least me, on guitar)
• and more!
  

$50 for 60 minute lessons.

10 years teaching private harmonica and guitar lessons.
I teach out of my humble home in the Haight, and Union Music Company (on Market St. @ Valencia). 
Call Union Music for references: 415-775-6043.

Schedule your lessons today!

www.alexwalsh.com
alex@alexwalsh.com
415-437-0671

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Requirements: “C” Harmonica
Which one? I like the Hohner Special 20, but  there are lots of options–experiment!

Instructional books: I like to use the Progressive Series of music books to teach Harmonica with (but anything you have will do). I think the layout and explanations are very clear, and they include a cd with tracks for each example (usually with a band). For beginners, pick up the Progressive Beginner Blues Harmonica  book by Peter Gelling. You can purchase it locally at Union Music, or order it online.

Shinji Eshima is a double-bassist in the San Francisco Ballet (Associate Principal) and San Francisco Opera Orchestras. He is on the faculty at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. An award-winning composer, he has written for a variety of venues including theater, documentary film, chamber music, opera, ballet, and has even written Buddhist hymns.

Shinji was born in Berkeley, and attended public school there. For his contribution to the arts, the city of Berkeley named a day after him at a recent City Council meeting. “I told the council I was very proud to receive the award, and that it was entirely public education that made this possible. Music in the schools produces a greater and more robust world. You have better thinkers, better contributors, and this award acknowledges that. The value of that cannot be underestimated.”

As a child, Shinji took piano lessons, which he says is common in Japanese households. At nine years old, he won the Junior Bach Festival. At a later competition, he had a memory slip during the winner’s recital—a turning point. “I went to the keyboard, and I thought, ‘Oh God, 88 keys, which one do I press first?’ That changed my life.”

In high school, he switched to the bass. His first string teacher was the late Anne Crowden. “I thought it would be easier because there was only one line to do at a time.”

Shinji was proud to attend Berkeley High. “We did Mahler’s 2nd Symphony, over a hundred people, with full chorus and soloists—and the West Coast premiere of Britten’s War Requiem. That’s how much music was valued at the time. It was an amazing thing to experience as a kid.” When the conductor, Bill Elliott, suggested that Shinji consider the bass a career, Shinji thought he was joking. “I never thought of it as a career until I got to college. It was just nice to play in an orchestra. It was more of a social thing back then.” His graduating class included Peter Shelton, former assistant principal cellist at the San Francisco Symphony, Ben Simon, now conductor of the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, and Doris Fukawa, who is now director of the Crowden School in Berkeley.

Shinji received a tuition scholarship to Stanford, where he assumed he would become an engineer. After meeting with a student advisor and realizing the course work involved, he switched to music. At Stanford, he studied bass with Charles Siani and played in the orchestra. He graduated a year early with honors, and then went on to Julliard, where he studied with David Walter.

In 1979, after receiving his Masters, Shinji returned to the Bay Area. He played with the Marin Symphony, and won an audition for the San Jose Symphony. In 1980, when Davies Hall opened, it created vacancies in both the SF Symphony and the SF Opera Orchestra; the musicians were required to choose one or the other. Shinji auditioned and was offered both positions. “At that time, the Opera and Symphony paid the same amount, but the Opera was half the time, so I said, okay, I’ll do the Opera.”

To his dismay, he found that he hated Opera music. “I didn’t know what I was getting into. My first rehearsal was Verdi, and I thought, ‘this sounds like circus music—Oompa oompa.’ I was perplexed. It took me a long time to learn the irony in the music. And it took a long time for me to appreciate singers. For ten years, I thought the singing was distracting to the music! I’ve since grown to prefer it. It doesn’t feel like a complete work unless it embodies theater as well.”

By the 1990s, Shinji was in love with opera. “I remember Calvin Simmons, the late conductor of the Oakland Symphony, came and conducted Lady Macbeth and just blew the house down. At that time, we had amazing singers—Caballe was singing. When I heard her voice, even though she’s 300 pounds, I just fell in love. I can’t believe how she can float a note. It’s a sound that just goes straight to your heart.”

“In the Arts, there’s sometimes a fine line between appreciation and falling in love, because the highs that you can get from a performance can be really thrilling. It’s intoxicating. I think that’s the reason why people are willing to hear something over and over again, the live music experience. There’s nothing like it. It grabs you from the inside.”

Shinji has a great appreciation for the Nutcracker, and can’t think of another show he would want to play 1000 times. “It has provided me with a house over the years, and I’m just one musician. When you think about the dancers and production crews, and all the different companies doing it all over the world, Tchaikovsky is like a whole country’s economy. Also, because of all the young kids, you get a whole new audience every year. For them, it’s a new experience. You get a new feeling every year.”

In the SF Ballet Orchestra, Shinji plays a unique bass. Made by Plumerel, it had its birth in the Paris Ballet in 1843, and appears in one of Degas’ famous ballet paintings. Shinji’s teacher, David Walter, played it in the NYC Ballet, and Shinji got it just in time for the 75th anniversary of the SF Ballet.

In 2010, Shinji’s life took a surprising turn when Yuri Possokhov, the resident choreographer and former principal dancer for the SF Ballet, asked him if he would be interested in collaborating on a ballet based on a Japanese story. Shinji jumped at the chance. “I’ve been composing now for 20 years, mainly chamber music for friends. RAkU was written for my friends in the ballet orchestra. The solos are written for specific people. I’ve been playing with these guys for 30 years, so I know what they’re able to do.”

Shinji said the bassoon solo he wrote for Rufus Olivier was very difficult. “He taught me all these ways to play the bassoon, and so I incorporated all of them in his solo. A few of us play poker during the breaks. During the first rehearsal, Rufus played his solo, and the guy who sits next to him leaned over and said – ‘You should have let him win.’ It’s a remark like that that makes it all worth it. There’s a camaraderie, a sense of humor.” Shinji also wrote a cello solo for David Kadarauch, who was retiring from the orchestra, and a fourth horn solo for Bill Klingelhoffer, who taught him a lot about the horn.

with members of the SF Ballet Orchestra:
Steve D’Amico, Shinji Eshima, David Kadarauch,
Jon Lancelle, Eric Sung, and Nora Pirquet.

The process of learning how to compose for ballet, and collaborate with Yuri, was a challenge. “Writing is very different to ballet than it is to something abstract. The dancers need different counts, different rhythms and tempos, to enable them to do what they do. Yuri really insisted on what he envisioned for the work. It was a lot of give and take.” Shinji worked out his ideas on the Steinway piano underneath the stage in the Opera House, his favorite place in the whole building. He recorded hundreds of different versions on synthesizer until he got it right.

For the premier, Shinji was able to watch the first three shows from the audience. After that, he was back in the pit, sight reading his own score. “It was the thrill of a lifetime! And the fact that it was successful is the icing on the cake.” In the fall of 2011, the SF Ballet had a successful tour to Los Angeles, where they performed RAkU with the Pacific Symphony. A unique feature of RAkU is its incorporation of Buddhist chanting. Through one of his students, Shinji made a connection with the San Francisco Zen Center, which provided monks to chant during the performances. “They chanted the most beautiful text. It means, ‘We’re here listening to your suffering, and we’re chanting for your well being’.”

Shinji’s family is Buddhist. “I have uncles who were bishops in Hawaii and Canada. My grandmother was the first woman to be ordained as a Buddhist minister. She started the Buddhist Study Center in Berkeley. That was where Alan Watts and Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen had their roots in studying Buddhism here. I have that in my family background. I haven’t practiced it, it’s just sort of come to me lately. People have always said that my music sounds Japanese. As much as I’ve tried to resist that, it just  unconsciously comes through I guess.”

The score for RAkU was recorded at Skywalker. Shinji says Steve D’Amico and Peter Wahrhaftig were instrumental in convincing the SF Ballet administration that it was a viable project. “It was basically not going to happen without the efforts of the orchestra. They took a vote and agreed to do it, and the result is unbelievable. The SF Ballet is producing it and releasing it. The proceeds go to them. The union helped out a lot by approving the circumstances to allow the recording to happen. It’s such a dream to be at Skywalker and have an orchestra play your work. I can’t thank everyone enough.”

Shinji continues to teach, perform, and compose. He has students performing all over the world—in the SF Symphony, the London Philharmonia, the Montreal Symphony, and the latest, the Utah Symphony. For the International Bass Convention held at SF State University last summer, he served on the organizing and host committees, as a performer and also as a judge of the orchestral competition. More than 1200 bassists participated. “The prize was named after the late Charles Siani. The winner of this competition was supposed to get a week as a paid player in the SF Symphony. I’m told he just won the Cleveland Orchestra job, which tells of the high quality we had here.”

Last summer, Shinji wrote a piece for Bay Brass, and is currently writing a new one. In the Fall, he had a premiere of a chamber piece in New York for the National Dance Theater, directed by Jacques D’Amboise. For the 50th anniversary of the Zen center, he was asked to compose a piece in collaboration with poet Gary Snyder, one of the first students to come to his grandmother’s Buddhist Study Center. The San Francisco Ballet will perform RAkU again this spring.

“And, I just received my latest union benefit–my dues are going down as a 35-year member. I can’t believe it’s been that long. It still feels like yesterday.”

For his career, he had planned to become a college professor and did so, but performing as a professional musician was always a parallel career. Retiring from teaching in 1992, David has continued to perform. “That’s not the way it’s supposed to go,” he says,” you’re supposed to retire from performing and then teach. I did the opposite.”

David was born in 1931. He was raised in New York City, mostly in Rego Park, Queens. “It wasn’t until years later that I found out I was born in New Jersey—another opposite. I was surprised that no one told me.” With three older sisters, he was considered the baby of the family. His father was a small business man. As a child, he remembers wanting to play the violin, but found himself in a clarinet class in elementary school. Actually, he says he knew so little about music at the time that he had confused “clarinet” with “cornet” and was just too shy to protest when he found that it wasn’t a brass instrument, so he just went along with it for three years. “No one in my immediate family was a musician, although my father’s side of the family were talented amateur artists and my mother had a strikingly beautiful untrained voice.”  A cousin, Roger Sprung, is a well-known blue-grass banjo player; another cousin, Barbara Sprung Wilkes is a talented pianist and a nephew, Alan Menken, is the famous Oscar-winning Disney composer of films such as Pocohontas, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

In high school, David finally got the courage to tell his parents that he really wanted to play the trumpet. He began taking trumpet lessons from Lorenzo Sansone, a well-known horn teacher, who happened to be a client of his father’s accountant. (Just so you know – “Horn” means “French Horn”.)  Mr. Sansone had been a renowned horn player, by then retired, and had successfully branched out into designing and manufacturing instruments, as well as publishing music. He also taught horn and made horns for the military during WWII. When David’s high school music teachers heard that he was taking trumpet lessons from Mr. Sansone, they asked him why he wasn’t taking horn lessons. “I was indifferent to their suggestions – I barely knew what a French horn was”. But they kept working on me – they had lots of trumpet players but few horn players, and at an open school night they said to my parents, ‘You know, if David takes up the horn, we can almost guarantee he’ll get a scholarship to college.’ That was music to their ears, so my parents said, ‘David, why don’t you take up the horn?’ So they bought a horn from Mr. Sansone, and he began giving me lessons.” After a couple of years with Mr. Sansone, David went to a new teacher, Robert Schulze, retired fourth horn of the New York Philharmonic, who was then an adjunct at the Manhattan School of Music. ”Schulze had me sign up for lessons at the Manhattan School because they partially subsidized the lesson fee, but I never attended any classes nor graduated from there. But, to this day, for some reason, the Manhattan School of Music considers me an alumnus.”

David attended Stuyvesant High School, which is well known as a school that specialized in science education. David had always loved science and had thought that would be his career path. But he progressed very rapidly on the horn, quickly joining the high school orchestra. After six months of lessons, he got into the All-City High School Orchestra and was playing in numerous community orchestras. He joined Local 802 in 1946 at age 15. In his senior year, he applied to the University of Michigan as a bio-chemistry major, but was turned down. When his high school music teachers suggested to the University that they were losing a great horn player, they took a second  look. “But by that time I had decided to go to Queens College, which was tuition-free and an excellent liberal arts school.” He lived at home and immersed himself in his studies.

In 1951, after his second year in college, the Korean War started, and to avoid the draft, he enlisted in the Navy. He went to the Navy School of Music in Washington, D.C. for nine months, then on to the Naval Training Center Band in San Diego. It was a large concert band that mostly played dress parades and ceremonials for graduating recruits and an occasional concert. Having lots of time on his hands, he practiced the horn, played in a youth orchestra, and, starved for good musical experiences, auditioned and joined a chorus organized one summer for Robert Shaw, who was in town for a special choral festival. “I remember singing bass (badly) in the chorus and participating in rehearsals and performances of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and Honnegger’s La Roi David accompanied by the San Diego Symphony. What a thrill!”

After two years, he was sent to the Far East, where he played in Unit Band 149, which was attached to the 7th Fleet and served as the admiral’s personal band. “These fleet bands were 17-piece groups that would play everything from marches and parades to concerts and dances. Why they needed a French horn, I have no idea. The sailors appreciated big band music, and sometimes they were short a sax, so I played tenor parts on the horn. It works pretty well.” During that time, the Navy announced a march competition with a first prize of $1,000. “Having lots of time on my hands, I composed a march and submitted it. To my surprise, among the hundreds of marches entered, mine came in second. All I got was a certificate and a hand shake, but it was nice to get the recognition.”

Following his discharge from the Navy in 1955, David returned to Queens College to complete his BA in Music. While at Queens, David became more interested in conducting and composition. “Vittorio Rieti and then Luigi Dallapiccola were guest professors in composition at Queens at the time and I had the privilege of studying with them.” He received a couple of prizes as a result of compositions written under their tutelage. ”I had some really great teachers at Queens, but I did not study horn in school; I studied everything else but horn.” The Queens College Music Department at the time was an academically-oriented environment and had no instrumental instruction. “Now, of course, they have the Aaron Copland School of Music and a full array of applied offerings.”  David did continue playing, though, performing in the school orchestra and various community and semi-professional orchestras. He finished his undergraduate degree in 1957 with a vague career path connected to conducting in mind. “It was something related to the idea that, there are no American conductors of any repute other than Leonard Bernstein, which was true at the time, so I thought what I should do is get a good liberal arts degree, and a master’s degree, and teach college somewhere. I liked the Queens College model. So for graduate school I applied to Princeton as a composition major because I thought composing would be a good way to get the skills to be a conductor.  The conductor waving his arms is trivial; what’s really important is to understand music, understand the notes, what’s inside the notes—orchestration, form, style, music history. Those are the things you learn in a liberal arts education environment.”

In 1957 he was accepted to Princeton as a composition major under the G.I. Bill.  At Princeton, he studied with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt. He also played principal horn in the Princeton Symphony. During his second year, he received a fellowship, which paid for the rest of his degree. About this time, he had a life changing encounter. He had just read “The Art of French Horn Playing” by Philip Farkas, a renowned horn pedagogue, and principal horn for the Chicago Symphony. “I wrote him a letter, just cold turkey. I said, ‘I know you tour with the Chicago Symphony, and I’d love to take a lesson with you when you’re near New York or New Jersey.’ He wrote me back and said yes. In that one lesson, he corrected my embouchure deficiency, and transformed my playing. It gave me a much better sound and much more flexibility. To this day, I think I can still play at the age of 80 due to that initial instruction from Philip Farkas.”

On tour with the Metropolitan Opera, 1960.

Princeton had promised David that they would get him a placement after graduation, but teaching jobs were tight at the time, so he returned to New York and taught part time at Queens College and City College. He also free-lanced as a horn player, finding work in The Orchestra of America, and the Symphony of the Air (previously the NBC Symphony) and a few other engagements. At the end of that year he auditioned and got into the Royal Ballet Orchestra as principal horn, which was traveling for twenty weeks in the US.  He also took an audition for the New York Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and won. “In those days, they did not advertise in the International Musician; it was all word of mouth. But as a freelancer I found out about it.” He was able to find a sub to get out of his touring contract, and began playing for the Met as a 2nd and/or 3rd horn in 1960.

David enjoyed playing at the Met, but really wanted to be a first horn player. His colleague, Richard Moore, told him the Pittsburgh Symphony was auditioning for a first horn. David auditioned and was accepted for the season beginning in the Autumn of 1961. It was a short, twenty-eight-week season, packed with concerts and tours. “We toured on the Greyhound Bus. I learned a lot, but I wasn’t happy doing it on a long-term basis. It was just too busy and hectic.  After the first season, I packed up my wife and child and returned to New York before returning for a second season the following Fall, and then resigned.”

He returned to his plan of getting a college teaching job. With the help of a music teacher placement service, he found a job as Assistant Professor of Horn and Theory at the University of Wichita, in Kansas. He taught horn and music theory, but was soon dissatisfied there because, while he enjoyed teaching, the general academic environment was not what he expected nor was accustomed to. After three years, he called Princeton again, and they told him there were opportunities in California, which was expanding its university system at the time. He took a post at Sonoma State College, a brand new school that was starting a music department. “Fred Warren was the chairman. He was less impressed by the fact that I graduated with honors from Queens, and got a Fellowship at Princeton, but for some reason he really liked the idea that I had gone to Stuyvesant High School.” It was 1966. He moved to Novato with his second wife, Gail, and began teaching theory and composition and tried to organize a community orchestra at Sonoma State. “That was difficult because the Santa Rosa Symphony, then itself a community orchestra, seemed to feel threatened as I saw it, although I did end up playing with them from time to time.” He also began subbing with the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and the San Francisco and Oakland Symphonies, but found that the school was somewhat skeptical of his outside activities due to some scheduling conflicts.

“By that time, 1970, California State University, Hayward, as it was known then, was building a big applied music department, and wanted a full time horn professor. I was offered that job, and took it, so we moved from Marin County to the East Bay. I taught at Hayward from 1970 to 1992.”

The SF Ballet horn section: (l-r)  Bill Klingelhoffer,
Brian McCarty, Keith Green and David Sprung.

In 1973, he got into the San Francisco Opera Orchestra full-time as co-principal horn. The Opera had a fall-only season at the time. In 1975, the San Francisco Ballet decided they wanted their own regular orchestra and he became principal horn of that, as well as the Opera, while still teaching at Cal State. By then, Gail and he also had two kids. “It was a lot of juggling.”

Sometime during the ‘80s, David decided to ask for partial leave from teaching so he could concentrate more on performing. He taught half-time and continued to play in the Opera and Ballet Orchestras, and on freelance gigs, including recording sessions at Skywalker Ranch. His nephew, Alan Menken, invited him to play some of his film dates in Los Angeles.

David Sprung Conducting Symphony Parnassus
in his Fantasy Variations

“I still wanted to be a conductor, but I didn’t know how to promote myself for that. I did conduct a couple of years at the Bohemian Club.” In 2000, he decided to go for it. He retired from the Ballet Orchestra, took a leave of absence from the Opera Orchestra, and moved to Florida to start an orchestra. “We bought a house in Palm Coast, Florida and started the Flagler Symphony, near Daytona Beach, so I could conduct. It required funds to be raised, and it was difficult. It went on for two years as a regular orchestra, then for two years as a weekend festival. I made sure it was a union orchestra.”

After two years, he began commuting coast-to-coast, coming back for the opera season and returning to Florida the rest of the year. In 2004, the Sprungs returned to the Bay Area permanently and David retired from the Opera Orchestra in 2008. Today, he continues to compose and freelance. He has played principal horn with the Midsummer Mozart Festival since 2005. Last week, he played with the Symphony Silicon Valley.

In retirement, he has resurrected pieces he composed while at Princeton and Queens College and is working on new material, including solo piano pieces, a horn quartet, and a choral work. “Eventually, I hope to work on larger pieces for orchestra, and who knows, maybe even an opera.” He recently had compositions performed by the Symphony Parnassus and the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra.

David says that he’s a big fan of the union. “Both the Ballet and Opera paid in to the AFM-EP over the years and created a great pension for me, which makes my current endeavors viable.”

“I’ve lost some good friends and colleagues along the way. That’s the downside of living a long time. But I have a great family, have had a good career, and I have no complaints—I think.” (laughs)

The Sprung family: (l-r) Irene Sprung,
Steven Sprung, Karen Sprung, Gail Sprung,
David Sprung and Audrey Sprung Banks

In his opening remarks, President Schoenbrun revealed that 200 of our 306 life members have belonged to Local 6 for 50 years or longer. He then acknowledged George Cerruti, whose 72 years of membership was the longest of those who attended the event. Others in attendance who were given special recognition included: six of the 10 new 50-year members since last year’s lunch – Enrique Bocedi, Tom Duckworth, Vincent Gomez, Gordon Messick, Al Obidinski, and Don Prell, and five of the 25 new life members since last year’s lunch – Terry Adams, John Fisher, Tony Gallardo, Shota Osabe and Daryl Schilling..

The yearly raffle to support the AFM Tempo Fund raised the princely sum of $660. Local 6 thanks the following organizations for their generous donations of raffle prizes: Nick’s Restaurant, ACT, Chanticleer, Lamplighters Music Theater, Marin Symphony, New Century Chamber Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Shorenstein Theatres, TheatreWorks, SF Ballet, SF Opera, and SF Symphony. Local 6 is pleased to honor some of our most loyal and esteemed members by providing them with this yearly opportunity to re-connect, reminisce, and celebrate long-standing friendships.

Anyone who has ideas for improving next year’s picnic is welcome to join the committee! We have Skype meetings, mostly, so you don’t even have to go anywhere to attend a meeting, although you do have to have a computer, install Skype, and be in range of some kind of high speed internet service!

–Betsy London

“I didn’t move here until I was 37,” said Ruth. “To start a career in a major city when you’re that old is a challenge. I was always in competition and playing with younger players. It was great. I didn’t feel old, I felt lucky to be playing with these fine players.”

Ruth started her music career at age 16 in Russ Andre’s Orchestra, what she calls a “Mickey Mouse Dance Band.” She grew up in Cheney, Washington, near Spokane, where her father was a geography teacher at Eastern Washington University. The music came from her mother’s side of the family. Her grandmother was a singer in Germany, and her mother was an amateur musician who learned by tagging along to her big sister’s piano and violin lessons. “She raised four string players, three violinists and one cellist—3 girls, one boy.”

Ruth’s mother conducted a church orchestra for 12 to 14yr olds. “I remember sitting in her orchestra in our living room. I couldn’t read music then, but I just played open strings wherever they fit. It kind of got me hooked.”

Several years later, Ruth became a member of the Spokane Musicians Union, driving all over Western Washington to work 3-hr dance jobs at officers’ clubs (“Scale was $10 a night, $15 on New Year’s!”). She was also a member of the Spokane Symphony. After high school, Ruth assumed she would go into education, as that was her family background. She enrolled at the University of Washington and registered as a music education major, but she switched after one quarter. “I very quickly realized that I hated the classes, so I auditioned and became a performance major.”

Ruth went on to get a masters degree in performance. After college, she applied for teaching jobs and was soon hired at Columbia Basic College, in Pasco, to teach music history, strings, and a lot more. “The Superintendent said, ‘would you mind also starting some fourth and fifth grade string classes, and conducting a middle and a high school orchestra?’ And I said — ‘Oh, okay’.”

Ruth with Russ Andre’s Orchestra.

She taught four grade schools, and by the springtime had an orchestra of 150 kids, and middle and high school orchestras that grew by leaps and bounds. They had to hire a second string teacher for the second year. By the third year, the high school orchestra was playing all over the Pacific Northwest. “It’s just amazing when you get hungry parents, hungry kids, and a teacher that’s willing to kill herself,” she laughed. ”I can remember tuning 150 violins to get ready for that first concert, but I loved it. I’m a ham, and you have to be when you’re a teacher. You have to know how to quiet the kids down, to get them excited, and to make them hold the bow and violin the correct way—and have it all be fun. So that was quite an experience.”

After she got comfortable with teaching, Ruth founded an orchestra at the college. The tri-city area of Pasco, Kennewick, and Richland was filled with highly educated people who worked at the nearby nuclear facility, and they became an enthusiastic audience. Ruth also taught many of their children privately. She recruited players from the local college and the community orchestra, of which she was concertmaster, and hired professionals from the Seattle and Spokane locals. By this time, Ruth was married to Francis Coelho, who taught art at the college. He made the posters for the concerts.

By the late 1950s, Ruth’s orchestra was successful, her teaching career was established, and she was married with two small children. “I remember wanting to get ready for another concert at the college. I needed money to rent the music and pay the musicians, so I went to ask for money from the administration, which by that time, was under a different superintendent. I asked him for $100, and he said, ‘$100? You’re doing this for personal promotion and financial gain!’”

This was a real blow to Ruth, and a culmination of her frustrating experience with sexism, both as a performer and conductor. “It was strange times for a woman to try to conduct,“ she recalled. ”No one in my training at the University of Washington had even mentioned that this might happen. All they did was train me as a conductor and a musician. This was not something I was prepared for emotionally. I just couldn’t take the attitude that I was getting as a woman conductor, both from the men in the orchestra and the administration of that little college. So, I pulled back. I wasn’t willing to force myself to face this. That was lack of knowledge on my part, that this situation existed. You know, they were barely having women in orchestras then. So it was weird.”

Ruth’s husband wanted to get a PhD at Ohio State University, so the family left the area. Everyone was sad to see them go, and Ruth kept in touch with many of her students.

Once established in Columbus, Ohio, she started a chamber group that combined strings and wind instruments. They put on concerts, and her husband made the posters and programs. “I switched from violin to viola because I could play with really fine violinists, and a higher level of players.”

In the early sixties, her husband got a teaching job at Wisconsin State University in Whitewater, and Ruth again sought out performance opportunities. “I played with the Waukesha Symphony and had a string quartet. Eventually, a job came up at nearby Beloit College, where I taught violin, conducted the Beloit Youth Orchestra, and was concertmaster of the Beloit Symphony. That was a good job. I could have stayed there and made a good career.”

But her husband was fired from his job after three years. The family moved to South Dakota, and then to the Bay Area where her husband took a job as head of the Art Department at SF State.

In 1969, Ruth divorced her husband, and had to scramble to make ends meet, supporting two teenagers. She got a teaching job at San Dominico, a private girls’ school in Marin County, and started playing at the Curran Theater.

By this time she was committed to the viola. “I had to learn all the literature really fast.” She auditioned and got into the Oakland Symphony. “I just loved that orchestra. Gerhard Samuel was the conductor. Going to the audition, I had butterflies in my stomach, which meant I was going after something that I really wanted. Those were happy butterflies.”

The Marin String Art Quartet:
Charles Meacham, Jan Volkert,
Ruth Freeman, & Michael Gerling.

At this time, Ken Harrison was principal violist. “Hope and Art Bauch were there, and I sat with Hope. I learned a lot of professional things from them.” She kept practicing and auditioned many times for the SF Symphony, two times getting within two people. Each time she auditioned, she learned more material and improved as a player, which helped prepare her for her big moment, her successful audition for the SF Ballet Orchestra, and
then later for principal.

She explained that, because it’s such a small orchestra, the SF Ballet Orchestra has always had a philosophy that its members have to be good chamber music players. So they have always included playing chamber music as part of their audition process.

Ruth’s extensive background in chamber music, and her professional attitude of being prepared for anything, paid off. The audition material for the principal position included a Beethoven String Trio for violin, viola, and cello, and a particular movement that had several variations. One was for the viola, and one was for violin with viola accompaniment. Ruth did her homework by getting as many recordings as she could find of the piece. “In every one of the recordings, the viola accompaniment was played completely differently. I decided I needed to know all those different styles, so that’s how I practiced the variations. At the audition, when it came time for the Beethoven Trio, we played the variations, and even while we were playing that particular variation—Roy Malan (the concertmaster) and I—he was smiling.”

When she was informed by the conductor that she had won the audition, it was made clear that her ability to quickly match the style of the violinist was one of the reasons she won.

In addition to working for the Ballet Orchestra, Ruth continued to play Broadway musicals at the Curran Theater. This enabled her to put her oldest son through Stanford. “The ballet work was wonderful, but it was only a short season. We had to scramble the rest of the year.”

Ruth met her second husband, trombonist Will Sudmeier, in the pit of the Curran Theater. “We were married for 17 years, and we did a lot of performing together. He had arranged 250 pieces for brass ensemble and trombone choir. When he died, there was no one who would take over the collection. I knew the arrangements inside and out, so I cleaned them up and started selling them at trombone conventions and by mail.”

Ruth’s CD cover shot.

The connections Ruth made in both the theater and ballet led her to recording work. “That’s a big, big chunk of why I have a pension now,” she said. “The first one was One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, in 1975. When my grandkids heard I had played on that, they thought it was great.”

There was so much recording that, for awhile, Ruth thought she would have to give up something else. “Not just the movies, but jingles. For years I would play on Ed Bogas’s jingle jobs. He’d never print anything out. He’d always scribble something in pencil. Then we’d get to the job and he’d say, ‘violas–let’s do that down an octave, and let’s change the key.’ So we had to be really quick.”

In the 1980s, Ruth joined the Marin String Art Quartet, started by Charles Meacham. Other Local 6 members were Jan Volkert, and Michael Gerling. Ruth worked in the group for fifteen years.

In the late nineties, Ruth injured her hand and did not know if she would be able to play again.  For income, she started selling real estate in Marin.  During this time she married David Stoner, a friend from childhood. She decided to retire from the Ballet Orchestra and began to collect her Social Security and AFM pension. Eventually, they moved to Sunnyvale to be close to her grandchildren. “And then my hand came back!”

In “retirement”, Ruth continues to perform with local symphonies and chamber groups. In the past ten years, she has released two CDs, featuring solo performances with orchestra and sonatas accompanied by other musicians, both of which are available on the Local 6 website. She spends a lot of time watching her grandchildren practice, one of whom – Kevin Coelho – has aspirations of becoming a professional jazz organist. Kevin will be performing in the 2011 San Jose Jazz Festival. She recently celebrated her 80th birthday playing a chamber music concert with Brenda Torn (pianist), Bill and Kineko Barbini (violinists), and Julie Hochman (cello).

Also, she has taken on the project of putting Will Sudmeier’s arrangements into Sibelius 6. “I’m at about 140 now, with 105 left to do. I love the computer, and I love doing it. No one can do it who isn’t a musician, of course. Also you have to know something about trombones and brass instruments. I’m very proud of the job, and I hope to still be around when it’s finally done.”

Beth Welch Snellings is offering CELLO LESSONS for all ages and levels in San Francisco and beyond.

I have more than 20 years of cello teaching experience.

I provide a fun and nurturing learning environment for you to develop your playing skills (beginner, intermediate or advanced).

My teaching includes a diverse range of musical styles such as classical, jazz, popular, etc.

References upon request.

(415) 422-0976
Email: bethsnellings@att.net

Website:
www.bethwelchsnellings.com

Thank You 4 Dancin
It’s All About You

Tom Hart, the grandson of Albert G. Hart, is a native San Franciscan, born in 1926, who still lives in the same house his father bought in 1942.

“My father bought the house for $5000, with a down payment he saved up as a pharmacist. This was during the war, when they had black-outs in the City. The person who sold it was afraid of the Japanese submarines off the coast.”

Tom’s father was an ambulance driver in WWI. After the war, he took a UC Extension course, got a certificate, and started his own pharmacy. He lost his business (three stores), in the great depression, and ended up working as an assistant manager for Walgreen’s until he retired.

Tom was an only child, whose earliest memories include listening to Souza marches on his Victrola. Later, while attending Everett Jr. High, he tried out for the school band. “In those days,” he recalls, ”Harry James (trumpet) was the hero, and all the kids wanted to play like him. I tried out for trumpet, but didn’t make it. The teacher, Mr. Wemmar, needed an alto sax player for the dance band the next year. So he shoved an alto sax into my hand, gave me a copy of The Merry Widow Waltz, and sent me upstairs to the music room to work it out. When I came back down, he was very pleased. He brought in the principle and showed me off to him.”

In high school, Tom switched to tenor sax, became student leader of the dance band, and started writing his first charts. In 1944, during his junior year, he joined the Musicians Union and began playing professional gigs with bands that were hiring high school kids because of the war.  “I worked several gigs with Howard Fredric’s dance band, and played with Dick Salzman’s Quartet. The group was called Dick Salzman, the Boys, and Lorellen. His wife was the singer.“

Tom graduated from Polytechnic High School in January 1945, and was immediately inducted into the Navy. After attending the Navy School of Music at Anacostia in Washington, D.C. for a few weeks, he was shipped to Calcutta, India, on a troop transport—a converted oil tanker—to play on one of the ship’s hatch covers to entertain men in the Army returning home to be discharged. The remainder of his eighteen months of service was spent in Bremerton, Washington. In the morning he played marches with the military band for the troops standing in line to be discharged, and in the afternoon, he played in the jazz band at the local Red Cross. “I was eventually made Musician Second Class, the highest rank obtainable for this short time of service. The Navy, as with the other services, thought music was important for morale.”

In August of 1946, Tom returned to San Francisco and began school at SF State under the G.I. Bill. He married his high school sweetheart, Gloria, in 1948, and they started a family. During this time, he played local gigs, including a summer at a strip club in San Francisco’s International Settlement, with his trio, which included John Markham on drums and Vince Guaraldi on piano. With school, family, and music, his life was full. “Vince Guaraldi and Eddie Duran used to come over to my house, and we would jam and make charts. We even made a demo record for Fantasy Records, but it didn’t go anywhere. I still have the record.”

Tom with his father in the 1950′s.

After getting his BA degree, Tom continued on to get his masters and teaching credential. In 1951, he was hired to teach instrumental music and chorus at Tamalpais High School in Marin County. “Teaching school was a limiting thing, as far as being a musician. I didn’t have time during the day to do justice to both, so I had to make do. But if it hadn’t been for the music business, I couldn’t have survived just teaching school. Teachers salaries were not very good.”

In 1954, Tom moved to the East Bay to teach instrumental and choral music at San Leandro High. In 1957, he moved to Arroyo High School in San Lorenzo to teach choral  music, a job that lasted fifteen years, and where his daughter, Pam, and son, Kevin, were members of his a cappella choir, which won a fair  share of superior ratings.  During this time, he was elected president of the California Music Educators’ Association, and he adjudicated for Bay Area schools. “Every county would have a festival, and they would hire adjudicators to give them ratings. It was a cooperative idea, not a competition—a way for students to listen to, and learn from, other groups and directors.”

Tom with his son Kevin.

Tom also began working for bandleader Ray Hackett, sometimes playing two or three shows a week, a relationship that lasted thirty years. “There wasn’t much of a conflict when I was with Ray, because he would always have the rehearsals after school hours.Those were the days when a lot of the gigs consisted of corporate parties, and corporate meetings in the major hotels. They would hire major celebrities who would put on a show, which was then followed by a dance. I worked the Fairmont, the St. Francis, the Palace Hotel, and many other venues.”

Over the years, Tom’s chart writing skills became well known. “I wrote charts for Jamie Davis, vocalist for the Count Basie Band. The band recorded six of my charts with him. I did about 30 charts in all. At the same time, Jackie Ryan, vocalist for the Rudy Salvini Band, used a lot of my charts.”

During the late fifties and early sixties, Tom subbed with the Dave Brubeck Octet on occasion, and played once with the Stan Kenton Band at a USF dance. “That was scary because I was young and innocent,” he recalls. “It was interesting because Kenton was one of the major jazz bands of the era, and he still had enough of a name to go on tours. His main strength, also, was doing summer clinics at colleges along the tour. They were known as the Kenton Clinics. That was the beginning of the rise of college jazz.”

In 1971, Tom attended a Kenton Clinic at Sacramento State, and was asked by Kenton to join his band. Tom declined. “I had just signed a contract to teach jazz studies at De Anza College. So I lost the chance to be famous, or at least to play in the Kenton band. It was very problematic, risking a new job, teaching a subject that I had never taught before—my experience had been in choral music for years, not especially jazz. I wanted to make sure I stabilized my career of teaching jazz at the college level.”

When Tom started at De Anza College, he received a boost in salary, which was fortunate because corporate shows were beginning to taper off.  In 1975, under Tom’s direction, the second-year jazz band won the Pacific Coast Collegiate Jazz Festival first-place trophy. He continued teaching at De Anza until he retired, eventually becoming an administrator during his final years.

In 1973, Ernie Heckscher, who led the house band at the Fairmont Venetian Room, hired Tom to play when Tony Bennett appeared. “There is a solo space in Tony’s book for the tenor saxophone. So I got a chance to play with him. From then on, he requested that I be hired whenever he came to town. This lasted for 8 years. I even got a mention in Herb Caen and John Wasserman.”

During the late 70s, Tom continued to teach and perform, conduct on occasion, and play in rehearsal bands. When Davies Symphony Hall first opened in San Francisco, he was asked to conduct a concert with the Ink Spots. Jamey Aebersold, a well-known jazz educator, clinician and music publisher, invited Tom to travel to Australia to do workshops. In 1985, Tom was asked to join the Bohemian Club, where he continues to play in, write for, and conduct the band. When he retired from De Anza College in 1988, Tom and Gloria, who was also a teacher, moved back into his parents’ house in San Francisco. “Both of my children became teachers,” Says Tom.” My son Kevin earned a Masters Degree in Music as a clarinet major at Hayward State, taught music for a number of years, and is now Superintendent at the Valley Home School District near Oakdale. My daughter, Pam, is a music teacher and administrator at Corvallis Elementary School in San Leandro, and has a degree in voice from Brigham Young University. We have over nine family members in education.”

In the 1990s, Tom served on the Local 6 Board of Directors, and was instrumental in helping the local move to its present location. In 2007, he released his first CD, It’s What It Is (For Family And Friends), which featured a quartet playing standards. Today, Tom continues to play in rehearsal bands, including Rudy Salvini’s band, the Piestrip Band, and the Bohemian Club Band. He spends hours each day writing charts on his computer and learning new bebop lines—and he has plans to record a CD of his originals.

“I’d like to be the oldest living jazz tenor player in town.”

Jeff with his grandson, Finn.

Jeff Neighbor is a Bay Area acoustic and electric bassist, and a longtime ukulele strummer. He has had a long career playing in the theater and as a jack-of-all trades musical sideman. “I’ve just had a sweet, long ride, and I’m still ridin’,” he says with a smile as he drops me off at the BART station. Up until that afternoon I didn’t know anything about Jeff except that I had seen him play at a few gigs. What better way to find out about someone than to interview them about their passion?

Jeff lives in the Berkeley Hills with his wife, Alicia Telford, a French horn player.  His music room is full of fake books, sheet music, and musical instruments. The living room has a grand piano, a fish tank, and a great view of the bay. “We love to have musical parties here,” he says. Alicia has her own music room that doubles as a teaching studio. They have a garden, two dogs, a cat, and a backyard that opens onto miles of running trails.

It’s a hot summer’s day, and the hills are buzzing. Over home-made gazpacho, we talk about Jeff’s life as a musician.

“My father brought home a ukulele when I was six, and I was hooked,” he says. Jeff’s parents met while they were working in the medical facility at the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington State. His mother was a nurse, and his father was a doctor who went on to become one of the founders of the Kaiser Hospital system. Jeff, the oldest of three, was born in 1942 in a hospital that is now under water because of the dam. Music was a way of life for the Neighbor family, who often burst into song in the family car. “I remember my father playing Irving Berlin on the piano and my mother sitting on the piano, singing. As children, we would be put to bed while the adults partied and sang around the piano downstairs. That’s the kind of family I grew up in.”

Jeff picked up the ukulele very quickly, and in 1952, Sid Garfield, the founder of Kaiser, gave him a guitar as a gift. He soon fell in love with playing bass runs on the guitar. By this time, the Neighbor family had relocated to the Bay Area and settled in Orinda, where the Neighbor children (2 boys and a girl) benefited from a top notch public school music education (all three became musicians, and married musicians). In the fifth grade, when his music teacher brought him to the instrument room to pick out an instrument, Jeff was immediately drawn to the bass. “It had that deep, rich sound. I fell in love with it right away.”

As a teenager, Jeff became a music maniac. “I lived and breathed music,” he recalls. “That’s all I did. I fell in love with jazz and classical music, and I especially loved show tunes.” His parents completely supported his interest. In tenth grade, Jeff went to the Cazadero Summer Music Camp, where he met his lifelong friend, Tony Kaye.
“I got off the bus with my bass, and he was there with his guitar. We ended up playing jazz tunes through dinner and late into the night.”

After high school, Jeff went to Occidental College in Los Angeles as a music major. He also excelled as a cross-country track runner (he was able to run a half mile in 1:51). For the next two summers, he worked in a band at the Tahoe Tavern in Tahoe City with trumpet player Mario Guarneri. “It was a great training ground for me,” says Jeff, “We’d start the evening playing background dinner music, take a break, and then play dance music the rest of the night.”

In 1961, Jeff joined Richmond’s Local 424 to play gigs on his school breaks. In 1964, he graduated college and decided to get a teaching credential at UC Berkeley, where he became active in the Free Speech Movement. During this time, Jeff worked constantly, especially with contractor Dick Foy. In 1965, he joined Local 6. By then, Beatlemania had taken over and Jeff was so impressed with Paul McCartney’s melodic playing that he started a Beatles cover band with his brother, Fred. He also began teaching in the Richmond Public School District and continued to gig constantly. He soon discovered that he would have to make a choice between teaching and gigging.
Jeff chose gigging. In 1969, he went on tour with a folk-rock group called The Joy Of Cooking Band, who had released an album on Capitol Records. The group recorded two records with Jeff, and by 1972, had run its course. Jeff returned to the Bay Area, unsure whether he should return to teaching. He soon reconnected with his old summer camp buddy, Tony Kaye, who was playing a run of Gigi in San Francisco. Tony said they needed a bass player in the pit, and he should audition. Jeff got the job, and for the next 30 years, became a first call musician for Wayne Allen, the theater contractor at the time.

Jeff’s experience with the Joy Of Cooking Band opened many doors for him with the rock elite in the Bay Area. He played on hundreds of sessions and shows with artists like Neil Young, Linda Ronstadt, Joan Baez, Ray Charles, and Chuck Berry. In the mid-seventies, he worked at the Reunion Club on Union Street in San Francisco, which showcased many of the headliners from the Concord Jazz label, including Buddy Collette, Sweets Edison, Art Pepper, Herb Ellis, and Barney Kessel. Because of his club connections, he would often go on the road and play special concerts with many of the performers.

“I’m very much a singer’s bass player,” says Jeff. ”I know and love the Great American Song Book.” He doesn’t play tunes just from one source. He’ll know the show tune version, the Frank Sinatra version, and the Miles Davis version, which adds versatility to his style. During this time, Jeff played on many commercials with contractors, including Ed Bogas, and from the eighties to the present recorded on hundreds of recording sessions and at least twenty first run movies at Skywalker Studios.

About his time in the pit: “One of the joys of my life was to stroll through the green door of the Curran theater, say hello to Loren, the house manager, and then float into the pit to play this amazing music.” The vibe in the pit was always relaxed and playful, and whenever the tension got too high, someone would crack a joke. Over the years, the theater musicians hired by Wayne Allen became very tight friends. In the early-nineties,Jeff met his wife, Alicia, while working on The Sound Of Music.

The 49er parking lot band: Tim Devine, Terry Russell,
Glen Deardorff & Jeff Neighbor.

Other musical highlights for Jeff include:
• The 49er band during “The Catch”. With his amp turned to 11, he could hear nothing but the roar of the crowd.

• Playing bass in a trio with Rosemary Clooney and the San Francisco Symphony, specifically rendering the song “Hey There”.
• In the pit for My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison at the Curran Theater, specifically “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face.”
• Two weeks on the road with The Four Freshman, highlighted by the song “Every time I Say Goodbye”.
• Playing Jerome Kern’s “Yesterdays” in the Guarneri Quartet with Mario Guarneri, Bob Scott, and Bill Swartz.

The Guarneri Quartet:  Bill Swartz, Mario Guarneri,
Jeff Neighbor & Bob Scott.

“The union has provided me with all of these wonderful experiences,” says Jeff. ”I’ve subbed with the SF Symphony, Opera, Ballet, and the Freeway Philharmonic. But my favorite work of all time is to play a wedding—with just a trio. I love to get Uncle Gus to dance with Aunt Harriett, to get the room moving. There’s something both magical and bitter sweet about celebrating with the family, knowing you may never see them again.” For Jeff, music goes beyond language.

Currently, Jeff continues to play bass with several jazz groups and singers, including Jonathan Poritz and Maye Cavallaro. He has been singing and playing uke with the Trader Vic Survivor Band with Steve Hanson, Shota Osabe and Bobby Black, an experience that Jeff describes as pure musical bliss. Jeff has one daughter, Jessica, who is a singer. And he is now a proud grandfather. When he’s not playing or working on arrangements, Jeff loves to go running in Tilden Park with his wife and their two dogs, Ipo and Gizmo.

Benny Barth was born in 1929 in Indianapolis, IN, to Lucy and Jake Barth. As a child, Benny could be found beating on his mother’s pots and pans. He later took tap dancing lessons and also played the trumpet, but dropped it when he noticed the girls liked him better as a drummer. In 1941, his Uncle Ben Caldwell, for whom Benny was named, bought him a set of drums. In grade school he organized a band, and in high school, Benny was playing drums in the orchestra and concert band and practicing many hours a day.

Benny’s memories of his Indianapolis days are filled with the great players he listened to and played with in that Midwest jazz center. Among these were bassists Leroy Vinnegar and Max Hartstein, trombone players Slide Hampton and the Hampton Family Band, Jimmy Coe, Willy Baker, Jerry Coker and Pooky Johnson on tenor sax, the Montgomery brothers-Wes, Buddy, and Monk, Freddy Hubbard, John Bunch and Fred Williams-piano, Lee Katzman, Al Kiger and Conte Condoli-trumpet, pianists Jack Coker and Al Plank, and a number of Indianapolis drummers-Earl “Fox” Walker, Hal Grant, Charlie Mastropaolo, Sonny Johnson, and Dr. Willis Kirk, who later became president of San Francisco City College. Benny credits Indianapolis big-band leader Barton Rogers with teaching him to play the high hat on the second and fourth beat.

Sponsored by Willis Kirk, Benny became the only white member of the musical fraternity B. S. of I., the Bebop Society of Indianapolis. They presented local musicians in concert and gave scholarships to deserving students at the Arthur Jordan Conservatory of Music. Meetings were held every Sunday at members’ houses. “To open the meeting,” Benny says, “we would stand in a circle with our arms around each other and each one had to scat two choruses of Dizzy’s Oolya Koo. When the meeting was at our house and my parents saw that going on, why, they couldn’t believe it.”
During the last day job he held (at the RCA Victor record distributorship in Indianapolis in 1949), Benny needed to get off early one day because Buddy Rich was holding a clinic at Indiana Music Company, where Benny took his drum lessons. The clinic started at 4:30, but Benny couldn’t get off work until 5:00. By the time he got to the clinic, the place was jammed. His teacher, Buck Buchanan, motioned for him to come closer to the front, and Rich had to stop his presentation and wait for Benny to find a place. Rich looked at Buchanan and asked who this young fellow was. “That’s Benny Barth. He’s a bebop drummer,” Buchanan said. “Come in and sit down, Barth,” Buddy Rich said. “There’s room for bop here.”

The first drummers to impress Benny were connected with traveling big bands. Gene Krupa came through Indianapolis with Goodman, and Benny wanted to be just like him. But his friend, Lee Katzman, who cut high school and went on the road with one of the touring bands, told Benny to listen to drummers like Jo Jones, Big Sid Catlett, Dave Tough, and George Whetling. “As soon as I started listening to these drummers, I realized that there is so much more to playing music than I had thought. There is the feeling part. The drummer’s job is to make the whole band play. To kick it into gear. To do this, you have to have a feeling for what the music is about.”

So Max Roach, Kenny Clark, Roy Haynes, Philly Joe, and especially Art Blakey, became Benny’s models. When he thinks of the influence these players had upon him, Benny turns philosophical about his calling. “I realized that the drums are as much a musical instrument as the violin. I learned to tune my drums to the style of music being played. You do not need a massive array of drums and cymbals to be a jazz drummer. A high hat, a snare, a bass drum, a good twenty-inch cymbal are the basics.”

Warmed up to the intricacies of drumming, Benny goes on: “drums color the music, and in that sense, they are the most important instrument. You can get many different sounds out of just your snare drum. Drummers have their characteristic sound. Some say I sound something like Blakey or Max Roach. So be it. I don’t care. I don’t mind being mentioned with those two. But I think I have my own sound. It can take ten years or longer to find your own sound.”

Benny says his greatest musical memory was going on the road with the Montgomery brothers and forming the group called the Mastersounds.  Buddy played vibes, Monk played electric bass (the first to do so in a jazz group, Benny says), and Richard Crabtree played piano. Wes Montgomery joined them on guitar for several recording sessions. “When the Mastersounds started out, we lived together in a big house in Seattle for several months in 1957, playing the Seattle clubs and traveling,” Benny says. “We rehearsed every day. It was full-time music.”

From mid-1957 to 1960, the Mastersounds’ home base was San Francisco. They appeared in local clubs and did gigs and festivals far and wide. “We worked real hard at it,” Benny says, “and our little unknown group from Indianapolis became recognized all around the country.”

The Mastersounds played the first Monterey Jazz Festival in 1958 and also the 1959 Newport Jazz Festival. They played the famous Blue Note in Chicago and the original Birdland in New York. During those years they did albums for World Pacific, both live and in studio. I asked Benny for his favorite recordings among these, and he named “Stranger in Paradise” from the Kismet album and a live cut from the Monterey Jazz Festival of “Un Poco Loco.”

When the Mastersounds broke up in 1960, Benny freelanced in the Bay Area, playing behind East Coast bands and the smaller groups that came through town. San Francisco jazz musicians worked six nights a week in those days, and maybe a Saturday or Sunday matinee. On Monday nights there were jams when everybody who happened to be in town got together at one of the clubs.

Benny remembers playing the great jazz clubs that were still going when he moved west—The Blackhawk, the Jazz Workshop, Sugarhill, El Matador, the Tropics on Geary, the Jazz Cellar in North Beach, Basin Street West, the Coffee Gallery, and there were others. One of his favorite Bay Area gigs was being part of the house rhythm section at the Jazz Workshop with Monte Budwig on bass and Vince Guaraldi on piano. Benny’s light tapping drumbeats can be heard on the famous “Linus and Lucy” tune that came out of that era.

Benny is happy to talk about being the drummer for Teddy Wilson when he came west. “Cal Tjader recommended me and Dean Reilly to Teddy,” Benny says, “and he picked us. I played brushes all night with Teddy on many gigs in the sixties and seventies. Helen Humes heard me with Teddy and Milt Hinton at one of the Concord Jazz Festivals and asked me to be in the group backing her. I backed some great singers after that—Irene Krall, Peggy Lee, Helen Forest, Joe Williams, Billy Eckstine, Sylvia Simms, David Allyn, and Jimmy Witherspoon.”
An especially high point in Benny’s memory is two weeks playing behind Jimmy Witherspoon and Ben Webster. “We did a lot of blues and a lot of Ellington, and we swung all night,” is the way Benny puts it. “The gig went from 9:00 to 1:30, including breaks, and when the night was over I always asked myself, ‘How could four hours go by so fast?’”

Many Bay Area jazz enthusiasts remember Benny Barth from the days as house band drummer at the hungry i with guitarist Eddie Duran. For several years, they played behind stars like Barbra Streisand, Mel Torme, and John Hendricks.

Benny’s long and pleasurable association with jazz guitarists, which began with Wes Montgomery, went on to include gigs with Joe Pass, Herb Ellis, Barney Kessel, Kenny Burrell, and Charlie Byrd. This continued in the Bay Area with recordings with George Barnes and the wonderful Ginza album on Concord Records with Eddie Duran and Dean Reilly. Barth’s drum playing is especially suited to the wide lyrical range and quickly changing feeling of the jazz guitar.

During these San Francisco years, Benny was married to his first wife, Janet, whom he met at Indiana University in the early fifties. They raised “two fine girls, Kim and Kendall,” in Benny’s own words. In 1987, he and Janet parted, and Benny moved to Guerneville, California, where he had made many friends from playing at the Russian River Jazz Festival in the formative years of that event. He married Diane Cosgrove in a swinging ceremony under the redwood trees that featured the seventeen-piece Rudy Salvini Big Band with maybe forty musicians sitting in from time to time.

Here along the Russian River, Benny has embarked on the third stage of his career. Among other local and Bay Area gigs, he plays regularly with the Bob Lucas trio with Tom Shader on bass. “I’ve played in the Lucas trio off and on for twenty years,” Benny said. “It’s one of my longest associations.”

Benny has been music director of the Cotati Jazz Festival and is drummer for a magnificent group called Bay Area Grand Masters that features Tee Carson on piano, Vernon Alley on bass, and Allen Smith on trumpet. He especially likes to play with guitarist Randy Vincent of Petaluma, and they get together often just to work out. With bassist Gary Digman, they formed the group Momentum, which has played the Cotati Festival and othcr gigs. Benny also returns to his hometown each May to play with the George Freije Big Band at the starting line of the Indianapolis 500 Speedway.

A couple of years ago, Benny had a new garage built, and over it he put a big room that serves as studio, storage for his drum collection, and a place for a pool table and several sets of golf clubs. Looking at the racks of drums along one wall of the studio, Benny says, ‘These are vintage jazz drums used in orchestras and little groups. Only two of them were made after 1960. No rock ‘n’ roll drums here.” This got him talking about his craft.

Benny on the cymbal: “A good ride cymbal will have all the tones of the diatonic scale in it. It will get better for maybe twelve years and then it might go dull and you have to find a new one.”

Benny on brushes: “God, I’d like to be able to find some good jazz brushes. I did a lot of brushes with the Mastersounds. They were light and flicky and felt good, but in time the strands would break off. After a gig I would see strands from my brushes on the floor. Now the brushes you can get are too stiff, and the sound isn’t as good.”

Benny on drumming in general: “This idea of bashing and pumping and playing loud all the time … there’s no reason for it. Good drummers can burn at a low flame. The idea is to play good music at any volume. I learned from listening to the other instruments. Listen to Gillespie, listen to Parker, Prez, and Jug. There is a range of feeling and tones. I also learned a lot from vocalists. Billie Holiday, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Peggy Lee. The tunes are trying to say something. I must know the lyrics to hundreds of tunes, and I think the lyrics when I play. And I love to shout some blues.”

Benny on the importance of drumming: “A good drummer can make a good band great. A good drummer can make a dull band sound good. If the drummer ain’t making it, no kind of band can swing.”

Some years ago, when he was still living in Daly City and had a weekend gig at the Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa, I came across Benny muttering to himself in the rest room. “They don’t pay us anything much, and we have to drive all this way, and we have to have these flashing lights from the ceiling, and nobody cares if we play good or not.. .” Here he wadded the paper towel he was drying his hands with and tossed it into the wastebasket for a perfect two-pointer. Then he continued “but they’re not going keep me from playing my drums.”

This, it seems to me, is the basic orientation of Benny’s ongoing life as a jazz drummer. You will still find him playing his drums every chance he gets. And when he’s not doing that, you will likely find him on the golf course at Northwood trying to hit his ball around a redwood tree.

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Website: http://www.emby.net

by Alex Walsh

The Northern California Bass Club’s Bass Bash #30, with John Patitucci, was a huge success. John was in town with Roy Haynes’ Birds of a Feather group that was performing at the new Yoshi’s in San Francisco. For this workshop, John focused on the acoustic bass. He spent the first hour covering technique, fielding questions from the audience, and demonstrating. After the break, two young bassists performed with piano accompaniment, and John gave them constructive criticism in a master class format. There’s no way to impart everything he said in this short article, but one of his key points was “know what you want to sound like, and go for that.” He said that listening to a lot of records is crucial. If a player has a thick tone, for example, ask yourself what ingredients make up that tone, and do everything you can to create it. The idea is to find the best version of you.

John brought all of the audience questions back to the main ideas of rhythm, feel and tone. He said that it is impossible to teach a person how to swing, but a great way to practice is to put a metronome on a medium tempo and play for 30 minutes. He emphasized falling in love with the simple sound of your bass. Why? Because the main function of the bass is to stay in the pocket and provide the foundation for the music. Having chops as a soloist is great, but if you get bored playing the pulse then you’re in trouble because you might have to do that on a gig for long periods of time. He said that he was put in his place many times by his mentors when he first started out.

About jazz, John encourages everyone to go back to the roots of the music to the blues. Jazz is an African American musical expression, and to understand its essence you need to study it, just as one would study the different forms of classical music. He says that many of the great jazz musicians he has worked with lament the loss of knowledge of the blues in younger players.

During the master class section, John commented that both students needed to work on providing the pulse for the piano player. Getting the best tone for both players was a technical matter of using the proper fingering and plucking the notes to pull the sound out of the bass. John explained that by pulling the sound out of the bass, rather than pushing the strings into the bass, the top is able to resonate more. After John explained this point he had the students try it out, and the tone was dramatically improved.

Last but not least, John drove home the point of having a good teacher by giving a quick overview of his bow technique, which he had transformed as a result of lessons from John Shafer, retired principal of the New York Philharmonic. (Former Local 6 member Chris Poehler was his first teacher in high school, and the late Charles Siani was his principal classical teacher). After the workshop, bassist Kurt Ribak remarked that John was an excellent teacher and very generous with his time. I think everyone agreed. Thanks to Pat Klobas and the Northern California Bass Club for making it happen.

Published in the January/February 2008 Musical News

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