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| George and Joyce Wein’s art collection graces the walls of the Boston Fine Arts Museum and his Manhattan apartment. In the background, an original Norman Lewis. Photo: Hal Drucker. (Other photos are from the George and Joyce Wein Collection). |
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| George is flanked by Duke Ellington (left) and pianist Erroll Garner. |
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Wynton Marsalis at his 88-key desk.
©1989 by Sid Lerner & Hal Drucker; ©Sing-Si Ltd. |
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| George Shearing in his VersaBraille-assisted music room. ©1989 by Sid Lerner & Hal Drucker; ©Sing-Si Ltd. |
When I hear the name George Wein (as in “wean”) my ears perk up and I instantly think in my mind’s eye of my subway trips as a 10 year old with my saddle-shoed sister to the famed Broadway movies houses of yesteryear where we saw stage shows at the Strand, Capital, Paramount (with its swooning bobby soxers when Sinatra appeared there), the Roxy and Loew’s State. In between the movie showings, the stage shows headlined the big swing bands of Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman, Frankie Carle, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and most memorably, Lionel Hampton, who paraded his band up and down the aisles of the Capital Theater with a scorching rendition of Flying Home, co-written by Benny Goodman and featuring a young teenager, Illinois Jacquet on tenor sax.
In my college years, it would be Jimmy Ryan’s at 52nd Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, which was renowned for the abundance of jazz clubs. We would catch George Shearing and his quintet at Birdland and Bop City, pianist Dorothy Donergan and Mel Tormé at the Embers and Marian McPartland at Hickory House.
From Satchmo to Bird, to Dizzy, to the divine Sarah, breathes there a jazz man (or woman) who was not a friend or client of George Wein or both? Other than producer Norman Granz, no man did more to lift jazz from Preservation Hall to Carnegie Hall. Beginning in 1954, Wein’s Newport Jazz Festival, became the elite garden variety sanctuary of High Society. Newport residents Louis and Elaine Lorillard of the tobacco family, invited him to organize a festival in their hometown of Newport, Rhode Island, with funding to be provided by them; the subsequent festival was the first outdoor jazz festival in the United States and became an annual tradition in Newport.
Wein pioneered the idea of corporate sponsorship for his events, and his Kool Jazz Festival and JVC Jazz Festival were the first Jazz events of consequence to feature title sponsors.
Earlier this April month I visited Wein’s plush east side apartment which serves as his office. Tastefully surrounded by Chagalls, Renoirs and Jacob Lawrences, the portraits, still lifes and landscapes were enhanced by exquisite furniture, mute testimony to the fine hand of his life partner Joyce who died in 2006. I was impressed to learn of the George and Joyce Wein Collection at one of my favorite museums, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
A slight man with the years rendering a pronounced stoop, he spoke optimistically about jazz and its future.
“Looking at the broader picture of jazz in the past 80 years, the art was fed by two primary sources. First and foremost, it was informed by a black experience, a culture steeped in the blues and in church music. Second, it was related to American popular music. Swing fans dismissed Dixieland and rejected bebop, while bebop fanatics ridiculed swing.”
We spoke of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, whom I interviewed 20 years ago as an acolyte of jazz and who is the force behind Jazz at Lincoln Center at the still tender age of 49.
”Wynton is one of the most remarkable young men of this generation. What he’s done at Lincoln Center is very, very important. It’s the first time we’ve got the cultural and financial backing for jazz and it’s all because of Wynton. I’ve known his father Ellis long before I knew Wynton, when Ellis played piano with Al Hirt on Bourbon Street.”
I was determined to test Wein’s celebrated historical acumen. I pulled out a CD of a singer Joyce Carr who toiled in relative obscurity from the ‘40s through the ‘60s. I would place her in the rarefied stratosphere of Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington, and Anita O’Dea. No, George did not know her work, but he asked to see the CD jacket and said, “Hmmm, she’s got some good musicians playing with her. Ellis Larkins on piano, also a conductor and arranger. Charlie Shavers on trumpet, Joe Benjamin on bass. Jackie Kanen, Roy Krall, Teddi King. Those were my people: They recorded for me. They started on my Storyville Record label and in 1953 they sang in my club in Boston, which I also called Storyville.”
“I see you’re doing a festival again.”
“This year, the health care company CareFusion will lend its imprimatur to the Jazz Festival in New York, June 17 – 26.
Click here: www.carefusionjazz.com/files/CareFusionJazzFestivalNewYork.pdf
“I never really quit. I sold my company in 2007. And in 2008, I was working for others. Though I was very active, they didn’t use me the way they should. When they went belly up, I jumped right in. We had a fantastic year last year. And many of my old staff stayed with me. It takes a lot of work, a lot of creativity and my going out nights to hear artists. So it keeps me active. I still play piano. I’m okay, but as a professional I get to play with the best musicians and that makes me sound better.”
When and how did you begin playing?
“I started playing when I was eight years old in Newton, Mass. My Teacher was Madame Shalloff. She worked at Berkeley College with major jazz pianists. As all young players did, I played Fur Elise and Liebestraum. Did she teach me jazz? Not at all. I used to sing on some of the kiddie shows on Boston radio. I’d gotten lucky and excited enough to sing I’d like go back to my little grass shack in Kialakahula, Hawaii. Unlike Mel Tormé who appeared on Chicago radio, I made local radio appearances only occasionally. So I started to take lessons on my own to learn how to play popular music. Gradually I got involved with jazz. The grammar school I attended was about 80% Jewish. When I went to junior high which was about 30% Jewish, it was a whole different experience. But what I wanted was to play popular. Next thing I knew, I had a little band when I was 12 years old. We played in my cellar, me on my Hallet-Davis small baby grand. It wasn’t a great piano but it was good enough for me in those days. Now I’m buying a new piano, a Yamaha made specially for me in Japan. We’d rehearse and all the kids in the neighborhood would come to hear us every Sunday afternoon. By the time I was 15 I had three trumpets, two trombones four saxophones, four rhythm men and a girl singer. We were called the Grant Wilson Stardusters. When I was writing my book (Myself Among Others) I went back to the house I grew up in, where I lived, from kindergarten through the Army and College. I served overseas during WWII. I was drafted at 18 in 1943 and was in Germany when the war ended. I was in the Combat Engineers and we were building bridges in England to cross the Rhine; most important, The Bridge at Remagen. We had a bunch of musicians who came into our band in our battalion and they were good. We played officers’ dances. Word got out. ‘Oh there’s a piano player in Company C. See if you can get him.’ The next thing I knew I was working in theaters in Marseille and in Germany. After the war ended we were still over there. They needed a lot of entertaining. My favorite war songs? You ask a lot of good questions that don’t have meaning for me.”
“But I would have to say: They’ll be Bluebirds Over the White Cliffs of Dover. In Boston we had the Metropolitan Theater, RKO Keith’s, Loew’s Orpheum, Loew’s State. I remember going to theaters to see Paul Whiteman with Jack Teagarden. I saw Jimmie Lunceford’s band. I dreamed of playing with Benny Goodman. I eventually took about 10 lessons from Teddy Wilson after the war when he was a teacher at Juilliard in New York. We became friends. Teddy worked for me later when I became an impresario. Thanks to Benny Goodman, he and Lionel (Hampton) broke the color line. I used to go down to New York with my brother to the Savoy Ballroom. I was cutting my teeth on jazz. I didn’t know it was going to govern my life.”
Why did so many Jewish people gravitate to Jazz?
“They probably didn’t want to work for a living. But seriously, ethnic groups have genetics that are involved. Why are so many opera singers Italian? And why don’t Scandinavian and Swiss have many painters? The Jews are a different story because going back historically they couldn’t be in business, but they could play an instrument. The Russian mothers taught their children instruments so they wouldn’t go in the Czar’s army. So many Jewish composers, from Mendelssohn to Bartok – they cracked a certain code at that time. All the great pianists, Rubinstein, Horowitz and certainly the great violinists from the same part of Russia, Menuhin, Elman, Heifitz, Milstein, Stern were Jewish.“
Who were the greats in your estimation?
“At the top of the list, (Duke) Ellington. Mel Tormé was perhaps the greatest singer ever, an incredible musician. He worked for me. I put him and George Shearing together. Mel was the total pro, he was supposed to work for me when he died. He was a better singer than Sinatra but Mel was too good some times. Mel never sang a note that was out of tune? Sinatra was always out of tune. But it didn’t make any difference. Sinatra could sing a song better than Tormé but he wasn’t a better singer. Tony Bennett sang for me at Newport last year. The technique of every note he is going to sing, he is prepared for and he knows exactly what he wants out of each note that he’s singing. The reason I didn’t become a full time pianist was because I got to know Art Tatum. I figured I better do something else to make a living. Other pianists of note would include Marian McPartland a good friend, and a great lady, well over 90. George Shearing of course. A great sense of humor; I liked him very much.”
I could vouch for that. I told him George used to call me with
a favorite pun or a new joke. ‘Hal, Come Up and See Me Sondheim.’ (Or… one musician bumps into another musician on the street. ‘Have you heard Andrew Lloyd Webber’s latest?’ The other musician responds: ‘Probably.’
“George played for me back in 1951. He did September in the Rain, Symphony Sid, Lullaby of Birdland at Storyville, my club in Boston. I was playing traditional bands and somebody said you should buy George Shearing. So I hired him and his quintet for 10 days. We sold out. George changed my whole direction. I started playing all the big name groups, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum, Sarah Vaughan, Sidney Bechet. I recorded with Bechet; we became good friends.
“Basically they were all memorable, whether it was Ellington or Art Blakely, Sarah or Ella, or Dizzy, Monk or Mingus. They were all vivid in my life. When I say vivid in my life, they were my life. Norman Granz predated me by a couple of years. He started the jazz concert thing; I started the jazz festival thing. Norman was a control guy. He wanted to control such artists as Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson. He controlled their lives their business, their finances. I never wanted to do that. When I started out I realized I couldn’t be a manager, and also a producer. I loved Billie Holiday – she was much a part of my life.
“My father was an ENT doctor. He loved music and was my biggest fan. He used to tap dance. He did the old buck and wing. The great Ethel Waters was working in a club for me. When she took sick, he took care of her. Regrettably I only did one thing with Lena Horne: A tribute to Billy Strayhorn – at Jazz at Lincoln Center. It was a very emotional night for me, because I always wanted to work with her. Lena was a good friend of Bobby Short and Bobby was a very close friend of my wife and me. Lena loved Billy (Sweet Pea) Strayhorn. so we did a tribute to him.
“What am I proudest of? I’m as proud of what I’m doing now as anything I’ve done in my life. The young musicians acknowledging me and thanking me for what I’m doing is nice. When I started Newport – I was the kid from Boston. The New York establishment was unhappy with what I was doing. The only person who was behind me was John Hammond who was very involved in the career of Billie Holiday, Benny Goodman, George Benson, Springsteen and Bob Dylan. He supported me – I don’t mean financially. People called him a dilettante, but he wasn’t. I went through years when it was difficult. Now, it’s not difficult. In New York, if you’ve got talent, they want you. In other cities, they don’t want you to interfere. That goes for every city in America, I don’t care where it is.”
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