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with cramped bandstands and tiny tables, but on any given night, the bright marquees were lit with the biggest names in jazz, all within less than two blocks. Fifty-Second Street represented the pinnacle of the jazz district, the culmination of Storyville in New Orleans and Eighteenth and Vine in Kansas City. For Stan Levey and other teenage arrivals like Quincy Jones, it was a cup of overflowing excitement.
Inside every doorway was one of my heroes. It was pulsating and alive. Electric. That period in the 1940s, the years when bebop was surfacing, creativity and the excitement that goes along with it were at a really high level. The music was just as pure as it could be.
“We were some of the luckiest people alive,” Quincy Jones said, “because we got a chance to not only participate in some of the best music that was ever made, but also to hear some of the best music ever made—the Birds, the Lesters, Basie and Ella and Sarah. Duke and Dizzy, Miles . . . I wouldn’t trade this time when Stan and I came up for any other time.”
So Dizzy introduces me to Specs Powell. Says to Specs, “This guy can play!” Specs is drumming for Ben Webster, but he has another gig, so he arranges for me to audition for Ben. I go into the Three Deuces and Ben is big and mean-looking. Intimidating. I try to play Spec’s drums but he tunes them too soft for me. I don’t play well. Everything was soggy and Ben doesn’t like it and he doesn’t hire me. My first audition in New York—a disaster. Now my confidence is real low.
But then Diz introduces me to Oscar Pettiford, who needs a drummer. Diz says to Oscar—and this is the kind of guy Dizzy is—he says, “Here’s your new drummer.”
So Oscar hires me on the spot for a week-long engagement at the Tick Tock Club in Boston. So I steal Ellis’s drums and off we go to Boston, where we play a lot of Dizzy’s music, which I already know how to play. It was a hell of a band, with Flip Tate on trumpet. The tenor man was Johnny Hosfield. Oscar liked to drink and, being an Indian, he could get pretty rough. But with me he was always just a great, beautiful guy.
I learn a lot and they really like me. At the end of that gig at the Tick Tock, who comes in? Billy Eckstine’s band with Dexter Gordon, Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Gene Ammons, Sarah Vaughan . . . they were the hippest band playing this very heavy music. Art Blakey was beginning to get into a modern groove. Technique-wise, he was a diamond in the rough, but he had that hard swing that could swing you right off the bandstand. I was on top of the world.
It was a grand gesture on the part of Dizzy Gillespie. Oscar Pettiford was the most highly regarded bassist on the scene. By vouching for the teenage drummer, Dizzy was staking his reputation with the A-list of American musicians. It bespoke a confidence in Stan that the drummer never forgot. For the rest of his life, Stan would give credit to Dizzy Gillespie as his most influential figure and his greatest teacher.
After returning to New York from Boston, Stan landed a gig subbing for Denzil Best in Coleman Hawkins’s band, a sextet that included trumpeter Benny Harris and Thelonious Monk on piano.
The bass player—nobody knows about this guy—was one of the best I’ve ever heard. His name was Eddie Robinson, and they called him “Bassie.” He got into trouble . . . I think it was guns and drugs. But that guy could really play.
I learned so much listening to Monk and Hawkins. People thought Monk was crazy, but part of that was a façade. Monk looked totally unaware, like a space cadet, but he was aware of everything. Hawkins was like a prince, with his perfect clothing. The younger musicians were in awe of him. His ears were always open to new music, and he always urged you on to play better. He was very competitive. He’d show up at a jam session and say, “I was just walking by and happened to have my horn.”
Thelonious Monk and Coleman Hawkins were formidable influences, but it was Max Roach that Stan studied for ideas and inspiration on the skins. The most iconic of the bebop drummers, Roach was two years older than Stan, and was creating a sensation with Dizzy and Pettiford at the Onyx Club. Roach would have countless disciples over the next fifty years, but Stan was his first “student” and his most ardent fan.
When I heard Max, it was like lightning had struck. I almost passed out. I went crazy. I got as close to the bandstand as I could; I had to get a better idea of what he was up to. The ferocity of the playing was new to me. I had never heard time split up like that.
Max’s playing had music within it. Whenever I could, I got up very close to him in a club and observed. Max was breaking things up between his hands and feet in a manner that, at first, was puzzling. Those techniques had not been used in just that way before. When you finally caught on to what he was all about, it was a revelation. He changed the course of drumming. Because of him, a drummer had to offer something extra—color the music, and give it a more well-rounded feeling.
Max was responsible for developing my concept of music. He had an underlying intensity and spirit, particularly on the up-tempo things, that I tried to capture in my own work. Now, I emulated him, but I didn’t copy him. We shared an apartment for a while and became very close friends. I got to know his mother well.
Stan would remain fiercely loyal to Max for the rest of his life and would tolerate no denigration of Roach’s playing. The two young drummers spent the rest of the 1940s trading jobs in the hippest bands on Fifty-Second Street, but unlike Max, who studied the instrument formally, Stan relied on his natural aptitude and ability to absorb ideas quickly.
“He was like a sponge,” said Stan’s wife, Angela. “Later, when we moved to California, he had never associated with neighbors before. He had never engaged in that type of social life. He just watched me and before long he was everybody’s favorite.”
Stan’s self-taught style epitomized the “feel” associated with jazz. His innate rhythm gave rise to a natural sound that seemed effortless and free. He played fast tempos with a fluidity that allowed soloists to fly on steady currents of unwavering time, uncluttered by bombast or affectation, yet strong with the potent accents of modern jazz. Dizzy Gillespie said of Stan, “He had the most feeling of any of those white drummers who picked up on modern jazz early, guys like Shelly Manne, Irv Kluger, and Dave Tough.”
I turned away from certain kinds of drummers—the bangers. They were machinery, hardware. I wasn’t interested in players whose pulse didn’t flow. There had to be a sense of motion. I didn’t want to plod through four beats of each bar just to get to the end of the tune. I wanted everything to swing. When musicians looked back and smiled, I knew I was doing it.
I’m a big one for simplicity. Unfortunately, a lot of drummers go into overkill when there’s a short solo to be played or a space to be filled in a chart. I believe in keeping things pretty straightforward. You tend to be more efficient that way. There’s no need to throw a whole career into a break. It’s really very distracting. It slows the momentum of the band and doesn’t enhance the swing in any way.
Stan’s first steady job on The Street was with Barney Bigard, who made a name for himself as Duke Ellington’s clarinetist. One night in 1944, Stan was working the Onyx Club with Bigard when Sugar Ray Robinson, future middleweight champion of the world, came in and asked Stan if he could sit in on drums.
He’s not great, but the hands work and he does pretty good. We talk about some of the people we know. We don’t mention Palermo or Frankie Carbo or anybody like that. You don’t talk about them.
Years later, Stan and Hoagy Carmichael Jr. went to the Los Angeles Sports Arena to see Sugar Ray fight Gene Fulmer for the NBA middleweight title. “Robinson was near the end of his career,” said Carmichael, “and they called it a draw: a decision that both Stan and I felt was predetermined.”
Then I get a call from Leonard Feather, the well-known English critic and record producer. He recognized me as an up-and-comer and called me to do a record date for the Black and White label.
Wow! My first record date! Just tell me where and when! I borrowed Ellis’s drums and went into the Reman Scott Studios on Fifty-Second Street, near Sixth Avenue. I went up there, got off the elevator, went into the studio, and stopped cold in my tracks.
There at the piano . . . sitting there playing . . . was Art Tatum.