In his new book ”Bass Line,” Milt Hinton tells about the time he went to hear Rev. Bill Bailey preach. The two had known each other 20 years earlier, when Hinton played bass in Cab Calloway`s popular band and Bailey, brother of singer Pearl, danced in Calloway`s night club shows.
In those days, the 1930s, Bailey was far from being a preacher; rather, he was a tireless playboy, ”a devil,” chuckles Hinton.
At the church service, Hinton and his wife, Mona, sat in the second row. Rev. Bailey seemed not to notice his old friend, for he was caught up in his sermon, at first speaking slowly, then faster and louder until he was threatening sinners with hellfire at the top of his voice, punctuating his words with dance steps.
He concluded his sermon: ”I liken myself unto Paul. He was one of the worst sinners. And I was just like him. I used to do everything. I smoked reefer, I took pills and other kinds of dope. I had prostitutes and I`d drink all kinds of whiskey every night.”
Then he looked down at the second row, pointed at Hinton and shouted,
”Didn`t we, Hinton?”
”We still laugh about it-it`s quite a joke among jazz musicians,” says Milt Hinton in 1988, from his home in Queens. And his own wild oats and vices, such as they were, are not ignored in ”Bass Line” (Temple University Press), the autobiography that Hinton and his editor, David G. Berger, produced.
Indeed the book`s first attraction is its candor and careful recall of events, for Hinton, now 78, is not only one of the great bassists in jazz, he`s one of the best storytellers. And because he`s an enthusiastic, gregarious person, he has plenty of stories to tell about his nearly 60 years in jazz.
Almost as compelling are Hinton`s photos: ”Somebody gave me an Argus C-3 camera in the early `30s,” he says. ”I thought it would be a nice idea to record on film the guys in the different bands I played with-not the way professional photographers record musicians but off the bandstand, in the different small towns, on the bus and on the train sleeping. I`d take everybody in Cab Calloway`s band asleep; then one day I went to sleep, and they took my camera and photographed me.”
So ”Bass Line” includes about 200 photos of musicians Hinton has worked with, from a sleeping Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong, a dancing Duke Ellington, an exhausted Billie Holiday, a sly Count Basie, to the youthful Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke, the worried John Coltrane and Billy Eckstine, the angry Dinah Washington and Ben Webster. They`re backstage, in ”colored-only” motels, in restaurants, at parties, in America, Europe and Asia. They`re most often surrounded by cardboard coffee cups at TV and recording studios-for Milt Hinton is surely the most-recorded bassist in jazz.
Born in brutally racist Vicksburg, Miss.-as a child, he witnessed a lynching-Hinton grew up in Chicago in the `20s, selling illegal booze for a Capone henchman and playing violin at Wendell Phillips High School, a hotbed of young jazz talent. Chicago was the center of the jazz world, clubs, theaters and ballrooms proliferating on the South Side. But theater orchestras became obsolete when the first sound movie, Al Jolson`s ”The Jazz Singer,”
appeared in 1927- ”On the South Side, every violin player lost his job”-and Hinton switched to the bass.
As a bassist he played in Chicago bands and toured with violinist Eddie South, before the touring singer Cab Calloway saw him in a Loop club, and hired him. ”Nowadays, records make a star, but in those days radio made Cab Calloway a star,” says Hinton.
”Every night at 10, people all over the country heard Cab Calloway live from the Cotton Club in New York. When he went out on tour, people flocked to him like they do to rock concerts now. Even on tour, they took a radio show with us, Cab Calloway`s Quizzicale. We had comedy-my (character`s) nickname was 62 Jones.”
Hinton joined Calloway at the height of the big band era; when he left, 15 years later, America`s ballrooms and the big bands that once thrived in them had all but vanished. That`s when Hinton`s prolific studio career began, aided by star comedian Jackie Gleason. ”The powers-that-be never let us black musicians get in, but when Jackie Gleason said, `I want him,` there I was. When they saw I could qualify, other black guys began to get in.
”We had 37,000 musicians in New York belonging to the Musicians Union Local 802, and we did 75 percent of all the recorded music in the United States-and 300 men were the qualified ones who did all of that recording. We went around the clock; I used to do three record dates a day, 10 to 1, 2 to 5 and 7 to 10.”
The 1960s decline of the New York studio scene left Hinton more time to play jazz clubs and festivals, to tour with stars such as Pearl Bailey, Barbra Streisand and Bing Crosby-luxury jobs compared to the conditions he`d endured during the swing era-and to teach jazz workshops at Hunter and Baruch Colleges in New York (Crosby and others showed up to help with his classes).
He`s also interviewed long-time jazz artists, first in his home, then for the National Endowment for the Arts oral history program, now housed in the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University. The Milt Hinton Scholarship Fund is a special project for promising young bassists.
David G. Berger himself studied bass under Hinton in the `50s, before becoming a sociologist. Hinton took a decade to dictate ”Bass Line” to him, and Berger indexed Hinton`s black and white photos.
Recently returned from a two-month gig at a hotel in Bern, Switzerland, he`s teaching once again. ”I`m always looking for youngsters like Dr. Berger to come along and be interested in us and sit down and pick my brain,” says Hinton.
