I was a teenage hepcat.
It started innocently enough at a high school band clinic at the Sherman House in December 1959. Stan Kenton was to be one of the guest clinicians, and I was looking forward to meeting and learning from this big-band legend as well as playing tenor saxophone in the main concert of the two-day event.
But the highlight of the entire weekend turned out to be none of the above. It was the discovery of a magazine, lying in a corner of a cramped dressing room, that gave me my first real entree into the heady world of jazz music and its fascinating practitioners. The publication, which originated from a warren of small offices a few blocks over on Monroe Street, was Down Beat. “The jazz bible,” people called it, and that weekend I became a lifelong convert. The music I had fallen in love with as a player and listener actually had a publication devoted to it, and I was as amazed and delighted as I was when I first heard Miles Davis. I proceeded to devour every back issue and every related publication and reference book that I could get my hands on.
The band I played in has been long forgotten, and the hotel has been torn down. But Down Beat magazine lives on, and the day I discovered it changed my life. Ten years, almost to the day, after that wondrous discovery I would become one of its editors. Eight months after that, managing editor. My hobby–my passion–had become my livelihood. I doubt that anyone ever combined an interest in music and journalism with more anticipation or enthusiasm.
It was a magical time, those years 1970 to 1973, one of honing my craft and rubbing shoulders with jazzmen great and near-great. A world, if you will, of deadlines and bar lines. A job that had an immense scope; it entailed not only editing and laying out one of the world’s leading music magazines but functioning also as record and concert reviewer and author of occasional cover articles. It involved representing the magazine at trade shows (in addition to covering those trade shows as a reporter as well as doing the lion’s share of our trade papers’ editing and production). It entailed acting as a judge at high school and collegiate jazz festivals. And it even involved tabulating the results of the Down Beat International Critics Poll. Yes, my plate was always full, and there were no weekends per se, but who was complaining? (Only, occasionally, my wife.)
The day Louis Armstrong died (July 6, 1971) was easily the most memorable and hectic day of my three-year tenure at the magazine. A good part of the day was spent talking to reporters as well as accommodating wire-service photographers who wanted to copy some of the magazine’s extensive Armstrong photo files. And, of course, there was a mountain of work to do in preparing a special tribute issue. The regular issue that was close to completion had to be scrapped.
The perks were plentiful. Hardly a day went by without the arrival of a stack of albums. Many were from well-known labels, but some were imports or from domestic mail-order companies-goods, in other words, that would never see the inside of a record store but were delivered regularly to Down Beat. The frequent trips to jazz clubs or concerts were, of course, on expense account. And then there was the biggest perk of all: Getting a chance to meet many of my longtime musical heroes, all “in the line of duty.” And in 1972, along with editor Dan Morgenstern, who has been moved to New York when I became managing editor, I helped cover the transplanted Newport Jazz Festival in its first year in the Big Apple. Thus I had finally made it to Carnegie Hall, but as a critic not as a player.
The staff was small but able and dedicated. Occasionally there would be ideological clashes between the “purist” camp (Morgenstern and myself) and president Jack Maher and publisher Charles Suber, who were bent on broadening the magazine’s appeal. They ultimately won out, and it appears that time has proven them right-there are a lot of magazines that don’t last six years much less 60. As Jack used to say, “The first responsibility of a business is to stay in business.”
Then there was the phone: When it rang-and it was rarely silent-one never knew whether it would be an out-of-towner inquiring about the local jazz attractions (“Is Herbie Mann still at the London House?”), a reporter from one of the downtown dailies looking for background about an incoming jazz legend . . or a fulminating Charles Mingus calling in a death threat. (The latter really happened, but luckily not to me.) On another day it was Bill Byrne, Woody Herman’s road manager, urgently asking, “Who was that drummer you recommended a couple of months ago?” (Woody hired the drummer . . . and fired him about three weeks later. Sorry, Woody. But the trumpet player I recommended to Buddy Rich stayed about two years-a near record, considering Buddy’s volatility-so it more than evened out.)
Herbie Hancock called one day in high dudgeon to complain about an unfavorable review I had written of a recent release. When I elaborated on my position (something that wouldn’t have been necessary if I hadn’t had to perform the self-mutilation of trimming my own review for space reasons!), he was considerably mollified, and the tone of the remaining conversation warmed considerably.
All of this, incidentally, was mere counterpoint for more than a year to the insistent, deafening beat of a decidedly different drummer–the pile driver across the street. The offices were no longer on Monroe Street but at 222 W. Adams, and the pile driver was hard at work on the neighborhood construction project, soon to be the world’s tallest building, aka the Sears Tower.
Th mail contained everything from complaints about record reviews (“How could you give that charlatan Albert Ayler 5 stars?”) to suggestions (“Why don’t you ever write about Zoot Finster?”) to nearly incoherent manuscripts, one memorable one from a would-be contributor whose nom de plume was Hack Wrightor.
Occasionally, though, the mail was as topsy-turvy as the job itself. Such as on the day in which I opened an envelope addressed to Editor, Down Beat, only to discover an electric bill, complete with check, from a reader in North Carolina.
I have to presume that the power-company clerk down in Fayetteville was equally as amused to find a letter addressed to a jazz magazine. (I hope it was complimentary.)
