Jazz Yarns On the Road

Life on the road is part of the jazz musician experience. The realities of life on the road range from exhilaration and an opportunity to see the world to grueling monotony. But it offers experience, steady work, and a paycheck.

Champaign-Urbana was part of the "Chitlin" Circuit, a succession of small towns in Central Illinois with small clubs and restaurants where jazz musicians could get a gig.

Even today, our proximity to Chicago and St. Louis means that musicians from those cities find it easy to spend a little time in CU playing in local clubs and trying out new ideas with the body of musicians in this area.

Tony Zamora, saxophone player and band leader
When getting my band together we used to have a problem with the pianos in the clubs. Some of them were ricky-ticky, and others were so horrible that I decided that I needed to have an organ to be able to have something to rely on. The organ became the vehicle to do that. I bought this organ, a huge monstrosity that weighed about 300 pounds plus. Which meant that now I had to go out and buy a vehicle. I went and found this panel truck, had my name painted on it and everything, and we used it to carry the organ around. I had to make sure that I could assemble the rest of the musicians to help me load the equipment. It took at least two of us. I couldn't get enough work in the Champaign-Urbana area, and I was struggling to try to keep the band moving, because if you're not able to find work, you soon lose good musicians. So I started venturing out. I'd get in my car and go to Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, Terre Haute, Springfield, Decatur, Kankakee, Chicago—every place I knew there were clubs, and I started making contacts. And so those venues, while they were scattered, they were enough to keep the band working. Soon I bought another van, called a carryall. I could carry six people, the organ, the huge organ speaker, drums, guitar. We'd do run-outs, or sometimes if we played multiple nights we'd have to get lodging. When we finished up on that last night, there was driving to get back home, and I was doing all the driving myself. The rest of the guys would go to sleep.

Jerry Tessin, trumpet player and road manager with the U of I Jazz Band beginning in 1965
President Kennedy had set up the Division of Cultural Presentations within the US Department of State. The idea was to go to other countries and break down barriers so that American art forms, American students, American professionals could effect a "people to people" kind of diplomacy. And the State Department became aware that they could get better mileage for the dollar by using student players as opposed to professionals, and that students might be more willing to mix with other people. So John [Garvey] got an invitation from the Department of State to send the University of Illinois jazz band on a nine-week tour. They wanted the jazz band specifically because jazz was very much of interest to people in other countries. The tour started in Ireland and went to Romania, Yugoslavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. Because we were going to Europe, the culture wasn't that foreign and we just had a great reception. We started in Ireland, then went to Yugoslavia. Those were the days of Marshall Tito and we didn't know what to expect. But as we were heading down the runway after landing we saw a big billboard for Gillette Instant Foaming Lather and so we figured Yugoslavia was Americanized. The difference between Yugoslavia and Romania was day and night. While we were there, the Romanian government got into a tiff with the Soviet Union and wouldn't allow Soviet planes to fly over Romanian airspace. But the people were just wonderfully warm. Once we started playing the music it seemed like the political barriers just disappeared. The night we spent in Prague, we were awakened in the morning by this terrible clatter that turned out to be the tread of tanks going down the cobblestone streets. We went on, but when we came back to play the Prague jazz festival, we noticed there was a contingent of Russian soldiers out in the audience. They obviously had tickets, except that they were given the worst seats in the house, behind poles and such. We went to Vienna and played in a big concert hall with a huge white Bösendorfer grand piano. A U of I faculty member, Howard Carp, was on leave in Vienna and was going to give a concert on that piano but they wouldn't let him practice on it. So Howard had us all out to his house and he quizzed Ron Ellison, the piano player, about the instrument. We spent nine weeks traveling internationally, playing concerts almost every night to standing ovations and had great experiences meeting people, so when we got back to the States—while we were glad to be back—I think a lot of the guys were ready to go out again in about a week. It was a little hard to get your feet down on the ground back in a university setting, to become music students once more.

Rich Warren, director of Nonesuch Concerts held at the Channing Murray Foundation, October 1972-May 1974
So Herbie Hancock's band had gotten into town really late the night before, and I picked them up at 10am to take them to the Channing Murray Foundation to get ready for their concert. It was in February, a brutally cold winter day. We pulled out the instruments, which we had left there the night before. The acoustic instruments had survived the trip. Then they opened the keyboard, the synthesizer, and all the parts fell out. It had been totally shattered by the airline. The band was devastated. It was a mess. And the keyboard player said: "Is there anybody here in town who could rent us one or fix it?" It was a particularly high-end keyboard so we didn't have anything like that in town. But I called CV Lloyd and told him that I had a REAL problem. I explained the situation and he sent his two best technicians over right away. And they went to work repairing this keyboard, literally soldering it back together. I can't speak highly enough of CV Lloyd. He never charged us for it that I can remember. And the damage was so great that it took them five or six hours to fix it. Herbie arrived, and here's this famous musician who could have been temperamental, but he took a look at the guys soldering that keyboard, then turned to the band and said "let's get to work guys." So they started practicing. Now I was famous for having my shows start on time—8pm and 10pm—but that show finally started about 8:45pm. Meanwhile, the 10pm people were arriving and filling up the Red Herring downstairs, but it could only hold about 125 people. They were selling coffee and cider hand-over-fist, but the people outside were cold and they were getting angry and started throwing snowballs at the windows. I think we got the second show started about 10:30pm, and the band was just fantastic. But this is also the concert that got the Channing Murray Foundation shut down. We let everybody in that we could squeeze into that chapel. I think we must have had 225 people and its fire capacity was probably about 175. The Courier had sent a reporter to cover the concert and she went back and wrote in the paper that it was too crowded and that we violated fire code. And so Channing Murray Foundation was shut down, just like the Independent Media Center recently. So I had to raise the money to get the fire code violations corrected because the church didn't have any money. And we did it. They put an extra fire door in the chapel, panic hardware on all the doors, changed some electrical wiring, put Exit signs up, all that stuff. We were closed for about two weeks, so we worked pretty quickly. We had a lot of volunteer help.

Cecil Bridgewater, trumpet player/arranger as a student in the U of I jazz band, 1961-1964 and 1968-1970
Donald Smith and I were part of the U of I jazz band in 1968 when it went to some of the Iron Curtain countries and Eastern Europe. We ended up in Vienna at the same time that there was a George Wein drum tour traveling through Europe. And Donald and I were out for a walk and happened to see signs for a concert that was coming up two days later and a jam session that was that night. So we decided to go to the jam session, and that's where I first met Max Roach, Art Blakey, Horace Silver, and Sonny Murray. Sonny was kind of picking up musicians as he went along, and he asked Donald and I to play in the concert. But we just walked over to these guys to say hello and they wanted to know why we were there. They were very warm and nice. As a matter of fact, that night, Max Roach invited Donald and I to come by his hotel room the next day so that we could chat. It was a great thrill, a great thrill. That was my first contact with him, and that association has lasted now for 30-some years, working together and so forth.