By Matt Schudel
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Billy Taylor met Frank Wess in 1935, when the young saxophonist moved to Washington from Oklahoma. They went to Dunbar High School together, and to this day Taylor -- the genial pianist, television personality and goodwill ambassador of jazz -- declares that Wess changed his life.
"He's the reason I don't play the tenor saxophone," Taylor says. "I was going to try to be the new Ben Webster," the tenor saxophonist who worked with another notable Washington jazzman, Duke Ellington.
Then Taylor heard Wess, and he decided to stick with the piano.
"Even in his teens, he was really a remarkable player," he says.
More than 70 years later, Wess remains one of the most durable -- and one of the most underrated -- performers in jazz. In the 1940s, he was in the influential bebop big band of Billy Eckstine (another Washington product), and he spent 11 years anchoring the reed section of Count Basie's band in the 1950s and '60s. He introduced the flute to jazz. Yet he's never quite received the full measure of attention he deserves.
"Many people have not recognized what Frank has done," Taylor says. "People just took him for granted."
Now 86, Wess will bring his piano-less quintet to the Kennedy Center's KC Jazz Club on Friday to kick off a nine-day celebration of Washington's place in jazz history. Wess and his much-younger band mates play plenty of standards, but he's constantly writing and performing new works in the classic swing tradition.
On Saturday, he and Taylor will sit down together at the KC Jazz Club to reminisce about the days when Washington's U Street corridor was known as the "Black Broadway," with nightclubs, dance halls and theaters stretching from Seventh Street to 14th Street NW.
"Every week we heard a different band at the Howard Theater," the 87-year-old Taylor recalls. "It was all very exciting for us. There was a lot going on in those days."
A documentary by journalist Hedrick Smith, "Duke Ellington's Washington," will be screened next Sunday, and at least one performance is scheduled each day through Nov. 29 to reawaken the echoes of the city's all-but-forgotten jazz legacy.
At Dunbar, Taylor and Wess studied music -- classical music only, thank you -- with Henry Grant, the same man who had been Ellington's teacher. Only when class was over was it time for jazz.
"When I moved to Washington," Wess recalled in a 2005 interview with the Web site AllAboutJazz.com, "I was in high school already and during lunchtime they used to have sessions down in the orchestra room. . . . We'd be jamming at noontime and I said, 'This is what I want to do.' " Taylor and Wess both attended Virginia State University, but much of their education took place after hours in such U Street jazz joints as Club Bali, the Bengasi, Republic Gardens and Crystal Caverns. (All are long gone except for Crystal Caverns, now Bohemian Caverns and still throbbing with music in its underground, cavelike setting.)
"You had to learn jazz in the streets," recalls Wess, speaking from Japan during a recent tour. "If you played it in the conservatory, they'd throw you out."
Wess and Taylor were still in high school when they met Jelly Roll Morton, the self-described inventor of jazz who was nearing the end of his life but still holding court at a U Street locale called the Jungle Inn.
Once, when Taylor and several other young pianists stopped in, Morton took it as a personal challenge and pulled out some of his finger-busting pieces from the glory days of Storyville in old New Orleans.
"You punks can't play this," he said.
"Sure enough," Taylor recalls, "we couldn't."
Taylor left for New York in 1942, but Wess was based in Washington until the mid-1950s. He went on the road with pianist Earl "Fatha" Hines and, at only 20, became the leader of a 17-piece Army band that was in Africa for more than a year during World War II.
After the war, he joined Eckstine's band, which was the proving ground for such jazz giants as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Art Blakey, Fats Navarro and Sarah Vaughan.
"Everybody knew that band was special," Wess says.
By the late 1940s, he was back in Washington, studying flute with the National Symphony's Wallace Mann. When Wess joined Count Basie in 1953, he "gave a new instrumental sound not just to the band to the whole of jazz," according to critic Will Friedwald.
Wess became a key figure in Basie's "New Testament" band of the 1950s as a soloist, composer and arranger, and recruited several other musicians for the band, including trumpeter Thad Jones, trombonist Bill Hughes and bassist Eddie Jones. He and fellow tenor saxophonist Frank Foster became known as the "Two Franks" and developed a friendly rivalry with their hot and cool styles. (Wess was always the one who played it cool.)
His casually swinging solo on Freddie Green's "Corner Pocket," recorded in 1955 for the classic "April in Paris" album, remains one of the finest performances in the Basie canon.
After leaving Basie in 1964, Wess led his own groups and worked in New York studios, including in the TV bands of the Dick Cavett and David Frost talk shows. (Taylor led the Frost band.)
In the 1980s and 1990s, Wess led a Basie-style big band and recorded many well-received albums. More recently, he's recorded memorable albums with pianists Hank Jones and Bill Charlap and has finally begun to receive some long-overdue recognition, particularly with a 2007 American Jazz Masters Fellowship from National Endowment for the Arts.
Now, with those musical adventures behind him, Frank Wess is coming back to where it all began for him and Taylor, more than 70 years ago.
"We played together then," Wess says. "We've played together ever since."
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