Friday, April 29, 1994

‘Dahn’ Beat:
West Aliquippa’s Ralph Lalama is a top sax man
By Peter B. King
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Any longtime Pittsburgher would recognize the accent of the tenor saxophonist on the phone from New York City. “I’m not puttin’ it DAHN,” he says at one point, talking about music besides jazz.

Ralph Lalama hails from West Aliquippa where, at the age of 11, he played his first gig as a clarinetist with his father, Nofrey, in the Sons of Italy Concert Band.

The S.O.I. band gave way to others when Lalama came of age — Woody Herman, Buddy Rich and the Mel Lewis Jazz Orchestra, in which Lalama has played 12 years of Monday nights at the Village Vanguard. Then there’s the small groups: Joe Morello, Barry Harris, Jack McDuff and Lalama’s two CDs as a leader. But despite the New York address and plenty of world travel, there’s still a lot of West Aliquippa in Lalama’s speech and in his unpretentious, dahn-to-earth attitude.

Backed by organist Gene Ludwig, guitarist Tony Janflone Sr. and drummer John Schmidt, Lalama will open for Maynard Ferguson tomorrow night at the Palumbo Center. And Lalama is thinking about the hometown crowd. And he doesn’t mean Pittsburgh or Aliquippa, but West Aliquippa.

“You’ve got to make that distinction. When these people from West Aliquippa come to this concert, they’ll shoot me if I don’t say West Aliquippa.”

Here’s how he recalls the town: “I looked to my right, I saw the hills of Pennsylvania — the Allegheny Mountains, I guess they’re called. To my back was the steel mill. You smelled the soot. To my left was the railroad tracks. I was the only guy who didn’t need a train that went around under the Christmas tree. I didn’t need one, ‘cause I had one 50 feet from my back. And then to the other side was the Ohio River. You had nature, the mountains, the river, the soot of the steel mill, and the sound of the trains delivering iron ore to the mill.” He laughs. “Ah, what was the question?”

Lalama’s dad played drums in dance bands by night and worked in an office at LTV Steel by day. He bought Ralph a saxophone for his 14th Christmas. Lalama heard jazz around the house and liked it, but he was playing the pop music of the day. When he was in high school he played James Brown and Temptations tunes in a band called the Reverbs.

During school, Lalama would drive to Pittsburgh to work Sonny Daye’s Stage Door in Oakland with the likes of drummer Spider Rondinelli and bassist Dave LaRocca. LaRocca describes Lalama as “a strong player. He’s out of the Gene Ammons style, to me. Like those hard-core kind of guys — Dexter (Gordon), Lockjaw (Davis). Which isn’t to say that’s his only way of playing. But when I heard him play, he’s very strong, which is probably a thing from this town — stronger horn players, Stanley Turrentine, that style. A big, dark sound.”

After college at Youngstown State, Lalama went straight to New York. In 1976, Woody Herman hired him for a two-year gig. In 1978, Down Beat’s jazz critics deemed Lalama a Talent Deserving Wider Recognition. In 1980-81, he played with Buddy Rich, then joined the Mel Lewis Orchestra the next year. Formed by drummer Lewis and trumpeter Thad Jones, the orchestra had become a jazz institution. (Jones had left a few years before Lalama joined; Lewis died in 1990, and the band is now called the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra.) What’s kept him in the band this long?

“The players are great. A lot of them are my friends. And the music is great. We still play Thad Jones’ music. To me, he’s like the Beethoven of the modern years. Any great music or art, if it stands the test of time, that’s what makes it so great. Like, I don’t still listen to Grand Funk Railroad, but I still listen to and love to play Thad Jones.”

Somewhere along the line, the New York press got the idea that Lalama is underappreciated. In a brief item, the New Yorker called him and his sometime partner, pianist Pete Malinverni, “two of the most terrifically talented and unrecognized jazzmen in New York.” New York Newsday ran an article on Lalama with the headline: “The Unknown Saxophonist.”

“See, I don’t understand it,” Lalama replies. “ ‘Cause I work all the time. I don’t feel that way, unappreciated. People are always writing that. It gets to be embarrassing sometimes.”

Certainly, Lalama, now 43, is getting more appreciated as time goes on. He released his first album as a leader, “Feelin’ and Dealin,” on the Dutch Criss Cross label in 1991. His Criss Cross follow-up, “Momentum,” was the second-most-played album of 1993 on WBGO-FM.

Lalama has occasionally played other kinds of music besides straight-ahead, from a Healthy Choice commercial to funk and blues. But now it’s almost always acoustic, roots-informed jazz.

“That’s the music I dig the most. When you get older, you start editing your life. And this is what I want to do, so I’m gonna go strong into it. ‘Cause when you’re younger you get more eclectic, you check everything out. (Later) you know what you feel comfortable with, so you might as well live that way.”

(Peter B. King is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer.)