Sunday, March 6, 1994

Stanley Turrentine: Tooting his own horn
By Peter B. King
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Saxophonist Stanley Turrentine plays to please himself, but his music is accessible and popular with fans everywhere, including the hometown Hill crowd.

La Place Street is not much to look at, a drab single block in the Hill District between Centre and Reed. Next to a vacant lot full of discarded washing machines and rusty cans, the corner row house sports a recent coat of red paint with yellow trim.

It’s the house where jazz tenor saxophonist Stanley Turrentine grew up, the one on the cover of his 1989 album, “La Place.” It’s also part of a neighborhood that Turrentine — though he hasn’t lived in Pittsburgh for more than 30 years — has never really left.

When Turrentine comes to town, he always gets together with the old gang. And he always hunts for a good jam session, just as he did in the old days.

“That was my way of learning how to play, basically,” said Turrentine, the man who made “Sugar” and “Pieces of Dreams” and all those funky organ records with Jimmy Smith and Shirley Scott. He was on the telephone from his home in suburban Washington, D.C., where he lives with his third wife, Judith. Turrentine had a doozy of a head cold. Waterlogged and wheezing, he sounded like an ad for Vicks.

“When I went on the road (with Lowell Fulson and Ray Charles), I was 16 1/ 2,” said Turrentine, now 59. “We traveled all over the country, and there were always jam sessions. When we finished our gig, we would go somewhere else and play. And when I lived in Pittsburgh, when I was coming up, there was always somewhere to jam, especially the old Musicians’ Club, on Fullerton and Wiley (in the Hill).

“They used to sneak me in. There was a guy named Leroy Brown, who was the secretary of (American Federation of Musicians) Local 471. He would allow me to sit in the corner. I’d have me a glass of water or a Coke, and I’d watch all these great musicians perform after they performed Downtown. Like Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Stitt, Gene Ammons, a lot of those cats. We used to jam, and we became friends. Illinois used to look me up whenever he came to Pittsburgh. I was about 13, 14 years old.”

When he’s in Pittsburgh nowadays, Turrentine does his jamming at Stolen Moments, on the North Side, with pianist Carl Arter, who has been Turrentine’s music teacher for more than 40 years. He also checks out the Pittsburgh Jazz Society sessions at the Oakland Holiday Inn on Sunday nights, or the Hill House jam sessions Sunday afternoons. He hits the Club Cafe on the South Side, Saturday or Sunday nights, to join drummer Roger Humphries, who sat in with Turrentine at the Hurricane and then went on the road with the saxophonist for a year in 1962.

He’ll probably fit in sessions with friends while performing gigs at the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild on March 18, 19, 20 and 22 — the first three with his band, the finale with the Duquesne University Jazz Orchestra.
“If ‘Tine comes into town and we’re working anywhere, he always brings his horn,” said pianist Walt Harper, whose past two albums feature guest appearances by Turrentine.

“(The jam sessions) are giving the younger guys an opportunity to develop and to be able to play, keeping that tradition going,” Turrentine said. “And I try to support them as much as I can. Besides, I like to play.”

Arter, now 75, began teaching Turrentine in the Warner Building, Downtown, when the younger man was still a teen-ager. Arter started as a sax player but took up piano when a woman danced into his sax one night and knocked loose his two front teeth.

Arter watched Turrentine develop: first in the band of Turrentine’s older brother, Tommy, then on the road with bluesman Fulson in a band directed by Ray Charles; with R&B sax honker Earl Bostic; and with the underappreciated jazz arranger/composer Tadd Dameron, among others.

“He got ready after he left here more than when he was here,” said Arter. ‘’When he came back after he had been out traveling a lot, you could see that he had seasoned.”

How much did he practice?

“He didn’t practice all the time. That’s why he and I would fall out sometimes, because I could tell when he hadn’t practiced like he should. But he has practiced.” Even today, said Arter, Turrentine “knows what he needs” musically, and usually takes a lesson with Arter when he hits town. Turrentine calls Arter a “genius when it comes to the saxophone.”

Bassist Bobby Boswell played with Tommy and Stanley on and off for a decade, beginning in the early ‘50s, when Boswell returned to Pittsburgh after backing Billie Holiday. Boswell and the Turrentine brothers ended up with Max Roach in 1958, after Roach’s band broke up while he was in Pittsburgh playing the Crawford Grill.

Boswell, 66, remembers the young Stanley Turrentine as “very determined” and “very good to work for. Because when he made some money, we all made some money. He didn’t take advantage of anybody, not to my knowledge he didn’t. And at that particular time, we always made a little more money with him than I made with other bands right here in Pittsburgh. He had a good business head on his shoulders and he could play.”

Even then, said Boswell, Turrentine mixed a knack for playing well with a style that dovetailed with the public’s taste.

“He had a very bright improvisational mind, and he could take a tune and really pick it apart and play it. But he did it so that the people who were listening to him could pat their feet and dance to it, and it wasn’t anything that would be distasteful. ... So naturally he kept work that way.”

Here’s how Arter describes Turrentine’s style: “Some musicians, the way that they like to play can be understood more by the general public than the music of some others. The average layman could understand or appreciate what he was doing. He had a good sound on the horn, and he never attempted to play pieces or songs that were over the general public’s head.”

Turrentine’s “good sound” comes welling up out of his horn as personalized as a thumb print or a memory. One of his secrets, he said, is to study song lyrics to understand a tune.

“It’ll give you a better idea of how to interpret it. I know Ben Webster, the great saxophone player, he used to do the same thing. As a matter of fact, he gave me the idea, when I saw him out in California one time, when I first started playing. I was so astounded by the way he interpreted ballads. And I asked him, and he simply said, ‘Try listening to the lyrics.’ “

But along with acclaim, Turrentine has endured his share of jazz critics accusing him of selling out. He dismisses them as “mostly frustrated musicians” who “don’t know the me that makes me me.

“I don’t like to use the word jazz anyhow. I listen to all kinds of music, man. Pop, rock ‘n’ roll ... If I hear a song, and it appeals to me, and I feel, hey man, it’s a nice song to play, I’ll play it, no matter what category they put it in.

“They put handcuffs on you — ‘You’re not playing jazz.’ And I’d like to ask somebody, ‘What is jazz?’ You put a hundred people up and ask them what jazz is, you’d get a hundred different opinions. Like Duke Ellington said, there’s only two kinds of music, good and bad.”

Turrentine had the good fortune to grow up in a town with an unusually strong jazz tradition, in an unusually musical family. His father was a professional saxophonist before he got a day job to feed the kids; he had subbed with the legendary Savoy Sultans, the great house band at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the ‘30s.

Stanley’s older brother Tommy was arguably the best trumpet player in town in the late ‘40s and ‘50s, Arter said. It was Tommy, said Boswell, who got the call from Max Roach when Roach’s band fell apart in Pittsburgh during a 1958 road trip. Tommy, who can be heard on one early-’60s solo album and on Blue Note sessions with the likes of fellow Pittsburgher Sonny Clark, stopped performing some years back.

Now 65, Tommy lives in New York City. Stanley’s publicist says Tommy doesn’t have a phone, and directory assistance can’t find him. Stanley paints his brother as enigmatic.

“He doesn’t play anymore; I think he just writes. And I think he’s teaching some students. Tommy just pops up if I go to New York. Like the last time I saw him, when he gave me two songs to record. I was working down at the Village Gate with Salsa Meets Jazz, me and Ray Barretto. We were rehearsing, and Tommy just popped up. He said, ‘Hey man, I got two tunes for you.’ And then we hung out during the record session (when Stanley recorded the two tunes on his latest album, “If I Could”) and then he just disappeared. I don’t see him that often, like I used to.”

Why doesn’t Tommy perform?

“The last time I spoke to him about it — he doesn’t discuss it that often — he said that he just don’t feel it anymore, to play. He prefers writing. That happens. But I never thought it would happen to him. He was such a great trumpet player.”

One of Tommy’s songs on “If I Could” is titled “Marvin’s Song.” It was written for the youngest Turrentine brother, who died at the age of 40 last year. Marvin was a good drummer, according to all reports. Stanley talks about Marvin fondly but reluctantly: “He was on a hundred percent disability; he got wounded in Vietnam. Well, a whole lot of stuff.”

Stanley had a brush with death in October 1989. After a six-hour lesson with Arter on a visit to Pittsburgh, he fell ill with pulmonary edema — a fluid buildup in the lungs. Turrentine was admitted to Mercy Hospital in a coma. The experience, he says, changed his attitude toward life.

“I try to live it as fully as I possibly can. We can go around feeling depressed and feeling bad, but it’s up to us, man. We have the privilege of making it a good day or a bad day.

“I’m not trying to impress anybody,” he adds. “I don’t have anything else to prove to anybody. There was a time in my life I was going to try and make this hit record. There were times I was gonna try to be the greatest saxophonist. And that was the most miserable time of my life. The more things were happening for me and my career, I still wasn’t satisfied... . I was trying to please this person, please that person all over the place, and not even thinking about me. So I try and please myself.”

Turrentine tours about two weeks out of every month, in Europe, Japan and the United States. When he’s not traveling or recording or practicing, Turrentine likes to bowl or swim or walk in a private park overlooking the river near his home — which is how he caught his cold, he thinks.

The busy musician, who has four children from previous marriages all living in Philadelphia, puts a Pittsburgh stop on his schedule whenever possible.

With so many friends in town, not to mention his older sister, Florentine, and various nieces, Turrentine can’t visit everyone. But he always gets around to his buddies in the Bobcats, a Hill District athletic club Turrentine praises for organizing sporting events for youngsters and taking them to games. Many of the Bobcats are men Turrentine grew up with, played ball with,went to Schenley and Herron Hill high schools with before he dropped out to go on the road.

James Thompkins, 61, a retired steel worker and a Bobcat, lived two houses away from Turrentine. He remembers La Place as “better than any other place in the world,” a street of caring, stable families and talented people like the Turrentine brothers and bassist Billy Lewis.

Turrentine was already playing piano and cello at a young age. But his life wasn’t all music, Thompkins remembers. He still had time to get into mischief — back when mischief had a more innocent connotation.

“There was an old guy named Mr. Brean. He was a Jewish guy, and he lived on the next street. He had a horse and a buggy he used to sell fruit on. A very nice person. And he would always tell us not to get on that horse.

“Well, we couldn’t just take his word for it. We used to go to the show and we used to see the Durango Kid and Tom Mix and all those guys, so we got on that horse. And that horse took off running. Stanley and I screamed so loud they had to call the fire department to get us off of there.”

The Bobcats hold a reunion every other May 30, with one scheduled this year. Turrentine has promised Thompkins he’ll be there — and it won’t be the first time. “Everybody from all over the country comes in,” said Turrentine, ‘’and we see some people that we’ve forgotten, that we haven’t seen since we were kids. And it brings back great memories. Although we didn’t have a lot of money or things, as they say, we had a great life.”

If it seems strange that a jazz musician who has moved far away in terms of miles, money and fame should retain such close ties with non-musician friends, Thompkins says that’s the magic of La Place, and the nature of the man.

“Stanley was Stanley then; he’s Stanley now; and when they carry him to his final resting place, he’ll still be Stanley. He’ll never change.”

(Peter B. King is a free-lance music writer based in Pittsburgh.)