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Interviews
Larry McKenna: Keeping the Legacy Alive
Victor L. Schermer
Former trombonist who now works as a psychologist.AAJ: Now, you were a teenager at the time. At some point you went to the Granoff School of Music. That school must have been really special, because guys like Martino, John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, so many of the best, they all went to that school.
LM: I went there in 1956, a few years after Coltrane. It was a non-accredited school, but they had a bunch of great teachers there. When I attended, Adolph Sandole taught there, and some highly respected classical guys like Frank Caruso and Joe Rocco. A lot of the students had been in the army and went under the G.I. Bill. They had good instrumental and theory teachers. I went for only six months to learn some specific things after going on the road with a band. Later, after I'd been with Woody Herman, I studied arranging with Adolph's brother, Dennis. He showed me about writing music—very helpful. Later, I played as featured soloist with Adoph's big band.
AAJ: So, you started playing on your own—a "natural," as you say. Then you had a sax teacher who taught you improvising and chord changes. And you started going to the Heritage House for the clinics.
LM: They called it the Tommy Roberts Jazz Workshop. Around the same time, they had sessions at Music City on Chestnut Street. Ellis Toland and Bill Welsh owned Music City, a music store, where they had sessions at night. I heard Sonny Stitt, Stan Getz, and some other guys there. They would take their horns out and play. They'd warm up with a medium tempo blues, but one time Stan Getz came out and warmed up with "Strike Up the Band" at a very up tempo. And just blew ten choruses of flawless playing. I was very impressed. By the way, Music City was where Clifford Brown made his last recording. It was before he was killed in that car accident.
AAJ: Was that the gig where there's a debate about when it happened?
LM: Yeah, some people say that he played there the very night he was killed in the car crash, but other people said it was a few weeks before that fateful event. But the recording did come out a few years later. Local guys often played there, like Billy Root, the tenor player, and another named Ziggy Vines.
Carl Schultz: I wanted to ask you about him. He's kind of a legend.
LM: Well, there's a lot of stories about Ziggy Vines. Herb Geller was a very good saxophonist who eventually moved to Europe. He was a West Coast guy who had Ziggy on tenor for some recordings. So it's not true that Ziggy was never recorded, as is sometimes rumored. I heard Ziggy, but not at his best. He was felt to be one of the great players, but he had a lot of mental problems. Bird was a big fan of Ziggy's and would always ask for him. There's a story that Ziggy was listening to Bird at a nightclub, came up to him and said, "You know what, you're not Bird—I'm Bird!" Then he turned around and walked away! Bird thought it was hilarious. Ziggy just disappeared back in the 1960s. That was it, and I don't know what ever happened to him. Very sad story.
I do remember when Ziggy showed up at Music City after getting out of prison. He showed up with a cheap silver horn. He played real good, but the people said, "You should have heard him before he went to prison." After jail, he was never the same and went downhill. They say that at one time he had a brilliant mind as well as being a great musician.
AAJ: So, there came a time when you went on your first road trip with a band?
LM: It was a five piece band with Vince Montana, the vibes player. It was a commercial lounge group. We covered parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York State. There was one trip to Savannah, Georgia. You would play one club for a week or two then. The musicians were good, but we had to play a lot of commercial stuff. I'd played a bit around Philly with guys like Mike Natale, but my first ongoing gig was with Vince. That was when I was eighteen years old.
AAJ: How did your involvement with the Woody Herman band come about? LM: I was about twenty-one at the time. My friend Jimmy Amadie, a pianist and teacher, was in New York. He was walking down the street, and heard this big band playing in a rehearsal hall. He went inside, and it was Woody Herman's band rehearsing and auditioning at the same time. Nat Pearce, one of Woody's arrangers and pianist, was hiring for a pianist and a tenor saxophonist. So, Jimmy comes back to Philly, calls me, and says, "Let's go up to New York and audition for Woody's band." We took a chance, went up, and auditioned. We read charts and played solos. About two days later, the road manager called and asked me to come with the band. Jimmy also got hired. The following Sunday we were in Jackson, Mississippi with the band. AAJ: Woody's band went through different incarnations, different "Herds," didn't they? LM: Yes. There were the first, second, and third Herds. People would come up and say, "Hey Woody, what Herd is this?" He'd say, "Well, this is the Swingin' Herd. No more numbers, from now on we'll give it names." So we made an LP around 1960 in Chicago, and he called it the Swingin' Herd. Truthfully, each one of the early Herds had a distinctly different style. The first had all the swing players like Flip Phillips, Bill Harris, and those guys. The second Herd was a bebop band which featured the "Four Brothers" sound—Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Serge Chaloff and all those cats. And then the third Herd was more or less an extension of the second. AAJ: You recently made an album called 4 Brothers 7, with Frank Tiberi. Was Frank in the Herd you played with? LM: No, he came in ten years after me, around 1969. AAJ: So how did you get the idea for the 4 Brothers 7 album? They had some arrangements that Al Cohn had written, and then Mike and Frank each wrote some, and they asked me to write a couple of arrangements. So we went up to New York with this group and recorded ten or eleven tunes in one day. Frank held onto the recording, and then, more recently, Frank thought we might release it. So it went out on the Jazzed Media label about a year ago. We did a release party at Chris' Jazz Café in Philly a while back. The saxophones on the recording were Frank Tiberi, Mike Brignola, myself, and a guy named John Nugent. Nugent has become a jazz promoter, so he couldn't make the Chris' date. We used our local rhythm section of Tom Lawton, piano, Lee Smith, bass, and Dan Monaghan, drums. A week later, we played a festival in Rochester, NY. We used Dave Reichenbach on sax at Chris' and in Rochester. AAJ: What's the connection of the "Four Brothers" to the Woody Herman band? LM: It refers to a certain saxophone voicing, three tenors and a baritone. In 1947, Woody put together his second band. Someone suggested he go to a ballroom in East LA, the Mexican section of Los Angeles. They had a band including Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, and Herbie Steward. Well, Woody was so impressed that he hired them on the spot. So he had three tenors and a baritone sax instead of the conventional two tenors and two altos, and Woody had some arrangements written for them. That year, the band recorded a song called "Four Brothers." The sound was very striking and became known as the Woody Herman Four Brothers Sound. So we got guys who at one time or another had been with the Woody Herman band and used them with just a rhythm section and give everyone a chance to blow. Our rhythm section consisted of all Woody Herman alumni as well. AAJ: Did you go back and listen to some of those early recordings? LM: No, the arrangements we use were strictly from us. AAJ: What was it like working for Woody Herman? LM: I liked Woody. I only saw him get mad one time, but he was usually very even-tempered. AAJ: What was he looking for with the musicians and arrangements? AAJ: I've always wondered about big band leaders. They don't seem to do much on stage, yet they have such a big impact. Woody's band had a unique style that evolved over a period of time, with so many innovations. How did he accomplish that? LM: Woody Herman didn't evolve much as a clarinet and saxophonist. But the great thing about him was that he allowed things to happen, to develop, with the band. While many leaders are very conservative and put roadblocks in the way of the band, Woody knew he had all this talent, and he was smart enough to encourage the guys' special talents. He never put his foot down. He had an open mind. In one newspaper, a critic put down Herman's clarinet playing. Woody read it and said to a bunch of us, "Well, I don't claim to be a great player. I know I'm not Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw on the clarinet. I just do what I do. My whole thing is my band." Which was the truth. The critic shouldn't have picked on him for his clarinet playing. He actually played quite adequately. He played alto in the style of Johnny Hodges. He was also a good singer. Did you know he had the first hit recording of the tune "Laura"? He convinced Johnny Mercer to write lyrics to that tune from the movie. As a result, Woody had a million selling record as a vocalist on that tune.
The Days with Woody Herman
LM: Well, I've known Frank as a Philadelphia musician for over forty years. He wound up becoming the leader of the current Woody Herman band. A few years ago Frank, and Mike Brignola, the baritone saxophonist and road manager, put together a small band with three tenor saxophones and a baritone sax with a rhythm section.
LM: It was said that Woody rewrote arrangements like Basie did, but I didn't see that. We went with what the arrangers brought in. I know as an arranger that the last thing you want is for someone to make big changes in what you do—you spend a lot of time working on it.Shop for jazz:
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