About 10 years ago, I interviewed legendary bassist Bill Crow at length for JazzWax Then the tapes went missing. Naturally, I was mortified and depressed. It was a great interview and sadly, our conversation seemed to be lost to history. My workload steadily increased and I forgot about the interview and the mishap. [Photo above of Bill Crow]
Then a week or so ago, Paul Brown in Maine begged me to interview Bill. Paul's note jarred my memory. Frustrated with myself, I took time out from my day and searched my cassette tapes and hard drives for the lost Bill Crow interviews.
While combing through my computer, I found the two interview files, which fortunately had been captured with a digital recorder over the phone, not an analog cassette. I had the digital files transcribed and, today, I'm starting the multipart, 10,000-word interview. For long-time JazzWax readers, this presentation will be like old times, since I'm spreading our conversation over multiple days. It's simply too long to serve up in one shot.
My apologies to Bill for the missing tape files, which I wound up misfiling originally. Here, in its entirety, is Part 1 of our conversation about Bill's sterling career. The period I decided to focus on is from childhood to 1962, when he was part of the ominous Benny Goodman tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. This includes a wide range of spectacular groups that include famous ensembles led by Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan.
Bill Crow: I was just trying to get into music any way I could. In grade school, I thought trumpet would be a great instrument. I had tried piano and that kind of hit a wall.
JW: What do you mean?
BC: I couldn't seem to get past John M. Williams and Shaylor Turner’s Second Grade Piano Book. I started when I was 4, and by the time I was 6, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a pianist.
In my grade school, they offered musical instrument lessons, so in fourth grade, I decided on becoming a trumpet player. But by the time I reached sixth grade, I was bugged that I didn't have the chops to play the first parts in the school band.
JW: What happened?
BC: The music teacher said, “Well, let's try a bigger mouthpiece." He gave me the school baritone horn, which I fell in love with immediately. I played it very well, right through high school. The problem is that by the time I became interested in jazz in high school, nobody was interested in listening to the baritone horn. I tried out on the alto saxophone to see if I could get into the high school jazz band. Then the drummer graduated, so I played drums.
JW: Do you attribute jumping around to a short attention span or just the fact that you weren't happy with how you sounded on instruments?
BC: Well, it was just what was happening, what was available. I would've stayed with the alto longer, except a whole bunch of new alto players came into the high school the next year and I was last in line in terms of skill. The band needed a drummer, and I was willing to try that.
JW: Then came the valve trombone, yes?
BC: Yep. When I went into the Army in 1946, somebody told me there was something called the valve trombone. I took to it right away and became a jazz player.
JW: How did you manage to learn these different instruments so quickly?
BC: I had started out with good ears. My mother taught me to sing at the same time she taught me to talk. Mom was a professional singer. In those days, during the Depression, nobody's profession made anybody much money. Mom sang on the local radio programs in Seattle to generate some income and in church, of course.
JW: What did you father do?
BC: He took a hard hit during the Depression. He did whatever he could do. He was a purser on the ferry from Kirkland to Seattle for a while. He also worked in a knitting mill until it burned down. Then he went in the Civilian Conservation Corps for a while to support us after FDR’s New Deal was passed in 1933. Then Dad started working for the town of Kirkland and ended up being manager of their sewage disposal plant.
JW: How many siblings did you have?
BC: Just one older brother. So there were two kids to support plus my mom. But we never felt poor. Except for two families in town that had some means, everyone in my class had families in the same boat. We didn't feel unhappy about it. I knew my dad worried now and then, but he always figured it out.
JW: Did you listen to music on the radio?
BC: A lot. I remember when we first got a radio—a little table model that my dad bought secondhand from the local druggist after the druggist got a new one. The choice of station was always up to my mother. She loved opera.
JW: How did you get interested in jazz?
BC: By the time I really got into it, pop music at the time was close to jazz. In fact I didn’t realize I was becoming a jazz fan. I was simply listening to bands led by musicians like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington. If you went into the soda fountain in Kirkland, there was a jukebox that had something like seven selections on it. Four of the choices featured music I was interested in. Now when you go into a place that has a jukebox with 4,000 selections, you don't want to hear anything.
JW: Did you have a piano at home?
BC: Yes, because my mother taught, we had an old upright. We also had an Edison phonograph that played wax cylinder recordings. My dad had bought it secondhand somewhere. Until we got the radio, that phonograph was our source of musical entertainment at home. I learned the songs of vocalists, like Harry Lauder, a Scottish singer and comedian.
JW: What was your first radio experience?
BC: My brother was mechanical and built us a crystal set, where you stuck a little wire into a galena crystal, put on earphones and hunted around the dial until you found a radio station. At night, when clear channels would come in, we heard jazz from California and even New Orleans sometimes. Then finally, I got a little table radio of my own and listened to the stations playing the music I loved.
JW: So for you, did that mean the big bands?
BC: Yes. The leaders of those swing bands were the Beatles of their day. When I went into the Army, I played the baritone horn in a military band until my discharge in ‘49. Then I returned to Seattle and studied for free at the University of Washington under the G.I. Bill, where I was a drummer and valve trombonist. In Seattle, I ran into all these musicians in a jazz world I didn't even know existed in Seattle while growing up in Kirkland. We only got to Seattle maybe twice a year.
JW: What’s the the turning point?
BC: One night, I was jamming after hours at the university music building when I ran into Buzzy Bridgeford, a drummer from Olympia, Wash. He had been out here and worked with Randy Brooks and quite a few other bands. Then he was in an auto accident and went back home. He had just come up to Seattle to see what was happening.
JW: Did you become friends?
BC: Yes, we fell in together, and he couldn't believe how innocent I was. He was hipping me to the whole jazz scene and playing me records I hadn't heard before. He even taught me what swing was, which I will be eternally grateful to him for. We gigged around a bit in Seattle, with me on valve trombone. When he was ready to return to New York, he said, “Man, if you want to be a jazz musician, you got to go where the music is. Why don't you come to New York with me?" I said, “OK." I had $50, a valve trombone and a suitcase full of clothes that I'd picked up after I got out of the Army. That was it.
JW: How did you get to New York?
BC: We rode a Greyhound bus and just scuffled in the city until we started get something going. During this period, Dave Lambert befriended me at Charlie’s Tavern, the midtown bar where all the best musicians hung out between record dates and gigs.
JW: How often were you there?
BC: Every day. I didn't know where else to go. I went and hoped I’d be introduced to one or two people who, in turn, would introduce me to others. That’s how it was before the cell phone and affordable answering services. I couldn't even afford to nurse a beer at Charlie’s. I'd just stand around. The musicians union had an open exchange floor three days a week, usually between 1 and 3 p.m. That meant guys would come hire musicians who were handing out.
JW: How did it work?
BC: Contractors would go around with their little books and book musicians on record dates and gigs. Then after you had work lined up, you’d stand out on the sidewalk if it was a nice day or musicians with some money might buy you a beer inside. It was always a big social scene there. I got to know people just from listening to their stories. Dave Lambert was one of the guys I met there. By then, he was an in-demand bebop vocalese singer,
JW: Did he come up to you and say, “Hi?"
BC: No, somebody said, “Hey, Bill, this is Dave Lambert. Dave, this is Bill Crow." I knew him from his records. He and Buddy Stewart had made records with Gene Krupa, like What’s This, and Deedle and Boplicity on their own.
JW: Were you playing bop then?
BC: I was interested in bebop singing at that time. Dave and I struck up an acquaintance. I went downtown and met his family on the Lower East Side. He had a little cold-water flat on Essex Street. By this time, I’d found a day job at a print shop to cover my expenses. I had learned to be a printer in high school. I was making 30 bucks a week. We printed small stuff, like business cards, envelopes and letterhead. I'd hand feed the press.
JW: Were you studying music in New York?
BC: Yes, with Lennie Tristano. I looked him up because I didn't know anybody else who was teaching jazz. He was out in Flushing, Queens.
JW: What instrument are you playing at this point with Lennie?
BC: Valve trombone. He taught me basic-harmony things to work on.
JW: That must have been exhausting given all you had going on.
BC: I went to Lennie's after my printing day gig in the Bronx. I’d take the subway back into Manhattan and change for the 7 out to Flushing, where I’d catch a city bus to Lennie's house. Sometimes he’d have me sit outside his bathroom door while he took and bath and got ready for his gig at Birdland. He'd holler, “Okay. Play the next section.”
JW: What was Lambert like?
BC: He was a jack of all trades. He’d been in the paratroops, I think. He came from Malden, Mass., and was a tree surgeon for a couple of years. Then he spent summers playing drums for a piano-playing singer. He became interested in vocal-group writing. He wasn't really a schooled arranger, but he could hear good vocal lines. His arrangements were easy to sing because the lines all led well. In fact, during the second musicians’ union recording ban in 1948, he did a thing with just singers, who weren’t affected by the ban because they didn't play instruments and weren't in the union. He had a tape of it that he played for me for an auto show where he had about six voices, one of whom was just singing bass lines. It was beautiful music.
JW: A jingle for an auto show?
BC: No, they were just singing “Oohhhs and ahhhs." It was like string writing. The auto show would have music in the background while you looked at the new cars.
JW: Was Lambert generous with you?
BC: Very. He taught me how to scuffle. He was living in a cheap place, and he knew where the cheap good food was. His attitude was, being poor doesn't mean that you have to be miserable. There were a lot of inexpensive place to eat around Midtown. There was a place on the corner of the Brill Building called the Turf Restaurant. Or you could get a decent bowl of lentil soup and bread for 15 cents at Jimmy the Greek’s lunch counter. If you had 50 cents, you could get London broil with Macedonia sauce, a real dinner. There also were a few cheap spaghetti houses in Midtown.
JW: Did Lambert ask you to become one of his singers?
BC: Yeah, he hired me on some gigs. That was nice. I met some really good singers and I had a low voice, so I came in handy. I also could read music and hear what needed to be played the first time around. On Dave’s gigs, there were four or five singers. In 1951, I recorded a few songs with Dave’s singers. The A&R guy called Dave and said, “I've got a record here that I want to do with Mary Lou Williams. She’s written this vocal arrangement, and I can't find singers who can sing it." Mary didn't know how to write to lead the voice.
JW: Meaning?
BC: Each part is like a melody that's easy to follow if you can hear the music. If you write for horn players, they push down valves and know a specific note is going to come out. Singers have to be able to hear the music to bring out notes in key. The goal was to have Dave bring in musician-singers who could play horns. We did that. One of the tunes was called Cloudy. In those days, everything was a 78 record. Mary Lou played four tunes—two sides of two 78s—and we sang. It was recorded but they were never released commercially. One of the other singers was Norma Carson, the trumpet player, and maybe Bob Newman, her husband and tenor saxophonist.
JW: How did it work out?
BC: Dave wrote an intro and we sang what Mary Lou had written. Dave's intro was so much easier to sing. It sounded much better than the rest of it, which is probably why it went unreleased.
JazzWax clips: Here are what I believe are three songs recorded with four vocals behind Mary Lou Williams, featuring Dave Lambert, Bill Crow, Norma Carson and Bob Newman on June 15, 1951:
Here's Walking...
Here's Cloudy...
And here's I Won't Let It Bother Me...
Then a week or so ago, Paul Brown in Maine begged me to interview Bill. Paul's note jarred my memory. Frustrated with myself, I took time out from my day and searched my cassette tapes and hard drives for the lost Bill Crow interviews.
While combing through my computer, I found the two interview files, which fortunately had been captured with a digital recorder over the phone, not an analog cassette. I had the digital files transcribed and, today, I'm starting the multipart, 10,000-word interview. For long-time JazzWax readers, this presentation will be like old times, since I'm spreading our conversation over multiple days. It's simply too long to serve up in one shot.
My apologies to Bill for the missing tape files, which I wound up misfiling originally. Here, in its entirety, is Part 1 of our conversation about Bill's sterling career. The period I decided to focus on is from childhood to 1962, when he was part of the ominous Benny Goodman tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. This includes a wide range of spectacular groups that include famous ensembles led by Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan.
Here's Part 1:
JazzWax: Why did you play so many instruments growing up?Bill Crow: I was just trying to get into music any way I could. In grade school, I thought trumpet would be a great instrument. I had tried piano and that kind of hit a wall.
JW: What do you mean?
BC: I couldn't seem to get past John M. Williams and Shaylor Turner’s Second Grade Piano Book. I started when I was 4, and by the time I was 6, I was pretty sure I didn't want to be a pianist.
In my grade school, they offered musical instrument lessons, so in fourth grade, I decided on becoming a trumpet player. But by the time I reached sixth grade, I was bugged that I didn't have the chops to play the first parts in the school band.
JW: What happened?
BC: The music teacher said, “Well, let's try a bigger mouthpiece." He gave me the school baritone horn, which I fell in love with immediately. I played it very well, right through high school. The problem is that by the time I became interested in jazz in high school, nobody was interested in listening to the baritone horn. I tried out on the alto saxophone to see if I could get into the high school jazz band. Then the drummer graduated, so I played drums.
JW: Do you attribute jumping around to a short attention span or just the fact that you weren't happy with how you sounded on instruments?
BC: Well, it was just what was happening, what was available. I would've stayed with the alto longer, except a whole bunch of new alto players came into the high school the next year and I was last in line in terms of skill. The band needed a drummer, and I was willing to try that.
JW: Then came the valve trombone, yes?
BC: Yep. When I went into the Army in 1946, somebody told me there was something called the valve trombone. I took to it right away and became a jazz player.
JW: How did you manage to learn these different instruments so quickly?
BC: I had started out with good ears. My mother taught me to sing at the same time she taught me to talk. Mom was a professional singer. In those days, during the Depression, nobody's profession made anybody much money. Mom sang on the local radio programs in Seattle to generate some income and in church, of course.
JW: What did you father do?
BC: He took a hard hit during the Depression. He did whatever he could do. He was a purser on the ferry from Kirkland to Seattle for a while. He also worked in a knitting mill until it burned down. Then he went in the Civilian Conservation Corps for a while to support us after FDR’s New Deal was passed in 1933. Then Dad started working for the town of Kirkland and ended up being manager of their sewage disposal plant.
JW: How many siblings did you have?
BC: Just one older brother. So there were two kids to support plus my mom. But we never felt poor. Except for two families in town that had some means, everyone in my class had families in the same boat. We didn't feel unhappy about it. I knew my dad worried now and then, but he always figured it out.
JW: Did you listen to music on the radio?
BC: A lot. I remember when we first got a radio—a little table model that my dad bought secondhand from the local druggist after the druggist got a new one. The choice of station was always up to my mother. She loved opera.
JW: How did you get interested in jazz?
BC: By the time I really got into it, pop music at the time was close to jazz. In fact I didn’t realize I was becoming a jazz fan. I was simply listening to bands led by musicians like Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington. If you went into the soda fountain in Kirkland, there was a jukebox that had something like seven selections on it. Four of the choices featured music I was interested in. Now when you go into a place that has a jukebox with 4,000 selections, you don't want to hear anything.
JW: Did you have a piano at home?
BC: Yes, because my mother taught, we had an old upright. We also had an Edison phonograph that played wax cylinder recordings. My dad had bought it secondhand somewhere. Until we got the radio, that phonograph was our source of musical entertainment at home. I learned the songs of vocalists, like Harry Lauder, a Scottish singer and comedian.
JW: What was your first radio experience?
BC: My brother was mechanical and built us a crystal set, where you stuck a little wire into a galena crystal, put on earphones and hunted around the dial until you found a radio station. At night, when clear channels would come in, we heard jazz from California and even New Orleans sometimes. Then finally, I got a little table radio of my own and listened to the stations playing the music I loved.
JW: So for you, did that mean the big bands?
BC: Yes. The leaders of those swing bands were the Beatles of their day. When I went into the Army, I played the baritone horn in a military band until my discharge in ‘49. Then I returned to Seattle and studied for free at the University of Washington under the G.I. Bill, where I was a drummer and valve trombonist. In Seattle, I ran into all these musicians in a jazz world I didn't even know existed in Seattle while growing up in Kirkland. We only got to Seattle maybe twice a year.
JW: What’s the the turning point?
BC: One night, I was jamming after hours at the university music building when I ran into Buzzy Bridgeford, a drummer from Olympia, Wash. He had been out here and worked with Randy Brooks and quite a few other bands. Then he was in an auto accident and went back home. He had just come up to Seattle to see what was happening.
JW: Did you become friends?
BC: Yes, we fell in together, and he couldn't believe how innocent I was. He was hipping me to the whole jazz scene and playing me records I hadn't heard before. He even taught me what swing was, which I will be eternally grateful to him for. We gigged around a bit in Seattle, with me on valve trombone. When he was ready to return to New York, he said, “Man, if you want to be a jazz musician, you got to go where the music is. Why don't you come to New York with me?" I said, “OK." I had $50, a valve trombone and a suitcase full of clothes that I'd picked up after I got out of the Army. That was it.
JW: How did you get to New York?
BC: We rode a Greyhound bus and just scuffled in the city until we started get something going. During this period, Dave Lambert befriended me at Charlie’s Tavern, the midtown bar where all the best musicians hung out between record dates and gigs.
JW: How often were you there?
BC: Every day. I didn't know where else to go. I went and hoped I’d be introduced to one or two people who, in turn, would introduce me to others. That’s how it was before the cell phone and affordable answering services. I couldn't even afford to nurse a beer at Charlie’s. I'd just stand around. The musicians union had an open exchange floor three days a week, usually between 1 and 3 p.m. That meant guys would come hire musicians who were handing out.
JW: How did it work?
BC: Contractors would go around with their little books and book musicians on record dates and gigs. Then after you had work lined up, you’d stand out on the sidewalk if it was a nice day or musicians with some money might buy you a beer inside. It was always a big social scene there. I got to know people just from listening to their stories. Dave Lambert was one of the guys I met there. By then, he was an in-demand bebop vocalese singer,
JW: Did he come up to you and say, “Hi?"
BC: No, somebody said, “Hey, Bill, this is Dave Lambert. Dave, this is Bill Crow." I knew him from his records. He and Buddy Stewart had made records with Gene Krupa, like What’s This, and Deedle and Boplicity on their own.
JW: Were you playing bop then?
BC: I was interested in bebop singing at that time. Dave and I struck up an acquaintance. I went downtown and met his family on the Lower East Side. He had a little cold-water flat on Essex Street. By this time, I’d found a day job at a print shop to cover my expenses. I had learned to be a printer in high school. I was making 30 bucks a week. We printed small stuff, like business cards, envelopes and letterhead. I'd hand feed the press.
JW: Were you studying music in New York?
BC: Yes, with Lennie Tristano. I looked him up because I didn't know anybody else who was teaching jazz. He was out in Flushing, Queens.
JW: What instrument are you playing at this point with Lennie?
BC: Valve trombone. He taught me basic-harmony things to work on.
JW: That must have been exhausting given all you had going on.
BC: I went to Lennie's after my printing day gig in the Bronx. I’d take the subway back into Manhattan and change for the 7 out to Flushing, where I’d catch a city bus to Lennie's house. Sometimes he’d have me sit outside his bathroom door while he took and bath and got ready for his gig at Birdland. He'd holler, “Okay. Play the next section.”
JW: What was Lambert like?
BC: He was a jack of all trades. He’d been in the paratroops, I think. He came from Malden, Mass., and was a tree surgeon for a couple of years. Then he spent summers playing drums for a piano-playing singer. He became interested in vocal-group writing. He wasn't really a schooled arranger, but he could hear good vocal lines. His arrangements were easy to sing because the lines all led well. In fact, during the second musicians’ union recording ban in 1948, he did a thing with just singers, who weren’t affected by the ban because they didn't play instruments and weren't in the union. He had a tape of it that he played for me for an auto show where he had about six voices, one of whom was just singing bass lines. It was beautiful music.
JW: A jingle for an auto show?
BC: No, they were just singing “Oohhhs and ahhhs." It was like string writing. The auto show would have music in the background while you looked at the new cars.
JW: Was Lambert generous with you?
BC: Very. He taught me how to scuffle. He was living in a cheap place, and he knew where the cheap good food was. His attitude was, being poor doesn't mean that you have to be miserable. There were a lot of inexpensive place to eat around Midtown. There was a place on the corner of the Brill Building called the Turf Restaurant. Or you could get a decent bowl of lentil soup and bread for 15 cents at Jimmy the Greek’s lunch counter. If you had 50 cents, you could get London broil with Macedonia sauce, a real dinner. There also were a few cheap spaghetti houses in Midtown.
JW: Did Lambert ask you to become one of his singers?
BC: Yeah, he hired me on some gigs. That was nice. I met some really good singers and I had a low voice, so I came in handy. I also could read music and hear what needed to be played the first time around. On Dave’s gigs, there were four or five singers. In 1951, I recorded a few songs with Dave’s singers. The A&R guy called Dave and said, “I've got a record here that I want to do with Mary Lou Williams. She’s written this vocal arrangement, and I can't find singers who can sing it." Mary didn't know how to write to lead the voice.
JW: Meaning?
BC: Each part is like a melody that's easy to follow if you can hear the music. If you write for horn players, they push down valves and know a specific note is going to come out. Singers have to be able to hear the music to bring out notes in key. The goal was to have Dave bring in musician-singers who could play horns. We did that. One of the tunes was called Cloudy. In those days, everything was a 78 record. Mary Lou played four tunes—two sides of two 78s—and we sang. It was recorded but they were never released commercially. One of the other singers was Norma Carson, the trumpet player, and maybe Bob Newman, her husband and tenor saxophonist.
JW: How did it work out?
BC: Dave wrote an intro and we sang what Mary Lou had written. Dave's intro was so much easier to sing. It sounded much better than the rest of it, which is probably why it went unreleased.
JazzWax clips: Here are what I believe are three songs recorded with four vocals behind Mary Lou Williams, featuring Dave Lambert, Bill Crow, Norma Carson and Bob Newman on June 15, 1951:
Here's Walking...
Here's Cloudy...
And here's I Won't Let It Bother Me...
This story appears courtesy of JazzWax by Marc Myers.
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