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Owen McNally writes about jazz and other music events in Connecticut's Jazz Corridor, stretching from the tip of Fairfield County, right through New Haven and Hartford, and on up beyond the state into the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. Keep up with the best our area has to offer in music.

Bassist Bill Crow Serves Hot Jazz and Warm Reminiscences at Bethel Pizzeria and Jazz Spa

Dennis Stock
Bill Crow in New York City in 1958.
Crow has a novelist's eye for spotting the telling detail and a humorist's, pitch-perfect ear for recounting the funny side of the jazz life.

Although Bill Crow has been an excellent and industrious bassist and consummate sideman since the height of the Golden Age of modern jazz in the 1950s, the 87-year-old jazzman might well be most celebrated for his groundbreaking accomplishments as a writer and grand master compiler and preserver of classic jazz humor in his famously funny and invaluable collection, Jazz Anecdotes.

Crow, an encyclopedia of jazz wit and lore, just might spin an anecdote or two about the many jazz legends he’s known or performed with over the decades as he returns on Sunday, July 19, at 6:00 p.m. to one of his favorite Connecticut stomping grounds, PizzeriaLauretanoin Bethel. The bassist/author’s colleagues at the popular pizza, pasta and jazz-friendly eatery are the Japanese-born pianistHiroshiYamazaki, tenor saxophonist Bob Kolb and drummer Roger Post. Admission: $15. Information: pizzerialauretano.com and (203) 792-1500.

A wordsmith with a novelist’s eye for spotting the telling detail and a humorist’s, pitch-perfect ear for recounting the funny side of the jazz life, Crow first created an indelible, insider’s view of the jazz world in 1991 with the publication of his first book, Jazz Anecdotes, a classic compendium of jazz humor that he not only collected but honed and orchestrated into eminently readable, even hilariously addictive material.

Jazz Anecdotes — which remains the definitive collection of jazz jokes and wit — later begat a sequel, Jazz Anecdotes: Second Time Around.  And in a more writerly, more personal and autobiographical work with well-wrought character sketches, From Birdland to Broadway, Crow chronicles his experiences in the jazz world through his second career as a double bassist and tuba playing member of premier pit bands for famous Broadway shows like 42nd Street, a profitable, pleasant pursuit for 10 years that, he says, even earned him a pension.

 

Credit Peter Strouse
Crow performing at Pizza Lauretano with Roger Post, Billy Cofrances, and Dee Cansella.

Crow has been the bassist of choice for a litany of jazz greats, including Gerry Mulligan, Marian McPartland, Benny Goodman, Stan Getz, Terry Gibbs, Teddy Charles, Bob Brookmeyer and Clark Terry, and appears on many now revered recordings.  

Besides playing with the Goodman Orchestra on its historic, cultural mission to Moscow in 1962 during the Cold War, the high-flying Crow has toured elsewhere throughout the world. He’s  performed everywhere from hallowed venues like Carnegie Hall, Birdland, the Village Vanguard and The Apollo to more jazz clubs and concert halls than anyone could possibly recall. Among his countless gigs are storied appearances in Hartford, including performances decades ago with the great guitarists Jimmy Raney or Jim Hall and the gifted, young pianist Dave Mackay, who was then the talk of the town. Momentous nights for local fans back then, those gigs occurred, more than likely, at Hartford’s old Heublein Hotel Lounge, the city’s, once-fabled  downtown jazz palace back in the day, which featured everybody from Dizzy Gillespie to Teddy Wilson.

Born in Macbeth, Washington on December, 27, 1927, Crow grew in up the thick of the Great Depression in Kirkland, Washington, where, early on, he developed an interest in music, starting out on piano at age 4.  His lifetime passion for jazz was  initially inspired upon first hearing Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five rendition of West End Blues on a 78 rpm record played for him by an empathetic  school music teacher.

“That record just knocked me out,” he says by phone, both for Armstrong’s startlingly innovative approach as well as for the then state-of-the-art technology of the 78 rpm recording played on a turntable. 

“Besides the music,” he recalls of that childhood moment of discovery, “I thought that having flat records (78s) was really hip, because we still had an Edison machine at home that played cylinders, and mostly old vaudeville material.”

Along with his music studies, which moved on to trumpet, baritone horn and valve trombone (the bass came later at an Adirondack resort summer job), he became enamored of writing and words, inspired initially by reading pieces by the stylish cadre of great New Yorker magazine writers of the 1930s and ‘40s.

“I was always a reader,” Crow explains of the origin of his interest in writing. “My mother taught me to read before I started school. And so when I began elementary school, they put me in the second grade, which put me behind everybody in mathematics. I still count on my fingers,” he says jokingly.

“I was fortunate to have a sixth grade teacher in Kirkland who was very urbane, and she introduced all of us to the New Yorker writers. So I started reading James Thurber and E.B. White and appreciating their use of language,” he says.

 

Crow believes that humor itself is a universal element in the human condition.

To this day, his favorite writers are White and yet another legendary New Yorker writer, Joseph Mitchell.

“I loved White’s lovely use of language,” Crow says of his lifetime prose idol. “What I admired about Mitchell’s writing,” he adds, “is that he wrote out of such a tremendous interest in things without ever putting himself in the picture at all. He just told about the things.”

Crow’s writing style today is still rooted in the wisdom of William StrunkJr. and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, his writer’s manual and Bible whose fundamental commandment, he immediately recalls, is: “Omit needless words.”

With E.B. White still much in mind, Crow says: “I write and then read it to myself. And if anything doesn’t sound clear, or doesn’t flow right, I look for a better sentence construction, or a better choice of words,” striving for White’s holy grail of lucidity and unadorned elegance.  

 

Credit Bill Crow
Bill Crow with jazz pianist Marian McPartland in 1997.

By the time Crow got to high school, he was writing for his school paper, excelled in English class and loved to write essays, a foreshadowing of his later, well-etched sketches of musicians.

“A few years later,” he says of the early steps in his writing career, “I was able to do a few articles for Down Beat magazine about Northwest Coast jazz.”

“Many years later when I was elected to the board of New York Local 802,  American Federation of Musicians, they gave me a page on the monthly journal to do a column, and I started collecting musicians’ stories. I also wrote a few things for the critic and songwriter Gene Lees’ Jazz Letter too, and later I incorporated some of that stuff in my books.”

By then, he was becoming known, not just as a fine bassist, but also as the literate chronicler of jazz anecdotes. Or as saxophonist Phil Woods, a longtime friend and noted wit, once said, Crow had become  "the Boswell" of the jazz world, referring to the great 18th century biographer James Boswell, the seemingly omnipresent observer and recorder of the life, thoughts and verbal gems of the eminently quotable, London literary lion and  lexicographer, Samuel Johnson.

When Crow  was elected to the union board, a position he held for 20 years, the then president, John Glasel, asked him to write a column for the monthly union publication, leaving it up to him to pick a topic.

“I knew exactly what kind of a column I wanted to do,” said Crow who had been listening to and appreciating fellow musicians’ funny stories for years backstage, in backrooms, bars or wherever they gathered and talked freely of funny things said or done by such luminaries as Lester Young, Al Cohn or Zoot Sims, and countless other colleagues.

Credit Bill Crow
Bill Cor performing with Marian McPartland and Joe Morello at the Hickory House in New York in 1954.

Musicians’ jokes — a whole, rich sub-genre of American humor — have long been a staple of jazz performers, a number of whom are natural born existentialists, apparently nurtured since birth on irony, wit and seeing the funny side of life. Anecdotes are a way, perhaps, of dealing with adversity or absurdity, which can seem synonymous. Quite often, jazz anecdotes  are just a happy outlet for laughing at or even reflecting on or mocking human foibles linked with sex, booze, or diverse forms of dissipation, deception or both. Or they can just be aimed at deflating swollen egos or diminishing the pain of sadness or  catastrophe. They can be a bit Rabelaisian, embracing everything from satire to satyriasis. Or they can be just served cold as plain and funny as a Borscht Belt one-liner.

Jazz anecdotes must always, of course, be flavored with funny punchlines. A raconteur can season stories with tall tales, puns, surprising twists and turns, trickery, mockery, mimicry, mixing, and matching anything in the mirthful manner of HennyYoungman and Groucho Marx to early Woody Allen. Jazz anecdotes alone generate more than enough earthy or irreverent comic material on just about every subject imaginable to have inspired Sigmund Freud to revise his psychoanalytical classic on how humor works, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious.

While Crow is the great connoisseur/collector of specifically jazz humor, he believes that humor itself is a universal element in the human condition, an omnipresent, positive force in the daily life of virtually anyone, anywhere.

“Humor is found in people everywhere,” he asserts with the confidence of someone who grew up in a household where humor reigned and was openly encouraged by his amusing parents. Not only was humor alive and well at home, but even everywhere he worked, even as a youth back in Kirkland, long before he arrived at 22 in the cosmopolitan Big Apple and fell in with urban wits like Al Cohn and Joe Morello or storybook characters like Zoot Sims and Jimmy McPartland.

“When I was a kid,” he says, “I used to work in a print shop in Kirkland and the printers were all funny. They played jokes on each other. They told stories.”

“And then I got a job in a butcher shop, and, lo and behold, the butchers were also funny. I think it’s just that working people have a tendency to see the lighter side of things,” he suggests.

 

Credit Bill Crow
Bill Crow with Ed Xiques, Ron Vincent, Tom Kohl, and Michelle.

Even for a writer with a good sense of humor, rounding up and getting all these gags down on paper was a big job, but somebody had to do it. Crow, with his years of insider status on the jazz scene, taste for humor and love of writing, felt he was the chosen one.

Making his case for writing a monthly column on anecdotes, Crow explained to the union president:  “Every time we play a gig, the guys in the band room start telling stories and someone always says, ‘Somebody should write these down!’ ”

“Let me be the guy who writes them down,” he urged Glasel.

Glasel gave the green light. And Crow began gathering, polishing, and preserving funny jazz anecdotes as part of the music’s verbal legacy. But for Crow’s long running history project, many or even all of these endangered species might  well have perished or languished in obscurity instead of becoming what is now a permanent piece of the music’s collective memory.

“For that first column,” Crow recalls, “I wrote about a few stories that I remembered people telling me, or things that had happened to me in jazz,” he says. In preparation, he scoured for anecdotes in ancient jazz magazines, pored over old jazz books, and checked out oral histories in the comprehensive archives at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.

“After the first column ran, everybody seemed to get the idea of the column immediately, and started sending me anecdotes. I’ve been doing it for over 30 years now, and I haven’t had to go looking for stories yet. They’re still coming in,” he says.

All of Crow’s books have been published by the prestigious Oxford University Press. That’s a piece of rare, good karma and a coveted seal of approval for any jazz book, a happy turn of events that, Crow says, happened this way:

“At the time, Oxford’s senior vice president in New York was Sheldon Meyer, who was a jazz fan and had already assembled a stable of celebrated jazz writers, including Whitney Balliett  (The New Yorker’s elegant stylist and poetic prose laureate of jazz criticism); Gene Lees and Ira Gitler.

“Oxford had already published anecdotal collections from the world of opera, literature and, I think, the Army. Sheldon (the jazz loving publisher/veep) had the idea of somebody doing a similar collection of jazz anecdotes. So he asked his jazz writers who would be the right person to do this. Because of the column I was writing for the union paper, they all pointed at me. Sheldon called me up. And that was it.”

Crow was off and running. And he still is, writing his monthly column; working three days a week at the union office in Manhattan, and often playing several gigs a week in small group or big band formats from Greenwich Village to Brooklyn to Jersey. And now, for what may be the dozenth time, the affable, articulate bassist is back by popular demand at Bethel, ready to riff musically. Or, if it’s what the audience desires, he can just as easily riff verbally on anecdotes or on the decades of vital jazz history that he’s experienced first-hand both as hip participant and reflective writer/observer.

Please submit press releases on upcoming jazz events at least two weeks before the publication date to omac28@gmail.com. Comments left below are also most welcome.  

Owen McNally writes the weekly Jazz Corridor column for WNPR.org as well as periodic freelance pieces for The Hartford Courant and other publications.

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