Index

Ella, Art, Frank and Chuck

Linda found us yet another house and we moved over to Güdingen, to a luxury house where we lived for the next ten years.

Meanwhile we’d had our eye on a really splendid place out in Speyer, right next door to Frank Farian, who owned the Boney M vocal group.

We’d gone to view a new house, which turned out to have 56 steps from front door up to bedroom. While I was complaining about this to the builder, Linda had started chatting to a man on the other side of the road. He showed us his own house, which was for sale.

It was marvellous, modern and roomy, with a huge indoor swimming pool. We decided that we wanted it badly. Once more Linda began her cal­cu­lations on how, by using all possible tax deductions, we could easily af­ford the house, and keep the one in Spain.

The owner told us that the pool had not been passed by the build­ing inspec­tors, because it had been built on the spot where the plans called for a garage, and they re­fused to accept that.

We made our way to the local Rathaus. Next day, after we’d spent a few mo­ments with the Bürgermeister, that worthy himself, plus seventeen building inspectors turned up to take a good look at Linda’s bosoms, both of which, plus the pool, they officially passed at once. (That her bosoms were more than generous had not previously ocurred to me, until, one day, in the Berlin radio station canteen, Milo said to me, “Here—you're a tit man...”)

We kept on visiting the house regularly, even taking the Molders to have a look. Of course we couldn’t afford it. It was a bit of a white ele­phant with that pool, and Hans-Joachim said that it would cost a fortune to run, as an in­door pool has to be heated summer and winter. I hadn’t thought of that. It put paid to the idea at once.

Linda never gave up trying, though, in her search for the perfect house, and we went all over the place looking. Even in Spain, after our beauti­ful new house had been finished, we rushed around seeking an even better one.

Then one day she said ‘Ron, I think we have the best one already.’

As soon as she stopped looking for another house Linda began look­ing for an­other husband. I didn’t notice this, being too occupied with my work at the time. I carried on in blissful ignorance.

We saw all the sights, visited all the restaurants in our corner of Spain. When we were nearby Linda liked to go to a place called Tico-Tico for her after-meal coffee. This place was run by a small elderly homosexual called Titch, and staffed by his boy­friends.

One of them, a big black guy from Chile, was Linda’s favourite.

‘What colour tonight?’ he’d say when we sat at the bar. Whatever colour she chose, he’d mix her up a cocktail to match.

Our immediate neighbour in Spain was a Dutchman named de Beers. When I told him about the Tic-Tico he insisted upon coming with us. Once inside he got quickly drunk and began flapping his hands and going ‘Whoops, dearie!’ to the fag waiters.

Titch came up and took me aside. ‘If you don’t stop him doing that, the guy from Chile is going to knife him.’ I had to drag de Beers away from the place.

Titch was the only restaurant owner I have ever known who gave me a free meal. It was just before Christmas, and he was trying to drum up some trade, so he invited us to dinner. It was excellent fare, and throughout the meal he gave us a com­plete rundown on the recipe for Christmas Day, and precise details of how everything was going to be cooked. To listen to him, it was going to be a meal fit for a king.

I dutifully informed all my neighbours and friends, while keeping away from the place myself on the big day. Everyone who went there told me afterwards that it was one of the worst meals they had ever eaten.

Some years later Titch was discovered tied hand and foot in his deserted restau­rant. The place had been closed for some time and was up for sale. He had obviously been inside there, trussed up like that, for some time, and was fully de­hydrated, and near death. He also had a big hole in his throat from a recent tra­cheostomy. The police are still seeking whoever it was who tried to kill him.

A lot of the action for me was in Cologne in those days, partly because some of the best recording studios and engineers were located in that city. Peter’s band used to get booked for all kinds of work, and, from time to time, we made backings for rock singers.

A guy called Kurt Kiesewetter was very popular at the time. He was a sort of quasi rock/blues/folk singer, but he wanted more than anything in the world to make a record with the Herbolzheimer band.

Peter wrote some really amazing arrangements for the session, which took place in the morning right after we’d finished some jazz concert or other the night be­fore, and had been celebrating with several kegs of beer during the small hours.

Peter had thrown the book at us on those charts. Some of the bars would be double-tempo, some half-tempo. At several points he had inserted 6/4 or 7/4 bars, which meant much rapid mental arithmetic, all taking place and being sight-read by us at high speed. He had perfected a sys­tem of writing for wind instru­ments which I be­lieve is unique in the mu­sic world. When the rhythm stayed on four, but we played double time against them, he would write us two bars in the place of one, divided by a thin dotted line. While playing it was essential to read the music sev­eral bars ahead, otherwise one of these bars would pop up and throw you.

This made it easier for us to play jazz phrasing on the passages be­cause it eliminated all sixteenth and thirty-second notes, but made it hellish difficult to re­mem­ber, as the only warning we got that a double tempo was coming up was that dotted line somewhere in the middle of the long bar.

The band played perfectly, as usual, and Peter was highly pleased with the re­sults. When we were listening to the playback he came over to me after one par­ticu­larly tricky passage.

‘Thank you for that bar,’ he said, with a smile. Amazing. No one had ever thanked me for a bar before.

Jiggs Whigham, the American trombonist, told me that he reckoned that no one would ever realise the amount of concentration we had to exercise when we played music like that. He com­pared it to the fierce concentration of a Formula One driver. One mis­take and it’s all over.

Of course—a mistake on our part wouldn’t be as dangerous as one made by a racing driver, but we also weren’t getting paid as much.

We had to hurry to the Westdeutscher Rundfunk after the session, to make a television show for somebody or other. I never used to pay too much attention to the details, so it was a pleasant surprise to find a rhythm section led by guitarist Joe Pass waiting for us, with Harry ‘Sweets’ Edison, the trum­pet player you can hear playing muted in the background on most Sinatra records, and Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis, the tenor player from the Basie band.

Norman Granz was running the session as producer. We had to finish by five o’clock because a lot of the guys had to catch a plane for Vi­enna.

Anyway it was a package for Ella Fitzgerald, and all the engineers and lighting and sound men were running around like a college football team, lots of radio station officials stood around look­ing impor­tant, and a really tremendous amount of German big boss-management posturing was going on all over the place.

The trumpet section was located right in front of the two huge Leslie speakers of Dieter Reith’s Hammond organ. The Leslie has a large double horn re­volving on top of it which gives the speaker its distinc­tive sinus sound wave. Each one of those speakers has a licence to kill at close range—the wave is concentrated like a laser, and can pierce an eardrum at six paces.

Every time Dieter played a stab chord we nearly went through the roof. There was some trouble with mike feedback on this, so we took a short break. Most of the guys rushed out to the coffee machine, but I never drink coffee when I’m playing as it makes my heart bang, so, just for a moment, I was standing in the corridor outside the studio on my own when she came.

I heard halting footsteps, and then, around the corner came this elderly woman. She was wearing a flowered dress, and clutching a really enormous handbag. She moved hesitatingly towards me, as if she was lost. When she came level she stopped, looked at me, smiled faintly, and said, in a husky squeak, ‘I’m as nervous as a kitten.’

‘Come on, Ella,’ I said, ‘You’ve done all this a thousand times.’

‘I’m still as nervous as a kitten.’

‘You’ll be all right once we get started.’

‘Oh, I hope so.’

I opened the door and ushered her into the studio, where she was im­medi­ately surrounded by the high officials and their yes-men, all jump­ing up and down, wag­ging their tails and panting.

We started running through the show as a sort of general camera re­hearsal. I suppose that Ella was singing somewhere else in the stu­dio, but we couldn’t hear any­thing because of the earsplitting din coming from the giant Leslie speakers be­hind us.

I guess we must have flinched or jumped once too often, because Di­eter sud­denly stopped playing and rushed around in front of us. He was hopping mad and snarling.

‘Every time I play you jump up in the air. STOPPIT! STOP­PIT! STOPPIT! DO I MAKE MYSELF CLEAR?’

All this at the top of his voice. We nodded humbly.

The number we were currently playing didn’t have much in it for the trum­pets because Sweets was playing muted over on the other side of the studio. Ack was nod­ding beside me with his eyes closed.

Just seeing him like that set me off on a truly tremendous yawn, which I didn’t bother to cover up because no one was going to be looking at us.

It was only a half hour show and we piled into the control room to look at the rough takes they’d made with the cameras during the re­hearsal.

Right in the middle of one of Ella’s songs there was a great cut­away shot of Dieter, red faced and shouting soundlessly at Ack and me. We all had a good laugh at that one. ‘You tell ‘em, Dieter,’ said the bass player, who was none other than the Swede, Niels Henning Orsted Pederson, who left our band shortly after to play with the Oscar Peterson Trio in the States.

During Sweets’ solo, the camera panned slowly over the trumpet section, God knows why, and there I was, yawning so wide you could see my tonsils vibrat­ing. The shot moved relentlessly on to show Ack nodding away, fast asleep.

‘Jesus, Ron,’ said Peter, ‘You could get your whole foot in that one.’

‘All right,’ the director said, ‘Let us make another vun.’

As we moved away towards the door Norman Granz spoke up.

‘No, no. No more. That was OK.’

Now German TV directors are used to getting unlimited re­hearsals, as many as they need to get all their camera shots and angles right, and this guy was no exception.

‘But ve haff time. Ve must do another vun. That vun vas terr-ri-bal.’

I looked around. Ella had gone.

‘No more takes,’ said Granz, firmly. ‘Ella only sings once. That was it.’

‘But—the yawns, the sleeping, the shouting—?’

‘Use cutaways. You know what cutaways are, surely. This is jazz, man. You don’t do jazz twice.’

With the show ending so suddenly we all had an unexpected four hours ex­tra to wait for our planes. As I left I could hear the director muttering in German about the crazy Americans.

That business about Ella being nervous had reminded me of an LP I once made in Munich with the German film star Hildegard Kneff. She was a great stage actress, and generally sang a kind of half-spoken cabaret style.

Now she was making an album of Cole Porter songs.

After we’d made all the playbacks I sat beside her on a bench out­side the stu­dio. Hilda was pregnant with her first baby, and was glowing with it, as all mothers do.

‘I don’t know what I’m doing here,’ she whispered, ‘I can’t sing this stuff. It isn’t my style. How am I going to sing it?’ She was on the verge of tears.

‘Are you kidding? Sing it the way you’d sing anything else.’

She wasn’t listening to me. Hilda was winding herself up for a gi­gantic at­tack of nerves. Of course, as soon as she started singing, the nerves disap­peared. The re­cord, when it came out, was great.

A lot of stars get the willies before they perform, and often they’ll talk about it with anyone who’ll listen, just to get it off their chest, like damning the devil—break an arm and a leg—that kind of thing. If you say you’ll be ner­vous, you won’t be. It may be good ther­apy, but musicians don’t go through all that. I guess that playing a lot of notes, the way we do, sort of steadies us up.

Al Porcino was a trumpet player, a man whom I had idolised in my youth. I had followed his career, which was a brilliant one, closely. For most of his career he had been on call to all of the best American bands. He had played lead trumpet with, among others, Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Buddy Rich, and Terry Gibbs.

Al was the darling of the Los Angeles recording studios. Recently he had vis­ited Europe with the fabulous Thad Jones/Mel Lewis band. Al was the greatest.

No sooner had he arrived in Europe to stay than nearly everyone even remotely con­nected with music re­ceived a package containing his life story, plus a T-shirt with I LOVE AL, or something like that, painted across the front.

I first heard about this when the boss of my radio station showed me a letter he’d re­ceived from Al offering his services, and saying that a really professional trumpet player would make all the difference to the band. He sent a simi­lar letter to every radio band in Germany and Switzerland, so that, in one single blow, he managed to make himself around two hundred enemies, just like that.

One afternoon he called me.

‘We. . . . ell, hi. . . ya Rah. . . n. . ny. This is Al Por. . . cin. . .no ca. . . ll. . . ling from Mün. . . . chen’ (ie Munich). Like most Americans he pro­nounced München to rhyme with luncheon.

The tiny dots between syllables there represent a pause of roughly one sec­ond each. Al spoke like that, spacing his words excruciatingly slowly and carefully, as if loth to give them away.

He began by giving me his life story in half-tempo. As I already knew his life story, I wandered away after about ten minutes and made my­self a cup of cof­fee. I came back half an hour later as he was just about to offer me a gig with his new band.

‘Of course!’ I gasped. ‘Golly, I’d do it for nothing, just to get the chance to play with you.’ I then named a price which he immediately said was four times too much for him to pay.

‘Who’s paying for this greatly extended, peak-hour, three hundred mile trunk call, then?’ I asked.

‘Oh, that’s OK,’ (slow. . . ly) ‘I’m calling from a friend’s house.’

We finally settled on a price five times that which he was pre­pared to pay, which didn’t worry him, as he had no intention of paying it anyway.

Al’s way of talking had always caused mirth among his contemporaries. Bob Burgess had already told me of an incident in the Kenton band bus. Kenton was asking some of the guys for advice on the future style of the band. They’d had the Johnny Richards Innovations period, the Bill Russo Sketches on Standards period, the Bob Graettinger, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Holman, Pete Rugolo, and Dee Barton periods.

‘What shall we do next?’ said Stan.

Al’s voice grated out slowly from the back of the bus.

‘Why....don’t.....we....try....swing.....ging........Stan?’

I drove the 150 miles to the gig in Darmstadt the next day. It was in an old fire station, which looked as if it had been deserted in a hurry during the First World War. The only source of illumination was a 40 watt bulb, high up in the ca­thedral-type ceil­ing.

Ack van Rooyen was there, too. It was a big band, eight brass and five saxes. The rest of the band was a mixed bag of mostly unsuccessful American gig players liv­ing in Munich. There were several girls in the sax sec­tion.

The book was a foot thick, and contained relics of the good old days—Al Cohn, Terry Gibbs, and Bob Brookmeyer arrangements which Al had acquired from the various bands he’d worked in. As far as I could see, everyone played all the time—my idea of hell, by the way.

‘Hey!’ I said. ‘I can’t see.’ His wife ap­peared, and, dur­ing the next hour and a half, built an enormous bit of scaffold­ing in front of me that even­tually supported a powerful search­light, which she trained to shine right through my eyeballs and directly into my head.

‘Now then!’ said Al. ‘I want you to play the 2nd Trumpet book.’

I picked up the 2nd book, and then, seeing that it was filled with 3rd trum­pet parts I changed it for the 4th book, which contained all of the 2nd parts.

He was back over in a flash. ‘No, no. You have to play the 2nd book, which is 3rd trumpet. Ack and Bill will play 4th and 2nd from the 1st and 4th books. I myself shall play 1st from the 3rd book,’ he added, grandly.

‘Why don’t you try putting the parts in the right books?’ I said.

He looked at me coldly. ‘You must think I’m stupid,’ he said.

As it was, he didn’t play anything, for as soon as we started he be­gan run­ning up and down in front of the band as if his pants were on fire.

Here at last was a man who could make a full-time occupation out of telling everyone what to do. He mimed all instruments, pantomiming be­fore the alto solo­ist with a hunch-shouldered, high-left-elbowed, finger-waggling stance, coupled with a ferocious squint which could only mean: ‘Play lots of notes, high.’

Strutting before the trombone section he vigorously pumped imagi­nary trom­bone slides. Looking at the trumpets, he puffed his cheeks grotesquely, point­ing at the sky. Picking delicately up near an imaginary bridge, he capered and strummed before the bass player like a man in the throes of a St. Vitus’s Dance.

He was at his best, though, in front of the drums. Pointing at each item of equipment during a solo he screamed, ‘TOM-TOM! MORE TOM-TOM! NO!—CYMBALS!! CYMBALS!! HIT THE DAMN SNAREDRUM! MORE BASS DRUM! DOUBLE UP FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! HIT IT! HIT IT! OVER THERE! YEAH, THAT ONE!!’

He went on like this for quite a while until Dai Bowen, the drum­mer, who was a Welshman, told him to bugger off. At this moment I decided to play one of the 1st trumpet parts, not having heard any lead at all, up to now.

He rushed over, waving his arms. ‘No, no, NO!! I play lead!’

Later on, greatly daring, I finished up a number on a screamer. ‘YEAH!’ he shouted into the mike. ‘THAT WAS ACK VAN ROOYEN UP THERE ON THE HIGH B-FLAT! WOW ACK! MY MAN!’

Ack looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. That was the last time I was going to do that.

It was one of those nights where if you looked up just for a sec­ond, you were lost for three pages. We waded through the book. As far as I was con­cerned, everyone played all the time and everything sounded the same. I be­gan to wish for some divine intervention. Maybe the fire station would catch fire?

I was out of luck. After we’d finished I hung around waiting for my money.

When he paid me it was less than we’d agreed upon. I protested. He went downstairs to get the rest of it from his wife.

He must have had a getaway car waiting, because the next moment they had both disappeared. I heard a distant voice say, ‘I’ll give. . . you. . the. . . rest. . . next. . . time. . . Rahn. . n. . y.’ Then he was Mr. Gone. There was no next time.

Bob Coassin, who played in the Herbolzheimer band later on, said that Al kept a row of trumpet mouthpieces lined up right across the mantelpiece of his apartment, rather like Lew Soloff, (who appears later in this tale). While Al was out of the room Bob picked up and examined a few of them. When Al came back in again he made a bee-line for the mantelpiece and began to straighten and adjust the disturbed mouthpieces, fussing and muttering angrily until they were all absolutely in line once more, with the numbers neatly facing front. He must have been standing outside the room all the time, watching to see whether Bob touched anything.

Bob had previously played first trumpet in the Buddy Rich band. When Buddy gypped him out of some of his wages he left the band, taking the first trumpet book with him. Several days later a man wearing a dark suit, a felt hat with the brim snapped down, and a face like George Raft knocked on his door to say that Buddy had taken out a contract on him, and could he please have his book back. A long black car full of his friends, all wearing dark suits, was parked outside the house. You didn’t mess with these people, otherwise you were liable to wake up with your head looking back at you from the top of the bedpost. He handed over the book and left for Europe at once.

I’d heard a lot about Chuck Findley. He was the new wonder boy in Los Ange­les. There wasn’t a session going without Chuck being booked on lead trum­pet. He even had to go over to New York when Sinatra made his Trilogy records. Billy May had written all the charts for one of the three LP’s on the album, using all the old guys who had played on Frank’s earlier records. They needed a young guy to lead the brass, though. None of the old stalwarts could play like that any more.

Peter had asked me to write several arrangements of Earth, Wind, & Fire tunes. When I turned up in Baden-Baden with the music Chuck was there in the band.

By now I’d played with many of the finest trumpet players in the world, in­cluding the fabulous Maynard Ferguson. None of them im­pressed me as much as Chuck. As far as I am concerned he is the perfect first trumpet player, and he also plays great jazz.

During the recording of Fantasy Peter asked me to put something over the top of one of the long chords. I went into the studio and asked Chuck if he’d like to play a few bars of New York, New York over the chord. This would take him up to a very long double octave C-sharp, a very difficult note to play on the trum­pet, and well out of most people’s range.

‘Let’s do it,’ he said, and played it at once, and once only.

‘Jesus, Chuck,’ I said, after he’d done it. ‘You brought tears to my eyes then.’

‘That’s nothing. Derek would have taken it up another octave.’

He was referring to the English trumpet player Derek Watkins. Derek gets past the range of normal hearing on the trumpet, right up into the cat and dog frequen­cies.

Chuck was like a schoolboy in the Italian restaurant later on. He ate three plates of spaghetti, one after the other, each one with a dif­ferent sauce. He was con­stantly laughing and joking. Every now and then his wife would say, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry you aren’t having a good time.’

The way the Americans always stuff themselves when they’re over here makes one wonder what the hell they get to eat back home. Our radio symphony or­chestra solved that question for me. After making a tour of the States they in­formed me that all they got to eat anywhere was hamburgers and hot dogs.

Hermann, the bass trombone player in the symphony orchestra, was a school friend of the leader of the Bundeswehr Big Band, which was sta­tioned at the old war­time military radio complex in Euskirchen. This was the official German Army, Navy, Air Force band, only there for publicity pur­poses. They never played anything but show and dance music, jazz orien­tated, and never, ever, played on parades, or military occasions.

The band was great, and Hermann got me an introduction to Egon Suhrenkamp, who directed the band. He was a Master Sergeant, but the real boss of the band was a career soldier named Major Schiffer. This guy knew nothing about music, and had nothing to say about policy in the band, but he made damn sure that his name got plastered all over the place wherever the band played.

I wrote Egon a score of the tune The High and the Mighty to try out, with rock rhythms, and featur­ing the three girl singers all the way through, but singing without words and min­gling all the time with the wind instruments. Singing EEEEE, AHHHHH, OHHHHHH or OOOOOOO in unison produces stunning effects from a vocal group. The result gave the band a strange, almost heavenly sound. Icy fingers played up and down my spine when I first heard it.

A few days after I’d sent the score Egon called up and gave me twelve ti­tles to write for the band—a whole LP.

The band came to Saarbrücken after they’d finished the recording and Egon took me into a pub to hear the music. He just gave the bartender some money to slip the cassette into the audio system.

No one in the pub reacted to the music, but the bartender gave Egon the cas­sette back almost at once, saying that his customers didn’t dig that kind of rub­bish.

I thought—Jesus, can it really be that bad? I’d had to write ev­erything in a tearing hurry. I could hardly hear anything in there any­way, because of my rotten ears.

I went with the band to the Saarlandhalle, where they were making a TV show, and found that the whole show had been based on my music. The band was just mim­ing to the newly recorded playback, and it sounded fan­tastic.

The girls almost stole the show, three great looking chicks. One of the girls came from Iran, a dark-haired beauty, and we hit it off right away.

What amazed me the most was the way the band had played on the record­ing. Everything I had written had been faithfully reproduced, great playing, won­derful feeling, with no alterations.

Many bandleaders like to show how clever they are by changing things in ar­rangements, without really knowing why certain things have been written in there. Usually they ruin the whole concept of the piece. One guy in Hamburg once took all of the raised ninths out of an introduction I had written for his orchestra, thinking that they were wrong notes. This turned a very exotic bit of writing into a succession of plain major chords, which made the piece sound ridiculous. Egon hadn’t done anything like that, and had somehow got inside my brain, bringing out the very best in everything.

Major Schiffer didn’t like the LP because it wasn’t commer­cial, didn’t have his name plastered all over it, and didn’t have any tunes composed by himself on it, whereby he could cop royalties.

Egon told me that it was the best set of recordings the band had ever made in its long career. He had ferocious arguments with Schiffer about this new kind of music, which was ultra-modern jazz/rock, using all the electronics available to me.

It got to the point where I was going to intervene with my Minis­ter-Presi­dent friend, to try and get Schiffer shifted from the job. Then Egon retired from the army suddenly, thoroughly disillusioned by every­thing.

I never received any more arrangement contracts from the Bun­deswehr af­ter he left, and the band settled back sullenly into playing pop music. It was a shame, with such a tremendous potential.

Getting money from the Bundeswehr meant filling in several forms in sex­tuple. These were the same forms used by the army for ordering tanks and air­planes. The position where you had to write in the price had nine places on it—room to write in a figure of up to 999.99 million marks. The com­pleted forms went everywhere, including one copy to the Gen­eral Secretary of UNO.

I had to fly quite often to Cologne, sometimes for a week at a time, for re­cord discussions with Egon. The cost was enormous, with a regu­lar flight, hotels and trans­port. The Bundeswehr didn’t pay those kind of costs, so that I had to put down some really stratospheric charges for my arrangements to cover expenses.

No one ever queried these charges. It seemed that I was allowed to put down any price I liked for the work, and they’d pay it, but expenses just weren’t on. This seems to be a stupid way of doing things, and in the end it cost them much more than it should have.

I had to go up to Hamburg to play a couple of jazz clubs with Pe­ter, then we were going to play in the Ljubljana Jazz Festival.

One of the clubs was called Onkel Po's Carnegie Hall. This place was so dimly lit, probably to disguise the dirt, that you had to grope your way around. The trumpet section was raised above the rest of the band by having us stand on orange boxes. I used to stand there, struggling to keep my balance and still play Peter's tricky scores, with Art Farmer tottering on a box beside me, and think, Here is one of the most famous jazz trumpet players in the world, and he's standing on an orange box!

Still, this was luxury compared with some of the things American bands had to put up with. Wally Heider told me that he once had to record Woody Herman's band in a restaurant where the entire band was standing spread out in a single line behind the bar. He hit on the idea of using a video camera to watch the band for soloists. It was a great record, too; I believe it was called Woody Herman '66, but I may be wrong about that..

It was almost too dark to see the music in Onkel Po's so I guess we more or less played by memory. Rudi Fuesers, the third trombone player, used to light a candle and stick it on his music stand. Still, the band was pretty formidable — so much so that the night Dizzy Gillespie came in to see us we couldn't persuade him to come on and play, and it took a hell of a lot to scare him!

The other club in Hamburg was called der Fabrik, and it was, indeed, an old factory building, with all the machines removed, and the dirt and filth spread out a little more evenly over the floor.

Over the entrance was a huge stuffed moth-eaten elephant, which swayed dan­gerously when we played. The off-white walls of the Fabrik acted as a free canvas for anyone who wished to draw or paint on them. A sort of club had sprung up from this, and the club clientele was divided neatly between those who wanted to paint, and those who wished to hear jazz.

It was here that the now legendary trumpet duel between Alan Botschin­sky and Ack took place, where the rest of the band, including the rhythm section, left the stand and went to the bar for ten minutes, leaving them to it. The two of them went on brilliantly together, ad-libbing, sometimes even getting into the same phrase together, and never missed a beat in the whole of the ten minutes. Finally, Ack took a second to shout ‘Come back!’ and waved an arm at the rest of us. He thought we were going to leave them like that on their own for the rest of the night.

The audiences at such gatherings reminded me vividly of those of the past, often bearing, in enthusiasm and numbers, a marked resemblance to the crowds that packed The Jungle, where I used to play all of Dizzy’s solos in the 1950’s.

Lots of local musicians would turn up when we played in Ham­burg, includ­ing those from the James Last band, his brother Kai Warner’s band, and the big band from the radio station NDR Norddeutscherrundfunk.

In some of Peter’s arrangements there were passages where the whole band would have to play ad libitum. He only indicated vaguely the kind of rhythm we should play, and wrote crosses instead of notes. Some of the bars, where he wanted us to play double tempo, while the rhythm re­mained in single, were split down the middle with dotted lines.

The results were always astounding when we played passages like this. Listen­ers used to come over and ask to take a look at how the pas­sage had been written. When I showed them they would look at me in disbe­lief. This wasn’t like any music they’d seen or heard before. Even Johnny Keating was amazed when he heard us do it in Ronnie’s club.

After the gig I had to take Peter’s BMW back to the hotel, and then drive it to Cologne the next day. Art Farmer came with me. Not knowing my way around Ham­burg, I had no idea where the hotel was. Art said he had a rough plan in his head.

I hadn’t driven a car with manual gears for about twenty years, so we had a good old rock about in the beginning, with me nearly throwing Art through the wind­screen a couple of times until I got used to the clutch.

‘I’ll be all right in a minute,’ I said.

‘I’m sure you will,’ said Art, strapping himself in firmly, and holding on to the door handle like grim death.

We got to Cologne next day at noon, just in time to pick up Frank Rosolino from the airport in Düsseldorf.

Frank was another man I’d always idolised. He had made himself fa­mous in the Kenton band with his sparkling trombone solos, which used to raise the roof whenever the band played before a live audience. He played differently to any other player I’ve ever known. He said it was because the only music he could find to practice with as a young boy had been his brother’s violin tutor. And this was roughly how he played, as if the trombone was a violin.

He was delighted to be in Europe again. Everything he saw became a source of wonder. I’ve noticed this before with people out of Los Ange­les. Any­thing genuinely British, French, or Italian fills them with joy, as if a life in America was one filled with cheap imitations.

We played in the Subway club that night. Next morning we journeyed down to Nürnberg, where Peter’s parents lived, stayed the night, and started off for Yugoslavia the next morning. Art had gone back to Vienna for some reason, so Jim Towsey, the baritone player was in the car.

We stopped for lunch in Salzburg. Frank pulled my arm and made me go and buy him a huge ice cream cornet. He licked and slurped away at it like a kid, moaning with pleasure. When he’d finished he demanded another one. He didn’t want to go and see Mozart’s birthplace or anything.

We were in the middle of the wilds of Yugoslavia, not long after leaving Aus­tria, when Peter asked Frank if he’d like to drive. They changed over and we started off, with Frank chuckling like a baby, delighted with the handling of the car. Then I saw Frank light up a huge roach.

At once I began banging on the back of his seat.

‘Stop the car!’

I got out and stood at the side of the road.

‘What’s up? You want to take a leak?’

‘Nix on the funny cigarettes,’ I said.

‘How so?’

‘This is Communist country. If you get busted here for smoking dope, none of us will ever get out of the place alive. They hang junkies here. Apart from that I don’t feel too happy about being driven by a guy smoking pot.’

I started to walk away. They just sat there staring at me in amaze­ment.

Then a voice drawled from the back of the car. It was Jim. He spoke with­out raising his head from his Frederick Forsythe novel.

‘Let Ron drive.’

This had an effect somewhat similar to that achieved by Major—de Cover­ley in the officers’ mess in Catch 22 when he shouted ‘Gimme eat!’ A stunned si­lence followed the announcement. Then Frank climbed grumpily out of the driving seat and got in the back, still smoking the joint. Jim cringed away from him and pointedly low­ered his window a few inches.

I drove the rest of the way into Ljubljana while the rest of them slept. I had memorized the town map when I was sitting in the back, and so I was able to take all the correct street turnings, and stopped finally in the hotel courtyard.

‘Hey,’ said Peter, waking up suddenly. ‘We’d better ask someone the way to the hotel.’

‘We’re there,’ I said, smugly.

He looked at me in astonishment.

I didn’t realise my mistake until we drove back home again. Lost sev­eral times in the Yugoslavian mountains I was shouted at and prodded.

‘Here! You’re the damn navigator. Which way now?’

But right now, at the reception desk, drama awaited us.

Art was standing there, speechless with rage. As soon as he saw Pe­ter he grabbed him and started shouting.

He had taken the late plane from Vienna to Belgrade the previous evening. Unfortunately, his ticket had been made out for Budapest, and he’d been put on the wrong plane.

His plane had landed in Budapest just as the airport was closing for the night. As he had no visa for Hungary he wasn’t allowed out of the air­port, so they locked him in for the night and put out all the lights. He’d had to sleep on a hard wooden bench in total darkness.

‘How could a mistake like that possibly happen?’ said Pe­ter, spreading his hands in placation. ‘My wife took care of all the ticket arrangements with your wife.’ ‘That’s right!’ bawled Art. ‘Your wife took care! And you know what? F— your wife!’

Then, realising that he had, perhaps, gone too far, he added, ‘AND F— MY WIFE TOO!’

Chapter Twenty-Three >>>