The route to Peggy in 1951 had its faint beginnings long before that on a day in early 1948 when I dropped by the Nola Studios looking for someone to play with. I found exactly the right guys in a studio on one of the upper floors where four people were sitting, just playing time. Exquisite time, as it happened. Barry Galbraith was on guitar, Joe Shulman on bass, Billy Exiner at the drums, and Gil Evans playing piano. The first three guys were the rhythm section for the Claude Thornhill Band, and Gil was the band's principal arranger.
Every modern jazz musician loved Claude's band. Besides the usual big band instrumentation, Claude used two French horns, a tuba and always at least one clarinet in the reed section on every number. The big thing Gil aimed for in his arrangements for the band was lightness, and he filled his writing with sustained chords and tonal colours that were as rich as he could make them. The band's rhythm section played long and clean, and the repertoire included Gil's arrangements of tunes composed by Bird (Anthropology, Yardbird Suite) and Miles (Donna Lee). It was no wonder that guys like Gerry Mulligan, Lee Konitz and John Carisi worked so happily in the band.
But sometime in early 1948, Claude broke up the band. My own opinion was that Claude might have had a perverse streak and disbanded every time he gathered a group that played at the top of their talents. The 1948 breakup left a bunch of musicians high and dry. That was the fate of the four guys I ran into at Nola's. They were playing that day just to keep loose and stay involved in beautiful music. They were doing nothing except playing time, perfecting their sense of rhythm. Since Gil was such a nice person, he invited me to take his place at the piano and play with the section.
"Sure," I said, sounding like a basic nervy kid from Brooklyn. "What do you want to play?"
Somebody suggested All the Things You Are.
We played it, and we played a bunch more tunes. Eventually it occurred to me that this was the first time I was truly accompanied. The three rhythm guys were listening to me, and they expected me to listen to them. Gil was listening too. He was listening with his ear in the piano.
I got in the habit of looking for Gil and the others at Nola's on a regular basis. Often other musicians joined in, young Turks like Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Brew Moore, John Carisi, the cream of the cream. Looking back, I can't believe how lucky I was, a young kid with all those great players.
After many of the Nola sessions, I went with the others to Gil's one-room apartment on 55th just west of Fifth Avenue. The apartment was in the basement of an old brownstone, a few steps down from street level and along a corridor past a Chinese laundry to the far end of a furnace room. Gil's place was fairly big and looked out on a small courtyard. Exposed pipes ran the length of the room's ceiling. The furnishings consisted of a double bed, a record player, a large lamp, a hot plate, a piano and a resident cat named Becky (Miles wrote the first eight bars and I wrote the bridge for a tune inspired by the cat; we called it Becky's Night Out, and it became a tune I played fairly often with different small groups.)
Gil lived in these spare surroundings from some time in 1947 to early 1949, and during that short period, it's no exaggeration to say that in this simple room, a group of musicians led by Gil worked out a new shape of modern jazz.
Guys used to flock to Gil's place all day and all night. I don't know how he got any sleep. Maybe he didn't. Maybe sleep wasn't important to Gil. Everybody went there at one time or another. Included in the mix of visitors were Mulligan, Konitz, Carisi and the clarinetist Danny Polo and all kinds of other people from the Thornhill band. Charlie Parker turned up frequently. Gil was always so glad to see him that he never objected to Bird shooting up heroin in the bathroom. The great trombonist J. J. Johnson came by, as well as the trumpet player Jimmy Maxwell who was Gil's oldest friend (the haunting trumpet solos on the sound track of The Godfather were Jimmy's). Two composers were regulars, John Benson Brooks and my pal George Russell, and part way into 1948, Miles Davis came often, usually accompanied by Max Roach.
Records were always on the player in the room. Mostly it was classical music: Debussy, Ravel, the latest Bartok and Stravinsky. Gil borrowed the records on his library card from the New York Public Library a few blocks south on Fifth Avenue. One time Bird came to the apartment door, asking for five bucks to pay his cab, which was waiting outside. Sergei Prokofiev's Scythian Suite was on the player at the time. Bird, listened for a moment or two, then he said, "I don't even scratch the surface." Somebody handed him five bucks, and we didn't see Bird again that night.
The most consistent talkers when philosophical subjects came up were Gil and Billy Exiner. They were trying to understand life, and the conversation got pretty mystical. I guess their approach was of a Buddhist nature, at least it sounded that way to a kid like me. I just sat there, absorbing everything that was going on, the music, the talk, the ideas, the musical plans. The conversation could be mystical, but then so was the music that Gil and the others wrote and played in the Thornhill band.
From out of the chatter at Gil's place, from out of the things that Gil and Mulligan and Miles and one or two other guys figured out at the piano, came the recording for Capitol Records under Miles's name that was called Birth of the Cool. The word "cool" was nothing I ever heard in the apartment. An unknown record producer or advertising guy must have stuck it on the album, and "cool" became a label that was pinned to many people in our generation of players. Everybody from Stan Getz to practically all the west coast musicians was described as "cool." But the people who made the music, by which I mean the guys in Gil's basement apartment, had entirely different intentions than just sounding "cool," whatever that was.
Their idea was basically to make music with a small group that would capture the sound and essence of the Claude Thornhill band. The instrumentation they arrived at consisted of nine guys: trumpet, trombone, alto sax, baritone sax, french horn, tuba, piano, bass and drums. Together, the group played one gig at the Royal Roost and then made the famous record. The recording took three different studio sessions, and since not all the same guys could make all the sessions, the personnel differed at each of the three. Only Miles, Mulligan, Konitz and Bill Barber on tuba appeared on all the records. As for the other instruments, there were three different bass players, three different trombonists and three different French horn players, two drummers and two pianists (John Lewis and Al Haig). But no matter who was on which track, all of the music was distinctive, beautiful and very influential over the next few years.
Of all the tunes on the album, composed for the most part by Miles and Mulligan, the one I already knew was John Carisi's Israel, the piece that we would later tease him about up in the Catskills. John and Mulligan were similar character types, both unbelievably intense about music, and when the two guys disagreed, which was frequently enough, it was like two mastiffs going at one another. The small miracle was that, no matter how much John and Mulligan rubbed each other the wrong way, both contributed gorgeous music to the album that came out of Gil Evans's funky basement apartment.
In late 1948, the guys who had taken me to the apartment in the first place-the guitarist Barry Galbraith, bassist Joe Shulman, drummer Billy Exiner-put an ad in Down Beat Magazine asking for work as a rhythm section. That was definitely an odd thing to do, great musicians like those guys advertising for work, but Dave Barbour spotted the ad. Dave filled a lot of roles in Peggy Lee's life, her husband, musical director and guitarist, and he and Peggy didn't waste any time in hiring the three guys. Barry was included even though Dave was a very fine guitarist himself. I guess he figured the three played so beautifully as a trio that Dave would leave them intact and confine himself to a little playing while he fronted and generally ran his wife's show on stage. What was even more amazing, Peggy and Dave reached out to two more Thornhill alumni when they hired Danny Polo to play clarinet with them and Gil Evans to write some charts for Peggy and the guys. Danny, I should say, was an amazing guy. He was born in Toluc, Illinois, a boyhood friend of Claude Thornhill. The two played jobs as a duo when they were just kids, and as he got older, Danny also played in bands led by people like Ben Bernie and Jean Goldkette. But he made his major impression in England where he worked for most of the 1930s with the famous Ambrose dance band. Back in the U. S. in the 1940s, he played plenty of jazz gigs with good people like Jack Teagarden and his old pal Claude Thornhill. Danny was so skilled and versatile that he was hired for Miles Davis's Birth of the Cool album. From Ambrose to Miles showed a heck of a range.
Galbraith, Shulman and Exiner stayed with Peggy off and on for next couple of years, even longer in Billy's case. Peggy didn't work steadily, taking months off at a time, and during those off periods, the three rhythm guys plus Danny and Gil looked for other jobs. Peggy paid her musicians only when they worked for her; it wasn't a deal where the backup people were on contracts for the entire year whether they worked or not.
It was eventually through my friendships with Peggy's rhythm section, particularly with Billy, that Peggy and I got together part way into 1951. By that time, Peggy and Dave Barbour had broken up and were on their way to a divorce. The separation brought a change in Peggy's backup group, and she added a piano player to the three rhythm people. Different guys played piano for Peggy, but Hal Schaefer was her most frequent accompanist.
Originally a New York guy, Hal had a couple of years on me, and he was an experienced and gifted all-round pianist. He spent many semi-regular years with Peggy, but it happened that he couldn't make a date in the early spring of 1951 at the Baltimore Theatre in Baltimore, Maryland. As a replacement, Billy Exiner brought up my name. When Peggy agreed that I might be worth listening to, Billy phoned me. I hustled straight down to Baltimore.