Herbie Stewart, Gene and Dave Young in Yokohama, Japan.
In early 1990, the Ontario government invited Jim and me to play in the Ontario pavilion at the Flower Expo that summer in the Japanese city of Osaka. I had never been to Japan and was keen to make the trip. So was Jim, but something came up that kept him from going.
"Never mind me," Jim said. "Go over by yourself. You'll have a great time."
Though I was disappointed not to be working with Jim, he was right in his remark about the great time I'd have.
When I arrived in Osaka in July, I found that I was being put up, not in a hotel, but in a much more comfortable apartment which I shared with a Canadian couple who made and presented jewelry. My job at the fair was to play solo piano at the Ontario pavilion just before and just after lunch. The whole deal was very pleasant, and apart from the intense July heat, I enjoyed the pavilion, which was built, paradoxically for an Ontario structure, of British Columbia cedar.
One day, a Japanese gentleman came up to me, sniffed the disctinctive odour of the B.C. cedar, smiled and said, "Good smell. Good jazz."
To travel from the apartment to the pavilion each day, I rode two trains. One train operated at street level, and the other was elevated. Getting from the first train to the second, I needed to walk up a short flight of stairs to a landing, then turn on the landing for another short flight up to the next train. On the landing, there was a large display case holding a beautiful flower. I saw this lovely flower on display each day, and I was surprised at how many hurrying commuters paused to absorb the sight of the flower. I couldn't imagine the same thing happening on the New York subway, and I decided that, for the Japanese commuters, this was a special moment when they absorbed the flower's loveliness. It was a different moment for them in their commuting, a precious moment. This so impressed me that I wrote a song about the experience. I titled the song Precious Moment.
While I was in Osaka, I got a phone call from a complete stranger. The man introduced himself as Mitsuo Johfu of Yokohama. Johfu owned a prosperous men's clothing business in his home city, but more to the point, he also owned a jazz record label. He started recording albums in 1978, and among the musicians he featured were guys like the pianists Duke Jordan and Sir Charles Thompson (it was Lester Young who put the "Sir" on Sir Charles's name), the trumpet player Chet Baker, many other contemporary American jazz guys and a ton of European musicians whose work I didn't necessarily know. Johfu was a huge jazz fan, and he wanted to record me before I went home to Canada.
Johfu in Canada.
How did Johfu know I was in Osaka at that particular time?
The answer was that Mark Gardner had tipped him off. Mark is a jazz writer in England. I met him during one of the many gigs I worked in London-I can't remember with whom--and we stayed in touch by mail. Mark's address was one I never forgot for its distinctive Englishness: The Hawthorne, 14 Partridge Lane, Faversham, Kent. Mark made his living as a local newspaperman, but his passion was for jazz, and he had written the liner notes on many of Johfu's records. Mark liked my playing, and he told Johfu that I made the kind of jazz that fit right into his label's recording philosophy.
Johfu called his label Marshmallow Records, a name whose significance didn't immediately register with me. The clue was that Johfu loved Lennie Tristano's music, and he was crazy about Tristano's longtime tenor saxophonist, Warne Marsh. Hence, Marshmallow Records.
Warne came from Los Angeles where his father was a prominent cinematographer, which meant that the family lived a well-to-do life. But Warne followed his jazz muse to New York City and to Lennie Tristano. He played his tenor in long, pure lines, which was just right for Lennie. Warne was a member of the quintet for many years, and later, post-Tristano, he had a big success with Supersax, the all-saxophone jazz group.
By the time I met Johfu, Warne had passed on in dramatic fashion. He died in 1987 on-stage at Donte's, a Los Angeles jazz club, in the middle of playing Out of Nowhere. Warne was gone, but his reputation as a first rate tenor player endured, and so did his name in Marshmallow Records.
On the phone, Johfu asked me to record an album before I left Japan. I rearranged my plane flights and traveled to Johfu's home in Yokohama. He had lined up two good Japanese guys for the rhythm section, Kohji Tohyama on bass and Yukio Kimura on drums. We recorded on July 10 in a studio in a strange location under the stands at a sports arena. Our engineer was "Mr. Stream." That was what his Japanese name translated to in English. Mr. Stream knew his business, so did the two rhythm guys, and we got right to it.
We cut eleven tunes in one day (though only seven of them made it to the record). Most were standards, Tea For Two, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and so on. But we also tossed in a couple of originals by me. One of them was the tune I'd written after pausing to look at the gorgeous flower on the landing in the train station. And it was the name of this tune that Johfu put on the cover of the CD. The album, the first ever trio recording in all my years in music, was called Precious Moment.
As things unfolded, the album served a larger purpose for me. It was the album, Precious Moment, that launched me on my second career as a purely jazz musician playing jazz. The first happened when I was a bebop kid playing around New York City with Dizzy and the Chubby Jackson Band, recording with Lester Young and leading the life of an itinerant jazzman. Now I was doing it all again-except that now I was a lot more than a bebopper, and the guys I was playing with were usually much younger than I was. Back in the day, I was the kid. Now I was the senior guy and eminence grise. In both cases, in both incarnations, I made a lot of music. The difference was that, in the later period, my playing was more mature and adventurous. And another thing different was that the second time around, I ended up cutting many more records than I ever had before, and always on the new records, I was the leader.
In large part, much of the volume of recording was owed to my new friend Johfu. As a typical example of how Johfu's ambitions and my career intersected to my benefit, it was a long-time dream of Johfu's to get Don Thompson on the Marshmallow label. So in March 1991, Johfu flew from Japan to Toronto, and we went into a commercial studio in downtown Toronto to record two albums with Don on bass and an interesting guy named Memo Acevedo on drums. Memo grew up in Colombia. That made him naturally gifted with Latin rhythms, but he was also a solid swinging jazz player. He spent a few years in Toronto, playing with everybody and teaching at Humber College's music school, before he moved on to a long career in New York City.
Both of the albums with Don and Memo mixed familiar standards with songs that weren't well known. On the first album, for instance, we did a tune called Maybe September that Tony Bennett used to sing. Percy Faith wrote the melody and the team of Jay Livingston and Ray Evans did the lyrics. And Deep Night was a tune that Frank Sinatra sang, but it went back further than him, back to Rudy Vallee who composed it.
The second album likewise had some fairly obscure tunes. Dream Dancing was one, a song written by Cole Porter for a 1941 Fred Astaire movie called You'll Never Get Rich. But I also made room on the album for a tune of my own, Shinkansen. That was the name of the fastest train in Japan. Naturally we played the tune at about a hundred miles an hour. Don loved the pace, and he was great on all of the tracks, which made Johfu a very happy man.
He was happy during his entire stay in Toronto. One unseasonably warm March day, with the sun shining, Johfu and I were walking down Spadina Avenue when we ran into Dave Young, another wonderful bass player. Naturally, Johfu knew Dave's work, and he got very excited when I introduced the two guys.
"I meet Dave Young on the sunny side of the street!" Johfu said.
Gene with Dave Young. May 19th, 1992. Kan Nai Hall, Yokohama.
My second visit to Japan came in the late spring of 1992. I was scheduled to record once again with Johfu. But this time Johfu asked me to bring along another musician he was dying to get on record. This was the tenor saxophonist Herbie Steward.
Jazz fans, including Johfu, appreciated Herbie as one of the tenor players in the great Woody Herman bebop band of the late 1940s. This was the Four Brothers band, and Herbie was one of the brothers alongside two other tenors, Zoot Sims and Stan Getz, and the baritone saxophonist Serge Chaloff. All four of these guys soloed on Four Brothers, a tune written for Woody's band by Jimmy Giuffre. All four were in their early twenties when they played in that great band. In the decades after that, Stan and Zoot had really productive careers. Poor Serge Chaloff died when he was just thirty-four of ailments brought on by heroin addiction. Herbie was the brother who kept on playing but had a lower profile-except, as I realized when I lived in Los Angeles, on the west coast where Herbie was regarded as a legend among musicians.
He had this legendary status out there in the way that another tenor player, Ray Turner, enjoyed the same type of recognition in the east. Both guys were authentic legends but there were differences between the two. Ray, whom I worked with in the Chubby Jackson Band, couldn't read a note. He depended on his ears, and he would play wherever he heard the piano player taking him. He always knew what key a song was in, and then, playing with a tone that was absolutely golden, he would follow the piano's lead.
Herbie could read, and was generally a better all-round musician than Ray. He doubled on clarinet, and he was good enough to play lead alto for any big band. But, like Ray, he was idolized for his great sound, and his wonderfully attractive solos. He was just a heck of a fine tenor player.
By the time Johfu asked me to bring Herbie, the legend, to Japan, he wasn't an easy guy to locate. After much research and many phone calls, I pinned him down in Sacramento, California, where he was playing lead alto in a Harry James tribute band. He was pleased to be invited to join me, plus Dave Young on bass, for the Japanese gig. When we got to Yokohama, Johfo hooked us up with Yukio Kimura, the drummer I had played with on my first visit to Japan, and we toured around some nice little jazz clubs in different parts of the country. Herbie was a delight to play with. He had that great sound, and the music we made took on the familiar feel of my old days in bebop--with the exception that all of us had more to say in our music than we did back then.
We made two records that reflected what we were doing, one in a studio in Yokohama and the other in Yamagata, a city in the north of Japan. Yamagata's skyline featured a building with the huge letters OZ on it. OZ had a TV studio at the top of the building and a concert hall downstairs, which was where we recorded.
On both records, we included a lot of tunes that beboppers loved-Topsy, Broadway, I'll Remember April, Nica's Dream-but we also recorded a tune of mine, which I titled Elegy. The person we were remembering in this particular Elegy was Monty Budwig, a marvelous bass player on the west coast. Monty played with a lot of the same people I played with, Carmen McRae, Shelley Manne, all kinds of top musicians. He belonged among the first rank of jazz musicians himself, and he was Johfu's first choice on bass for that 1992 visit to Japan. I had hired him, but it turned out Monty suffered from liver cancer, which apparently swept over him very suddenly late that winter. Monty died on March 9, only sixty-four years old. I composed Elegy so that all of us on the tour, including Dave who loved Monty's playing, could remember in music this excellent bassist and friend.