Paul Combs: Do you want to ask me questions? Do you want me to tell you...
Katrina Morse: I’ve got a few prepared questions...
PC: We’ll start with those.
KM: Ok. I’m speaking with Paul Combs, who is a Cambridge area musician and music teacher. Could you start out by telling me a bit about your musical background, your involvement with music, both in Cambridge and the surrounding area?
PC: Sure. I’m one of those people, I’ve always thought of myself as a musician, even as a child. I took voice first, actually, in church, that was my first instruction was in church. I had a choir director and organist, he would take the time to rehearse us and we had this choir that went from little kids like me--I was about eight, seven years old--up to grandparent age. He taught us all how to breathe and how to listen and how to use the voice and how to listen to each other and get the parts to come together. I wish I could remember his name, but I value that initial instruction tremendously, especially the instruction about how to use one’s air, because next I took up the trombone in grade school. Then when I was about twelve I switched to saxophone and was very, very interested in jazz. I’ve been interested in jazz and classical music almost always. When I was a very little child--I was born in 1946--when I was a very little child, jazz was at the heart of a lot of our popular music, so that’s what was on the radio. So, there it is. I studied composition at the Philadelphia Musical Academy, which is now the University of the Arts. After that I drifted some, but I was in music. I had played saxophone, I had started to double on bass, I had always played around with the guitar, so picking up the bass wasn’t that hard. I worked for some time as a bass player for folk singers, and also sang and played guitar on the folk circuit until I felt that for myself there wasn’t any farther for me to go creatively. Experiences hearing jazz brought me back to jazz. I got my saxophone back out and started working on that. I’ve had, as a lot of musicians have, a career that--it’s hard to make money in jazz, unless you really manage your career very carefully or are very lucky. So I’ve played a lot of blues, r&b, bar band music. I vote in the Grammys, mostly on the basis of recordings with folk singers and blues people, not on the few jazz records that I’ve made. So I’ve had this eclectic career. I was also involved in radio. The radio station that you know here as a talk station, WBUR, used to be primarily music and I was on staff there and then I continued to fill in for people on WBUR for quite a while. One thing and another, and in the eighties I tried a company, we’ll call it Jingle House, and they did jingles and background music for industrial presentations and what not. I had a partner, an old friend from when I was in undergraduate, but it really wasn’t a good fit for us. We’d work, but we didn’t enjoy the work. We always had to have other jobs in order to fill in, so be bagged that. And after that I got pretty seriously into education. I became certified as a school music teacher. I taught first in private parochial schools, and had been doing that kind of off and on, and I’d been teaching privately and so for the next stretch of time that was my main occupation, was teaching and public school music, and gigging as much as I could, and teaching privately also. Then I left, I was in the Revere Public Schools, and then I left the Revere Public Schools and just taught privately, performed, and I got working on a book on a gentleman named Tadd Dameron, a very important jazz musician who has fallen into obscurity, and an influence on me, a lot of people. That’s turned out to be a bigger adventure than I had expected. Not really being a book writer, I’ve had to learn how to write a book, so I’ve been devoting a lot of time and energy to that. We’re just about done. So, here I am. I came to Cambridge originally in seventy-one or seventy-two, so I’ve been around here for quite a while. Ever since the gentleman for the Historical Society, we met at this party for Cambridge Local First and he told me you might be coming to visit me, I’ve been trying to, really thinking back on that time and thinking about all the different venues, so am able to give you some information.
KM: It sounds like you’ve, is it true you’ve played jazz in different parts of the country?
PC: Some. Mostly just in New England. There was a professional organization called the International Association for Jazz Education, and I was, some other members of that had organized a big band to play for social events at the annual conference, and I was a regular member of that. So I’ve played in Toronto, Canada, and New York City--well, I’ve played in New York City at different times with different people, but it’s mostly been around here. No, I wasn’t on the--I was on the road in the folk circuit, but the rest of the playing has all been pretty much New England, local.
KM: Do you have any thoughts on how this area is different in terms of the jazz scene and being a jazz musician playing out in venues? Is there something that sets it apart or makes it unique?
PC: Well, the depth of the pool of players and the level of the quality is quite astounding because of the presence of Berklee and of the Conservatory, although there are other major cities that are like that: Chicago, Toronto, Los Angeles, Los Angeles perhaps even more so. It’s got a different flavor, Los Angeles. But there’s no work. There’s work, but it’s all--I mean, I know some terrific jazz musicians and most of the work that pays them anything playing is playing in wedding bands. There aren’t enough venues. There’s not enough support from the municipalities and so on. It boggles my mind. It’s not just jazz, it’s several idioms of music. This is very rich, musically, here. There should be music coming out of every doorway, almost, when you go down the street, out of restaurants and any place that could possibly be a venue. Music should just be everywhere. Why the tourist people and the city people don’t take advantage of us...they could take advantage of us, they could give us a little more work, and we could play out more. You’ve got all these musicians here. They do to some extent, but it’s not as much as...there are smaller municipalities that do draw on their musical neighbors more, I think, in proportion than around here, so it’s sort of a frustrating thing. That being said, I always have to remind myself that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. I don’t know how much, when I go somewhere else, I’m seeing a fresh place and seeing--maybe it’s not that much better there than it is here. But it is, it’s mostly that there are so many really capable players around here and there’s just not enough places to play. It’s sometimes hard getting an audience.
KM: Do you feel that the jazz culture in this area ever gets overshadowed by different musical genres?
PC: Oh yeah. Yes. I think the whole--I was trying to get a jazz thing started at a tavern over in Somerville. Very nice place, it’s pretty much in my neighborhood, I’m right across the line in Cambridge. I like the place and like the people and they like me, and one night last year they gave me Sunday afternoon, four to seven. I brought in my bands, I brought in other people’s bands, and we would hope to appeal to their audience, which mostly--most of the music there is under the rubric of Americana. There is varieties of country music, folk music, some blues, and so on. But we’re in the city, it’s a sophisticated audience. We got a good turnout. Sometimes I was hoping to draw a new audience in there because it was an easy place to get to. We just couldn’t quite turn the corner on it so we had to give it up this year. The places that do have jazz are always struggling. There’s a very nice club out in the suburbs, the Acton Jazz Cafe. The woman who owns that has run that pretty much on grit for twelve years now, just on sheer determination, and every now and then almost going under. It’s a very nice little club. It even has a national reputation as being a good club, although it books primarily local people. I know Fred Taylor over at Scullers is always struggling to keep that going. Fred Taylor, there’s somebody you should talk to. He runs the jazz program Scullers at that hotel, Doubletree Suites is it now? I don’t know. It’s over, it’s right across the river in Allston. Fred Taylor used to own two clubs in Boston. Well, it was one location but he had two rooms there, Paul’s Mall and the Jazz Workshop. Oh, I miss those places, they were right on Boylston Street. All the national touring people came through there, that was back in the seventies. So Fred’s been on the scene for a long time. If you want to talk about the Boston area and go back some, Lenny Sogoloff is still around, he’s quite old, but I have a contact with him and you can get back to me later on about that. Lenny used to have a place outside of town, but it was a very important Boston area venue called Lenny’s on the Turnpike. It was on Route One. There’s a lot written about Lenny’s and so on, so you can also find a good deal about that, about Lenny’s on the Turnpike. Fred also had another place, I think he had Lulu White’s. After Paul’s Mall and the Jazz Workshop closed, there was another place in the South End called Lulu White’s that booked regular people. I was down in New York City at that time so I didn’t ever go to Lulu White’s, but that was another important venue. While I think about it, another guy you should talk to is Fenton Hollander, who started the Regatta Bar. He was elbowed out, I only know gossip about that so I won’t get into that, but Fenton ran that jazz program at the Charles Hotel from the beginning, until just a few years ago. He still produces some concerts over at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center. Those are people who can give you, those are old hands around here, they can give you a lot. You also want to research a place that was out in Beverly, but it was important; jazz, blues, a variety of music, called Sandy’s Jazz Revival. That was a significant place. So when you’re thinking about Boston, you kind of have to stretch out into the suburbs some too, you know. Well, you’ll decide for yourself how far out you want to go, but I’d say, certainly out to 128 or a little bit beyond there’s things that are happening. There are things in the South Shore, too. Anyway. So when I got here, there was a club in Somerville, I think there’s a Chinese restaurant there now, on Beacon Street called the Zircon. They presented local people of local stature, of good stature locally. Also some nationally touring people. This was still back in the seventies so it was a lot easier to be out there touring, but I remember hearing Dave Liebman at the Zircon with a band that he had called Lookout Farm. Dave is one of the major saxophonists in jazz these days. He played with Miles Davis, he had his own bands. I think he played, he and Steve Grossman played with Elton Jones. This guy is a major, important artist. I heard him with a band of his own, after he had left Miles Davis, at this place the Zircon. It was a funky little place but they came through and they played there. So there was the Zircon, there was a Chinese restaurant down near MIT, and I think the building might still be there, it might still be a restaurant. There was a jam session that would happen there on Sundays led my a guy named Len Dedler. There was a club called the Speakeasy, and there’s a parking lot there now, in Central Square. I’m embarrassed sometimes, I know my way around the city blindfolded. I often don’t remember the names of the streets, because I don’t need them. But it’s there--do you know where the Harvest Co-op is? Ok, there’s a big parking lot, and as you’re looking out the back door of the Harvest, looking in the direction of Boston, that door out of Harvest, where the big, big, big parking lot is, across the street there’s another parking lot. Well, where that parking lot is, that used to be where the Speakeasy was. The Speakeasy had an eclectic programming policy, including jazz. There was another place, I can’t remember the name of it, in Harvard Square. The building is gone now. They had a big restaurant upstairs and they had a room downstairs, and again another eclectic policy. I played there, this is the seventies into the eighties. Other folks will remember the name of this place. A lot of people got their start there. It was a very popular venue for--there was a lot, there were rooms that were specifically jazz, but in the seventies I remember there was a lot of very open booking policies, so you’d have rock and roll, blues, country music, folk music, jazz, all in the same venues on different nights. I lived for a while on the North Shore in Newburyport, and, being a very small place, all the musicians played with each other. It was not a strange thing to see an excellent jazz drummer playing with a country/western band. And enjoying himself. We all played with each other, you know. I had kind of a fusion jazz band for a while called the Groove Squad, and I had a few of the rock guys in that band, you know. There was an openness back then to each other’s approach to playing that I think in some ways has, people have become so parochial about their genres.
KM: How do you think that that informed your playing? Did that change your styles?
PC: Well, we jazz musicians generally tend to be rather open. I mean, there are those who have sort of a “jazz police” mentality, but most of us are pretty openminded. The music itself is open. If you just kind of study its whole evolution, it grows out of a melange of musical styles, even from the very beginning, even before World War I. The roots are there. The roots are in string band music, brass band music, a little bit of classical adaptation to these kinds of other ensembles which a lot of the black musicians were doing. They were playing transcriptions of light classical stuff but they were playing it with mandolins and banjos and so on. There was all this kind of, circus music, vaudeville, all this together is what jazz emerges out of at that time. You find it’s kind of open to things. At least, that’s how I feel. I still, I don’t mind going playing a blues job or playing with somebody else doing other things. I mean, I have my thing that I do and it has a certain stylistic definition to it, but I respect what other people do too. I have a friend--it began at this bar over in Somerville, Sally’s, there’s a fellow who plays there once a month, I’ve known him for years, and he has a band. His style is kind of based in a little bit of country, a little bit of blues, a little bit of reggae and ska and what not, and he writes his own songs, and it’s a dance, bar band music, dance. He has a saxophonist in his band. Sometimes the guy can’t make the gig date and I try to go there because he’s an old friend, you know, I’ll go there and support him. And I always stick one of my horns in the trunk of my car because sometimes I go there and the saxophonist hasn’t made it. They’ll say “Paul, have you got your horn?” “Yeah.” “Come sit in!” But certainly there was that openness at that time, and if you go back and you consider what was happening in jazz in the seventies, you really hear this reaching out and incorporating and experimenting with different things. Some of the experiments didn’t work, some did. I miss that time. We all went to each other’s gigs and played with each other and so on. Now, some of that is also age. I’m tied up with so many other things I don’t have the time to be out on the scene right now. But jazz really, there’s not many places to play jazz in this town. That just doesn’t happen much in Cambridge. There’s a couple in Boston. There’s places around, there’s gigs, but it’s not the way it was.
KM: Sort of related to that, I know that you’ve talked about a resurgent interest in jazz--Metronome magazine had a quote where you were speaking about that--and also how blues is the foundation for jazz, and I was thinking about Cambridge, specifically in the sixties, how there was this sort of blues and roots revival.
PC: There was a lot of the major folk and popular people who came with a strong sense of folk traditions. There was a big, important scene here, that’s before I got here. Club 47, Jack’s, which was on Massachusetts Avenue. Jack’s is another interesting place. Mostly, folk becoming rock, blues, country, not much as at Jack’s. Jack himself, Jack Riley, then opened another place called Ryles, which is still there, but it’s very different since Jack sold it. I mean, it’s still a jazz policy, but it’s...well, I won’t get into that. I used to be on rotation at Jack’s and now I find it frustrating to deal with that venue. But let’s just leave it at that. That’s just me speaking for me, so. I miss Jack. He was a real gentleman and a good guy to try to work for. But he had this one club, and Bonnie Raitt came out of that club, Jonathan Edwards, those folks cut their teeth at Jack’s. There was another bar on Bow Street--not Bow Street, but the far end of Harvard Square where Quincy Street comes in, and then you go across, and Bow Street comes like this and it’s like a little street that goes down. Right there in that corner, there was a bar with a large stage, and I remember hearing Bruce Springsteen there just about the time he made his first record. There was a place there that had music, and it’s changed so much you can’t even imagine where--I go there and I can’t--it’s just all changed so much. There was another place in Harvard Square called the Oxford Ale House. Again, a very open kind of booking policy. They had jazz groups there. I played there with a kind of hippie funk band that I had for a while back in the seventies. We were a bunch of hippies. But we were into the Meters and into Sly Stone and so on. That was a fun band. We couldn’t quite turn the corner with that one. There’s the Casablanca that’s still there, I think, on Brattle Street. They had jazz. Little trios, usually guitar, bass, and some wind instrument. But anyway, back to your question, there’s another thing in my research, and I don’t know the details on this but I was thinking that somebody told me that earlier on, maybe even into the early sixties, in Cambridge the city code forbade the playing of outdoor instruments indoors. You’ve heard of this too? I don’t know. Anyway, apparently you couldn’t have drums and horns inside, so there was a point where they weren’t playing jazz in Cambridge. But research that a little bit. I seem to have read this, it was before my time but somebody told me there was this time.
KM: I guess the resurgence in jazz that you were speaking of, is that something that you noticed all over, or specifically in this area, and do you think that it’s a natural progression, the way that jazz evolved--
PC: Well, it comes and goes, you know. It’s the same thing that happens with blues. Jazz never goes away, blues never goes away. The interest ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows. We go through periods where suddenly people will be interested again. I think when I said that I was seeing that happen. That was around the time when Gwen Vivian out at Acton Jazz Cafe got mentioned in Downbeat magazine as one of the hundred best jazz clubs in the nation, and we were seeing some--right now, well right now everybody’s suffering, so it’s kind of hard to say. It’s mostly, I find when I play, people come in and hear one or another of my bands playing somewhere, and it’s kind of like, “Oh, this is jazz? Oh, I like this!” “Well, yes, why don’t you come back?” There are some jazz musicians who are probing the edges of things, and that may not be so accessible to people. There’s a little tiny venue in Inman Square called the Zeitgeist that caters to that. I don’t, I’m pretty progressive in what I play, but it’s all, tap your toe to it. It’s there, it’s just music, enjoy it. When people hear it they enjoy it. It’s getting them to lock into it. Right now we seem to be ebbing a little bit. Two or three years ago when that interview happened it seemed like it was flowing. Another two or three years, it’ll flow again, so it seems to go like this. There’s so many thing that clamor for people’s attention today. I mean, just look at what’s happening in popular music today. There aren’t big names the way there used to be. I don’t think people would be--I don’t think, if you go down the street, the average person might get thirty percent of the people could sing for you a Britney Spears song. Britney Spears stays famous by scandal, but not by her music being ubiquitous. Perhaps the last one to be that way was Michael Jackson, and then everything’s kind of atomized. So I hear interviews with people on the radio, young musicians, maybe not so young musicians, who are out there, bands and pop bands playing, and they’ve been, some of them, have been doing what they’re doing for twenty years and are still on the road, and I’ve never ever heard of these people. I hear names of some bands that come up, I have no idea what their music sounds like, and I can’t remember a tune of theirs. That wasn’t the case when I was growing up. That wasn’t the case. You knew Elvis Presley’s tunes.
KM: What do you think has changed? Is there just so much variety?
PC: There’s just so much variety. And there’s so much variety of media. It’s just exploded. It’s like the communications thing. A friend of mine--I have a presence on Facebook because it seems like unavoidable. I avoid going there because I don’t have the time. I don’t have the time to respond to all these things, I’m trying to get other things done. Twitter? Are you kidding? Why would I tell you “Oh, I went upstairs to get a cup of coffee!” I don’t care! Why should anybody else care? You know what I mean? I can see where in certain ways it may have a usefulness, but I don’t even text on the phone yet. If it becomes evident to me that it would be useful then I’ll turn on the text service on my phone, I’m not a Luddite, but right now I don’t need text. If you want to get in touch you call. If I don’t pick up the phone, leave a message, I’ll get back to you. So there’s all this explosion of media through which people communicate with each other.
KM: Does it end up diluting things?
PC: Well, you know, it’s got its plusses and minuses. It dilutes things. It also opens up possibilities that weren’t there before, so it’s neither good nor bad, it just is. But because of that, yes, the whole performing arts scene is just atomized. Just atomized. That’s where we are. And that’s part of why the live performance scene is so frustrating these days.
KM: I was going to ask you about who’s coming to your shows these days. What’s the audience like?
PC: Mostly forty and older. Although again, you know, the youngsters come and they hear it and they say “Oh, this is nice, man, you guys rock.” But getting them to come back. I suppose generational separation is something that’s always there, but it seems to be exacerbated these days. When I was coming up I played with older musicians, and then as I was getting a little bit older, younger musicians too. There wasn’t this kind of, even in jazz, the younger jazzers don’t come and play with me. I wish they would. I used to seek out my elders. I sought them out. The youngsters aren’t doing that.
KM: Why do you think that is?
PC: I don’t know. It seems to be a phenomenon across the board. We seem to be very segregated by age, which I think is really sad, because everybody’s got something to learn from everybody. People of my generation have things to learn, and energy to pick up, the stimulation of ideas, and those people have my experience and more power, have that experience to draw on and to learn from. That’s changed. And I think that’s probably part of that same atomization that the whole media thing and communications media thing seems to exacerbate that. Because, yes, in certain ways as you get older there are things that the younger people just don’t understand about your reality. And when you’re younger, the older folks don’t always want to look at things as you want to look at them. So there’s a certain amount of that. You go to a family event, even a long time ago, the toddlers are hanging out together, the teenagers are hanging out together, the young adults are hanging out together, the old ones--but still, you know what I mean, because it’s a family thing so the large family event, but you’ll still see that happening, you always saw that. But it just seems we’re all kind of locked into these age bands more. I don’t know.
KM: As a musical instructor and someone who is involved with teaching music to the younger generation, I guess, what do you hope to pass on to the next musical generation? What do you hope for the future of music?
PC: Everything that I know to help them be more musical and get in touch with their own musicality. In the general music situation it’s just, music is an essential humanity. So I like for my students all to be unafraid to sing, even if they don’t sing well, I don’t ever want them to be afraid to sing. If they have trouble carrying a tune, go ahead and try. I want them to be able to act musically, and I try to open up their ears to a variety of different kinds of idioms of music, maybe ones that aren’t, certainly the ones that aren’t present elsewhere they listen. Just acting together musically. One of the nice things at this little school where I teach now is they give me a free hand, so the kids like to sing, so we sing. We don’t have a lot of resources there, but whatever instruments we have. We’ve got a Christmas program coming, that’s the big event there, it’s a little Catholic school, so the Christmas show is a big deal. What I do is I try to fashion things so that I directly am as uninvolved in playing the music that is heard in the show as possible. I really try to be very much in the background and give them the opportunities to accompany themselves and take command of their own musical performance. So just try to get people to behave musically. Be in touch with that part of their humanness, because it’s an essential humanity. There is a substantial community, there’s a substantial agreement among many anthropologists and linguists who suspect that music pre-dated speech in human development. Nobody can prove anything, but there are very serious linguists and anthropologists who have a strong suspicion that that’s the case and they--I’m neither a linguist nor an anthropologist, so I can’t give you what the reasoning is on that, but I’ve heard this many times. Music is just an essential humanity. So if nothing else, that’s the main thing.
KM: Are there any more clubs or venues around here that you wanted to talk about or had any specific stories about?
PC: Yeah, let me go through my memory. We’re in Cambridge. So I told you about the Zircon. I was one of the first people to play at the 1369. It was an old man’s bar, and these two brothers, the Martien brothers, bought it and they didn’t kick the old guys out. The old guys were all done drinking usually by six or seven in the evening, anyway. They’d be in there when it opened in the morning and knocking them down all day long, so they’d pour themselves out the door by five or six. They held onto that clientele but they put the stage in the back and had jazz. Some other musicians I knew bought the place and that was about the time I was out of town for a while so I didn’t really continue to play there too much, but I was one of the first. So there was the 1369, there was the Inman Square Men’s Bar across the street from the 1369. Another one of these places with an eclectic booking policy, all different kinds of music. I played there too. I played there with different types, different genres of music. The S&S Deli eventually gobbled that up, but Inman Square Men’s Bar. The fellow who owned it was a guy named Richard Simpkin, and he may still be around. I don’t know, but you can ask around, he might still be around. Let me see. There was another venue, in Harvard Square there were various venues. As I mentioned, the Oxford Ale House and the Casablanca, there was...oh golly, I can’t remember the name of it. There was a place down in the basement in the late seventies going into the eighties that also had an eclectic booking policy, mostly blues and folk-based pop music. Oh, I can’t remember the name of that place. Other people will. There was, for a while, at the top of the old carriage building, which is at the corner of JFK and Mount Auburn, up on the top floor there was a very nice venue back in the seventies, and they booked national touring acts. I don’t know what ever happened, but it was a bar/lounge/performance space that was up there on the top floor. There was a place right on JFK called the Sunflower that was primarily a jazz room where locals played. In the late eighties, oh, there was this wonderful man, Ken Williams. Ken Williams was the media director at the Cambridge Public Library. A fascinating man. He’s a whole interesting story, himself; a photographer, social activist, he was one of four people who started the boycott against the apartheid government. Big jazz fan. There was an auditorium as part of the Cambridge Public Library, and the auditorium was sort of in his purview, and he made that auditorium available to all of us jazz musicians. There wasn’t any money, but you could at least put something on a stage and invite people and play for them. Once I managed to get some grant money for something that I did there. Then he started, and he ran for ten years, a Cambridge jazz festival, which he held there at the library. Some indoors, some outdoors--it would be like a week-long event, just all local people, but he made [a plan]. When he retired, there was a Chinese restaurant in Central Square called the Lai Lai, and it was a rather large restaurant. There’s been several other restaurants in that space over the years. He started the jazz program there. A regular jam session, Wednesday night jam session. I think it was Wednesday night. That was a great jam session, I made a lot of friends who are still friends to this day there. Oh, there’s somebody else you want to talk to, you want to talk to Frank Wilkins. Frank was very much part of that scene. He’s still around. A marvelous musician, Frank Wilkins. And another sort of eclectic musician, excellent jazz musician, but he also was a keyboardist for some major rhythm and blues acts in the seventies. He played with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes and he played with Tyrone, what was his name? Anyway, Frank Wilkins. There was a bookstore on Brookline at Green Street, we played jazz there. They had all different kinds of music, but they had a concert series. Of course there’s the Middle East, and there was TT the Bear’s, TT’s still there. There was a place catty corner, the building’s gone now, a notorious place called Manray. The neighbors didn’t like Manray too much because they were open late. They had a two o’clock license and you had these inebriated young people coming out of Manray, making all that noise at night. Then finally the building was condemned and something else has gone up there. Central Square. I told you about the Speakeasy--
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KM: Ok, I don’t think we lost anything, so sorry, continue where you were.
PC: Ok. I’m just trying to think of all the places. The 1369...Oh! I don’t know if they’ve taken that building down now. There was a place on Main Street that, as far as I know, was owned by mafia people, but I played there. It was know originally, well I knew it first as The Ace of Clubs, then it became The Club, and as The Club, again it had an eclectic booking policy but jazz was definitely a part of the mix, especially touring acts who, for one reason or another might not have been booked into the Regatta Bar. Sun Ra and his Arkestra. I remember hearing Mick Goodrick, who teaches alternately at the Conservatory at Berklee and came out of that whole scene. Very highly regarded jazz guitarist. Anyway, that was the place, it was there, and the building was in limbo for a long time. It’s been torn down or they’re gonna tear it down, but there was The Club or The Ace of Clubs, and that’s right in the Central Square area, but down the far end. Technically Lafayette Square. The squares, there are a lot of squares. Harvard Square is Harvard Square, and right down the street it’s actually Brattle Square, and the other end is Quincy Square. I live just off of Carter Medeiros and there’s an old brick factory building which is now called One Kendell Square, which to me is absurd because it’s almost half a mile or more outside of Kendell Square. That’s where was Beatrice Square. That’s long forgotten, and I only know it because I drove a taxi cab to fill in the holes and things, and one of our dispatchers knew the old names for all of these squares and he would call out the locations by these old names. Beatrice Square. I think just the old-timers in the neighborhood might remember that. Over here, it’s the Lizard Lounge, that used to be Rose’s or Rosa’s, but that room downstairs, the stage used to be in a different place, but that was always a place for the stage. That restaurant was an Italian restaurant and they used that room primarily as a function room, but there were different times when there was music booked in there. I think that’s pretty much it for Cambridge. You go over to Boston and Gainsborough Street near the Conservatory, there used to be this wonderful little hole-in-the-wall called Michael’s Pub. A lot of us jazzers back there in the seventies, the locals played at Michael’s. There was another place on Commonwealth Avenue where you’d go up to get on the Fenway called Pooh’s Pub. It was this strange room, it was all mirrored and everything, but they had jazz there, including some rather adventurous stuff. There was a son of a famous guitarist, they had a band called Year of the Ear, I can’t remember his name, I subbed in that band. Anyway. It was not unfriendly, out-there music, but it was on the edge in a very delightful sort of way. He had a regular night there, so he was drawing people in. There used to be jazz at the Eliot Lounge in the Eliot Hotel. Before I got here, the old Van Damme Hotel had a ballroom, and I played later on with a guy who played there pretty regularly, a Filipino fellow named Teddy Guerra, and we played up on Route One at the Kowloon. The Kowloon. You should go there some time, it’s like a Chinese restaurant--if Woody Allen knew about the Kowloon, he would use it if he needed a Chinese restaurant. These are sort of the gigs that you do. There was a fair amount of jazz, there were a couple of places down on Revere Beach...there was a place in the North End, upstairs, called something about steaks or beef or something, and Maggie Scott played there, I think Herb Palmwright played there some. That place was there for a long time, and a lot of the generation ahead of me of local people, a lot of them are not with us anymore, but in my memory...what else over in Boston. Of course Wally’s, but Wally’s wasn’t where it is now. Wally’s was about three times bigger and it was across the street. That’s the Wally’s I remember. That was a nice place, that was a fun place. They had a Hammond B3 organ, they were all set up for all different kinds of music, different brands of jazz, Wally’s. I told you about the Palms Mall, that was on Boylston Street near Exeter, across from the Lennox Hotel. The Howard Johnson’s in Kenmore Square had the Starlight Roof, which was primarily a singer’s room, and great singers would come there. Carmen MacRae, that would be the place that she would come to in the seventies and the eighties. The first time I hear Diane Reeves, I heard her at the Starlight Roof. That was a long time ago, it was in the eighties. I guess that’s a long time ago now. Long time to you, right?
KM: Doesn’t feel like it.
PC: That was another place over there. The Colonial Hotel used to have a jazz trio regularly, a good one. I thing Ray Santisi played there a lot. That’s pretty much what I remember. Oh, and there was the Willow. The Willow, over in Somerville, up Willow Street. You’d go over here, the back side of Porter Square, you’d see Willow Street, and you’d go all the way up Willow to Broadway, that’s where the Willow was. A fellow named Brian Walkley. That’s another person you might want to try to hunt down, Brian Walkley. Brian Walkley booked that room. It was a strange situation, it was like a townie bar, but it had this room they weren’t using with a stage, and Brian put a good piano in there. He booked mostly local people, sometimes some people passing through from out of town would play there. But the townies are all in the bar, dealing coke out of the other side of the bar, and it finally got shut down. No reflection on Brian. I think Brian just didn’t want to know. His thing on that was that he didn’t want to know what they were doing. That side of the bar was kind of a holdover from the old Winter Hills Gang days. The Irish mafia. But for many years, a lot of jazz happening right up there. Then south of the city there’s stuff, but I didn’t know those venues that well. You might want to talk to Kenny Hadley, a drummer. He had a big band, and he had a regular thing going on down on Quincy. I kept meaning to get down there and hear it. This restaurant up here in Porter Square, across the little street from Christopher’s, it’s a pan Asian restaurant now. That started off as, I used to live there in Porter Square, and the shape of that building comes from the fact that it was originally an Arby’s. The Arby’s went out of business and it was bought by this Greek guy with a Russian name. He was known as Adoroff. It was primarily a Greek and Middle Eastern restaurant. Anyway, this guy build out the rest of this building, left the Arby’s part and built out from there, and back in the eighties, Greg Hopkins’ big band played there every Sunday, so that was another scene that happened here. I think that’s about all I have. I with I could remember the names of those couple of rooms. That one place, and the building is gone now, but that place in Harvard Square was on Mount Auburn Street, there’s an old apartment building on Mount Auburn Street, it was on the same side as the post office. I think it’s where the building that has the Kinko’s is now. I think that’s went when they tore that building down. But that was a place a lot of people started off in Boston, then went on and did other things got their start. Again, an eclectic...Oh, there’s a wonderful old man, Harold Lane, he’s a drummer, and I think Harold is still with us. I haven’t heard from him, he must be very old now, I don’t even know if he can...no, I don’t have Harold’s contact information. I have your email, so I have to find out if Harold is still--he had a stroke a few years ago. I saw him a few years ago at a jam session, and there was a case of some younger musicians reaching out to older musicians. These younger guys, he can’t drive anymore, but they would come and get Harold and bring him to jam sessions so that Harold could play. He was coming out of this stroke, but his time was so beautiful that even with not having complete control of everything it was still a joy to play with Harold. Harold, he’s a Cambridge guy so he knows that older stuff. I’ll see if I can...I think he’s still around. The time goes by so fast. I saw him at that jam session those guys used to have over in Brookline, but that’s already now a few years ago.
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