Paul de Barros

Torsten Schmidt

Before you start going into telling us what’s so great about the Northwest, what can you tell us about yourself that we should know?

Paul de Barros

You should probably know that one of the reasons I’m here is that I’m the local jazz writer. I did a book called Jackson Street After Hours. You’re going to see some pictures from it. It’s kind of the untold underground history of the early Seattle music scene… As I did that research it made me start thinking about what made Seattle what it is. It made me become rather contemplative about it. I write for the Seattle Times every week on Fridays, I write about jazz, also some world music. I used to write more about pop music. I don’t anymore, kind of got specialized about 14, 15 years ago. I did review Nirvana once, however; I think that was the last rock review I ever wrote. You can read into that what you like.

I write for Downbeat magazine, which is the national jazz magazine out of Chicago. I cover a lot of festivals around the world for Downbeat, and that’s probably all you need to know about me.

Torsten Schmidt

What do we need to know about Seattle apart from Boeing, Microsoft, the Space Needle, the EMP probably not being Frank Gehry’s greatest building and...

Paul de Barros

[laughs] Well the first thing that you need to know about Seattle – and I have to give credit to the person that this came from because it wasn’t me. I was doing an article for Downbeat about ten years ago about how there were all these young jazz musicians who had gone to the Cornish College, which is up on Capitol Hill. By the way, you’ve been welcomed but welcome to Seattle. It’s a very odd place and I hope you have a wonderful time here. I moved here in 1979 myself – I’m not a native. I’m from California – became rather attached to it. Not to the weather, I must say, but to the place. I know you’ve all come from a lot of different places so welcome to the madness of the Northwest.

John Schott is a guitar player who now lives in Berkeley who was going to Cornish and I called John and I said, “What is it about your class in Cornish, the late ’80s, early ’90s, [drummer] Mike Sarin, [guitarist] Brad Shepik, John Schott, [drummer] Aaron Alexander, [saxophonist] Briggan Krauss. There were about ten or 12, mostly men, who went to Cornish who moved to New York and within a matter of a year had suddenly become really successful jazz musicians on what they called, The downtown scene, in New York; the Knitting Factory scene in the late 8’80s and early ‘90s, an avant-garde kind of eclectic, post-modern jazz scene.

I asked John why he thought so many musicians from Seattle had become a part of this particular scene and what had driven their creativity. He said, “The circle-A, Paul.” If you lived here in the ’80s you would’ve known what I meant. If you walked around this neighborhood in particular back in the ’80s, there was an anarchist “A” with a circle around it on practically every building; graffiti. The anarchist spirit is very, very strong in Seattle. It goes all the way back, I think, to the nineteenth century. This is a city of free-booters, of outsiders, of contrary people. This is a city full of people that if you say, “It’s raining,” they’ll say it’s not. If you say, “The sun is… the sky is blue,” they’ll say, “No it isn’t it’s gray.”

It’s a very contrary exceptionalist place and I think John is very right about that, that the grunge rock that happened here went hand-in-hand with a bunch of experimental jazz musicians as well; Tim Young, a guitar player who’s still here. When Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz moved here from New York right around the same time, they sponsored a lot of these young musicians. I think the circle-A anarchist thing is real strong here.

You can go all the way back to 1919. Seattle is the only city in the United States that ever had a general strike. The IWW, I mean in fact it was called the Thirteenth Soviet of the United States at one time. The Northwest was the strongest place where the IWW took hold, the Wobblies, the International Workers Of The World. That was a left-wing sort of proto-communist workers movement that was very popular in the United States amongst lumbering people, primary industries: lumber, mining, shipbuilding, that sort of thing. You’ve got this strong tradition of outsiders and anarchists who go against the grain.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean strong traditions, you’re talking 1919 and unions, work unions were almost an established thing in Europe at that stage. This city hasn’t been around for that long.

Paul de Barros

No.

Torsten Schmidt

What’s the age of the city to start with?

Paul de Barros

1851.

Torsten Schmidt

Were there settlements before that? It’s obviously always a pretty Euro-centric way of looking at, “Oh yeah, it’s 1851.’ People have been living here for how long?

Paul de Barros

Oh, well, depending on which anthropologist you talk to. There’s a lot of great Native American music, the Makah people, Muckleshoot people, anywhere from 25 to 35,000 years. The first Europeans got here in 1851 and they kind of expressed the other side of the city’s character, which is also very kind of prim, business-like, orderly, sort of what I call the ‘roll-top desk mentality.” The city, from the very beginning, had a kind of schizophrenic dual personality.

On the one hand, Arthur Denny, who founded the city, one of the first things he did was found a university. He wanted this to be the business district, this to be the university. It was all planned in his mind and yet the flipside of that was this kind of anarchist, rowdy, very male, honky-tonk neighborhood that sprouted up in what’s now known as Pioneer Square; what was originally known as Skid Road.

One of the first band leaders in this area in the 1920s, his name was Vic Meyers. During Prohibition, when it was illegal in the United States to drink, his band would play down at the Butler Hotel, which is in Pioneer Square – it’s gone now – and they would… you could drink there. You could buy booze from the bellboys. He later ran for Lieutenant Governor on a Gandhi ticket. He had a picture of himself taken in a diaper leading a goat. He was elected and he served four terms. A jazz bass player named Red Kelly ran for Governor and got 40,000 votes.

This is a place where people have a rather ironic take on politics and kind of an outsider take. To mess with the established order has always been part of the scene here.

Torsten Schmidt

You somehow still got that schizophrenia that you get harassed till God knows what to show your ID to buy a bit of booze, but you can get all the smack in the world and ...

Paul de Barros

Right. There’s always been kind of a puritanical city fathers and then beneath it this kind of repressed action. In the 1890s Seattle really took off because there was a gold rush in the Yukon. Seattle was the jumping-off point for the gold rush and this is where people got outfitted; they bought all their stuff for the gold rush.

So, this honky-tonk neighborhood sprung up around Pioneer Square. A city can do one of two things when it has vice. It can either try to outlaw it or it can try to make money from it. This city decided to make money from it, so from the 1890s until 1969 the city was completely crooked. The mayor, the police chief, everybody was on the take getting money under the table. This was a very good thing for music because music thrived in the city because the cops were paid off so that there could be booze, drugs, gambling, alcohol, prostitution.

From the 1890s to 1969 it was a pretty rocking city. In fact, in the 1920s Joe Darensbourg, who was a clarinet player who came up here from New Orleans, settled here because he said, “There’s no city in the United States, other than New Orleans, that has so many night clubs after hours and so much illegal goings on, so it’s great for a musician.”

Let me just play you a little cut from John Schott’s record. John made an album called Shuffle Play and I thought it was particularly appropriate for what you all do here. He took some of the earliest recordings ever made like Thomas Edison, one of the earliest African-American songs ever recorded in 1897, which is called “Poor Mourner.” Let’s say this is a remix of one of the first recordings ever made. There’s a line in it, “Ye shall be free when the good Lord sets you free.” This is John Schott. His album, Shuffle Play, encourages you to play the album in any order you want to play it, that’s why he called it, Shuffle Play. He did remixes and electronic manipulations with live instruments as well as with electronics of all these original recordings because he was fascinated by the early recording. It doesn’t sound like much in the beginning and then you’ll start to hear this African-American voice.

(music: John Schott – “Poor Mourner Repainted”)

New Orleans was really the birth place of jazz. It’s a complicated story, but it has to do with the way the laws were changed in the city that brought certain kinds of black people together. Creoles, who had musical training, and black people, who represented more of the country music and the rural music, came together and made what we know as jazz, and before that, ragtime piano and blues. There was a great diaspora from New Orleans that started after 1917, of people moving to Chicago, going to Los Angeles, and also coming to Seattle. We started getting some of these musicians, like [Jelly Roll] Morton and Oscar Holden, who was another piano player who’s on the cover of my book, his picture is up there at 12th and Jackson too now, who started spreading this music really, really rapidly.

Without going into real details, New Orleans was really the cradle of jazz, and jazz was really the cradle of all popular music in America. Anything you want to hear, from hip-hop going back, you can find in Armstrong or Ellington or Morton. It’s all there. The singing styles, the improvisation, the rhythms, it all comes out of that early jazz.

Torsten Schmidt

That early jazz being, probably, I guess you’ve got some recording samples that will illustrate a little bit how that term progressed as well over the years.

Paul de Barros

Exactly, and in fact, if we go to the next slide ... [looks to screen] That’s Oscar Holden. He was the piano player who actually hired Jelly Roll Morton to play in his band. Even though Oscar was normally a piano player, he played clarinet as well. He met Morton in Chicago in 1912. Then he lived up in Victoria in Canada, and in Vancouver, and lead a band at the Patricia Hotel in which Morton played. It’s very likely then when Morton played here at the Entertainers, he was playing for Oscar, but Oscar died long before I could have gotten to him to interview him, so I don’t really know and nobody really does.

Let’s move on to the next one [looks up a screen]. This is the corner where the sign just went up. This is the corner of 12th and Jackson, and this was the Black and Tan Nightclub where everybody from 1922 to the mid-’60s that was anybody in jazz, and later in rhythm and blues, played it to play here. It was in the basement of this building. It went up because this neighborhood started to host all of the black people that worked on the railroad. For a while it was actually called the Porters and Waiters Club, and the porters and waiters had a union and they would stay overnight in the neighborhood. Since they had to wait for a train going back out, they’d be in town two or three nights, so they needed something to do. So, all these bars, restaurants, gambling joints, and jazz clubs started to spring up.

The building is actually still there, and the sign we put in kitty-corner from the Black and Tan, that marquee, you can’t really read it, but it actually says “Black and Tan” on the marquee sticking out from the corner of the building at 12th and Jackson. It was owned by a guy named Noodles Smith, who hired all the early players. He was a gangster. He owned all the clubs, and basically if you wanted to start a club yourself you had to pay him off.

Let’s go to the next picture [picture on screen]. This is Joe Darensbourg on the right. He’s the clarinet player that I mentioned who came out here from New Orleans. The band leader is Freda Payne, she’s the one behind the banjo. She would play in bands that ran up and down from San Francisco and LA up to Seattle, on ships, on the president lines. The reason people did this is that you could gamble legally if you were six miles out. They had bands, booze, and gambling, so this was another big source of work.

Let’s move along.

Torsten Schmidt

When you speak of work, obviously the income was coming from different sources, as later on in the ’60s, or even nowadays. Recorded music was still in its baby shoes. How did these people survive as musicians?

Paul de Barros

It was all live gigs. There was no recording industry here whatsoever.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, if you have a guy called Noodles Smith running the joint, why would you have a union in the first place? He doesn’t sound like a character who would be very much for a union.

Paul de Barros

The union got you jobs. You’d go to the union hall at 14th and Jefferson and you’d say, “Where can I get work?” There’d be contractors there, and they would send you out to the clubs to work. It was organized, even though it was run by gangsters. Gangsters are very organized people. Shooting somebody is a form of organization. [laughs]

Torsten Schmidt

It’s a pretty binary thing, yeah.

Paul de Barros

It’s a form of sorting things out. Most of the early jazz musicians played for gangsters. If you read any of Louis Armstrong’s stuff, he talks about that in Chicago. Seattle really wasn’t much different, but there was no mafia here. It was all just kind of small-time operators.

Torsten Schmidt

How did the different travelling circuits of musicians interact with each other? You said there’s people that come down from California or up here on these boats, and at this stage would you have national artists that would come around on big tours?

Paul de Barros

Yeah, that’s sort of where I’m going. [Gestures to screen] For example, this picture here, I think the piano player’s cut off, but on the right, the piano player’s Palmer Johnson. Palmer came up from Los Angeles and he learned from Oscar Holden. He became sort of the piano professor in town. Other people would come in on famous bands and they might leave the band and stay here for a while, or people would start working here and get picked up by a band and go out and wind up getting hired by a famous band leader. There was a continuous kind of dialogue between touring bands that were led by people who were successful in the recording industry and had national reputations and local musicians here, but you couldn’t get famous here. You couldn’t become a famous band leader here. In fact, there was so few jazz band leaders here in the ’30s and ’40s, there wasn’t even a full-sized swing band. It was all combos like this, three, four, five, six people.

Let’s go to the next slide because I think it’s the one that speaks directly. [Screen shows another slide] This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. The cool dude in the middle of this picture, with the shades on, is Dick Wilson. Dick was really on of the premier saxophone players. I’m going to play you a little bit of his music. He’s in a touring band here. This is Andy Kirk’s band, from Kansas City. Kansas City, of course, is where Count Basie and Bennie Moten & The Blue Devils and the kind of swing band sound really originated. Andy Kirk lead one of the best black swing bands in the country. Dick Wilson grew up in LA, but he moved here when he was going to high school. He went to Broadway high school during his last couple of years, up on Capitol Hill.

He started playing with that clarinet player I showed you, Joe Darensbourg, way up on Highway 99 in a place called The Jungle Temple. A lot of the places here these kind of names like The Ubangi, The Congo Room, they all had African names because the Harlem renaissance had really popularized the sense that jazz was an African music, or an African based music. They’re playing up at The Jungle Temple, and who should come through town but Zack Whyte, who’s a territory band leader from Texas. By territory band, I mean that he only played in a certain small territory, but he wound up getting all the way to the Northwest from Texas. Dick gets hired by Zack Whyte, travels all over the country, winds up in Kansas City, and the band goes broke. Dick gets hired by Andy Kirk and winds up coming back to Seattle in 1941, when this picture was taken at the Eagles Auditorium, which is now where ACT Theater is downtown on 7th Avenue.

When Dick came to town, local people knew who he was, so he had the pleasure of having an advertisement in the newspaper that said, “Hometown boy, Dick Wilson, comes home and plays with Andy Kirk,” and so all of his friends went out to see him at the Eagles Auditorium. See if I can get to this tune. This is Dick playing a saxophone solo with Andy Kirk on a tune called, “Lotta Sax Appeal.” Unfortunately, all these tracks are mixed up. Here we go. This is from 1940. That’s him.

(music: Andy Kirk & His Orchestra – “Lotta Sax Appeal”)

Torsten Schmidt

If this is 1940 and 1941, obviously the world has been slightly restructured at that time. Did the demographic change in any sort of way because all the men were away either in Asia or in Europe?

Paul de Barros

Well, nobody had shipped out of here yet. It’s still 1940, ’41, and we didn’t even get into the war until the end of ’41, but eventually that did have an effect. The effect that it had on Seattle, surprisingly enough, was not to decimate bands, but in fact to really boost the economy. This place was just rockin’ in the ’40s. One of the things Quincy Jones described, going to Garfield High School, which is the same high school where Jimi Hendrix went, Ernestine went there too, Ernestine Anderson, and saying, here we were in high school and we were trying to play jazz. We knew something was going on in New York, and we would hear rumors. He’d say “We heard Rubber Legs Wilson put benzedrine in somebody’s coffee, and that was the big rumor. We heard Ray Brown is coming to town, and he’s got this new band, and Dizzy Gillespie’s in it. What does he sound like? Because he haven’t heard him yet.” They would go out, and that was how they heard him. Records also carried the message, but bebop was really the new message in the ’40s, and that’s how it got here.

Torsten Schmidt

Obviously, a lot of us come from countries where choir singing and church choir singing is slightly different than what you guys might have out here. Are there any recommendations on good choirs to check out while we’re here?

Paul de Barros

Church choirs? Oh well, you go to Mount Zion. That’s the main, big, black church. Actually, I can recommend a few churches along Pine, too. You got to mind your manners. Got to go to church. [laughs]

Torsten Schmidt

If you left your information with us, I guess there might be some people who would like to check it out, because it’s not a household thing around where…

Paul de Barros

Absolutely. You’ll hear some great choirs here. The Total Experience Gospel Choir is more of a professional choir that sings secular gigs, but there’s some real good church choirs here. Ernestine, not growing up here of course, didn’t come out of that tradition, but she had a real strong career in the ’50s, early ’60s, then she dropped out for a while, came back in the ’80s and she’s been singing ever since. She’s matured now, she’s 75 years old, she’s not singing like she did in the ’50s.

If you want to picture this in the ’40s when these guys were in high school, when you walked along Jackson Street from 1st Avenue to 14th Avenue, along Jackson Street, through Chinatown and on the side streets, you could drop into as many as 25 or 35 different night clubs and many of them went all night. One of them on Maynard had a dinner show, a nine o’clock show, a midnight show, a 3am show, and a breakfast show, and they started all over again at noon the next day. There was a continuously running dice game in the back, that ran for three years without stopping. Day and night. I interviewed the bartender who was in charge of it.

There was really a lot going on in this town in those days. Ernestine grew up knowing that this scene was right in her backyard from Garfield High School, and she wound up singing at the 411 Club at the breakfast show when she was 16, 17 years old, down on Maynard. Quincy Jones knew that this was happening in town. He would go to the Washington Social Club, which was on Madison and 20th, and there he met this blind singer from Florida named Ray Robinson, who you know as Ray Charles, who taught him how to make arrangements and every night they would get together and talk about music.

Everybody would go to the Washington Social Club late at night after their gigs because the bands that were traveling through town would go there to hang out and jam after their regular gig. If Dizzy’s band came to town, all the musicians would go down to the Washington Social Club at one o’clock and they’d all play. That’s how the kids, “kids,” learned how to play music back then. They were 15, 16, their moms didn’t know where they were. They lied, but they got into these places somehow and they got home late.

Torsten Schmidt

What would be the difference between the gig, let’s say Dizzy’s band is there, the regular gig and when he played for the [inaudible] later on?

Paul de Barros

Well with Dizzy there wouldn’t be that much difference because Dizzy was leading a bebop band, but the question is on target because usually the reason you’d go out to play in a jam session is that you got to open up and play more freely. The regular swing dance band gig would just be playing for a dance crowd. That’s been true in the jazz scene from day one. Jazz musicians have traded ideas at jam sessions after the regular gig from the beginning.

Torsten Schmidt

Was there a crowd big enough and wealthy enough to support a national band coming here and buy tickets?

Paul de Barros

Huge. About six blocks from here was the Trianon Ballroom at 3rd Avenue and Wall, and that’s where Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, Benny Goodman, all the great swing bands all played there. They had crowds of two to three thousand people. There were theaters downtown like the Pantages Theater and the Metropolitan Theater where Duke Ellington played. Oh yeah, this town was supporting from about 1934 on, and even in the 1920s Mamie Smith played here. All the great early blues singers came through town in theater shows, because there was a very strong theater tradition here, even though it was a young town. It was a big audience and a real hunger I think because it was such a pioneer outpost, people had a hunger for something cultural and something interesting.

Torsten Schmidt

You were talking about a young Quincy Jones meeting Ray Robinson. Can you fill us in a little bit about the nature of the talks they had at night and what they all learned from the other?

Paul de Barros

They’re a little bit vague both of them, I’d have to say. Let me play you a little bit of Quincy. Quincy went to Garfield High School and started a swing band. Let’s see if we can go to the next... [points to slide on projector screen] This is the Trianon Ballroom that was about six blocks from here where all the big bands played. The guy holding the trumpet in the middle of the band is Quincy Jones, and this night when the picture was taken was his 16th birthday. He was celebrating his birthday, playing in the band. The leader of the band was Bumps Blackwell who’s playing the vibraphone. To Quincy’s right, playing alto saxophone is Buddy Catlett, who would later play with Louis Armstrong and Count Basie. Quincy was going to high school, and he had no other dream than to lead a big band, but by the time he grew up, the big band scene was over. It was practically over when he was in high school.

He wanted to play with Lionel Hampton so bad, that he went back stage at the Pantages Theater and he showed Lionel the arrangements that he had written in high school. Lionel, who would say yes to anybody because his wife really ran the band, said, “Yeah, Gates, get on the bus, man. You’re hired!” Quincy got on the bus, he didn’t even go home because he was afraid his mother would tell him he couldn’t leave, he was still in high school. So, he got on the bus, then Gladys came on and saw him on the bus in the morning. She said, “What are you doing here? Get off this bus and go back to school!” Quincy had already told all of his friends that he had been hired by Lionel Hampton. He was so embarrassed, he told me didn’t want to go back to school the next day [laughs]. That was everybody’s dream, to get onto a big band.

Eventually he got hired by Lionel Hampton, he started arranging for the band.

Torsten Schmidt

How long, how much later was that?

Paul de Barros

Actually only about a year and a half later, in ’51 he got hired.

Torsten Schmidt

When you’re in high school, a year and a half can make a big difference.

Paul de Barros

He graduated from high school, he went to Seattle University for a year and then he went to Boston to what was then called the Schillinger School, which is now the Berklee College of Music, and five months after he got there, Lionel came through and hired him. One of the reasons Lionel hired him is that he had already hired another singer from Seattle named Janet Thurlow. She reminded Hampton that he had promised Quincy to hire him. Janet got him onto the band. By that time there were four people from Seattle on the band, so Lionel Hampton ended up hiring a lot of people from Seattle.

Quincy got an offer in 1959 after going to work for Mercury Records, producing albums by Dinah Washington, Ernestine Anderson, all kinds of people. He got offered this amazing deal to put together this big band of his dreams and go to Europe and open a show with Sammy Davis Jr in the title role. It was called “Free and Easy,” it was based on a Harold Arlen show that had been written in 1939 but rewritten by Arlen, the great songwriter who wrote “Over the Rainbow” among other things. He got Clark Terry, Phil Woods, Sahib Shihab, and he hired four of his friends from Seattle. He hired Patty Bone the piano player, he hired Buddy Catlett to play bass, he hired Floyd Standifer to play trumpet, and they took off for Paris and they opened the show. About three days later it closed because the Algerian Crisis happened in France.

I like to bring this back to Seattle’s love affairs with the blues because starting with those crazy white kids and the Sonics and the Wailers and the Kingsmen, the blues really was a strong force here as soon as Ray Charles and this great mix of black people moved here from the South from the 1940s on. If you play music in Seattle, you somehow need to honor the blues in some way. It’s not like California. There’s a visionary streak here because we’re close to the Orient, we have a lot of trade with Asia, but there’s also a real groundedness here.

I like to think that the thing that Jimi Hendrix got from Seattle, a lot of people will talk about the distortion and the electronics, but I really don’t think that that’s what he got from Seattle. What he got from Seattle was blues. He played on Jackson Street. This is at Washington Hall, this picture [gestures to screen], which is four blocks from the corner of 12th and Jackson. Jimi’s father, Al, was a competition dancer on the Jackson Street jazz scene. His grandparents were vaudevillians who got stranded here in 1911 after a vaudeville of theirs had been playing the Pantages Theater.

Whenever I hear this cut by Jimi Hendrix, I like to think that in some way “Red House,” the blues that he recorded on his first English album, really hearkens back to what he learned in Seattle.

Those are some of the themes. I hope I introduced you to some character of the place. It’s a place that loves the blues, it’s a place where people seem to really feel like, a little bit ornery and contrary, a little bit eccentric. It’s a place where black music is very, very important and it’s also a place where white people have been really fascinated by ethnic musics of all kinds. It’s a place where eccentricity and being naughty is very much opposed to the powers that be. We’ve had this long history of an oppressive middle-class culture or “roll-top desk mentality’” on the top and this kind of naughty let’s have fun and drink all night and be bad people going on against it, a kind of repression. I think you can hear that in some of the music. I’m happy to take any questions, but I hope that I haven’t distorted too disastrously your image of what our city is.

Audience Member

What was the name of Quincy Jones band that went to Paris?

Paul de Barros

They just called it the Quincy Jones Big Band. Yeah, in fact, let’s see if I have that... I think I...

Torsten Schmidt

That was the first out of how many times that he got stranded?

Paul de Barros

This is actually the vinyl that they made, it’s called Birth of a Band (holds up record). They were in Europe for nine months playing. They told me horror stories getting stranded overnight in Transylvania, playing country fairs so they could get their train ticket to the next town. Eventually… Clark Terry, the great trumpet player, was in the band… Eventually, this is actually a form of experience in Quincy’s career, because most of us know him as a really commercial producer, the guy who produced the Brothers Johnson and Michael Jackson. That was the turning point in his life, when he went on the road broke for nine months, he came back. He told me this, he said, “Paul, I vowed to never lose money again in the music business.”

Torsten Schmidt

Which he did how many times again?

Paul de Barros

Yeah, but he made a lot, too. He really vowed to learn how the business worked. He became well-versed in the commercial side of it. Any other questions?

Audience Member

Can I borrow your record collection please?

Paul de Barros

Can you borrow my record collection? Yeah! I’ll just put it on my iPod [laughs].

Audience Member

What’s your favorite jazz record, maybe one that we can still find on the record shelves?

Paul de Barros

One of my favorite local ones, it’s interesting you ask that, I’ll play you just a bit of it. It was made here by the Al Hood Quartet in the 1980s (holds up record). Al’s dead now. He was a piano player, but this is a free jazz, freebop album. Real nice album. I’ll just play the opening of it. Jim Paul, doesn’t play anymore, but just has a nice feel. Just a kind of a free jazz quartet.

(music: Al Hood Quartet – unknown track)

Torsten Schmidt

Can you give us some other names of labels to check out because obviously we stop somewhere at a time when most of us jazz gets interesting, especially as sampling source?

Paul de Barros

Yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

Any things to look for which are local and which would give you that Seattle feel?

Paul de Barros

You know, unfortunately there hasn’t been that much recording done here. This album was done on a little album called Auroar, that a friend of mine ran for a few years, his name is Gary Banister. These records are around if you see anything on Auroar, but there’s only three or four of them. Most of the albums that were made by people here wound up being made somewhere else. The early stuff is on Linden, which is a label that started in the ’50s here, but it covered everything like country music, pop music, a little bit of jazz. Now there’s a Jackson Street label that’s run by Paul Rutger, who’s a cellist and a bass player. There’s Origin Records, but we’re not talking vinyl here, we’re talking CDs.

There’s really not that much out there in the crates, I’m afraid, for local jazz.

Audience Member

Scott Joplin had to do something with Seattle?

Paul de Barros

No, Scott Joplin never came here. Scott Joplin was the ragtime piano player and composer from St Louis. He went the other way, he went to New York. As far as I know he never even toured here. WC Handy came here in 1898, the guy that wrote Memphis Blues, the first published blues song. He came here with the Minstrel Show at the Pantages Theater in 1898. We got a lot of the big shows like that, but as far as I know, Joplin never came here.

There is a great ragtime composer named Joe Jordan who composed some of the best rags, and he was from Tacoma, which is very nearby here. Yeah?

Audience Member

You mentioned free jazz several times in your speech. What impact did free jazz have on the jazz scene here in Seattle?

Paul de Barros

Free jazz?

Torsten Schmidt

Free jazz, yeah. Second question, do you know any Ornette Coleman or Don Cherry stories?

Paul de Barros

Well I know lots of stories, but they don’t have anything to do with Seattle. Free jazz has had an interesting history here. I would say the first free jazz started happening at a really interesting nightclub here in the 1960s called the Llangollen. It was a room run by a guy named Jim Heldman, who was just a crazy man. He played piano and he played the bass, and he would have musicians come and jam with him that were playing at local ... Jerry Heldman, I’m sorry, not Jim. McCoy Tyner player there. You may know, see if I brought this, not sure if I did. No, I didn’t.

If you know the South African composer Abdullah Ibrahim, who plays piano, also called Dollar Brand, he hired saxophone player from here who played on that old Llangollen scene. Michael Bisio comes indirectly out of that scene. Free jazz has always been strong here. There’s still a real strong free improvising scene here at the Gallery 1412 which is on 1412 18th Avenue on Capitol Hill. It’s always been underground. Al Hood had a class at Seattle Central Community College that he would run at his house. It was of free jazz improvisers. It’s been an underground that’s always been strong.

Torsten Schmidt

What are the hidden gems, the missing chapters that are probably not part of the Barnes and Noble world that we should know about?

Paul de Barros

In terms of the music?

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, I mean obviously the music industry was a totally different game back then and there are probably lessons to learn from that age.

Paul de Barros

I don’t know if there’s any hidden gems as far as the music goes, I mean the box sets have pretty much brought out everything that’s… from his first solo with Lionel Hampton. I think the most interesting thing about Quincy is that he was really ambitious. He’s a real textbook example of somebody who really, really wanted to make it.

It’s funny, because as you say, he lost a lot of money as well as making a lot of money. He really wanted to make it in the mainstream of the music business. He didn’t want to be on the side. I think that’s one of the reasons he left jazz after the ’50s and mid-’60s. He wanted to be where the action was, where the money is. He’s an extremely good-looking man. I’ve been around him with women. It’s quite a remarkable experience. He’s an extremely attractive, charismatic person. People just kind of melt around him.

I once saw him do something here in Seattle that was incredible. There’s a local band here that plays repertory jazz, and they’re just sort of okay. They invited Quincy to come conduct them, and it was like they were a different band. I’ve never saw him work in the studio, but you could see that this man just by his body language and what he expected from people, could get three times more out of any musician, and I think that’s really part of the role of a producer obviously. He really could get stuff out of this band. It was like you suddenly understood why he had made so many great records… because he has very high expectations but a lot of real support and he communicates stuff with his body.

Also, I guess another little secret about Quincy is that he’ll say anything. He said stuff to me on tape that no living human being should say about other people. You just think, “Is he really telling me this?” You can’t publish it. He’s completely open. He has to have people to manage him and take care of him so he can be dragged away from interviews because he just likes to talk and share stuff really openly. Just the opposite of Ray Charles who was a very closed human being, the opposite of his stage image. Ray also was extremely ambitious, really wanted to make it in the business, but... let’s just put it this way, he had a lot of demons and he was very closed about his business world. Musicians did not like to work for him.

Torsten Schmidt

What’s the story with the city and the demons? Is it because of the harbor? So many great musicians’ minds have been wasted here on smack basically, is it because you’ve got the harbor nearby? Why is it that there’s such a strong influx?

Paul de Barros

I think so. This crazy trumpet player from Tacoma named Neil Friel, he went to Stadium High School in Tacoma. He told me as a high school kid, they could get heroin in Tacoma. This is in the ’40s, white kids in Tacoma. That really shocked me. I’d never heard of anything like that. I think it’s probably just because it was a poor town, probably a little under-policed. Drugs were around, definitely.

Again, when I ended with Hendrix, I really should say that Seattle’s undercover image was blown when the grunge era happened, and when Microsoft and Starbucks hit the world, the roof blew off of Seattle and there’s still lots of people in Seattle that aren’t happy about that. They preferred it when no one had ever heard of the place.

You’ll hear jokes while you’re here, “If the sun comes out don’t tell anybody.” Because we want everybody in the world to think it rains everyday. There’s a xenophobia here about other people that’s very real. I’m from California and the first year I lived here I was shocked about the horrible things people would say about California all the time. Just really mean shit on purpose to get you to move [laughs]. There’s a real undercurrent of “Would you just get out of here and leave us alone?” That’s still here even though the town is really, like I say, the cover is really blown off. That gray sky is gone, at least psychologically, and people know about the city. Lots of musicians moved here.

The big change that happened after grunge is that a lot of the musicians who had money and could start recording studios and could support night clubs stayed here. That was the difference. Now there’s actual money here and creativity and people that stayed instead of moving to LA or New York. That’s what’s changed in my lifetime here.

Torsten Schmidt

It’s about sustainability and not just about throwing something at the wall and see what sticks?

Paul de Barros

Absolutely. It’s about Stone Gossard [of Pearl Jam] opening up a studio and having jazz musicians record there. It’s about having lawyers, bless their hearts, that know how to write contracts, so you don’t have to go to LA to have a manager. It’s about having a recording studio with somebody who knows how to produce a jazz record with a real bass sound on it. It’s about all those things. It’s about studios, it’s about clubs, it’s about sustainability.

That’s what we have here now. There’s a music industry here. Until three years ago, there wasn’t even a really functional chapter of NARAS, the recording academy. I was on the first board, and it was during my tenure with a lot of the people who live here, like Michael Shreeve who played with Santana, Dave Dieter, people from the grunge bands. Once we kinda got that going, it was really clear there was a music industry here, for better or for worse. Now Seattle is really part of the music industry. All this history I’m giving you before, it was not. It was kinda the underground, special, eccentric, on the edge place that nobody cared about, nobody knew about. It was like a little secret place. So, you can understand that old-timers wouldn’t be happy about it changing.

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, I guess we’re pretty curious in finding more of these secrets and revealing them.

Paul de Barros

We’ll never tell! [laughs]

Torsten Schmidt

Secretly share them and we won’t tell them that’s only ranking, the rainy cities, it’s only ranking 41st or something of the rainy cities of the...

Paul de Barros

I don’t know.

Torsten Schmidt

Thanks for sharing some of these things with us.

Paul de Barros

Oh yeah, my pleasure.

Torsten Schmidt

Give the man a hand.

Paul de Barros

Thanks for coming. Thanks.