JazzCore1/part five

JazzCore1/part five

And now, Jim Jeter, the fifth of the five St. Louis jazz musicians playing in JazzCore1. Your comments invited at the end of his solo.

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At Benny Carter’s birth, his father was a janitor but soon became a night-watchman, longshoreman, and then a postal clerk.  He played some guitar and led the musical family in singing at home, mainly church songs.... He encouraged his son's musical interests, taking pride in his growing professional success.  

Their mother mainly developed the children’s musical inclinations, at first.… She played piano and saw to it that there was always one at home on which she could teach the children the rudiments of music.  She gave her son Bennett piano lessons when he was about ten years old, then sent him to a teacher in the neighborhood along with his sisters….

Though she encouraged her son’s musical interest, Mrs. Carter was apprehensive about it.  She did not want him to become a professional musician, fearing he might fall into jazz.  ‘After all,’ Carter recalls, ‘jazz was a dirty word to many black people, who saw it played in an unwholesome atmosphere. Yet she wanted me to learn music as well as I could since that’s what I wanted.  She would have been most pleased if I could have combined music with a respectable career, say, as a clergyman.’

Morroe Berger, Edward Berger, and James Patrick, Benny Carter:  A Life in 
    American Music/Volume I (2^nd ed., 2002).

Jim Jeter

You improvise within a framework, but it’s like a mosaic: You don’t really know what shape…the exact shape…of what every little piece is going to be in it.

After I play, I feel endorphins.  It’s almost like when, years ago, I used to run, you’d be tired, but then you had this sense of well-being.

I always had this bug in me about music.  There’s just something about it I like.  It’s like playing a sport in that, probably with people like you, we could sit around and talk about jazz musicians the way some people will sit around and talk about baseball players or football players.   I guess you get the music in you somehow, and the next thing you know, you’ve got 1500 albums.

     --Jim Jeter

Jazz as a bug for some of us, contracted as we grow up and hear our environment comping. The condition is chronic.

Jim’s story is an intriguing version of that process: the nuanced relationship that can evolve between the jazz legacy environment in which the player grows up and the player’s attraction to the music.

Jim was born in St. Louis, at the now-razed St. Mary’s Infirmary on Papin Street, and he grew up here.  For seven years, he attended grade school at Blessed Sacrament School on North Kingshighway near St. Louis Avenue, “just north of what was called--I still call it--Easton, now Martin Luther King Drive.”

“Probably the main reason I went there,” he says, “is because at that time, that was the only integrated school system available in St. Louis.  The public schools in St. Louis were still segregated in ’52 and ’53,” and he believes his parents “thought that it was important for me to go, that it would be of benefit to be in an integrated situation.”  (“I can remember when I first went there that most of the kids in the class were white.  And as the demographic in the neighborhood changed, by the time of eighth grade, it was predominantly black.”) He went on to attend and graduate from Soldan High School.

During these years, Jim says, “I was hearing jazz all the time.”  His mother  “was a music lover, and she always played records.” Among them, Jim recalls, were recordings she found of “obscure tenor players like Sam ‘The Man’ Taylor,” but she was also a “huge Frank Sinatra fan, so we had all the Sinatra albums, and I can remember listening to Rosemary Clooney and a lot of Ella Fitzgerald, and she liked Dinah Washington, too.”

Jazz was in the family air. Jim’s mother had cousins in Chicago.  “She used to go to Chicago to see them, and then they would go out to clubs in Chicago, and she actually knew Milt Jackson for a while because Milt Jackson dated one of her cousins at one time, and they used to play bridge.  She played bridge with Milt Jackson.”  And, Jim recalls, Sy Oliver’s first wife, Billie, was “one of my mother’s best friends.”

Then there was the powerful influence of Jim’s father, James Jeter.  During the early 1920s, he played saxophone with the popular Alphonso Trent territory band.  The band gigged both on the road and later as the house orchestra for eighteen months at Dallas’ Adolphus Hotel, where, Jim says, there was “a segregated club on the roof called The Jungle Room,” complete with very popular radio broadcasts of the music. Jim recalls a picture of the band:  “They were a very elegant band.  They wore tuxedos every night, and…their music was pretty hot, some of it was very hot-- the hot jazz of the twenties.”

James Jeter came to St. Louis as the co-founder and co-leader of the Jeter-Pillars Orchestra, one of St. Louis’ most popular jazz and dance bands during the thirties and early forties.   “They started playing at the segregated Club Plantation in ’34,” first at a location on Vandeventer, then in a building at Grand and Delmar that, as Jim says, “is still there—it’s catty-corner from Powell Hall.  The band came to St. Louis for a six-month engagement, and they ended up staying here for 10 years.”

The gig was arduous: The band played three sets a night, seven nights a week, and was broadcast regularly over St. Louis radio.  Then, after ending its long run at the Plantation in 1944, the band played off and on at St. Louis’ Club Riviera and toured cities such as Detroit, Washington D.C., and New York, playing twice at the Apollo.  In 1945 the band also went on a USO tour of the Far East that included stops in Japan, the Philippines, and Guam. In 1947, the year after Jim was born, the orchestra broke up, and the Club Plantation closed.

Jim’s father continued to play local gigs with band members—dances and such—following the USO tour. After he had dental surgery in 1955, he stopped playing altogether.  By then, he was seven years into a day job selling beer for Anheuser-Busch.

The family messages Jim heard were multiple: Love jazz, play jazz, but don’t try to live on it. “My father really wasn’t in favor of me spending a lot of time with music.  He kind of permitted it, but he didn’t encourage it.”

Jim says his father wanted to protect him from pursuing the life of the working musician. “He said he didn’t want me to do it because it was not a good life.  He had a very negative experience at the Club Plantation because, first of all, it was a very segregated club and they were very racist.”

Jim recalls finding “some artifacts online from the Club Plantation a few years ago.  They had blacks depicted in a very stereotypical, ‘stupid coon’ kind of thing, like a menu and a stand with a caricature of a black woman with chains on her knees to keep her legs together, ‘Come on, let’s party’.  It was just very demeaning.  I mean, that was not him at all.  He was a very dignified man.”

To make matters worse, Jim’s father had run-ins with the mobsters who ran the club.  Jim remembers a scary incident: His father’s band “played from the fall to the spring, but when it got real hot in St. Louis in the summer, they didn’t have air conditioning in the building, so they shut down for the summer, and then they would tour. 

“One year—and I’m not sure which year it was—they went to New York and played with the Jimmy Lunceford band, which was a pretty famous band.  You know, at the Savoy [in New York], they had two bandstands so they could have continuous music, and they were like the second band, and my father said they used to trade arrangements, but there was an opportunity for them to go on…I think Lunceford, whom my dad was friends with, had a tour set up which was the same kind of deal in the New York area on the East Coast that was going to run into the fall.”

When Jim’s father called the Plantation owner and told him, “‘We’re not going to come back, we’re going to go with the tour,’ the guy said, ‘If you do, you’ll be dead in a month’ and threatened him, so they finally came back.  I mean, apparently somebody visited them and threatened them.”

Beyond the racism and the threats, Jim remembers the instability of his father’s career as a musician.  “He never had a home until he was 52 or 53 years old.  I mean, all that time from when he was in his early twenties until then, he either lived out of hotels or a rooming house or something like that.   And when he married my mother in 1940, and they…I mean, they were renters when I was born, and I think it was ‘52 or ’53 that they finally bought a house.”

“When he got the house,“ Jim recalls, “he was into the Father Knows Best kind of thing.  I mean, he put on a suit and a tie, went to work everyday, and came home and went outside and raked leaves.” (“And then my mother worked for the City of St. Louis in the treasurer’s office downtown, so she went to work everyday.”)

So as Jim was taking in the jazz his mother loved listening to--and the idea of making a place in your life for jazz--the messages he heard about pursuing a life in music like his father’s were very different. They grew out of both “the racism and the uncertainty” of that life.  In a word, “he said he didn’t want me to do it because it was not a good life--that was his best advice out of love and what he knew—that making a living as a jazz musician is a very precarious undertaking.”

From 1947 on, as his band’s days were waning, Jim’s father held his day job at Anheuser-Busch, showing Jim a life that blended music with stability. “I probably aspired to be like my dad in a lot of ways.  And the thing that I saw him do on a daily basis growing up was be a salesman, and so I went into sales.”

Jim recalls that his father had “wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor. I didn’t spend long in school before he gave that dream up.  I think his main thing was he wanted me to go to college and get a degree, which I did, and then I went into sales right out of college—first with IBM and then a couple of other companies, and then I ended up with almost 18 years with Hewlett-Packard.  So…that’s where I retired from.”

In his own life, Jim has found a middle way with music that seemed to please his father:  Say no to the jazz life, yes to jazz in your life.  It seems clear that Jim’s father, like his mother, wanted Jim to connect to the music and receive the legacy.

One early example: Jim’s father also played clarinet, and “I remember one of my first toys:  He gave me a LeBlanc clarinet, and it had cracked because it had come from overseas.”

Then, in seventh grade, a teacher at Jim’s school wanted to start an orchestra.  “His focus was really on string music, and his daughter was a good violinist, so he started off assigning instruments to kids if they were interested in playing.” Jim was interested, and he wasn’t playing anything in 7th grade, so the teacher suggested, “Why don’t you play the bass violin?’”

When Jim came to his father with a sheet of paper on which to sign up to rent a bass and begin playing, his father said,  “Two things you don’t want to play:  You don’t want to play drums, you don’t want to play a bass because, one, they’re cumbersome to move around and then, two, you’ll break it. If you want to play an instrument, I’ve got this old baritone sax that you can play.’ So I started on the baritone sax”—on his father’s baritone, the one he’d owned since the early 1930s and had played in the Jeter-Pillars sax section years before. “It’s a connection,” as Jim says,  “the fact that I’m playing his horn”—and still playing it, still living that vital connection to a musical legacy. 

As if emblematic of the future passing of the instrument and the music it represented, Jim remembers hearing his father play his bari “when I was a small child. We moved into the house when I was seven years old, but I can remember.  They had a duplex on Fountain Place, right on the corner of Fountain and Euclid, and I can remember him sitting, working on the horn, and sitting on the side of the bed playing it.  He had a very rich tone.  I think he had a pretty wide vibrato. I just remember it was beautiful.  I just liked it.”

Jim remembers two later, very special legacy experiences with his father that amounted to passing on the horn in another form, after Jim had started playing his father’s bari—two moments when listening to jazz, loving jazz, playing jazz, and bonding in respect with his jazzy father really came together.

The Basie band was in St. Louis.  “Sometimes they would be here a couple of nights, and it was like my father would disappear for a couple of days.  He did drink a little bit, and so when I got to be a teenager, my mother would encourage me to ask him to take me.”

This particular time, “Anheuser-Busch sponsored some kind of jazz festival at Kiel Auditorium, and I went.”  With his father at his side, “I met Gerry Mulligan, and I said, ‘What kind of horn do you play?’  He says, ‘It’s a Conn.’ I said, ‘Well, I play a Conn, too.’”   Then his father “introduced me to Marshal Royal [Basie’s lead alto] and Mr. Basie.   And then they would have all these acts--I met Dizzy Gillespie—they’d have all these acts playing, and they’d have a buffet and bar set up backstage, and these great players spoke to my father as a peer.  I forget who it was--it could have been Eddie ‘Lockjaw’ Davis or someone like that--and he says, ‘Your father was a really good sax man’ or something like that.  I appreciated that and was really proud.  So, despite his wishes, that’s kind of how the bug got set for me.”

Then Jim recalls the time he and his father “were at a wedding reception…. He belonged to this men’s club called the Royal Vagabonds, and they have a big mansion right on the corner of Boyle and Westminster.  They bought it years ago when they were almost giving those houses away, and they kept it.  We were at my cousin’s wedding reception there, and they had a little jazz ensemble with [saxophonist] O’Hare Spearman.  I knew who Mr. Spearman was because he was the band director at one of the black high schools in St. Louis.  And my father says, ‘If you get a chance’—we could hear him playing in the background—‘go over and listen to this guy.  This guy’s really good.’  And he would do little things like that, and I went and heard Mr. Spearman play, and he was very good.  He grew up across the street from ‘Cannonball’ Adderley.” 

So while Jim’s father “didn’t encourage me in terms of playing, I can’t say he wasn’t supportive, because he gave me the horn.  He didn’t prevent me from doing it, but he said he didn’t want me to do it because it was not a good life.”

Jim plays his father’s horn today, describing himself as “a jazz appreciator aspiring to learn to play jazz better.”  He keeps the legacy alive by listening to jazz, studying it, and playing it.

After he began saxophone in seventh grade, Jim “played through high school, and then in college in what they called the stage band, which was like a big band, and then I played in the concert band in college, and then I played in the marching band for a couple of years, too. Then after college, I pretty much stopped playing.” 

In the “30-plus years that I didn’t play saxophone,” Jim became (and remains) a serious jazz listener. “I amassed a moderately large record collection, and then starting I guess in 1980, I began collecting CDs, so I have like about 2,000 LPs and about 1,500 CDs.  And then it’s gone beyond that with being able to buy music online, because before, if you liked a song off of an LP, you’d buy the whole LP and maybe just listen to that one song.  And now you can go on Amazon or iTunes and pull out the one song that you…or the one recording that you were really interested in.  So I have about 10,000 MP-3 files on my computer.”

Jim’s listening is eclectic, and, he says, “it almost changes on a weekly basis.”   Recently he’s listened seriously to two bari players, one younger—Rik van den Bergh—and one older, Ronnie Cuber.  And he has a six-CD changer in his car, and, Jim says, “the first CD I never change.  It’s got Charles Lloyd, Gerry Mulligan, and then a couple of really good Miles recordings—“Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Stella by Starlight”—and I’ve listened to those thousands of times.  But then the other five slots, I move stuff in and out of those.”

Jim came back to playing his father’s horn about seven years ago as a result of a series of serendipities that actualized his long-time intention to return to playing. Truly one never knows, do one.

He’d stored his dad’s horn in its case under his and his wife’s bed, where it got in the way of cleaning the inevitable under-bed dust.  One day, Jim says, “I came home and the case was sitting in my office,” and his wife told him, “Well, I brought it out because I need to be able to dust under there.”

Dust led to dog as Jim’s Labrador retriever got involved with the bari’s old wooden and leather case: “She was attracted to the leather, and so we began to see strips of leather off the case and pieces of leather all over the house, so finally the case was coming apart, and I went on line and said, ‘Well, I’m going to buy a case for this horn.’”

That led Jim to Saxquest in South St. Louis, where owner Mark Overton told Jim his father’s bari was “a fairly rare horn,” and Jim decided to have it “put in playing condition again. ‘It’s a good horn,’ Mark declared after the work had been done, ‘and it really plays well.’”  Jim “brought it home, and I tried to play it, and I didn’t play so well, so I said, ‘I’m going to take lessons,’ and I started.” Those lessons, Jim says, were “almost like re-setting a bone, a process of breaking bad habits and then learning to do it properly.” Jim continues to take lessons today, working on his reading, his technique, and his improvising--a student of the music, as Adaron Jackson put it.

He plays his bari regularly in several local groups, including the OASIS Jazz Ensemble and a saxophone quartet.  He used to play in a big band that rehearsed on Wednesday nights, and Jim usually didn’t get home till 10:00 or 10:30. “And I’m walking in here with this horn, and I say, ‘Well, this is what my dad used to do,’ because I can remember him coming home with the horn or leaving with the horn, and those types of things, so it’s like, I mean, he’s my musical hero.  I think he’d be proud of me.”

Jim’s son, Mark, lives in L.A and plays guitar.  “He played saxophone for a while,” Jim recalls.  “I rented him a saxophone, and he took lessons for about a year, and then he went away to college, and he never kept up with it.” Still, Jim says, “he’s aware of the legacy--my father’s legacy that he was a musician.” Who knows what might happen next?

One auspicious answer:  Recently Mark became a father—and Jim a grandfather—for the first time.  “I reflected on the fact,” Jim says, “that I’m the same age now that my father was when my son was born.”  Jim looks forward to continuing and sweetening the musical lineage.    He sent his new grandson, Noah, a Mozart for Babies CD but says, “It will be a couple of years before I start playing Giant Steps for him.”