Oral History Program Skip Musgrave Interviewed by Adam Rosenberg 12 February 2009 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Skip Musgrave Interviewed by Adam Rosenberg 12 February 2009 Copyright © 2014 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Musgrave, Skip, an oral history by Adam Rosenberg, 12 February 2009, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Skip Musgrave. The interview was conducted on February 12, 2009, by Adam Rosenberg. Mr. Musgrave describes the details of his musical career with the Junction City Big Band as well as his personal musical history. AR: This is Skip Musgrave. SM: Yep, yep. AR: And could you just spell your last name? SM: It's Skip Musgraves. M-U-S-G-R-A-V-E-S. AR: Yes, I spelt it right. Cool. And it is, get the date ... 2/12. SM: Two twelve. AR: Alright, okay, cool. Well let’s go then, alright, and make it official. So I guess how'd the Junction City Big Band start? SM: Um after we all graduated, well me and Ray, Ray Barios and Rod Rippon, and a couple of other guys who are no longer in the band and we graduated in 1980. A couple of years after that we sort of determined that we missed playing big band music because none of us were playing too much of that anymore. We were all playing other stuff, but not big band. And we kind of missed Earl. And uh, so we started getting together in the band room to play, you know just a rehearsal band type of thing, do that once a month or so. And somebody, I think it was Ray had the bright idea, "Why don't we just move this over to the ballroom over at the Union Building and we will just play for humans 1 instead of playing for ourselves". That sounded like a pretty good idea and so we did that, and that was probably about '81, 1981, something like that, '81 or '82. At some point after that we only had ... at that time big band wasn't very popular, but we decided that it was okay to do that. We were going to do it anyway and we might as well play for humans. At some point after that I believe the college decided to start charging us to use the hall. We weren't real crazy about that so we decided, well, we're going to have charge something for people to come in the door. So I think Ray Barrios, who's an attorney, he worked it out with the college such that they would take a percentage of the door sufficient to pay the person that was taking the tickets and renting the hall and stuff. So we just started doing that. At some point, I don't know, probably in the '90s sometime big bands kind of took off, and instead of having retired professors coming to listen to us, you know we had kids, and some kids from BYU would come up every time, the dance team down there. Which was pretty cool, you know, watching almost professional style dancers doing the jitterbug and the Lindy Hop, that was pretty neat, you know. Because we played this music for so long we didn't really have to look at it; we could watch the dancers sometimes. Some of those girls spent more time in the air than they did on the ground. They were flying all over the place and it was pretty cool. Then to have a kid come up to Earl; it was Earl that was in the front row. He was the saxophone guy, and obviously the leader because he was speaking to everybody. You know having a young person dressed rather shabbily maybe with chains hanging out of their ear coming up and asking for obscure Dorsey tunes, you know, that's pretty weird you know. And Earl, if we had the tune, he would ... usually when you get a request as a musician you want to accommodate that. He would eventually accommodate it if we had 2 the tune in there. He wouldn't instantly accommodate it. Usually when you're playing in a band and somebody comes up to you and asks you if you can play a tune ... if you can play it you usually do it the next tune, at least try to take care of your audience. That wasn't Earl's way. Earl was an outstanding basketball player. He's an 85-year-old guy and he's pretty big dude. You can imagine. You know people have gotten bigger over the years. He was a monster back in his era when he was going to college. When I showed up, in spite of the fact that I have little or no hair now, coming from southern California I had hair halfway down my back. And I did everything ... I lived with guys on the golf team and played tennis and did all this stuff, and he came up to me once and he told me, "I could beat you in anything", and I believed him. And I think he could probably beat me in about anything too. He doesn't get around ... you know he's pretty keggy ... pretty keggy old guy. He's way tough too. He's quite a fellow. I wouldn't mess with him. Even at 85, no I wouldn't mess with him at all. AR: No way. SM: So that's kind of how it started. It was going pretty good until they remodeled the Union Building; and then it was closed for like two years so we sort of lost our audience. We have some ideas on how we might be able to get it back, but it requires money that there is scarce little of right now. But uh, we've got some ideas, Ray and I do. We'll keep it going. When Earl retires I don't know exactly what we're going to do at that point, but we'll do something. AR: So were you and Ray kind of the first guys in the Junction City Big Band? SM: No there was a whole bunch of guys that were students and graduated in 1980. The fellow that plays bass, Dutch Van Leeuwen, and it's his name ... he's been around 3 forever, and I played side gigs with him for a long time. He's in his eighties also. Uh Clayton, I had run into Clayton off and on all through the years and uh, I've gotten a lot closer to him in the last probably ten years because of his affiliation with Joe. I've known Joe McQueen for close to thirty years now. We got him ... part of the little cadre of musicians that got him playing again, and he's kind of legendary you know in the jazz circles. He's one of the few people that is remaining probably in the whole world that played with all of the jazz masters. If you went down the list of all the great jazz musicians from Count Basie to ... just go down, Duke Ellington ... go down the list, he's played with all of them because of Ogden being a jazz Mecca back in the forties and fifties. When Joe told us these stories, we didn't realize that they were the truth. You know, Ogden was a bigger deal than Salt Lake City at the time because of its position on the railway. Um guys would get off... musicians that were on their way from San Francisco to Chicago would stop in Ogden, get off the train, wander downtown to Porters and Waiters where Joe was playing, and it wouldn't be unusual to see Charlie Barker, the Bird, Count Basie, all those guys just walking into the club and walking in on their gig. So Joe knows everybody and still plays at 89, plays just a bad, bad tenor sax. AR: Oh... SM: I know. I got close to Clayton because of Clayton's affiliation with Joe, so that is how I know him. Or I got reacquainted with him I think. But we got him playing again. Joe thirty years ago when he first showed up, he spent a lot of time doing other stuff. He's been in Utah since a year after Pearl Harbor. AR: Wow. 4 SM: He's been here a long time and uh, and we got him playing again. And it's great to have him doing what he's doing. He's got a day named after him in the state of Utah, April 18th I think it is. And uh ... he's a heck of a fellow and he's still sharp as a tack. AR: Geez. So are there ... do you know if there are any of those places that all the old jazz guys used to come in. SM: Uh Porters and Waiters is not there. They pretty much rebuilt 25th Street, and to tell you the truth, I don't know exactly where on 25th Street Porters and Waiters was. When all of those little bars that are there ... One of them is called Brewskies. That was something else back in the day. It wasn't Brewskies; it was something else. But all those places usually had live music, but Porters and Waiters, that was the place to go. And his good friend who passed away, who died in December. Joe was on the way back from Wendover with Annabel. Annabel Weakley was her name and he got in an auto accident and she didn't have her seatbelt on and she was killed. She was as legendary as he was because she ran Porters and Waiters and is the one that was responsible for bringing a lot of the great jazz players into town; and they had been close, close friends for many years. AR: Wow. SM: I know. That was tough. Joe was in the car too, but Joe had his seatbelt on. The van rolled like six times. Joe had a bruised shoulder and that was it. 89-year-old guy. If I would have been in that car, with my seatbelt on, I'd still be in the hospital. Great big old dude like that, he just walked away. Anyway. AR: Geez, wow, wow. That's impressive. So what... I guess ... what instrument do you play? 5 SM: I'm a trumpet player. Started playing trumpet when I was nine years old. I'm now fifty so do the math. A long time. I started playing in Southern California. The guy that actually taught me how to play was actually a clarinet player. The clarinet which I sort of despise, but he ... we had a little group called Eddie Allen's Serenaders and it was a big band. We were all this high with little red vests and pussycat bow ties, and we played on a show that you don't know what it is because you're too young. It's called Truth or Consequences. We played on that and the Red Skelton Show which were like variety shows back then. We did some movie work. He was always ... he had connections to Columbia Studios and so they were always dragging us little kids, little guys to play down there, to play in the Salvation Army band or whatever. So we made some money doing that. When I graduated high school in Thousand Oaks, I loved Utah and I had roots in Utah. My grandmother was from Salina and I'd never been up here before, but came up here and loved it and didn't want to go back down there so I just stayed. I graduated in 1980 and got a job and bought this place in 1985. They'll eventually plant me right outside. My daughter will. My daughter lives downstairs. She drove down to Las Vegas today with her boyfriend. So it's kind of clean today. Pretty nice looking, huh? AR: It is, yeah. Wow. SM: It's all shined up. AR: Wow I need to get the same maid as you have. SM: Eighty bucks every two weeks. That's what it costs. AR: So there you go. So uh, so then have you just played big band music? 6 SM: No I play all sorts of music. I play in a band called The Sensations, which was formerly called Armed and Dangerous before 9-11 and then we had to change the name after that. We uh, that's a soul, rhythm and blues show band. We play primarily up in Jackson Hole in the summer time. We spend a lot of time in Jackson. We play shows around here, weddings in Park City and stuff. I also play in a band called Heart and Soul which is a seven-piece, kind of a Chicago-Earth Wind and Fire type of thing. We play with Joe, you know casual jazz up there. I will play for anybody, I don't care. Whoever's paying. And these days nobody's paying, you know. That's the problem. AR: Right. SM: You know what's happening in the music community is an unprecedented economic disaster here. Everybody is shortening up their groups. The nine-piece groups are now six pieces. You know. The five-piece groups are now three pieces. They're trying to find some sort of a combination where they can still make decent music and get pain because nobody can afford the size of a situation that they could afford before you know. A lot of the work is three and four pieces now. Joe and I and Clayton play, we play down at the Wine Cellar in Ogden and that is usually a three piece. You know just sitting in keeping my chops up is basically all we're doing. It's pretty nasty right now, but it'll get better. AR: Yeah exactly. Yes. That is a good attitude. SM: Attitude is everything. I'm a chief financial officer for a manufacturing company in Salt Lake and we're hurting like everybody else is, but you've got to believe you know. Stop watching the news and stop reading the paper. Because uh for the same reason that people go to car races ... they go to car races to see wrecks and deaths ... people watch 7 the news to see the bad news. Bad news is news. Good news is not such good news. So payin' attention to the fox there. AR: That is true, that is true. So I guess uh ... What do you think the difference between just jazz music and is and like big band. SM: Big band is very structured. You've got sixteen eighteen pieces and everybody pretty much needs to know what's going on. You know you've got a chart in front of you. You've got... you know you kick it off on the upper left and you play it to the upper right. Everybody knows what they're doing. There might be some space within that chart for jazz, solos and stuff, which is spontaneous musical composition, you know just playing stuff within the chord framework, but you know by and large everybody knows what's going on. If you're playing a five-piece jazz thing, you know, we do this all the time. Well you're playing with guys that you've never met before, but you all know Satin Doll, Duke Ellington's tune, and you decide what key you're playing in and off you go. Everybody's... and they know the melody which is usually played ahead, which is called the Head, that's the melody and then, you know, the rhythm section goes back and plays that same form again while somebody else plays whatever fits in there, you know. And that that's the difference between what you would call pure jazz and big-band jazz. Big-band jazz is structured. Everybody knows what's going on. There's usually, you know, sections playing music together in harmony and they're playing exactly what they're seeing and they're not making up anything. AR: Oh, so in big band, like the measure, the sixteen measure solo would be... SM: Yeah, that would be right in the, in the context of that it would say ... okay when you get to the letter C it says 'trumpet' and all that is written is chords and that means that the 8 trumpet player whoever has that particular part is gonna just play whatever he wants to for sixteen bars and then they're back into the form again and you're playing lines with counter melodies with the sax section and the trombone section and whatever. It's a lot of fun, but it is way structured. Some jazz musicians can't stand it. You know, some people just... you know Miles Davis would ... I imagine that he played a little bit of big band at some point, but Miles was all about going off and doing his own thing. He wanted to spontaneously improvise all the time. That was his thing. So I can't imagine that he did a whole lot of that. I might be wrong, but I don't think. There's a bust of him right behind your head there. My daughter did that. I came home one night from a gig and you can't imagine ... it's two in the morning and you show up and that thing's sitting on my kitchen counter out here. I about evacuated my bowels. There's a shrunken head there ... so I looked at it... and I said, "Gosh he head looks like Miles Davis." Miles is returned with only his head in my kitchen. AR: So that is The Bird cool right, on that wall? SM: That's the guy. AR: Yep there it is. Wow that's cool. So how do you feel then about vocals? Do you feel that vocals have a place in jazz and big band? SM: Of course. Oh gosh. You've got to talk to Ruth. AR: Yeah that's what I've heard. SM: Yeah me and the trumpet section, we're all about Ruth. Ruth is the bomb man. She uh... I mean um, vocally, vocals are either a flashy gal or a flashy guy have always been in front of a big band. Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, and all those. And uh, when Ruth 9 joined our band ... well Dave Stephensen, the trombone player, who you also ought to talk to too... AR: Okay. SM: Dave kept telling me. He's an attorney. He moved here too. He went to school at BYU in a little bit younger than Ray and I, but he played lead trombone in Synthesis. They're a big band down there. AR: Oh wow. SM: Great player. Great musician. And he kept telling me ... his wife was back in Kentucky or Tennessee or something. That's where they lived. She was back there trying to get their house sold. And he kept telling me, he says, "You gotta hear my wife sing. She's got the serious chops in the family". You mean more serious than yours? And I can't even believe it but she is spectacular and she has taken our band up a level that I never even thought was possible just from energy. And she's sweet and nice and very good looking and wears the right clothes, you know the sequin dress which was the typical female look you know of the big band era. She brings it. She's got a great set of charts that we read for her and she sings The Lady is a Tramp which is fairly ... that's a great old big-band tune but usually men sing that, but she just nails it. She is absolutely terrific. As matter of fact, Earl's gotten mad at us over the fact that we ... whenever we want her to sing a tune all four of us in the trumpet section start going Ruth, Ruth, Ruth... and he doesn't think that's very professional and it probably isn't. But I don't make enough money in that band to even worry about stuff like that. That's not why we do it. We're not doing it to make money per se, we're just doing it because we love to play big band. Anybody that's playing big band, unless you're playing with ... for 10 instance Salt Lake City jazz orchestra. They have terrific players, good guys, and they make pretty good money when they do that, generally speaking. But if you're playing in kind of a community type big band like the Junction City band, you just love big band. You're not trying to make any money at all. I mean some of those jobs that we've done at Weber State where nobody showed up, there was a Jazz game on or something and nobody showed, we didn't make anything. And that's okay. I have no problem. Just to be able to play a little big band every now and then kind of keeps my hand in it because I've been doing it for forty years now. And I'm sure you'll get the same comment from all these guys that you're talking to. AR: Yep, they all agree. That's all that they say. So does Ruth ... She doesn't sing every song then? SM: Nope, she's got six or seven tunes I would think. Yeah she has six or seven tunes that she usually does at night, but you know she's got quite a few things in the book that she could do. Dave sings a couple of songs also. You know Dave is a trombone player, a very fine trombone player, but he can also ... I've had him down at the Wine Cellar with Joe and he can also play the piano. He's a great vocalist too. Very good presence and he knows what he's doing. But uh ... yeah vocal has a big time place in big band music and it always has. AR: Yeah and have you always had someone singing? SM: No... We have always... well over the last maybe ten years... There's a lady by the name of Jane Felstead who Earl may have mentioned. She has a group of singers out of Davis High School called the Moonlight Singers and they are high school kids and they roll through there. Some of the groups are better than others, but her last group... 11 they seem to get better and better every year and um they sing... It's usually probably eight or ten pieces that they bring, probably eight or ten vocalists and they all sing with their little wireless mics and they sing different tunes out of the era and they do very well. AR: Oh wow, that's cool. That's very cool. So now like you said... you mentioned in the nineties there was a resurgence of big band and jazz music, do you think that's still going on? SM: No. It abated a little bit. I mean it was the hot thing to do. You know Big Bad Voodoo Daddy kind of helped a little bit, you know bringing it on a little big and there have been some other groups that have been similar, but it seems to have abated a bit. I think the music world was starving for something and that just happened to come in and fill the void. And now the modern era of music seems to be coming back a little bit. You know you watch the Grammies and you see what's going on there, there are some people that know what they're doing, you know. Richard Keyes and there's Beyonce uh ... there's some stuff happening that's cool that kids can connect with. And not only that but some of the great rock and roll that's out there now. That's resurged too. It's a lot better now than it was for a while. You know you've got U-2 trying to make ... they are great musicians but also trying to make a little bit of a statement. So then people are connecting to that a little bit. AR: Right. SM: It seems like just in the nineties that he big band came on just because there was just nothing else out there. It was sort of a ... the music was kind of at an ebb and so when it ebbs maybe it just went back to some old school type of stuff. That is kind of what I 12 thought watching it. I really wasn't paying all that close of attention, to tell you the truth, but that's kind of what I think happened. You know... AR: Yeah, yeah, that's cool. So is there still like um... like your audience now, who does it consist of? I mean is it a wide range of age. SM: You know it's going to be... you've gotta be at least forty, you know, and if you're sixty you're hooking right in. You know, you remember this stuff. My mom and dad are in their seventies and eighties and they hook right in too. They hear it, they remember it, you know and it reminds them of the stuff that they heard when they were kids. Because unlike other big bands, the Junction City Big Band is still playing the older music. There are wonderful new arrangements of big band music that is coming out all the time that are killer. You know they're up tempo stuff that's somebody just wrote that killer. It's really good stuff. But Earl... his view of what the Junction City Big Band is about is old school. You know, this is the Tommy Dorsey, the Jimmy Dorsey, Glen Miller, Benny Goodman. All of the stuff out of the primarily forties and fifties. That's what Junction City Big Band does, with a smattering of stuff up to ... now that we have Ruth we can do the Sinatra era type big band music, which is a lot more fun to be quite honest. But I might be a little jaundiced because I've been playing the forties and fifties stuff since I was nine. I might be getting a little tired of it, you know. I've played "In the Mood" and "Little Brown Jug" and those tunes I can't even tell you how many times. Literally thousands of times from when I was nine years old and you hit the point where you're going, "I think I'm done with this". Especially now that we see, that Dave brought all these arrangements, Dave Stephensen brought all these arrangements to us and we're kind 13 of trippin' on the next era after the forties and fifties. We're kind of tripping on that and I want to do more of that. We will do more of that someday. AR: Oh good. SM: But you know Earl's on the team. He loves her too. He understands how special she is in terms of what she brings to the plate, so we're preaching to the choir with him, you know. He likes it too. AR: So do you think that if you guys do that... the stuff that's been written after the forties and fifties will appeal to the younger generation? SM: No. I don't think so. There's too much ... there's too many talented people out there that have the wherewithal to put together great stuff and it's right there on your tube man, and it's right there on your iPod and it's right there on the CD that you scalped from your buddy that you pirated off onto your iPod. It's right there. There's no reason to consider a horn-driven type of thing like that. Horns in the modern music are just the spice. It's just a little dust that you sprinkle on top of something, whereas, you know, in the big band era it was all about the horns. It was all about those musicians that did the thing. So, no it's not going back there. There's too much too good stuff on there. I hope it doesn't. Even though I'm a big band guy, you know, I want to watch what I want to watch. There are several good big bands that are out there. Salt Lake City Jazz Orchestra is one of the finest jazz orchestras in the whole country. They're sponsored by Jazz Lights of the Mountain West which is an organization that I'm an officer and board member of and we're all about them. Man we love those guys. And everybody that comes to town that sings with those guys, like at the Jazz Festival in July; they all 14 say the same thing, no matter who they are. They say this is one of the finest bands that we've been playing in front of and it's right here in Salt Lake City. And that's way cool. AR: That is really cool. SM: But in terms of it being popular to anything other than the niche that it's already popular with, no way. It'll never happen. AR: So do you feel that the insurgence of like Rock and Roll or Rockabilly... do you think that kind of contributed to big bands popularity...? SM: Big bands went kind of down the tubes because of their expense. I mean if you have great players, great jazz musicians. It's kind of like the question you asked a few minutes ago. Combo jazz versus big band. Okay you've got, for instance, if you have one of the greatest tenor saxophone soloist that anybody's ever heard sitting in the section, he's only going to get this much space every now and then. Why should he put up with that when he can go play with a five piece and blow all night and say what he has to say. You've got sixteen mouths to feed with a big band and they've got to make something. You know, they're not all like me and these guys that don't care about money. I've got a day gig that pays me good. You know I don't need to worry about making money with music per se unless I'm driving five and a half hours to Jackson Hole. Then they're gonna pay me. You know because that's back and forth eleven hours out of my life; I'm gonna get paid for that. Yeah big bands are ... they're expensive because you have so many people to pay for. I mean if you're going to do a private function. We do these public dances at Weber State, but if we're going to do a private function ... If we're going to play your wedding, somebody's going to pay us and they're going to pay us a couple of hundred bucks a person and that's $3200 right off the rack. 15 Who wants to pay that? Unless you're filthy rich, you're not going to pay that. You know, I mean things are changing. The economics of the whole situation right now. We're doing some gigs with Sensations up on Jackson Hole this summer. We do seven or eight of them, but they're for the elite rich, that most of which have never even been to Jackson Hole. You know the bride sees Jackson Hole in the wedding magazine and says, "Daddy I want to go there and get married" and he says, "Okay princess, we'll load the Gulf Stream" and they fly to Jackson Hole. Most of them are from Detroit and Chicago and from Texas and wherever and they've never even been there. They're just the other party and they have piles of money and that's kind of the way that's driven. But anybody less than the very elite rich that's looking for a band to play for their wedding is going to find something that's not going to cost them a lot, or they're going to go to a DJ. There's a lot of really high-end weddings that are all DJ driven now, because being a DJ is such a big thing, you know, and the kind of music that you lay out in that regard, you know, so. Yeah live music has a problem, a financial problem in terms of being able to get out there and do the thing. So it's a real problem. AR: Yeah, that is true, that is true. Yeah. So the Junction City Big Band; how many times a year do you guys play? Or does it change over the years? SM: It kind of changes. I mean we played... uh... When we do five or six public dances, the public dances up at Weber State, there has been... uh. Well usually this time of year, Earl because of his affiliation with the Mormon Church... He's a goombah with them up in Mountain Green... We usually play the Morgan Stake that's down there. You know we've done as many as two or three of those right around this time, right around Valentine's Day. We didn't do one of those this year. I think we did three of them last 16 year. And there are usually three or four other functions that we'll do. I think it's an Episcopal church that does a big party up in Ogden at the Eccles center. There are probably, in addition to the six on average, there's probably another six or so deals that we may do on a good year. This year there were probably about four, just because nobody has any money. We did the Utah Educator's Association. It's an affiliation of all of the boards of school districts in Utah. They did their convention at Little America and we did that a couple of weeks ago. Those types of functions we usually do a few of. But yeah it's, it's... it's not anything that you do a whole lot. And that's part of it, but I'm fine with it because I've got other stuff going on, you know. Some of the other guys that are in that band that's the only gig that they do and so they really look forward to it. I look forward to it just because it's big band but I don't have to worry about not playing my horn because I get to do that a lot. AR: Ah, that's cool. SM: Yeah, I'm really lucky. I've been around a long time so people know what I do and so I get calls to do stuff and that's alright. So like Rodney, Rod Rippon. He graduated the same year I did. He does a lot of orchestral stuff and what not. AR: Oh really. SM: Yeah he's a very, very good orchestral trumpet player. That's his thing, so he gets a lot of those deals and he plays in the Ogden Wind Symphony and stuff and they travel a lot all over the world. I think he's gone to Europe a couple of times and they're really fine. Everybody's got their own little thing. That's probably enough playing for him, doing all that stuff, which he's really good at. Ray Barrios, the other trumpet player, he plays in a couple of rock-type groups around. So he gets his jollies that way. And I've got 17 Sensations and Heart and Soul and whatever casuals I can pick up with McQueen. So they're all good. They're all good day gigs, so. AR: Yeah exactly. And you get to play music _____. SM: People that play music. I run into people all the time ... it just makes me sick sometimes because ... Some guy would come up and say, "I played coronet in high school". Well why'd you stop, you know. Or a kid would come up and say, "Yeah I played piano; my mom made me play piano and I actually started to like it". Then they just stop and every damn one of them will hit themselves when they get to be about fifty or so. I mean it's the only thing that... there's something about playing a horn especially... I was in a really lousy mood last night and I drove up to Ogden to the Union Station and did that. When you play a horn, that sound in your head... you know you've got this floating thing in your brain that's kind of floating in that liquid in there and... when you play a horn and the sound kind of bounces off in the inside of your cranium and it kind of pushes all your buttons and stuff and it comes out of there. And it's kind of like you're stoned or something, you know. I got back to the car and you know, I walked in there all crinkled up and (bang) and I walked out to my car and I was whistling and happy guy. Something about playing a horn. AR: It's your drug right? SM: Exactly, you know, it just... it fixes me. Come home from work and had a lousy day. Boss has been not such a good guy, you know. Pull out my horn and throw the dogs outside because they don't like it. Just blow my brains out. I had all sorts of... one of the teaching eggs that you use to teach a kid how to play jazz is to use these... they used to call them music minus one. There would be a combo with everything except for the 18 melody on it. So you put it on the stereo, crank that up, and you play... and you're playing with the greatest band you ever heard of is right on your stereo. And I've got a whole bunch of those so I can play until my lips bleed and nobody has to be around and nobody knows and whatever. Whatever it takes. AR: Yeah, exactly. SM: Uh hmm. AR: Do you do any recording or do you just play live pretty much? SM: Um ... with Heart and Soul, the seven piece, you could check out the website if you like. AR: Oh really. SM: www.heartnsoul.com. There are some samples on there of recordings that we've done. There's probably some samples on the other website too which is www.sensations4soul.com. You know when you're promoting a band like that, like these two you, at some point you have to do some studio work to come up with a demo to send to people. So, you know, the example of the Little Princess in Detroit that's flying to Jackson Hole, mom and dad who are footing the fill need to hear the band at some point other than looking at maybe the website with all the stuff that's on the website. Yeah so we've done some demos over the years. Yeah, you can't help but to do that. AR: Wow that is cool. So what's your best memory from the Junction City Big Band, or is there a few of them? You can give as many as you want. SM: I was trying to think of one, of something that happened over the years that might have been fairly noteworthy. I might have to call you. I started thinking about it and then I stopped because something else happened, then. I'm sure there's something in there 19 that would be. I think just... When the band has been good, which especially lately with Ruth and Dave... when the band is good, it's better than I ever thought it could be. You know we do have some, you know some, not very many but a couple of you know kind of fill-in musicians. But you know it's uh... when that band cooks... its... We got the chairman of the Music Department of the University of Utah plays lead also, Bob Wazzell, and it is a very interesting that the chairman of the Music Department from the U comes to Weber State to play these things, and he does it out of respect for Earl more than anything, you know. But uh, he is a fine, fine musician. Poolson plays our lead tenor and he is a terrific musician. He's been around a long time. He is a great soloist. You know. We have some spectacular players in there. Don Keipp, holy crap, I mean that guy can just flat play the drums, you know. We have some really, really, really talented people in there. And when everybody's playing on the same page and the sounds okay and there's a decent enough crowd to get your heart rate up a little bit, I mean, there's nothing funner, you know. I said this many times to people. You know people would get up and you would get done playing or whatever, you know, and I look right at them say, "As much fun as you can have with your clothes on". I've said that and that's the truth. Probably not a lot of guys in the Junction City Big Band would put it that way, but they would all secretly agree with me. Even Ruth would agree with me. Hold up a minute, I've gotta do something with this dog. This is not my dog. This is my daughter's dog. I don't have a dog. Shut up. That is the worst dog in the world. Never get a blue-tick hound dog unless you're living in the mountains and you want to go hunt bear or something. The dog is dumber than a box of rocks. Alright. I can't come up with anything good for you that happens. You know, it's a pretty uh ... With Sensations and 20 Heart and Soul and some of the stuff that we've done there, you know, there's some fairly color things that happens in that group, but you know when you get a bunch of guys that are fifth, sixty, seventy, eighty, not a whole lot of goofy things happen. You know, those guys are pretty just down the line, show up, do the gig, we're done. One other trumpet player that I haven't mentioned, Cliff. He's a very busy guy, a financial dude. You know he's got two houses. A house in St. George and a house up here. A real busy ... just trying to keep his whole life together. He has a couple of different times showed up in Park City when we were playing in Ogden. He's calling, "Hey, I'm trying to find the band. Where are you guys?" "Hey, we're in Ogden." "Oh dude, I'm in Park City." "Well dude, I think you better just go on home because by the time you get here, we'll be done". That's happened a few times. Guys show up forgetting their horn. I've even done that a few times. But I have a... my grandmother was early to everything so I'm early to everything. Which is a good habit to have when you're in the music business because a lot of guys, like Rod Rippon, for instance, that guy will come screaming up at two minutes before the deal, fly his horn out of its case, sit down and you know he's ready to play; but he's making all of us crazy because he's never on time to anything. Never has been, you know. Never on time to anything in college. You know I have to be there an hour early just to kind of get the lay of the land. So it's pretty mellow what goes on. It's just show up and play. AR: So do you have different songs for different gigs at night? SM: Yeah. The book has five hundred tunes in it probably at least, and there's a section of like Christmas stuff which is lame. Christmas music is lame, who's kidding who. It's the lamest of the lame especially for a big band. Valentine's music is equally lame. All of the 21 period music that you would do for a holiday ... I don't think there is any Thanksgiving music and that's a good thing. I mean a big band ought to play big band music, not watered-down versions of carols or something. That never makes it and it's quite frankly rather sickening. With the other groups that I play in... You know, "We ought to do some Christmas stuff'. No, no, people don't come out to hear that, I don't care if it is Christmas. They don't, you know. You come out and do what you do. There are great charts in the book. I think Earl thinks that that shows that we have an extra ... like we're better because we can do that, but I don't think it does. I would never do that. You know, if I was writing out the tunes, I would play the best stuff that we have. He always ... we know exactly what we're going to play when we show up there because when you've got five hundred tunes we usually call it in groups of three or four, and there's like different sets, like set one, set two, and you go all the way to eight. And so you have a piece of paper that's sitting on your stand that says what tunes you have and usually most guys pull them one set at a time. So you pull out number five, number fourteen, number 533, and you lay them back to back to back, so you can play them real fast without a whole lot of wait between the two. Then you stop for a minute then everybody puts that away and pulls out another set and it goes from there. And he has for sure, some sort of method on how he does that, but I have no idea what it is. It doesn't really make any sense to me, but I'm sure it makes perfect sense to him. And it may make perfect sense to everybody. I just have a weird way of thinking about stuff. AR: So you don't really play the same song? SM: No, no, no. He likes to mix it up a great deal in terms of... like if we played the tune the last week. Well when you've got five hundred tunes you can do this pretty easily. 22 There's a couple of standbys that you have to do like "In the Mood" and some of those tunes. You've got to play those because you're a big band and that's what big bands do. But everything else could be a complete wild card. You know, he just pulls them out, some of which we've seen before. We have a standing joke in the trumpet section because I always say, "Yeah we've played this before", because they all think you know I must have drank too much in my day because I can't remember anything. It's always a big joke about recycling every tune because I can't remember. It makes it fresh and keeps me excited about the whole deal. AR: See and you're excited to play. SM: I'm excited to play. Never seen it before. AR: You get to get better at the site reading and you don't need to practice. SM: Oh everybody needs practice. I practice three times a week at least. Gotta, otherwise you... you know it's not like riding a bike. We were playing last Friday night at the Wine Cellar, and this fellow, older fellow that used to play with Joe McQueen on 25th Street back in the forties and fifties. They somehow or another, either Clayton or Joe got reacquainted with them and he told me right before... I guess he sat in with them one time like in the last month or so... and he told me right before we played the other night that he hadn't played since the seventies. He had recently acquired a bass and he was starting to do the deal. And he was not good and Joe was mad. He was mad. He was madder than h*** all night long. I mean when you've got a big old guy like Joe mad, it makes everybody uncomfortable. Clayton just basically held his hand through the whole gig because he didn't really know what he was doing. Time was bad. That's one of the misconceptions in jazz music, both in big band and in regular jazz, the time keeper is 23 the bass player. You know the drummer is there to spice that up. You're bass player keeps the time. And this guy couldn't keep the time. He couldn't hold it and it was all over the place and it was making everybody crazy. It was making us crazy. But I talked to Clayton the other day and he says, "I guess it ain't really like riding a bike". It's not like if you learn, you stop, and you had it together in the fifties or sixties or seventies, that you could stop and then suddenly, "Oh okay, here we go, you know, ride the bike". It doesn't work like that you know. So if I don't practice three times a week, the gig I have Saturday is going to be way painful. I'm going to wake up with blood on my pillow because my lips are bleeding or something, you know. You gotta keep it going on, you know. AR: Is a trumpet player kind of different because you have to keep your lips stretched and... SM: No, my lips are dead. Anybody's that played for as long as ... you know you play for thirty or forty years and this parts dead. And it's all about your belly. Bringing the air up from your... it's a lot like singing. You try to bring the air up from as low in your body as you possibly can. Bring it up from your diaphragm, so you push in air. It's all about velocity. This is just in the way. I mean ... but it needs to be all firm and everything. You can't be letting it all blow out like Dizzy. Dizzy had a way of doing that where he could. He had actually an affliction that allowed his cheeks to swell and his neck to flair out like a leaking' lizard or something, but most people have to keep it all firm and stuff up there. And the only way you keep firm is to do it. If you don't do it, you know, every now and then, then you have a problem. AR: Right. Well is there anything else you want to add? SM: Not a dang thing. I probably said too much. Don't get me in trouble now. 24 AR: I won't. Well thanks. SM: You ought to talk to old Dave. Dave's a lawyer. He's got an office I believe in Ogden someplace. AR: Oh really? SM: Yeah. You could blow the lid on him. He's not that bloody busy and he's rather talk about music than civil law anyway. If you can get his wife in there at the same time, you'd have the deal. Because they've only been with our band for like a year or so, but you know all of their experiences in the stuff. I mean, I give him h*** all the time about the fact that... how did a trombone player attorney hook her. It defies description because trumpet players and trombone players are always giving each other h***, you know, and gosh she is spectacular, you know. How did you, a trombone slash lawyer, which means that you're bottom feeding, and you got Ruth. I don't get it. He is a really, really terrific guy, self-appreciating and he's all of that. 25