CALLIOPE RECORDS: June 2012

CALLIOPE CAL 3017
SESSIONS, LIVE

FIREHOUSE FIVE PLUS 2 / BARBARA DANE - FIREHOUSE FIVE PLUS 2 / JEANNE GAYLE

Will Thornbury interviewed Ray Avery and Jimmie Baker when the project to produce a book of Ray’s photos of the “Stars of Jazz” series got underway in the early 1990s. Will was familiar with Ray’s wonderful photos of the jazz artists who had appeared on the program and had urged Ray to publish a collection of these photos in book form. Portions of those interviews will be featured as we move forward in our coverage of the Calliope Records releases of music from the “Stars of Jazz” programs.

Ray Avery Will Thornbury

WT (Will Thornbury): We left off at about 1952 about the time you start getting active in taking photographs. I guess that some of the burdens of the record shop have been lifted a bit and some of the financial burdens, and I was curious, during that time, I was wondering when you switch from the camera your father gave you to the camera you would use next and what's your memories are in terms of what you'd be using and what photographic techniques and stuff would be, you'd be acquiring from '52?

RA (Ray Avery): Well, the camera that my father gave me I believe it was lost or stolen when I was overseas and I was lucky in a drawing at the PX I was able to buy a little Kodak 35mm camera which was a pretty good camera for those days, so I used that all the rest of the time I that I was in China and India and then when I came home, oh, before I left, I had a chance to buy a Contax, a beautiful German camera when I was in Calcutta and good cameras were very scarce then because of the war so I able to buy that and I did use that for a while and it was almost an antique. When I came home I was able to sell it for quite a bit more than I'd paid for it and so I got something more modern, I got a Canon I believe it was, and also about that same time I got a a Rolleiflex and I began using shooting two and a quarter square negatives. Those are wonderful cameras but they have to be shooting something like people that are on your own level, they won't work in crowds because you have to look down through them and you can hold them over your head and take a picture but it is very difficult. There's Just one lens, there aren’t any interchangeable lenses, there are no zoom lens so it's a very limited camera but it has wonderful Zeiss lens and some of the things I took at that time and many of things I took on the "Stars of Jazz" were with the Rolleiflex and some of those are the nicest negatives I have now.

WT: So even then it had a fast lens?

RA: It had a 2.8 lens. Now they go down to 1.9 or 1.5 but it was quite fast for that period and I think about that time or shortly before that the Tri-X films came in and they speeded up to a 400 speed where the old films were mostly 100. With a good lab you could even push that film to a higher speed.

WT: The Rolleiflex is the camera you used primarily on "Stars of Jazz"?

RA: About half and half. It was…. I notice now as I go back those are the

negatives that I print the most, they’re a larger negative and so they enlarge to a better quality print…

WT: Less grain?

RA: Less grain, true, yes. You see, you're blowing up a larger area, if you blow up a 35mm negative it's not much bigger than the end of your thumb and so this is 3 or 4 times that size, you do get better quality from the larger negative.

WT: And much more of a portrait..

RA: Yes, they’re great for portraits and if you can walk up close to a person you can get a beautiful shot.

Bobby Troup introduces Barbara Dane on Stars of Jazz

Calliope Records Production Credits:

Executive Producers: Hayward Collins, Rick Donovan, Lee D. Weisel

Production and Coordination: Jim Pewter

Technical Assistance: Mike Jordan for Krishane Enterprises

Mastering: Jack Skinner for Keyser-Century Corporation

Art Direction and Photography: Jeffrey Weisel

(Barbara Dane)

Barbara Dane Celebrates 85 Years of Life, Music at Freight

by Andrew Gilbert

Berkeleyside, May 10, 2012

Barbara Dane was born in Detroit in 1927, and she was reborn musically in Berkeley about 25 years later. Possessing a big, bold, beautifully expressive voice, she had already earned a reputation as a gifted folk singer and musical activist who had campaigned against racial discrimination with Pete Seeger when she and first husband, folk singer Rolf Cahn, relocated to the Bay Area in the late 1940s.

After serving as the host of a pioneering folk television show broadcast on KGO TV, she was recruited as the founding member of a group conceived as a West Coast version of the hugely popular Weavers. But when Dane bailed on the project at the last minute due to creative and other differences, she was left in something of a quandary, in need of income and seeking a new creative direction.

Living in a brown-shingle house at Dwight and Telegraph (rent $35 a month), she often sat in at the Blind Lemon, the pioneering storefront folk club Cahn launched on San Pablo Avenue (a building most recently inhabited by California Office Machines). It was there that she encountered banjo player Dick Oxtot, a leading figure in the East Bay's thriving traditional jazz scene, who was impressed by her soulful renditions of country blues and spirituals.

"He said you should come down the street and sit in with this jazz band I play with," Dane recalled during a recent interview in her Oakland Hills house. "I went over and there was Bob Mielke's band, the Bearcats. They were wonderful musicians and very welcoming. The first time I got up to sing something with that kind of backing, wow! Oh man, this is it!"

It's not that Dane became a jazz singer, though she fit snugly in "trad" ensembles inspired by the raucous sound of early New Orleans jazz, which was inextricably entwined with blues, spirituals and latter day ragtime. Rather, she emerged as a singular figure in American music who performed, recorded and befriended a vast constellation of foundational artists in jazz and blues, including New Orleans masters Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory, George Lewis and Pops Foster, blues patriarchs Tampa Red, Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and some artists who like her defied category, such as the great guitarist Lonnie Johnson and Count Basie vocalist Jimmy Rushing.

Dane celebrates her 85th birthday Sunday at Freight and Salvage with a concert that encompasses a huge swath of her musical legacy. I spent an evening with Dane recently and we barely scratched the surface of her storied "career" (the disdainful quotes are hers, as she always prefaces the "c" word with "so-called"). "The idea of sitting down and mapping out a career seemed totally boring and inhibiting, like trying to plan the way a river's going to go," Dane said.

One reason that she didn't always thrive in the business the way she could have is that Dane never backed off her passionate leftist politics. Her outspoken ways, which were still evident during an interview we coincidentally scheduled on May Day, probably cost her a State Department sponsored European tour to which Louis Armstrong had invited her.

She may not have maximized her commercial potential, but Dane has achieved something far more precious, connecting deeply with audiences and artists around the world. At her 75th birthday concert at the old Freight she tried to shoehorn just about everything into the evening and ended up with an exhausting four-hour event. She cut back for her 80th and for this milestone she figures she's tailored the evening just right. The first set she's singing with a trad jazz quintet including multi-instrumentalist Clint Baker on trumpet, the illustrious jazz historian and DJ Richard Hadlock on reeds, pianist Ray Skjelbred, and bassist Marty Eggers. They'll be joined by for several pieces by the Stovall Sisters, a venerable gospel combo.

The second half is devoted to Dane's international musical empire. She'll perform with her son, Pablo Menendez, a long-time Havana resident who leads a popular Cuban jazz-fusion band Mezcla. Her oldest son, Oklahoma-based singer/songwriter Jesse Cahn, will accompany her on a Woody Guthrie number. And her daughter, Bay Area Flamenco Society founder Nina Menendez, will also take a turn in the spotlight. "She's going to do some flamenco, which is blues in its way," Dane said.

Window into Bay Area music scene

Dane's creative pursuits and travels are far too varied to detail, but her early years offer a fascinating window into the Bay Area music scene before it started exploding in the mid-60s. After getting a feel for New Orleans jazz sitting in regularly with Bob Mielke's Bearcats at the Lark's Club at Sacramento and Prince, she landed her first paying jazz gig at the Tin Angel in San Francisco, a high-profile date with trombonist Turk Murphy during the 1956 Republican Convention. But she credits a two-year run at a seedy joint on San Francisco Embarcadero, Jack's Waterfront Hangout, as her real proving ground. From what she could tell, the club was allowed to operate in the shadows by paying off the police, and she was headlining artist in a regular cycle of acts that sound lifted right out of "Broadway Danny Rose."

"There was this woman who had a record act," Dane said. "She would put on a record and mouth the words and do the dance. And there was a guy who played the piano with oranges, and fit that wasn't funny enough he put on gloves."

She moved down to Los Angeles in 1958 to take a year-long gig at Cosmo Alley in Hollywood, and when it fell through after a few months she landed on her feet when she started working at a new club called the Ash Grove, which became a Mecca for Delta blues legends, folkies, singer/songwriters and country musicians. In other words, a perfect fit for Dane.

Signed to Capitol, she toured on a double bill with a rising comic named Bob Newhart, packing clubs across the country. Eager to move back to the Bay Area, she opened her own joint in North Beach, Sugar Hill, the first blues club intended to attract a mixed race audience. She opened with Jimmy Rushing, the inimitable blues crooner anchored the Count Basie Orchestra during its glory years in the 1930s and 40s. When she wasn't performing with pianist/cornetist Kenny Whitson and bassist Wellman Braud, she booked a steady parade of blues greats. Big Mama Thornton would drop by to sit in with the veteran jazz artist would wander down after gigs at the Jazz Workshop to hang out with Braud, a pioneering bassist and early member of Duke Ellington's band.

"People were ready for it," Dane says. "We never had a night where we didn't make the nut, and that's not very common, I can tell you."

San Francisco is for suckers

Never interested in living in San Francisco ("That's for suckers," she says), Dane settled back in Berkeley when she moved up from LA. She spent several decades in New York City (Brooklyn, not Manhattan) and moved back to the East Bay in the mid-1990s with her husband Irwin Silber, the co-founder and longtime editor of Sing Out!, the magazine devoted to the folk music movement. Silber died in the summer of 2010.

From breaking the embargo to perform in Cuba in 1966 to founding the indie label Paredon with Silber to document the progressive social movements of 1970s and 80s (some 50 albums they donated to Smithsonian Folkways), Dane saw music as the vanguard cultural expression in an era of far flung struggles. But her primary agenda as a performer has always been to make sure her audiences has a great time, not matter what kind of music she's singing.

"People say what style do you work in?" Dane said. "I say, whatever communicates."

__________

Barbara Dane plays Freight and Salvage on Sunday May 13 at 8:00 pm. For information, visit http://www.thefreight.org/barbara-dane

Andrew Gilbert, whose Berkeleyside music column appears every Thursday, also covers music and dance for the San Jose Mercury News, Contra Costa Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe and KQED's California Report. He lives in west Berkeley.

SHOW #97

MAY 12, 1958

The Firehouse Five Plus Two: Danny Alguire, cornet; Ward Kimball, trombone, leader; George Probert, clarinet, soprano sax; Frank Thomas, piano; Dick Roberts, banjo, guitar; George Bruns, tuba, acoustic double bass; Eddie Forrest, drums. Barbara Dane, vocal.

Production credits for this show:

Host: Bobby Troup

Executive Producer: Peter Robinson

Producer: Jimmie Baker

Writer: Bob Arbogast

Director: Leo G. “Hap” Weyman

Audio: Chuck Lewis

Cameramen: Bob Haley, Sal Folino, Ernie Buttleman

Technical Director: Gene Lukowski

Lighting Director: Vince Cilurzo

Video: Noble Moore

Ward Kimball, Danny Alguire, George Probert

SHOW #67

OCTOBER 14, 1957

The Firehouse Five Plus Two: Danny Alguire, cornet; Ward Kimball, trombone; George Probert, clarinet, soprano sax; George Bruns, piano, tuba; Dick Roberts, banjo, guitar; Ralph Ball, tuba; Eddie Forrest, drums. Jeanne Gayle, vocal.