Lu Watters’ Yerba Buena Jazz Band
by Jerry Stanton

Before I start I should say that on this subject The Source, capital S, is Bob Helm. Of those of us from the dinosaur days still around, he’s the one who lived and knew it all. He has to: he’s ten or more years ahead of me, as Wally was, and knew Lu in the band’s formative stage in the late 1930s.

When did I come into the movie? It seems like a movie now looking back—a long one and a very memorable one. I came in the summer of ‘39, together with my brother Tom Stanton (he was christened Peter Thomas Stanton and in his ‘30s wanted to be only Peter, then P. T. But when you’ve grown up with a brother Tom, at work and play, you’re never going to call him anything but Tom).

But Tom wasn’t with me on the late summer afternoon at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island when I left the close of the daily Benny Goodman big band open air concert in the Temple Compound on the south side of the island and strolled along a road full of fairground attractions. Across from one of them, Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch, was another: The Corral. Drinking, eating, and jazz from a trio consisting of Bob Helm, pianist Forrest Brown and Freddy Higuera drums. I stayed, of course, then introduced myself, and that was the start of friendships which in Bob’s case have lasted sixty years to the present writing.

I didn’t talk long enough to Bob that day to hear what was coming in the Bay Area jazz scene—maybe Lu’s plans weren’t quite finalized. But a couple of months later, September or October, l939, the equivalent of a musical atomic bomb detonated Bay Area, California—make it all of U. S. A.: righteous jazz. The Yerba Buena Jazz Band opened at the Dawn Club, 20 Annie Street in San Francisco.

Nothing like it had ever hit town before. It’s true that the King Oliver Band played The City in the mid-1920s, maybe more than once, on their West Coast tours. But they weren’t there long enough to make the impact they deserved, and anyway by 1939, with the advent of the big band era and hundreds of smaller bands the classic Oliver sounds were forgotten, if they’d ever been remembered long in rousting, live-it-up San Francisco balling the livelong nights.

The Dawn Club changed all that, because Lu had really done his homework. The band was brilliant, without making a fuss about being that way. It was highly professional, disciplined, with a fabulous repertoire including Lu’s originals and arrangements, yet still gave you the feeling they were fresh on the scene and playing for your New Year’s Eve party. Spontaneity was in the air, not least because Lu had selected the Dawn Club for its spacious dance floor—the ‘30s on the way out had been a great dancing era all over America, in thousands of clubs, halls, ballrooms, hotels, fairgrounds—you name it. They even got up and did it in theater aisles when the band on stage got hot enough. Me included.

Okay, I’ve opened with atmosphere, and now for some facts. You turned off Market Street, walked maybe fifty feet along Annie Street, more like an alley, next to the Palace Hotel. You went in the club and down a long steepish flight of stairs. At the bottom you bought your admission from a guy who in return handed you a long single-sheet program. Genial idea of Lu’s: every number to be played that night was listed by sets (five, sometimes six).

You were early, in your early-teenage anticipation, the way we of the kid Golden Gate Jazz Band (Tom dubbed it that) were, and some trepidation because there was no guarantee we were going to get a real drink at our tender ages. Who were we? Tom Stanton, trumpet and cornet; Pete Allen, clarinet; Bill Bardin, trombone; Jerry Stanton, piano and George Clark, drums. Larry Grey, bass, too but not always, and Tom Dowd, our booker, poster designer and general tub-thumper. We were sponsored by Augie Giretto, Lu’s manager and master of the lease on the Dawn Club—and had the approval of the real master himself, Lu, who smiled benignly on our efforts and gave us genuine encouragement. He also, in his quiet savvy way showed us where in the dim recesses of the spacious back room of the club we could cluster in a corner and get served firewater—for hard cash, of course, nobody could afford to be in the business of charity in those days. So for four bits—you heard it—we got our gin and juices. For a couple of bucks each we could join the rollicking spirits of the long night, trip the light fantastic with a gal, and still go home sober with the sounds of an amazing band ringing in our ears.

Brass players stayed constant in the band, both before and after World War Two: Lu, Bob Scobey and Turk, but clarinet duties were divided between Ellis Horne and Helm, more Ellis in ‘39 and ‘40, and more Helm in ‘41, ‘46 and ‘47. Wally, too, was a constant, though Forrest Brown was in before the war on piano awhile at the Dawn. Bill Dart was a constant on drums, Dick Lammi on tuba and string bass as well, but there were several banjo men on duty: the inimitable and unforgettable Clancy Hayes, doing his great jazz singing, and Harry Mordecai and Russ Bennett.

The Dawn Club, as you no doubt know, was not invented suddenly in 1939. It had a pretty riotous life as a Prohibition speakeasy, or “Speak,” all through the ‘20s and early ‘30s behind it. The long brass rail bar was one of the longest, if not the longest in San Francisco. Another contender for that distinction was Breen’s, the classic early-S. F. style Irish-flavored bar off Third and Market, in an alley behind the Examiner Building, and an off-duty favorite of Lu’s. I lifted more than one beer mug with him there.

The atmosphere with the band was infectious at the Dawn, and it was always full of dancers and listeners. There was a lot of dark wood there and a mellow dim decor— plenty of tables and oodles of atmosphere in the style of the times. The whole cast of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Maltese Falcon,” that director John Huston was filming on location in The City was often there: Huston, Humph Bogart, Mary Astor, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet etc. Probably not only for the music but because they felt they hadn’t left the movie sets: the Dawn was just like one of them.

After the war in 1947 Orson Welles was often there, with his current flame Rita Hayworth. Welles loved the music. I can remember seeing and hearing him cry out “That’s the Black and White Rag!” when Wally was playing it, then grab Rita and swing her high, wide and handsome around the floor. And he shouted: That’s-a-Plenty! Great!“

A whole lot of other notable people, not only Hollywood but from the professions, big business and politics etc. came regularly to the Dawn. And of course Herb Caen, a legend in his own lifetime. He often put some anecdote about the club in his columns, in the Examiner and the Chronicle (he shifted gears several times in his life). Everybody danced. Lu said the foundation of everything was to have people dancing, and when he moved the band in 1948 to El Cerrito he stayed firm to that principle.

A word must be said at this point about Lu Watters the man, because he was as well put-together as a human being as he was as a jazz musician. You could call him the Rock of Gibraltar: while all the waves and storms and winds lapped and whirled around him, he was always unflappable and unruffled. He’d gone through the rough-and-tough mill of the orchestra business as it was in the ‘20s when he started at 16 with his first job as second or third trumpet in a section, Anno Domini 1926. He toured the country with various bands of all sizes and styles of the time. He built up a lot of general musical savvy until he gradually separated the wheat from the chaff and knew what he wanted to do on his own.

That time didn’t come till much later, in the late 1930s, but by then Lu’d found the players he wanted and knew exactly the results he wanted: continuation, with his own refreshments, of the great New Orleans Oliver and Armstrong two-trumpet tradition in an eight-man band with banjo, tuba, support but not solo drums, and ragtime-tinged piano. And of course a clarinetist in the Dodds, Simeon, Nicholas traditions deeply embedded in the best New Orleans bands. In Turk he’d found the ideal driving bottom line for the front line.

It was a carefully thought-out band, but as already mentioned it had that great feeling of right now, freshness and spontaneity that got people up from their tables right now and out on the dance floor. In the first great flourish of the YBJB at the Dawn—’39, ‘40 and ‘41—a lot of young and very impressionable starting-out musicians, our gang included, formed an enthusiastic and faithful fan support element, which translated out in many ways, the most important being there every night the band played and if possible memorizing every tune they played. That was no easy job since most of the tunes were three and four part numbers, with introductions, interludes, repeats, breaks and codas galore.

All the guys in the YBJB had a lot of previous experience in improvising, but Lu wrote out all his numbers and rehearsed them that way before he let the improvising take wing, as it should in the middle of the tunes. In this way the band stood out from all the Dixieland-style bands that were often good, but long on jamming and short on substance and ensemble quality. It can’t be emphasized enough in a resume of Lu’s impact on the Bay Area, California and national jazz scenes. The band was unique, the band was organized, the band swung, the band was great. Period.

After funding and lease problems, the Dawn Club closed after two successful post WW II years, and in 1948 Lu found a new home for the band at a great big, roomy club, Sally Rand’s, on San Pablo in El Cerrito just over the Albany line. A long rectangular building with a spacious parking lot of its own, band and staff rooms on the other side of it—and a two story house in back with a lot of little rooms for what had obviously been Sally’s hanky-panky trade, never admitted and never officially allowed, though gambling in an upstairs room at the Kona Club nearby went on while the city uncles looked the other way, when they weren’t upstairs themselves taking a flutter.

And then Lu christened it Hambone Kelly’s with a bow to his wife Pat, and the enterprise took off, and how. The big dance floor Lu insisted on was there, a prime factor in the choice. Then he ordered the same dimly-lighted cozy atmosphere of the Dawn, and initiated a unique feature: dozens of names of his tunes were written in script style large on the wall behind the long bar at the front of the club, facing toward San Pablo Avenue. In Manuel, the head bartender, he found an expert, trustworthy man, and Augie Giretto was on hand again to manage the band, the finances and the club. Most important of all, Augie was a dedicated fan of the band and knew his jazz music, with a big record collection at home. 78s in those days, with LPs just emerging on the scene.

For more intimate Hambone reminiscing, check with Bob Helm. Bob had a room there and stayed till the closing New Year’s Eve, 1950. I was there the last year of Hambone’s. I’d replaced Johnny Wittwer who in his turn had replaced Burt Bales—‘48 and ‘49 respectively. Lu had come out to El Sobrante over the hills and out toward Martinez and the Carquinez Bridge, several times where I was working in my brother’s weekend band. Then he asked me to come aboard at Hambone’s and I think I waited about ten seconds to sign on. The band was abbreviated by then, down to Lu and Bob and Lammi and Dart and myself. But Turk hadn’t started his own band yet and often came around to sit in, as did Scobey. Charlie Sonnanstine often came around with his trombone, as did other good players, all of them needing Lu’s careful approval, of course. It was never a jam session. Clancy Hayes came in to play banjo and sing. I must say here that Clancy, along with Lu and Wally, gave me the early strong encouragement, early 1940s, that I badly needed, and that got me over the hump, y’know—that feeling that you’re not going to make it.

Another institution Lu invented was the Sunday afternoon special: inviting names in the jazz world to be guest artists at Hambone’s, with their own support players or with us, depending. He only did it in the summer months when the vacation-time atmosphere and the weather combined to make it worthwhile. I got to meet a lot of memorable people and players: one Sunday or sometimes a pair of consecutive Sundays Lu’d book in the Red Nichols band from L. A. Then another time the Wingy Manone band. Out of that contact I got a job with Wingy two years later. Then Lu brought out members of the Eddie Condon band from New York. And one very memorable week he finagled the presence of master James P. Johnson, Fats Waller’s teacher. Though no longer a young man, James P. played strong stride solos on the big Hambone redwood upright with a resonant sounding board, and I was right there two feet away at his right hand. The slightly elevated bandstand at Hambone’s was a replica of the Dawn Club stand: like a square box, open at two ends but with a big drape at the back for you to come in and out.

FROM ISSUE NO. 10, FALL 1999