A Good Time Was Had by All in 2006 |
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Bay City Stompers - Front row, left to right: Leon Oakley, John Gill, and Clint Baker.
Back row, left to right: Marty Eggers, Bill Carter and Tom Bartlett.
(Not in this photo are Duke Heitger and Alan Adams.)
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| leader, banjo, vocals- JOHN GILL |
trombone- TOM BARTLETT |
| trumpet- LEON OAKLEY |
piano- MARTY EGGERS |
| trumpet- DUKE HEITGER |
tuba- ALAN ADAMS |
| clarinet- BILL CARTER |
drums- CLINT BAKER |
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We are pleased to announce the Bay City Stompers will once again play for us at the classic, incomparable Bimbo's in San Francisco. Their last two October concerts were sold out. With Leon and Duke's trumpet duets this year, we expect another sell-out crowd.
Seating is on the first come, first choice basis, with priority seating to those with "Sponsor" tickets. So come early. The "no-host" bar starts serving when the doors open at 2 PM.
Consider joining the Foundation to take advantage of these attractive ticket prices, which we are offering only to SFTJF members:
- Limit of 2 tickets per member at $25 each,
- Limited number of "Sponsor" tickets at $60 each, and
- Additional general admission tickets at $35 each.
Or come, enjoy the Bay City Stompers using general admission tickets at $35 each.
Either way, don't miss out. Only 400 tickets will be sold. So order your tickets now using this Concert Ticket Order Form.
Send your October 22 Concert Ticket Order Form directly to:
San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation
41 Sutter Street, PMB 1870, San Francisco , CA 94104
If you have questions, e-mail us at: info@sftradjazz.org.
See you at the October 22 Concert!
* Made possible by these special event "Angels":
O'Reilly & Danko, Trial Lawyers The Alafi Family Foundation
As a non-profit, the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation depends not only on annual dues from faithful members, but also and importantly on generous financial contributions for general operations and special events. The Foundation gratefully acknowledges all dues and contributions, including these categories:
Angel Level - $1,000 & above
Emperor Level - $500 & above
Earthquake Level - $250 & above
Hambone Level - $100 & above
Aficionado Level - under $100
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A Good Time Was Had by All in 2005
The Foundation's big October bash in San Francisco is becoming a yearly event. A sold-out crowd at Bimbo's on Sunday, October 16, 2005 foot-tapped, schmoozed, danced, and swooned to the irresistible beat of the Watters-style Bay City Stompers - all in a special honor to Turk Murphy. The momentum seems to be building to make this an annual fall affair.
Members had their choice of super-low prices or preferential seating. All the more reason to join now for only $25 per year. By receiving the SFTJF newsletter, The Cricket, you'll be the first to know what's happening.
PARTY PICTURES! To view and order photos taken by Richard Ressman at the October 16th event, please click here and sign in to visit the photo display. Or go to www.pictage.com, sign in, and enter "Turk Murphy Tribute 2005". Note: If you have a pop-up ad blocker, you may need to disable it.
Below are the band roster and biographies of the stellar 2005 band, drawn from their busy schedules around the U.S.
About Turk Murphy
Melvin Edward Alton "Turk" Murphy was born in Palermo, California, in 1915 and began playing in dance bands in 1930. He performed with the Will Osborne and Mal Hallet orchestras in the 1930s and, in 1939, Turk teamed up with the great Lu Watters in his Yerba Buena Jazz Band, performing at the Dawn Club in downtown San Francisco.
Murphy served in the Navy during World War II, but did play some engagements and made some fine recordings with Bunk Johnson and Lu Watters. The Yerba Buena Jazz Band broke up in 1950; Turk performed with various orchestras until January 1952, when he opened his own band at the Italian Village at Columbus and Lombard, very close to this spot where we are performing this evening.
In 1960, Turk opened his first "Earthquake McGoon's" on Broadway. It relocated to the William Tell Hotel on Clay Street, then to the Embarcadero and to Pier 39. From 1984 until his death in 1987, Turk and his band played in the New Orleans Room of the Fairmont Hotel.
Four of our noted musicians performed with Turk—Leon Oakley, cornet; Bill Carter, clarinet; John Gill, banjo; and Ray Skjelbred, intermission pianist.
The Bay City Stompers
Bay City Stompers Ready To Roll - Bottom row, left to right: Tom Bartlett, Leon Oakley, Jim Cullum and Bill Carter. Top row, left to right: Ray Cadd, Marty Eggers, Clint Baker, John Gill.
The Ensemble
Jim Cullum
Jim began playing cornet in 1955 when he was 14. Fascinated with the records of fabled cornetist, Bix Biederbeck, Cullum was at first self-taught. While attending college he formed a band with his father named the Happy Jazz Band.
Soon after, some San Antonio business leaders and music lovers established "The Landing" a jazz club on San Antonio's famous Riverwalk as a showcase for the Happy Jazz Band. Under Cullum's creative leadership, the band evolved into a nationally acclaimed ensemble now known as the Jim Cullum Jazz Band. The group has toured and recorded 45 record albums as well as hundreds of radio broadcasts.
Leon Oakley
Leon began playing trumpet at the age of 9 and is one of today's most highly regarded jazz cornetists. He is closely associated with the Turk Murphy Jazz Band and has been a major inspiration for many young musicians. Leon continues to play great traditional jazz with a number of groups in the Bay Area and has done a number of appearances with Jim Cullum on his "Live from the Riverwalk" for Texas Public Radio.
William Carter
At the age of 20, Carter toured internationally with Turk Murphy's Jazz Band, recording for Columbia with musicians including Milt Hinton, Billy Butterfield and Lottie Lenya. Bill is a noted photographer, writer and author, as well as a top traditional jazz clarinetist. His four books include one on New Orleans jazz: Preservation Hall. Carter can be heard on a dozen recordings and he has served for over 10 years as Chairman of the San Francisco Traditional Jazz Foundation board of directors.
John Gill
John took up banjo and drums after hearing his father's Dixieland albums. In 1977 he joined The Turk Murphy Jazz Band on banjo and stayed for almost 11 years. He is now in New York City playing drums with Vince Giordano's Nighthawks and is leader of the Lu Watters-style band called the Yerba Buena Stompers, performing in many jazz festivals throughout the country.
Tom Bartlett
Tom joined the Salty Dogs Jazz Band on the Purdue campus in 1959, playing in the style of Lu Watters and Turk Murphy. He formed jazz bands in South and Central America while serving in the Peace Corps and the United States Army. He rejoined the Salty Dogs in 1969 and has performed and recorded with many notable jazz bands including the Frisco, Red Rose, Down Home, South Frisco jazz bands and the Yerba Buena Stompers.
Clint Baker
Clint is a master of all instruments and has instructed many musicians on the intricacy and secrets of playing authentic New Orleans jazz. His own New Orleans Jazz Band is well known on the jazz festival circuit and on the Bay Area nightclub scene. He has stayed busy as a sideman on his various instruments with the Usonia Six Swing Band. His latest recording is "Tears" on the EFO label.
Marty Eggers
Marty is well known on the West Coast as a top-notch ragtime pianist and bassist. His music career began in Sacramento as a teenager. Besides performing as a solo pianist, Marty plays with a number of traditional jazz and ragtime groups, most notably with the Yerba Buena Stompers, The Royal Society Jazz Orchestra and the Black Diamond Jazz Band. He regularly performs with his wife, pianist Virginia Tichenor. He records frequently and is a skilled composer and arranger of ragtime and traditional jazz.
Ray Cadd
Ray grew up listening to his grandparent's 78s, including recordings of Rosy McHargue, Firehouse Five, Lu Watters and Turk Murphy. He began on tuba at the age of 13. He has performed with the Yerba Buena Stompers, the Titanic Jazz Band and Hal Smith's Frisco Syncopators. Ray's other obsessions are antique trains and 20th century classical music.
Ray Skjelbred
Ray is one of the Bay Area's finest classic jazz performers, a mainstay in the Turk Murphy band for over four years.
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Music in Exile: An Update
The story continues to unfold even as the early Katrina and Rita stories have disappeared from the headlines. You may wish to keep tabs on some of the affected musicians as they go about trying to rebuild their shattered lives. A good place to start: riverwalk.org; click on the "Jazz Me News archives" link at the bottom of the left navigation area, and then click on the October 2005 issue.
Youll find a personal account by clarinetist Evan Christopher, exiled from his New Orleans apartment and currently living in California. (Many of you will have heard Evan perform with John Gills Yerba Buena Stompers, with the Jim Cullum band and in many other top-notch venues.) Youll also find an exclusive report by the temporarily exiled Bruce Raeburn, Curator of the important Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University, on the state of things in that corner of soggy New Orleans.
The emerging picture is that a great many New Orleans musicians of all stylistic persuasions are displaced to different parts of the US, deeply uncertain of the future, and struggling to cope. With this situation having gone beyond the immediate purview of the above-mentioned New Orleans Musicians Clinic (itself impacted by Hurricane Rita) the New York-based Jazz Foundation of America is stepping in to help with housing, employment and other assistance right across the United States. Working in a coordinating role with other groups, by October 1 JFA had reportedly sponsored over 150 gigs in the Gulf Coast region alone. Visit them at www.jazzfoundation.org.
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Katrina Update October, 2006
Amid a torrent of gloomy world headlines, it is hard to stay mindful of a real, localized torrent like Katrina. One year on, however, we were reminded of that unending insult to the birthplace of Americas own music by the arrival of the latest issue of The Jazz Archivist, the newsletter of the William Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University in New Orleans.
That Archive remains a big-brother model for our own more modest effort to preserve the sounds, sights and memories of closely related San Francisco jazz. Reflecting the local grit and worldwide resonance of the music itself, the scholarly but friendly institution has served as the First Research Stop for generations of jazz historians. Reporting on Katrita...the double whammy of Katrina and Rita, curator Bruce Boyd Raeburn writes:
The staff survived, and our facility sustained no major damage, despite the presence of four feet of water in the basement of [our] Jones Hall... the spring semester commenced with an inspirational speech and concert by Wynton Marsalis on Martin Luther King Day that deftly set the tone for renewal, with 91% of the students returning to campus.
When we returned to uptown New Orleans on October 6 [2005]...the Tulane campus was off limits unless one had special dispensation from a Dean...although there was no electricity in Jones Hall, a flashlight tour of the premises revealed that it was exactly as we had left it. The Archive reopened on December 19, about two weeks before Howard-Tilton Memorial Library (which had taken seven feet of water in the basement, destroying the Music Library, Government Documents, and Microfilms.) Since then, we have seen a steady rise in patron service, peaking with French Quarter Festival and New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, which coincided with the last few weeks of the spring semester. Our daily reality today seems not very different from what it once was, except for one thing: we cannot escape the day-to-day realization that 80% of the city remains devastated and most of its population is still dispersed, including about 87% of the musicians. Everyone wants to know about the future, and there are no answers...The Grammy Foundation has awarded the Hogan Jazz Archive $40,000 to continue the digital transfer of its oral history collection...
Reading this report, plus others which detail the difficulties jazz venues in the French Quarter and beyond are having staying open, we suspect New Orleans music is undergoing a modern day diaspora at least as profound as that which occurred nearly a century ago, when the seeds spread first to California, then on to Chicago and New York and Europe. We can be grateful for that first diaspora, even as we mourn the losses suffered in this second one. We can thank the many whose gifts, intangible and tangible, have continued to fertilize a fundamentally American art form, which, with its many variants, continues to flow seamlessly into the culture of a globalizing world.
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