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Last Years in the United States (1959–1964) At ‹fty Ben had become very compact. He was thickset and broadshouldered , his bearing erect, and although he had gained weight over the years, he was not really overweight. He was of medium height with thin legs that didn’t ‹t in with the rest of his body. He still had immensely strong arms, and enjoyed showing off his strength. “Ben Webster was one of the strongest musicians I ever knew,” recalls record producer and critic George Avakian, and that includes Zutty Singleton. Sid Catlett was even bigger than Zutty, but he didn’t have muscles like Ben or Zutty. Ben and I were listening to somebody at the old Birdland bar, and for the third time since midnight I said, “Ben, I really have to get home.” Ben looked at me in the eye, said, “Uh, uh!” and picked me up, turned me sideways and held me over his head. But he was always a gentleman through and through—the moment I said, “I’ll stay!” he set me down gently and picked up all the change that had fallen out of my pocket.1 When Ben played, he stood erect, was well-dressed, and held his horn straight in front of him, almost like a soldier presenting arms. His face, with its eagle-beaked nose, was expressionless, and he stood completely still, totally concentrated with closed eyes, as if listening to something inside his head. Only when playing an altissimo note, would he open his upturned eyes, as if in need of extra space or of help from above. Once in a while, he would remove the saxophone from his mouth after a phrase, ever so slightly shake his head—on which he always wore a hat that seemed too small—and continue with the next phrase. 8. 179 When Ben arrived in Los Angeles late in the summer of 1959, the only ‹xed point in his life was the house in which he lived with his aging mother and grand-aunt, who were eighty-seven and ninety-‹ve years old, but still able to take care of themselves. He had no bookings, but calmly awaited a change of events. He did not wait long. The ‹rst days of October were hectic, with bookings at two simultaneous festivals in Monterey and Los Angeles. In 1958 Jimmy Lyons had arranged the ‹rst jazz festival in Monterey , the small California town where writer John Steinbeck had settled in the early 1930s and which had inspired him to write Tortilla Flats and Of Mice and Men. Lyons’s jazz festival was so successful that he continued in the years to come, and in 1959, the festival had grown to three days over the weekend of October 2–4. Ben performed Friday evening and Saturday afternoon, the ‹rst evening with blues singer Jimmy Witherspoon and the Monterey All Stars with, among others, Eldridge, Hawkins, Earl Hines, and Mel Lewis. Recordings from the concert reveal an attentive and interested audience of six thousand, and an equally inspired band driven forward by drummer Mel Lewis’s effective and swinging drumming. Ben is featured quite a lot, and in the rocking Big Fine Girl he starts up a series of backing riffs that lift the music an extra notch, and in the slow Ain’t Nobody’s Business he plays two lyrical and sensitive choruses that ‹t Witherspoon ’s vocal like hand in glove. The day after, he played with a combination of musicians quite different from anything he had been accustomed to. He had always followed new directions in jazz, and often listened to young musicians at their gigs or hired them in his groups, but he had never played with avantgarde jazz musician Ornette Coleman before. Following a set alone with a rhythm section, he concluded the afternoon’s program with Hawkins and Coleman in a group announced as The Three Saxes. “One of the most stimulating performances came from Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, and Ornette Coleman,” one reviewer wrote. “This was a study in contrasts , with Webster and Hawkins embodying the virile tradition of jazz and Coleman hinting at another and esoteric direction that may be in its future.”2 Alas, this group is not documented on record. The same evening, Ben and Hawkins drove back to Los Angeles to perform at the ‹rst Los Angeles Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl. S O M E O N E T O W A T...

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