Jade Visions: The Life and Music of Scott LaFaro

Chapter 6. Transposition 1957

59 •฀ ChapTer 6 • transPosItIon 1957 After the Baker Quintet’s booking at the Ball & Chain in Miami ended in January 1957,they headed for a date in St.Louis. Chet’s father acted as chauffeur, driving their big Cadillac while the guys generally slept or listened to music on the radio. During this tour Scotty called home quite upset, remarking that driving through one of the Southern states, some folks that he called “ridiculously stupid people”derided them and threw rocks at the car for the simple fact that folks of different color were riding in the same vehicle. He could not tolerate intolerance. We had grown up in an area that had a long history of concern about human rights issues.There were the underground railroad and safe houses during the days of slavery.The women’s rights movement had its start here.An African-American girl was queen of his high school class prom. And while he certainly was aware that many were not so enlightened, this was his first brush with the realities of the situation. Phil Urso shared hotel rooms with Scotty for a while on this tour,but then begged out of this arrangement since“Scotty was up and practicing by nine in the morning in the room and I couldn’t sleep.” Phil continues:“He was one of the greatest bassists I’ve ever 60  JadeVisions:The Life and Music of Scott LaFaro played with. He was an out front bass player. He started the single string soloing.A lot of bassists started copying him.” While playing with the Baker group in St. Louis at Peacock Alley, Scotty met pianist Pat Moran who recalls they “hit it off right away and became good friends.” Baker booked January 25 through February 2, following Pat who was booked January 11 through the nineteenth. Pat recalls, “I met Scotty when he was playing with Chet Baker.Chet was pretty funny.He had just made an album where he sang and after the gig that night,he sat on the bandstand and sang ‘Look for the Silver Lining’ to some girl.We were all cracking up.He didn’t have a tooth in front,but was very handsome.” Chet had signed onto the annual Birdland tour, the Birdland Stars of ’57 or Birdland All-Stars Revue. The tour, which opened at Carnegie Hall in NewYork City Friday, February 15, was to run through most of March. The all-star tour included SarahVaughn,Billy Eckstein,the Count Basie Band with JoeWilliams , Bud Powell, Phineas Newborn, Lester Young, Zoot Sims, and the Terry Gibbs Quartet.To promote the tour, on February 14, Scotty made his first television appearance with the quintet on the Tonight Show with Steve Allen.A recording from this appearance is included on the CD The 2Trumpet Geniuses of the Fifties : Brownie and Chet (Philology Records). Chet’s group did not appear on the tour’s stop in Rochester, NewYork, since they had a prior booking at a jazz club in Philadelphia just before the tour was to play there at the Academy of Music. The family was disappointed that we wouldn’t have the opportunity to see Scotty in Rochester, which is just forty-eight miles from our home in Geneva.To assuage my great dismay, I was able to arrange a short trip by train to Philadelphia to meet Scotty. My first night in Philadelphia was spent at the club hearing the group, meeting the personnel, and sharing the time be- Transposition  61 tween sets chatting with Scotty.He was a bit down,expressing his dismay at Chet’s drug use. Scotty, as he often did, shook his head in disbelief at how guys chose to “screw up” so badly. Many did this mistakenly, he said.“A lot of guys think that Charlie Parker was great because of his drug use—that it somehow added to his genius—and maybe it’ll do the same for them.Yardbird was great in spite of his drug use.” He said that of all the musicians he had met, he was most unable to understand Gerry Mulligan’s drug use. He thought Mulligan was really quite an intellectual and it made no sense to Scotty that he allowed himself to get caught in the drug habit. The next day we had a late breakfast. Scotty wanted to introduce me to Scrapple (a Pennsylvania Dutch concoction of pork...