© -Steven
Cerra , copyright protected; all rights reserved.
“52nd
Street was a garden – a very
special place where you could learn and grow. Young players were reassured and
given the courage to be themselves. Competition and the question of race never
came up. The players I met were a constant source of inspiration and
encouragement. I’m proud the musicians liked what I did. I kept it simple and I
didn’t mess up.
These guys took me around;
they were my guides; my teachers. Unfortunately, most people don’t do that
anymore.”
- Shelly Manne
“He was my favorite drummer.
He was the most empathetic of all the drummers I had worked with.”
- Russ Freeman, Jazz pianist and composer
“Shelly’s playing was
different from anybody’s His time was better than anybody’s.”
Conte Candoli, Jazz trumpeter
With fifty years
of hindsight since the writing of the article captioned in the above
photograph, the words Jazz + Success would seem to be oxymoronic.
But if any Jazz
musician was ever more deserving of such a triumph, it would have been Shelly
Manne.
The following
article published in the July 5, 1962 edition of Down Beat explains many of the reasons why the editorial staff at JazzProfiles
feels this way.
But our view, and
the appreciation of Jazz fans everywhere who experienced Shelly’s Manne Hole
aside, after reading this piece, is it any wonder that Shelly’s widow to this
day rolls her eyes at the mere mention of the place?
But then, it
seems, just about anything to do with Jazz ends up being a labor of love.
© -John Tynan/Down Beat, copyright
protected; all rights reserved.
“One of Jazz'
great drummers, a gentleman rancher, breeder of show horses, and proprietor of
"the most elegant Jazz joint in town." Sheldon Manne is the prototype
of the Successful Jazz Musician.
Shelly Manne. who
will he 42 this month, has husbanded his success with a levelheaded view of
life in general and the Jazz world in particular. He is the antithesis of the
stereotype of the Jazzman as a shiftless, irresponsible gypsy overly fond of
strong drink and stronger drugs and oblivious to society. Manne is a teetotaler
with an almost puritanical hostility toward the use of all kinds of illegal
narcotics.
No social
bumblebee, the drummer lives quietly in solid comfort with his wife. Flip, and
a stable o! show horses in the San Fernando (Calif. ) Valley community of Northridge.
In the typically
California-modern home where the Manne’s live, one wall of Shelly’s
wood-paneled den-cum-practice-room is covered with the Down Beat poll plaques
he has been winning off and on since 1947 and with other awards from a variety
of other magazines. Behind the house, beyond the patio and swimming pool, lie
the stables and corral where he and his equestrienne spouse exercise the horses
daily.
In November 1960,
Manne took a lease on a former Bohemian hangout located on Hollywood's Cahuenga
Blvd. and opened a Jazz club he dubbed Shelly's Manne-Hole. Like inn-keepers of
old, the drummer suspended over the entrance the sign of his establishment—a
wooden replica of a manhole cover with the name of the place printed thereon in
lurid orange.
Manne deliberately
retained the Bohemian atmosphere in the cellar-like club. Moreover, he and
Manne-Hole manager Rudy Onderwyzer added a few homey touches of their own so
that now the only suitable adjective to describe the present interior is
"kookie."
Riddled with nooks
and crannies on different floor levels, the Manne-Hole is festooned with a bewilderingly,
varied collection of tapestries, curios, pictures, and art objects of dubious
lineage.
Hung high on one
wall is a typical example of the management's whimsy, a framed newspaper front
page yellowed with age with the glaring banner headline: "10.000.000 Pairs
Of' Shoes For Suffering Russia." The newspaper is dated 1920.
Beaming from a
dominating position over the bar, which dispenses beer, wine, and coffee, but
no hard liquor, is a life-size cardboard Commander Whitehead appropriately
draped in a bar apron. Directly above the bar archway, a round, fancily framed photograph
of host Shelly Manne, pictured holding a pair of drumsticks and benevolently
smiling down on one and all. is labeled "Our Founder."
Manne recently
summed up his feeling about the club with understatement "The beauty of
the place." he said, "is its lack of formality."
With the paucity
of Jazz clubs in the Hollywood area, the Manne-Hole basically is a place for Manne to play on
weekends. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays the drummer forgets the monotonous
(but lucrative) grind of routine studio recording as he works on his own
bandstand with tenor man Richie Kamuca, trumpeter Conte Candoli, pianist Russ
Freeman, and bassist Monty Budwig, the regular personnel of Manne's
"Men."
But the Manne-Hole
has become notable, too. in that it features no fewer than five jazz groups
throughout the week. Although these other groups appear but one night apiece,
Manne's policy gives some 17 Jazzmen the opportunity to play and be heard at
least once a week and hands the customers a Jazz menu possibly unique in its
variety. On weekends, moreover, a vocalist, currently Kitty Doswell, is
featured with the Men.
With a capacity of
only 125 persons, the Manne-Hole is no potential gold mine nor does the owner
anticipate striking it rich. In fact, said Manne. just breaking even each week
is a formidable problem. Yet. he is careful to insist on a no-pressure
relationship with his customers.
"I want to be
fair to the customers,” he explained. "By that, I mean I don't want them
to feel they're being hustled and hyped. I've seen enough of that in the years
I worked jazz clubs all over the country, and I know that waitresses hustling
for drinks and big tips can ruin a room.
"I want the
customers to feel they can drop by for a beer on their way home and listen to a
set without it costing them an arm and a leg, like it can in other clubs
around town."
In his role of
Jazzman-turned-club-owner. Manne said he had come to appreciate the business
problems of running a Jazz room.
"You have to
think of all the things that keep a club from becoming a pigsty," he
noted. "For example, the city health department requires you maintain
adequate and clean toilet facilities; and the linens must always be clean.
Then, too, you've got to see to it that the piano is always in tune: that's
most important.
"You must
consider the sound in the room. In my place there isn't a spot in the club
where you can't hear perfectly well what's being played on the stand. When we
first moved in, one of the first things on the agenda was to install a complete
and modern sound system. It cost a few hundred dollars, but it was worth it.
"So. you can
see that I've come to understand the problems of running a club. There are
city and state taxes to be paid, insurance and pension payments for the
musicians who work for me, and the details involved in deducting income tax
payments for everybody who works there. And on and on. There are problems I
didn't even know were so numerous before I opened the place."
Manne doesn't need
these headaches. But he accepts them as part of the price to be paid for
maintaining a Jazz spot he can call his own, where his quintet can drop anchor,
and where he can guarantee his musicians steady jobs at least for part of each
week — an enviable situation for any permanently organized jazz group.
Beyond the confines of Shelly's Manne-Hole, the drummer
nurtures a further ambition. "It's an idea I have in mind." he mused.
"I'd like to see about four or five Jazz clubs on
the same street. I'd like to see Cahuenga Blvd. like 52nd Street as it was in New York during the war. This is what Hollywood needs. We could call it Jazz Street , or something like that, and it would pull
all the people who're interested in Jazz into one area. I'd love to see a Jazz Street happen out here. In New
York everything is so easily accessible.
Whether Manne will
ever see his dream realized is, in all practicality, quite doubtful. But in his
corner on the future Jazz Street he and his sidemen and the other Jazz
groups who work for him are doing their bit to keep the hope alive.
Manne's quintet,
organized seven years ago. today is judged by many to be one of the country's
best small groups. Since Shelly and The Men opened at Los Angeles ' Tiffany club in 1955, the drummer-leader
has maintained the original quintet format through the years. But today,
according to the leader, "the feeling of the front line is
different." For one thing, he noted, Richie Kamuca is not doubling alto saxophone
and is working on some "different things" with trumpeter Candoli.
"In the past
few months." Manne said, "we've been playing some of John Williams’
compositions, and we have started rehearsing a long work by Bill Holman. Also,
we're going to be doing some of Russ Freeman's pieces. I feel runs is one of
the best Jazz writers around."”
At the height of
the groove-funk-soul fad, when any Jazz record company's contemporaneousness
could be measured by its output of Gospelized sounds. Manne dropped in one day
at Down Beat's Hollywood offices. After a few minutes of small
talk, he gestured impatiently and asked:
"Are they serious
with all this soul stuff? Man, it's getting to the point where you can't pick up a new
Jazz album without it being so-called soul music. And so much of it is junk!
Where's the musicality gone?"
He continued in
that vein awhile and then, having gotten the complaint off his chest, subsided
and left shortly thereafter.
This is typical of
the drummer. Manne has always been outspoken. One of his more celebrated blasts
once got him on the cover of Down Beat
after he declared that playing with the Stan Kenton Band was like chopping
wood. The cover photo showed Manne wielding an ax at a log with Kenton standing
Simon Legree-like behind him.
Manne is far from
happy with the general situation in Jazz today. He ascribes much of the
disorder to the writings and attitudes of Jazz critics.
'Take
swinging!" he exclaimed. "What's happening? Would someone please tell
me that? I feel a lot of people may have read a certain thing swings, and they
accept it. Well, a lot of people are laboring under a delusion created by
groove-funk-soul.
"The best
group I've heard in recent years is the Sonny Rollins Quartet with Jim Hall.
It's a band! They listen to one another and function in such relation to each
other that the listener can relate too. They follow their own train of
thought—and it can be far out but still be valid.”
He then added his
opinion that sometimes the honesty of musicians is open to question when they
follow the call of the far-out "just because it hasn't been done before."
The drummer
shifted his aim a bit and continued. "I blame the Jazz critics a little
bit too. They're steered a lot of the time by the in-group of musicians. Then.
later, they try to retrace
their steps—when, for example, the musicians they once touted begin to be
successful and aren’t starving anymore."
Moving to record
reviewers, he declared, "I don't think they should become so devastatingly
critical. I agree that a lot of 12-inch albums shouldn't be made unless the
artist has enough to say to fill that particular LP, but it seems to me that
the reviewers all too frequently give five stars to the first LP of a line of
albums just because it's new, maybe, and the artist's first effort.
"I'm against
the star system. It's not fair. The reviewers are influencing the younger,
Jazz-buying public. And, after all, a review is just one man's opinion. They
don't necessarily have a star system on paintings.
"Jazz
criticism reminds me of the car industry. The new-model comes out, and maybe
this year it has a little more or a little less chrome or a different grille.
Everybody wants the new car even though their own may run just fine. To me,
critics have become car salesmen, only with music. They discard last year's
model too frequently."
Manne said the
influence of critics is felt keenly in another important way as well: praising
too highly and prematurely some new players, resulting sometimes in these
basically untried men regarding themselves, and being regarded by others. as
"new stars."
"This really
affects young musicians," Manne said. "They begin playing the way
they think they're expected to, not the way they really feel."
In a word to the
wise critic, Manne suggested this recipe:
"The real way
to find out how a man plays is to find out the feelings of those who've played
with him over a long period. You can't judge how a man, or a group, plays on
one hearing, or in one night when he may not be feeling his best. In a
20-minute concert it's hard to hear all the subtleties in a musician that have made
him popular over the years. It's just hard to hear what a musician does in 20
minutes."
He returned to his
distaste for the star system to elaborate:
"It used to
be," he recalled, "that I'd go down to the local record shop to hear
what just came out. This was in the days of 78s and, later, 10-inch LPs. At
that time, you'd buy the record. It didn't matter too much what it was. You'd buy it, period. Now, today, there may
be one side in the whole LP that's really good — and this one side may be lost
if the entire album doesn't measure up critically to it. This is one of the bad
things about starring albums. Maybe critics should judge the sides
individually. I feel if a guy does something worth the five-star rating on one
track — something truly outstanding, say — then the whole album should rate
five stars for one touch of greatness.
"Take Hawk's Body and Soul. Now this is one of the
greatest recorded jazz performances. But if this performance of Body and Soul were to be recorded today
and were released as one track in an LP that as a whole didn't measure up to
that performance, what would happen to that really great side? Would it get
lost in the star shuffle?"
Throughout Shelly
Manne's career in Jazz he has been identified
with searching out different
musical avenues of
expression. This was evident in his
work with the other ex-Stan Kenton
musicians, who, in the early 1950s, made the West Coast synonymous
with experimentalism in Jazz;
it was obvious
in Manne's first 10-inch LP on Contemporary when the drummer
led the way to explorations with such musicians as Russ Freeman and Jimmy
Giuffre. This is no less true today; only
the context has changed.
"I've always
been happy as long as I'm playing,” he said. "I still feel enthusiastic
about playing and experimenting and swinging."