CENTRAL AVENUE SOUNDS:
Art Farmer
Interviewed by Steven L. Isoardi
Completed under the auspices
of the
Oral History Program
University of California
Los Angeles
Copyright © 1995
The Regents of the University of California
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RESTRICTIONS ON THIS INTERVIEW
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LITERARY RIGHTS AND QUOTATION
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the University Library of the University of California,
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Photograph courtesy of Manolo Nebot .
CONTENTS
Biographical Summary vi
Interview History viii
TAPE NUMBER: I, Side One (November 22, 1991) 1
Upbringing in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Phoenix,
Arizona — Early musical influences — Moves to Los
Angeles at age sixteen with brother Addison —
First exposure to Central Avenue — Early days of
bebop and rock-pop — Preference for swing era and
big band music — Art and Addison take on odd jobs
to support themselves through high school — Art's
first musical gigs in Los Angeles with Horace
Henderson and Floyd Ray — Samuel Browne and
Jefferson High School's music education program.
TAPE NUMBER: I, Side Two (November 22, 1991) 29
Fellow musicians at Jefferson High School in the
forties — Juggling high school and professional
gigs — Cecil "Big Jay" McNeely.
TAPE NUMBER: II, Side One (November 23, 1991) 36
Tours with Johnny Otis band as first trumpet —
Farmer's lack of training on trumpet leads to his
dismissal from the band — Works as a janitor to
support music lessons in New York City — Returns
to Los Angeles to play with Jay McShann's band —
Mid-forties jazz scene in New York — Charlie
Parker and Miles Davis — Parker and Dizzy
Gillespie play bebop at Billy Berg's — More on
Parker and Davis — Bebop and the challenge it
provided musicians — Jam sessions on Central
Avenue — Problems with police on Central —
Community-based jazz of Central Avenue versus
today's mass spectacles — Problems with "black and
tan" clubs on Central — Playing in San Diego with
Horace Henderson.
TAPE NUMBER: II, Side Two (November 23, 1991) 68
Playing dance halls with various bands — Roy
Porter's band — Eric Dolphy — Charles Mingus —
Decline of Central Avenue in the late forties —
IV
Police opposition to interracial mixing — Middle-
class attitudes toward the world of jazz--Farmer
brothers gain membership in all-white American
Federation of Musicians local in Phoenix —
Amalgamation of Locals 767 and 47 — The Community
Symphony Orchestra — Anglo and Latino musicians on
Central Avenue.
TAPE NUMBER: III, Side One (November 23, 1991) 97
More on Big Jay McNeely — Sonny Criss — Frank
Morgan and Central Avenue Revisited — Narcotics
abuse in the jazz world — Art Pepper — More on
Frank Morgan — The accessibility of jazz
performers on Central Avenue — Its support of
musical styles other than jazz — The invisibility
of history on today's Central Avenue.
Index 115
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
PERSONAL HISTORY:
Born: August 21, 1928, Council Bluffs, Iowa.
Education: Jefferson High School, Los Angeles.
Spouse: Mechtilde Farmer, deceased; two children,
CAREER HISTORY:
Played flugelhorn and trumpet as sideman with:
Lionel Hampton
Horace Henderson
Johnny Otis
Oscar Pettiford
Floyd Ray
Gerald Wilson
Lester Young
SELECTED RECORDINGS:
Art
The Art Farmer Quintet
Art Farmer Septet
Art Worker
Blame It on My Youth
Brandenburg Concertos
Central Avenue Reunion
Farmer '
's Market
Foolish Memories
Gentle
Eyes
VI
In Concert
The Jazztet: Moment to Moment
Live at the Half Note
Maiden Voyage
Manhattan
Meet the Jazztet
Mirage
Modern
Art
On the
Road
Real T;
Lme
Something to Live For
To Sweden with Love
Two Trumpets
Warm Valley
When Farmer Met Gryce
You Make Me Smile
Vll
INTERVIEW HISTORY
INTERVIEWER:
Steven L. Isoardi, Interviewer, UCLA Oral History
Program. B.A. , Government, University of San Francisco;
M.A., Government, University of San Francisco; M.A. ,
Political Science, UCLA; Ph.D., Political Science, UCLA.
TIME AND SETTING OF INTERVIEW:
Place: Metropolitan Hotel, Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood,
California .
Dates, length of sessions: November 22, 1991 (44
minutes); November 23, 1991 (108).
Total number of recorded hours: 2.5
Persons present during interview: Farmer and Isoardi.
CONDUCT OF INTERVIEW:
This interview is one in a series designed to preserve
the spoken memories of individuals, primarily musicians,
who were raised near and/or performed on Los Angeles's
Central Avenue, especially from the late 1920s to the
mid-1950s. Musician and teacher William Green, his
student Steven Isoardi, and early project interviewee
Buddy Collette provided major inspiration for the UCLA
Oral History Program's inaugurating the Central Avenue
Sounds Oral History Project.
In preparing for the interview, Isoardi consulted jazz
histories, autobiographies, oral histories, relevant
jazz periodicals, documentary films, and back issues of
the California Eagle and the Los Angeles Sentinel.
The interview is organized chronologically, covering
Farmer's life through the early 1950s, with emphasis on
his early life in Phoenix, Arizona, the Central Avenue
jazz scene, his year at Jefferson High School in Los
Angeles, and his early career as a musician.
EDITING:
Alex Cline, editor, edited the interview. He checked
the verbatim transcript of the interview against the
original tape recordings, edited for punctuation.
Vlll
paragraphing, and spelling, and verified proper names.
Whenever possible, Cline checked the proper names of
nightclubs against articles and advertisements in back
issues of the California Eagle. Words and phrases
inserted by the editor have been bracketed.
Farmer reviewed the transcript. He verified proper
names and made minor corrections and additions.
Betsy A. Ryan, editor, prepared the table of contents,
biographical summary, and interview history. Lisa
Magee, editorial assistant, compiled the index.
SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS:
The original tape recordings of the interview are in the
university archives and are available under the
regulations governing the use of permanent noncurrent
records of the university. Records relating to the
interview are located in the office of the UCLA Oral
History Program.
IX
TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 22, 1991
ISOARDI: Okay, Art, we'll begin our Central Avenue
recollections. But perhaps since you came to Central
Avenue in your teens, maybe you can begin talking about
your beginnings, your roots before L.A.
FARMER: Yeah. Well, I was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa,
in August 1928. And my family moved from Council Bluffs to
Phoenix, Arizona, when my brother [Addison Farmer] and I
were four years old. And then when we were around the age
of sixteen we came to Los Angeles on a summer vacation, and
there was so much musical activity here that we just
decided to stay here.
ISOARDI: No kidding. That's what did it?
FARMER: Yeah. We had one more year to go in high school,
which was fortunate. And we just didn't want to go back to
Phoenix, to Phoenix High School, because we knew that we
wanted to be professional musicians, and this was where it
was happening.
ISOARDI: How did your music start? At what age?
FARMER: My music started before I started to go to school,
actually, because my mother [Hazel Stewart Farmer] used to
play the piano for the — My grandfather [Abner Stewart] was
a minister, and she used to play the piano in the church.
We lived in the parsonage, and I used to go to the church
with her in the afternoons when she was practicing the
coming week's hymns. And after she would play, well, then
I would get up on the piano and I would try to play, too.
I thought all you had to do was just put your fingers on
there and music would come out. [laughter] So that was my
introduction to music.
ISOARDI: So this was early. You're just a few years old.
FARMER: Yeah, maybe three or four years old or
something. And then when I started elementary school, then
I started to study the piano. A piano teacher would come
by the school once a week and give the kids lessons.
That was my first study.
ISOARDI: Was that something you wanted to do then? Your
mother didn't have to force you into it?
FARMER: No, no. She never had to force me. I don't know
why; there was just something that seemed very attractive
about music. She never had to say, "Come and practice your
lessons," no.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: No. I never felt it took that much. It wasn't a
chore. I didn't realize how much work it actually took.
It was just fun to me.
ISOARDI: Was Addison also playing then —
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: — and as interested as you?
FARMER: He wasn't quite as interested as I was, but it was
the — Actually, in reality, it was the tradition of black,
what we would call middle-class or some kind of middle-
class families to have a piano. Well, not only middle-
class but almost — There was a piano in houses in the
United States. This was before the days of television, you
know. Most houses had a piano, and somebody could play
something on the piano.
ISOARDI: People had to entertain themselves then.
FARMER: Yeah, right. Yeah, that's the way it was. You'd
play the boogie woogie, somebody 'd play the boogie
woogie. And always some kid had to practice piano. You
heard about that. "Practice your lesson, now."
[laughter] So it was common. But I think I was the most
interested at that time.
And then later on, a few years later, somebody — We
had an extra room that we rented out, and there was a man
who just happened to have a violin in his trunk. And he
said, "Well, I have this violin here. Maybe you might like
to have it." And I said, "Sure, thanks."
ISOARDI: He gave it to you?
FARMER: Yeah, he gave it to me. It had a little hole. A
rat had gnawed a hole in it by the F hole for some reason,
but that didn't mean anything. [laughter] And this was
during the time of the WPA [Works Progress Administration],
so the WPA had all kinds of people employed, you know.
Teachers teaching people — I remember going to an art
school where you could learn how to sculpt and paint.
ISOARDI: You did?
FARMER: Yeah. In Phoenix.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: And there was a man teaching the violin. I had
lessons from him. He was in the neighborhood, and he gave
me lessons on the violin. So I played that for about a
year, maybe a little longer. And I also studied in the
public school, the violin. I remember when our class
graduated from grammar school, I played the march for the
students to march in.
ISOARDI: On violin.
FARMER: Just me with my violin. [laughter] So that was
the first instrument.
Then there was a church there, a Catholic church,
that had a very active priest, and he organized a marching
band in the church. And I wanted to be in the band. I
couldn't play the violin in the band, so I wanted a horn,
but there were no horns available. The only horn that was
available was the bass tuba. So I said, "Okay, I'll take
that one."
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: And I played that for about a year. Then Pearl
Harbor came, and guys started being drafted, and other
horns became available, so I shifted to trumpet. Actually
I shifted to cornet at the start, because that was open,
and it was in the same key as the tuba and the fingering
was the same. So that's how I —
ISOARDI: So it was kind of a pragmatic choice, then.
FARMER: Yeah. I played that for maybe a couple of
years. Then I bought a trumpet and started playing with a
little school band around Phoenix, Arizona, and going out
and listening to the dance bands when they came through on
their one-nighters and got to meet some of the people.
ISOARDI: What kind of music were you interested in then?
I guess probably in your early years it was probably formal
training?
FARMER: Well, formal training —
ISOARDI: And church music?
FARMER: Well, church music, but my main — That was — I
realize that the formal training, like everyone who starts
on the instrument — If you have any kind of teacher, you
start with the same things that the classical players start
with. But my main interest at that time was swing music,
you know, the big bands, dance bands. That was what really
grabbed me.
ISOARDI: Who did you like?
FARMER: Well, what we heard on the radio the most was
Harry James and Benny Goodman. We heard quite a bit of
Duke Ellington and heard Stan Kenton and — let's see — Jimmie
Lunceford. As far as the trumpet, Harry James had the most
exposure. And I certainly liked him; I thought he was a
great player. I hadn't heard Louis Armstrong at that time.
ISOARDI: Not at all?
FARMER : No .
ISOARDI: No records?
FARMER: Well, no, I hadn't. I hadn't heard any records
when I was in Phoenix, and he didn't get any exposure on
the radio like other people did for one reason or the
other. Harry James, of course, was a very fine player, so
he was the first one that I was really made aware of. But
then, let's see, Artie Shaw's band came through on a one-
nighter, and Roy Eldridge was working with him.
ISOARDI: Oh, boy.
FARMER: I met him, and he was a wonderful person.
ISOARDI: Were you playing cornet then when you — ?
FARMER: Yes. He was a wonderful guy. He came by — No,
no, what happened, the band came in town a day early. I
was playing in a little club, and he came by there, and he
sat in on the drums first. And then he went to his room
and got his horn and brought his horn back and played. And
then the next night, well, at the dance hall, the Artie
Shaw band played the first dance from nine to one, and then
our band played from like two to five, because there was a
thing then called the swing shift, where there would be a
dance held for the people who were working on what is
called the swing shift at night — where they would get off
at midnight. They would get off from work at midnight and
then they would go to a dance. So we played then. So the
guys from Artie Shaw's band, they stood around and listened
to us .
ISOARDI: You guys must have been the best band in the
area .
FARMER: We were the best because there wasn't any other
one. [laughter] Of course, we really thought that we were
great, you know, but we didn't know. But these guys were
standing around listening. At that time I thought they
were listening in awe, but when I look back on it I figure
they were listening in shock. [laughter] But Roy was a
great person, you know.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: Yeah. In fact, a lot of guys — When the bands
came through, we would go to where they were staying and
introduce ourselves and ask them if they would like to come
by our house for a jam session.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: And some of them would, you know, and they were
very kind and gentle and helpful. There was never any kind
of stuff about "Oh, we're tired and too busy" or
something. They would come by.
ISOARDI: You can't imagine something like that happening
today — some of the finest musicians being in a neighborhood
and just sort of-- I mean, the opportunities don't seem to
be there as much.
FARMER: Well, no, but the bands don't exist anymore. But
there's a certain kind of community inside the jazz area,
jazz neighborhood, that's international. And there's a lot
of mutual help going on. There always has been. This is
what's kept the music alive until now, because it's been
handed down from one person to the next. And as long as a
young person would show that they were sincerely
interested, nobody would say, "Hey, go to hell," you know,
"I'm busy!" I never had that kind of experience with
anyone.
ISOARDI: Wonderful.
FARMER: So these guys would come by the house and they
would give us whatever help — You know, if you knew what
questions to ask, you would get the answers. A lot of
times you didn't know the questions. But whatever you'd
ask, they would help you.
And there was an army camp that I was working in after
school. Of course, they had an army band and they had the
marching band, and part of the marching band was a swing
band. I met some of the guys in the band, and they would
come by the house when we had a rehearsal. One of the guys
would write arrangements for us to play. He's still active
back in the East.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: Yeah. So it's another case of people being
helpful.
ISOARDI: Was Addison playing in the band then?
FARMER: Yeah, he was playing bass then. And through that
type of exposure to people in the jazz world and hearing
the music and loving it so much, we came over here on a
vacation because we wanted to hear more music. And then we
saw what was going on and we just couldn't see ourselves
going back to Phoenix.
ISOARDI: You and your brother came out by yourselves for
vacation?
FARMER: Yeah, yeah.
ISOARDI: So there was nothing like that in the Phoenix
area? There were no club scenes?
FARMER: No, there was just this little club that we were
playing in. It was like a little what we call a "bucket of
blood."
ISOARDI: Was that the name of it or your nickname for it?
FARMER: No, it was our nickname for it. [laughter] It
was just a place, you know, a little bar where you would go
in and play. I don't know what we got paid, but that
wasn't important, you know. Maybe five bucks a night or
something like that. But then there was so much happening
over here, we just couldn't go back. And the center of it
was Central Avenue. You know, there was like — If you come
from Phoenix — Phoenix still had wooden sidewalks in some
areas downtown, you know, like in the Western movies. If
you come from that to Los Angeles, to Central Avenue, well.
Central Avenue was very exotic. It was like going into a
bazaar. [laughter] It's like you're going directly from
Idaho to Baghdad or someplace. [laughter]
ISOARDI: So how did you get out here? Did you guys take
the bus? Or did you go by train?
FARMER: Well, my brother came first, and then I came over
with another guy who was coming over here on a vacation.
He had a car, so I just came over with him. My brother
already had rented a room in a house, you know, because a
lot of people rented rooms, so I just stayed with him.
ISOARDI: Where was that at? Do you remember?
FARMER: Oh, that was — let's see — around — It was right off
of Central Avenue, say, around in the fifties somewhere,
around Fifty-second Street, I think it was.
ISOARDI: Okay, so I guess you were near Lovejoy's or — ?
FARMER: Oh yeah.
ISOARDI: Yeah. Not too far from the big corner.
10
FARMER: Right. I can remember pretty well the first day,
that evening, I went to Central Avenue. That block where
the Downbeat [Club] and the Last Word [Cafe] and the Dunbar
[Hotel] — all those places — are, that was the block. And it
was crowded, you know. A lot of people were on the street,
you know. Almost like a promenade. [laughter] I saw all
these people. Like I remember seeing Howard McGhee; he was
standing there talking to some people. I saw Jimmy
Rushing, because the [Count] Basie band was in town. And I
said, "Wow!"
ISOARDI: So they were just hanging around.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. Of course, you heard there was a
place called Ivie's Chicken Shack. Ivie Anderson?
ISOARDI: Right.
FARMER: There was Lovejoy's and the Downbeat, the Last
Word, and this big club — Alabam. The Club Alabam.
ISOARDI: So you're walking down the avenue on your first
night. What's the first place you went into?
FARMER: I think the first place I went into was the Down-
beat. Howard McGhee was there with Teddy Edwards and
another tenor player by the name of J. D. King. And Roy
Porter was playing drums, and the bass player was named Bob
Dingbod.
ISOARDI: You didn't have any trouble getting in. I guess
you were only sixteen then.
11
FARMER: No. Well, I was sixteen, but we were tall for our
age. And it was crowded, so we just sort of walked in and
stood around and stood up next to the wall.
ISOARDI: Now, I guess they were playing bebop then.
FARMER: Yeah. As far as I know, that was the first
organized band out here that was really playing bebop.
Dizzy [Gillespie] and Bird [Charlie Parker] hadn't come out
here yet at that time. I think Dizzy had been out here
with other bands, but he and Bird hadn't come out with the
quintet yet.
ISOARDI: So those guys were playing bebop before Dizzy
Gillespie and Charlie Parker came out here.
FARMER: Absolutely. Certainly people were playing
bebop. We were playing it; we were trying to play it
before Dizzy and Bird got here.
ISOARDI: When was the first time you became aware of it?
Was it through records in Phoenix?
FARMER: Yeah, I guess the first time I became aware was
when I heard a record by Bill [Billy] Eckstine's band.
ISOARDI: Oh, yeah.
FARMER: Because he had these guys in the band. That was
the first time I became aware of it. But I didn't actually
hear any records with the quintet until I got here, and
then one of the kids played me a record with Dizzy
Gillespie. Oh, I'd heard Charlie Parker on the record with
12
Jay McShann also. But then the real concept of the music I
didn't become aware of until I heard a record with Dizzy
Gillespie and Charlie Parker and the quintet on something
like — I don't remember the name of the label, though.
ISOARDI: Savoy [Records]?
FARMER: No, it wasn't Savoy. I think it was Music Craft
or something like that. It was Guild. I think it was
Guild. They had tunes like "Hot House" on it. So that was
the first thing.
ISOARDI: Well, it must have been a shock in a way, then,
musically walking into the Downbeat and hearing that group.
FARMER: Well, it was a shock, certainly, but it wasn't a —
It just sounded good to me. It didn't sound like — I
didn't have to ask myself, "Gee, what is this? Do I like
it or don't I like it?" because my mind was completely open
at that time. I still hadn't even heard Louis Armstrong,
but I hadn't heard anything that I didn't like. Everything
I heard I liked.
But it was just — At this time was the beginning of,
let's call it, at the time, the bebop era, but it was also
the beginning of the rock era in a certain sense, rock-pop,
instrumentally . Across the street from the Downbeat was a
place called the Last Word, and Jack McVea had a band over
there. There was a guy in Los Angeles by the name of Joe
Liggins. He had a group called Joe Liggins and the
13
Honeydr ippers .
ISOARDI: Right, wrote that great song.
FARMER: So you'd call this — I guess you might call this
like a jump band, a jump group.
ISOARDI: So they were going on when you got there?
FARMER: Yeah. Well, they had this very popular record
called "The Honeydr ipper , " and it was very, very simple
music. It didn't have any of the harmonic complexity that
bebop had to it, but it was very popular. So while the be-
bop thing was going in one direction, which was musically
complex and has some quality to it, I would say, well, this
other thing was going in a completely different
direction. Very simple, and people could — The average
person could get something out of it without any effort,
you know.
ISOARDI: Right, right.
FARMER: So that's where things started going in a
different direction.
ISOARDI: So you sort of see it as the music being sort of
one, say, swing up till that time, and then sort of
splitting off like that.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. Well, that kind of music didn't have
any interest to me.
ISOARDI: Not at all?
FARMER: No, not at all. Because my attraction to music
basically was the swing era with the big bands — Jimmie
14
Lunceford and Count Basie and Duke Ellington — and that was
a high level of music to me. It had a lot of things going
on. And things like "The Honeydr ipper " — It was just
completely watered down. It's like TV; it's watered down
to the lowest common denominator, something that's made for
idiots, you know, for morons. That's what the whole pop
music has become.
Now we're at what we call rap, which has less music in
it than any music of all time. You know, a very well known
classical composer and teacher named [Paul] Hindemith has a
book called — what is it called? — Elementary Training for
Musicians . And it begins, he says, "Music has three
elements: rhythm, melody, and harmony, and they are
important in that order." But if you take rap music, it
only has one. That's rhythm. Now, the guys are saying
their little speech, their poems, in a monotone. There's
no melody there. There's no harmony. It's just that
rhythm and the words. So that's what it's become.
ISOARDI: But it almost seems — It strikes me, too, that in
a way it makes sense, because music plays much less of a
role in the school systems now, it seems.
FARMER: It does.
ISOARDI: So they don't have the instruments, and they
don't have the Sam Brownes, and they don't have people
encouraging them to develop musically and play. So in a
sense they're producing what music they can with what
15
they've got, which is essentially just their voice without
any —
FARMER: Yeah, well, there's a lot of these kids — A lot of
school dropouts never cared about anything anyway. But
anyway, they're looking for a means to express
themselves. They have that, so I can't blame them.
They're dealing with what they have to deal with.
But the music that I liked was more complex. The big
band music had a lot of depth and profundity to it to me.
So it was a natural movement from big band to bebop as far
as I was concerned. It really pleased me. Plus the fact
that at the end of the war [World War II], big bands
started fading away because of one reason or the other.
And one of the reasons was the music became too complex for
the audience, for one thing. The economic situation was
against it — the cost of moving a band around the country.
Plus the fact that the record companies and the promoters
thought that they could make as much money with five pieces
as they could make with sixteen or seventeen. They could
put a singer in the front. Until then, well, the singer
was just someone who would sit up there on the bandstand
and smile and got up and sang one chorus on a song every
now and then. That goes for Frank Sinatra and whoever else
was up there. They would just get up and sing one chorus
and sit back down again. But then they became more and
16
more popular and salable. So the big bands faded away.
And in order to stay in music, you had to be able to work
in the small group. To work in a small group, you had to
be able to play a decent solo. My first ambition was just
to be a member of that sound in a big band. I would have
been very happy just to be a second or third or fourth or
first trumpet player, whatever. At that particular time, I
would say it was beyond my dreams that I would ever become
a soloist. I would be very happy just to be in it, at least
to start off with. But then in order to stay in music I had
to be able to play solos, so one thing led to another.
ISOARDI: So let me take you back then to that first night
on Central. Did you spend the whole night at the
Downbeat? Or you cruised down the avenue a little bit?
FARMER: Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. I was going from one
place to another.
ISOARDI: To see what was there.
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: Did any other places strike you other than the
Downbeat in terms of what you heard that night?
FARMER: Well, I didn't really go into the Alabam, but I
passed by there. I heard the big band sound coming out.
That was a place where you had to buy some kind of ticket
to go in. I couldn't buy a ticket, you know. And I went
into the Last Word and listened to Jack McVea, who had more
17
of a sort of a jump band entertainment type of thing, which
wasn't as interesting to me as what was happening with
Howard's group. Plus, Howard was a great trumpet player.
That's about my only memories for the first night. And
there were a lot of people our age hanging around. One
thing led to another; we would meet guys. But that was the
heart of it right there.
ISOARDI: How were you and your brother surviving?
FARMER: Well, we would get some jobs, but that first
summer — Well, there was still work available, because the
war was winding down. We got jobs doing other kinds of
work. I remember me having a job in a cold storage plant.
[ laughter ]
ISOARDI: Oh, for the summer that might not have been so
bad. [laughter]
FARMER: Stacking crates of fruit and vegetables. We were
kids, you know; we didn't take anything seriously. A lot
of the time we didn't have any money, and we got thrown out
of rooms and things. We got fired from that job because we
started throwing these potatoes at each other. [laughter]
Me and my brother and a couple of other guys, we just had a
little fight in there. [laughter]
ISOARDI: What did your folks think about all this?
FARMER: Well, they — My mother — My father [James Arthur
Farmer] was dead then. We were living with my mother in
18
Arizona. She said, "Well, if you want to stay over there —
Well, I wish you'd come home, but if you're going to stay
there you have to go to school and get your high school
diploma." So we promised her we would do that. So she
said, "Okay." So that was in the summer. When school
opened, well, we went over to Jeff [Jefferson High School]
and enrolled, which was — I'm glad we did. [laughter]
A lot of good players were still in the army, and
there were still some big bands around getting some
shows. I think the first job that I got in Los Angeles was
with Horace Henderson. Horace Henderson was the brother of
Fletcher [Henderson]. I don't remember how I met him. I
think that he came by Jeff one day, and I was out on the
playground. He said, "Come over here." I walked over
there, and he said, "You're Arthur Farmer?"
I said, "Yeah."
He said, "Well, I got a band. I need a trumpet
player."
ISOARDI: Whoa. So who hipped him to you?
FARMER: I don't know how that happened. You know, looking
back, I can't remember now. But something like that came
up. And I got some work with him. And one thing leads to
another, and I would work with Floyd Ray. These were the
two people that I worked with in that first year.
ISOARDI: So you were able to pay your way, then.
19
musically?
FARMER: Well, sometimes. [laughter] It wasn't that easy.
ISOARDI: You'd have to move fast.
FARMER: It wasn't that easy, because sometimes we would
work and wouldn't get paid, you know. Things started
getting weird. I remember I went down to San Diego with
Horace Henderson and didn't get paid. And I remember
working somewhere around here with Floyd Ray and didn't get
paid. That would happen sometimes.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: The club owners were skipping out?
FARMER: Club owners skipped out, or the people who would
put on the dance, they skipped out. That was part of the
business, and it still is. But it didn't take much to stay
alive. Rent was very cheap, you know, and food was
cheap. If you could get a gig every now and then, you
could make it — if you didn't have any habits. We were too
young to have any bad habits. [laughter]
ISOARDI: Did you notice bad habits — people with bad
habits? Or was it something you just never crossed?
FARMER: That first year, I didn't notice. I heard about
it, but I didn't see any of it. I didn't see anybody doing
anything.
ISOARDI: So what was Jeff like?
20
FARMER: Well, Jeff to us was a great school, because we
had gone to the schools in Arizona which were totally
segregated then and very limited, which I never will be
able to overcome — the handicap that you get from that kind
of education. Because I wanted to study music. There was
nobody there that could teach me. I never had a trumpet
lesson.
ISOARDI: In high school in Phoenix? There was no music at
all?
FARMER: No. In the high school that we went to, there was
one lady, and she was teaching English and home economics
and music. She could play piano, but she didn't know
anything about trumpet at all. And one thing she told me
one day I never will forget. She said, "Boy, you played
more wrong notes than anyone I ever heard in my life."
[laughter] That was the only thing I ever learned from
her. And she meant well, but she just didn't have the
knowledge, you know. She couldn't tell me what to do. I
developed bad habits. And when you develop bad habits at
an early age, and playing the trumpet is a physical thing,
it's hard to overcome that. You know, if a guy starts off
from the ground floor with the right type of teacher, he's
really at an advantage. But if you're in that kind of
environment and it — The system wasn't the only thing at
fault, but we didn't like living in a segregated
21
environment where-- There were no professional people in
this environment other than teachers and doctors and
preachers and things like that. No one said, "Well, look,
if you want to be a musician, you have to take lessons." I
never knew you had to take a lesson. I didn't go out and —
If I had known that, maybe I could have found some white
person that might teach me for a couple of bucks or
something, but I didn't ever feel that was necessary.
ISOARDI: Really? So you taught yourself cornet?
FARMER: Yeah. Yeah. Bad habits. Like pushing the horn
into my mouth, you know, pressure and all, when your teeth
get loose and you get holes and sores on your lips. Well,
I had to pay for that later on.
ISOARDI: Geez. You know, when I started studying
saxophone a while ago with Bill Green, the first thing he
said to me was, when I was going to go pick up this horn,
he said, "Don't even open the case." He said, "Don't touch
anything." [laughter] And he said, "No bad habits."
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. So we came over here and it was a
whole new world, this big school there with all kinds of
white people, black people, Chinese, Mexican. Everybody
was in this school.
ISOARDI: Jefferson is completely integrated.
FARMER: Completely integrated. They had classes where you
could study harmony. They had this big band. You could
22
sign up for the big band and go in there and learn how to
play with other people. It was just completely different
for us. And you'd meet people your age who were trying to
do the same thing, and we would exchange ideas, of
course. So it was great.
And [Samuel] Browne was a nice guy. I think one of
the things that he — Well, first of all, I ought to say
that he was really ahead of his time. To my knowledge,
this was the only school in the country that had a high
school swing band.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: Yeah. Back in Chicago, there were two schools
there that a lot of great jazz players came out of. One
was this school called Wendell Phillips [High School] that
Lionel Hampton went to and other people his age, and a
school called Du Sable [High School]. Like Johnny Griffin
went to Du Sable, and a lot of other guys. You know, these
schools — people like Ray Nance went to these schools.
Numerous people. But I think that they had marching
bands. I don't think that they had swing bands. I might
be wrong.
ISOARDI: Gee, that surprises me. New York, no swing band?
FARMER : No .
ISOARDI: Extraordinary. It just seems to me —
FARMER: Well, see, this kind of music wasn't regarded as
23
serious music in the education system. In Texas, at North
Texas State [University], they have a very good musical
program there, and I think they started early there. But
this was in college. In colleges, like in the southern
part of the United States — like in Alabama in the black
schools — you had swing bands. Erskine Hawkins, who became
popular, brought a band from the school, Bama State
[Alabama State University]. There was one. And then there
were some other schools like — Let's see, Jimmie Lunceford
was a schoolteacher in Tennessee.
ISOARDI: That's right. That's right.
FARMER: He brought a band out. But these were colleges.
To my knowledge, this was the first high school that had
anything like this going on, where they had an organized
thing that was part of the curriculum. So we would play —
We'd have an hour every day, I think. We would play in
this band. We would go around and not only learn to play
in that type of a setting, but we would have exposure to
audiences also, because we would go around to other schools
in this area and play concerts.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: Yeah, during the school day.
ISOARDI: Extraordinary opportunity.
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: So you would take, I guess, an hour of big band.
24
which Sam Browne conducted.
FARMER : Yeah .
ISOARDI: And there were other music courses, as well, you
could take.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah.
ISOARDI: A full program.
FARMER: Yeah, right. Right. So I was sorry that we came
here on the last year. If we'd been here earlier, it
certainly wouldn't have hurt. [laughter] But when we were
in Phoenix, we didn't know anything about this.
ISOARDI: Well, how much of your school day, then, was
devoted to music? It must have been a few hours at least.
FARMER: Oh, maybe a couple of hours a day. But I just
remember big band and harmony — I would say harmony and
theory. But other guys were studying arranging, also.
Some of the students were making arrangements for the big
band.
ISOARDI: Geez! What a place!
FARMER: You know, guys who had been there for a year or so
in front of us — they were at the level then that they could
write arrangements for the big band. And they could hear
their stuff played then. So they were really at least
thirty years ahead of the rest of the United States.
ISOARDI: Was he the only one teaching music?
FARMER: No. No, there were other people teaching music.
25
Sure. I was in the class of a woman that was teaching
harmony and theory by the name of Mrs. Rappaport. There
were other music classes which were —
ISOARDI: What was Sam Browne like?
FARMER: He was a very quiet person. He kept order by his
personality. He never had to shout at anyone. He never
had to say, "Do this or do that" and you didn't do this and
you didn't do that. Somehow you just felt that you should
do it. Otherwise you just felt that you were in the wrong
place. This was a serious thing. And everyone who was
there really wanted to work. They wanted to do what — They
wanted to play music, otherwise they wouldn't be there. So
he didn't have any problem with the kids.
ISOARDI: I saw a photograph of him, I guess it was in the
old California Eagle, when I was going through the old
issues. It must have been in the early thirties. In fact,
I think it was about the time he'd been hired or something
like that. And it was a very young Sam Browne, but his
picture was — I don't know if I would say he was austere,
but certainly serious.
FARMER: Yeah. Well, he was — Here's his picture. I guess
this was taken —
ISOARDI: Oh, this is from yesterday's memorial service.
FARMER: Yeah. Well, he was a quiet guy. You know, like
26
some people do things, and they put their name in front,
say, like "Sam Browne, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," and
they become well known, you know. But he never did seem to
be going out for that kind of publicity. You know, he
loved music, and he wanted to help kids.
ISOARDI: So music was always first for him.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. He wasn't like trying to blow his own
horn, let's say. And he would bring other people — Like if
somebody came into the town that he knew, he would go
around and tell them to come around and talk to the kids.
ISOARDI: Some of the musicians?
FARMER: Yeah. He would get the people to come around and
play what we'd call an assembly for the whole student body--
free, of course — and then talk to the band. Leave
themselves open, like you could ask them any questions that
would come to your mind.
ISOARDI: Wonderful experience. Do you remember any guys
that you saw who came out to school?
FARMER: Well, during the time I was there, there was Slim
Gaillard and a bass player named Bam [Tiny Brown]. They
came by one day and played. They were very popular at that
time. And then there was an arranger named Wilbur
Barranco. He came by one day and played a record that he
had just made with an all-star band. It had Dizzy
Gillespie on it and other people like that. And he
27
explained to us how it came to be and things about getting
these people and the trouble it would cause everybody to
come to be available at the same time.
28
TAPE NUMBER: I, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 22, 1991
ISOARDI: Do you remember who some of the guys were at Jeff
that you played with there, who were in the band?
FARMER: Sonny Criss was there. I guess he was the best
known. Ernie Andrews, the singer, was there.
ISOARDI: Really, when you were there?
FARMER: Yeah, I saw him yesterday. He was in our class,
summer of '46, the Helvetians — you know, every class has a
name. There was a drummer by the name of Ed Thigpen, who
was the year under us.
ISOARDI: Oh, really?
FARMER : Yeah .
ISOARDI: He was a Jeff man? I didn't know that.
FARMER: Yeah, he was. But he was in the class under us.
There was a tenor player named Hadley Caliman, who is now a
teacher at a conservatory up in Seattle, Washington.
Another tenor player by the name of Joe Howard. I don't
know what happened — I think he's dead now — but he was
writing very nice arrangements by then. Alto saxophone
player named James Robinson. We called him "Sweet Pea."
He was a very good player. He's not alive anymore,
either. Let's see. These are the people that I remember
who played very well. There were others around there, and
their names don't come to me right now, though.
29
ISOARDI: Did any of you guys form your own groups or
rehearsal bands? Or was it mostly you going out — ? By this
time you were out playing in commercial bands?
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: It was mostly that, eh?
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: That must have been a bit tough. I mean, you're
going out playing gigs at night, and then you've got to
come —
FARMER: [laughter] The worst thing I remember was hanging
out all night-- Of course, the clubs would close around one
or two o'clock, and then the first class was physical ed .
ISOARDI: Oh, no! [laughter] That's brutal.
FARMER: And I remember one thing that really — The lowest
thing to me was trying to climb a rope.
ISOARDI: Probably like — Oh, no.
FARMER: Yeah. And I didn't have the build for it
anyway. I remember one little guy would scamper up that
rope like a monkey, you know, and I'm there trying to —
[laughter] I couldn't get up there to save my neck.
[laughter] And, well, I was starting to work and get these
jobs, and I had to go out of town sometimes for a week or
two. Well, my brother and I, we were living by ourselves,
so [when] we couldn't go to school, we would just write our
own excuses. I'd say, "Please excuse my boy today because
30
he has to do such and such a thing." And sign it "Mrs.
Hazel Farmer," you know. Because the school didn't know we
were living by ourselves.
ISOARDI: Oh, really?
FARMER: You know, they didn't know what we were into.
ISOARDI: So you applied forging your mother's name on all
the documents.
FARMER: I don't remember forging her name as far as
applying, but I remember forging her name on these
excuses .
So we didn't have any trouble. We'd go out for a week
or two, go to San Diego or San Francisco or whatever,
[laughter] Come back and go back to school, everything is
okay. Then I got this offer to go on the road with the
Johnny Otis band and the school year wasn't out yet. And my
mother had told me I've got to get that diploma. So I went
to the principal and I told him, I said, "Look, I have this
chance to go on the road with this band. This is the
beginning of my career and I really don't want to lose it.
I really need this. If my work has been okay, I would like
to be able to get my diploma. I would like you to please
consider this and write a letter to my mother to that
effect." And the guy was nice enough to do it.
ISOARDI: Oh, really?
31
FARMER: And he said in his letter, he said, "If all the
boys were like your two boys, this school would be a better
school." And I said, "Would you put that diploma in the
safe just in case you're no longer here?" And I went back
there ten years later, and that diploma was in the safe.
ISOARDI: Oh, geez! [laughter]
FARMER: It was more than ten years. It was more than ten
years. I came out here with Gerry Mulligan's group like
around '58. This was in '46 when I left. I came back in
'58, and that diploma was in the safe, and I went over there
and got it. The principal was gone. Sam Browne was gone.
He was at another school. But the diploma was in the
safe. And I got it.
ISOARDI: [laughter] Well, that's good. Any other thoughts
on Jeff that come to mind and we should know about?
FARMER: Well, Jeff always had a great track team. You
know, Jeff's track team was feared throughout the whole Los
Angeles school system. And somebody at this funeral
yesterday said the swing band was just like the track
team. It was held in just as much awe as the track team —
going all around the schools playing, you know. Because
none of the schools had anything like this band. And the
track team was beating everybody up. But I remember about
Jeff, like, the saying was if one of the schools came to
Jeff and won, they would have to fight their way home.
32
[laughter] If they won the match, they'd have to fight
going home.
ISOARDI: [laughter] That's good. That's good.
FARMER: But it was a nice thing. It was a pleasant
memory. Of course, we were, let's say, operating at a
handicap compared to the rest of the kids, because we just
couldn't go home and tell our parents that we needed money
to buy the class ring or the class sweater or something like
that. But that was a minor nuisance, you know, compared to —
I'd still rather have been here than have been in Phoenix at
that time.
ISOARDI: Yeah, once you got out of it.
FARMER: You know, meeting these guys and exchanging ideas
was just a great thing. Big Jay McNeely was there. "Cecil"
we called him.
ISOARDI: Yeah. Do you have any memories of him?
FARMER: Yeah. I think he was in the class in front of us,
but — Was he? Yeah, I think he was in the class in front of
us. But I was in the harmony class with him. And my memory
is not so clear, but somehow the story is there that he
asked the teacher, "Well, how much money do you make?" And
the teacher told him. And he said, "Well, I already make
more money than you. How do you think you can teach me
anything?"
ISOARDI: [laughter] Oh, no, really? Oh, geez ! [laughter]
33
FARMER: But he wasn't in the band. He wasn't in the swing
band.
ISOARDI: Why not?
FARMER: I don't know. Maybe he didn't want to be. Maybe
he felt he didn't have to be there. Maybe he felt he was
too hip for that. [laughter]
ISOARDI: [laughter] Gee, you know, I think I remember him
telling — I think he bounced around from school to school,
because he started — I think it was at Jordan [High School]
in Watts.
FARMER: Yeah, Jordan, yeah.
ISOARDI: And then he just bounced around, I guess, looking
for different teachers. Well, that's a funny story.
[ laughter ]
FARMER: But he had his little group, and he was working
around town. He was getting jobs and things, you know. The
scale was sixty dollars a week, you know, for a sideman.
Sixty dollars. And that was big money.
ISOARDI: That was in the top bands?
FARMER: Yeah, well, that was the union scale like if you
were working at the Downbeat or someplace like that.
ISOARDI: Yeah, that's good money.
FARMER: Yeah. So he was getting that much, because the
union was strong then.
ISOARDI: [laughter] I like that story. Oh, geez.
34
FARMER: Let's see, I'm trying to think if there was
anything else.
ISOARDI: Well, we can stop it there.
FARMER: Yeah, that's all I can think about Jeff for the
time being.
ISOARDI: Okay. We'll resume tomorrow, then.
35
TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 23, 1991
ISOARDI: Okay, Art. I think we stopped yesterday with
your year at Jefferson High School.
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: What comes after Jeff, then?
FARMER: Well, there was a band at the [Club] Alabam.
Johnny Otis had a big band that was sort of styled after
the Count Basie band: you know, five reeds, four trumpets,
four trombones, and four rhythm.
ISOARDI: Were there charts like Basie?
FARMER: Yeah, well, actually Basie sent him some charts
that Basie didn't want to play. You know, Basie would buy
arrangements and play them, and if he didn't like them for
one reason or another, he would put them in the back of the
book or send them to Johnny Otis or Billy Eckstine or
somebody like that, you know. So they had been working at
the Alabam steady for some time. I don't know how long,
but when I came to L.A. they were working there. But
when they got ready to go on the road, some of the guys
didn't want to leave, so they left an opening in the
trumpet section. He sounded me and asked me did I want to
go, and I said certainly. So that was my first chance to
go back east.
ISOARDI: How did he know about you?
36
FARMER: Well, I'd been playing around with various other
bands in the area — like I said, Floyd Ray and Horace
Henderson. I don't know who else. It's not a very large
community of people, so word gets around. Just like Horace
Henderson sounded on me when I was still in school.
ISOARDI: Yeah.
FARMER: I don't remember exactly how it happened, but it
seems to me like he just — I was on the playground, and
somebody said, "Can I talk to you for a minute?" you know,
and sounded me.
ISOARDI: Well, you must have been damn good by then; the
word was getting around.
FARMER: I wasn't very good, but you see, the war was still
on really, and a lot of the good guys were still in the
army.
ISOARDI: Yeah. But up to this time you hadn't had much
formal training on trumpet.
FARMER: I hadn't had any on the trumpet.
ISOARDI: Completely self-taught?
FARMER: Yeah, completely.
ISOARDI: Extraordinary.
FARMER: Yeah, but I paid for it later, you know.
ISOARDI: [laughter] Well, some people would find that
hard to believe listening to your albums. [laughter]
FARMER: But anyway, he sounded me, and I said yeah. In
37
fact, I went in — I was — With the confidence of youth
because I was still about sixteen or seventeen or something
like that, I asked for a certain price, and I got what I
asked for. It turned out that I was getting more than some
of the other guys were getting, which I paid for later on,
too. [laughter] But anyway, that was the beginning.
That's how I happened to have left California. And of
course, as I told you yesterday, I went to the school and
told them that this was my chance to get started and I
really needed to take it, and they said that they
understood. We had this agreement that they would — The
principal wrote this letter to my mother [Hazel Stewart
Farmer] and said he would put the diploma in the safe.
ISOARDI: Oh, yeah, and hold it for you forever.
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: What was Johnny Otis like as a bandleader?
FARMER: Johnny was a fine guy. I didn't have any problem
with Johnny at all. Johnny loved music. He loved to
swing. You know, he was really into jazz then. Later on
he got into this what we called "barrelhouse." He had a
place in Watts called the Barrelhouse, which was really a
rock and roll type of thing.
ISOARDI: That was his own place?
FARMER: Yeah. Yeah. At this time he was really into
swing. But when the big bands went by the wayside, well.
38
then he went into rock and roll.
ISOARDI: With still a big band setup but doing rock and
roll?
FARMER: No, no, with small groups, like six or seven
pieces with whining guitars and screaming tenors. And he
had—
ISOARDI: A lot of honking.
FARMER: Yeah, a lot of honking. He had success with that,
too. He couldn't make it with the big band thing because
the time was just past for big bands. So he changed. And,
let's see, I lasted with Johnny for a few months.
ISOARDI: All on the road?
FARMER: Yeah. Well, we went from New York directly to
Chicago, and we worked in a club there that was owned by
Earl nines called the El Grotto. We worked there for about
three months. Then we went to New York City and worked at
the Apollo Theatre. And at the Apollo Theatre he gave me
my notice, my two weeks' notice, which he was required to
do. You know, like if you want to fire someone, you have
to give them two weeks' notice. And the reason why he did
that was because he said, "I hope there's no hard feelings,
but when I hired you I hired you as a first trumpet player,
but you are unable to do the work, so I have to get someone
who can." And the people that were coming out of the army
were more competent than me. Now, what happened — This is
39
when I started paying for my lack of training, because I
was playing with bad habits, and it hurt my lips, and I
couldn't hardly play the parts anymore. You know, I
developed a hole in the lip, and it just wasn't
happening. So he was perfectly right to do what he did.
So I decided — My final week was in Detroit. Then I
went back to New York, and I was talking to some other
trumpet players--some pros who really knew what was going
on. They recommended a teacher that I should go see. And
I went to see this teacher, who was very nice. He said,
"Well, what are you going to do?" I said, "Well, I don't
have any job anymore so I guess I'll go back to Los Angeles
or back to Phoenix." And he said, "Well, I think you
should stay here and get your playing in order before you
start talking about going someplace else. What good is it
going to do you to go back to Phoenix or to Los Angeles?"
So I could see the point.
So I started working as a janitor in order to pay for
my keep and pay for my lessons. I did that for about a
year or so, and then I got a job with — Or about at least
two years. My brother [Addison P'armer] — see, I had a twin
brother — was playing with Jay McShann ' s band, and an
opening came up in that band, and he got me in that. And
that's how I got back to Los Angeles. This must have been
around 1948 or something like that when I came back to Los
40
Angeles .
ISOARDI: How long were you in New York?
FARMER: Oh, I was in New York doing this study period for
at least maybe two years. Yeah, from November of '46
until, let's say, around the spring or summer of '48.
Yeah.
ISOARDI: And a lot of woodshedding, I guess, working as a
janitor and then woodshedding like crazy?
FARMER: Yeah, sure and spending a lot of time listening.
ISOARDI: Oh, geez, back then you must have gone out on
Fifty-second Street.
FARMER: Yeah, Fifty-second Street was still happening.
And I remember at one time I was working as a janitor at
the Radio City Music Hall. And, you know, you could get a
janitor job just like that. It only paid twenty-eight
dollars a week, you know, and there was a lot of
turnover. Your work started around midnight, so if I was
working at Radio City — I remember working at Radio City
Music Hall, which was like on Fiftieth Street, a couple of
blocks from Fifty-second Street. I got to work late one
time too many at the Radio City, so the guy fired me. So I
went right across the street to the RCA building and got a
job over there the same night. [laughter] Of course,
Dizzy [Gillespie] was there with his band, and Charlie
Parker and Miles Davis were there also, so there was just
41
too much to hear, you know. I would get absorbed and be
late. It could happen.
ISOARDI: Now, you had a jolt when you came to L.A. from
Phoenix and you saw Central [Avenue],
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: After having spent a few years in New York, that
was an amazing scene on Fifty-second Street then.
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: But how would you compare, say, the Central
Avenue scene and the New York scene?
FARMER: Well, the New York scene was more intense because
these real, true giants were right there in one little
small area. Here there was like — When I first came to Los
Angeles, Howard McGhee was at the Downbeat [Club]. Dizzy
Gillespie and Charlie Parker hadn't come out yet. We'd
heard about them, but Howard McGhee was the major
nationally known jazz star that was living and playing in
Los Angeles at that time. So they had the run of the whole
town. If you went to New York, well, you had Dizzy here
and Charlie Parker here, and Coleman Hawkins across the
street. Art Tatum next door. You know, it was much more
happening.
ISOARDI: Yeah.
FARMER: And then you could go uptown to Harlem and go to
the Apollo Theatre and sit there all day long just like you
42
could do here. You could pay one admission and sit there
all day long and listen to whatever band was there. So
there's a lot to absorb. But I met Charlie Parker and
Miles Davis when they first came out here.
ISOARDI: Before you'd gone back there?
FARMER: Yeah, yeah.
ISOARDI: How did that happen?
FARMER: Well, there was a tenor player named — Well, the
tenor player with Howard McGhee, Teddy Edwards, I met him,
and there was another tenor player named Gene Montgomery
who was a close friend of Teddy's, and he used to run the
Sunday — They had Sunday afternoon matinee jam sessions at
the Downbeat on Central Avenue, and he was what we would
call the session master. The club would hire one man to
coordinate the session to see that there weren't too many
guys on the stand at one time and keep things moving
along. So I met him. He was a few years older than we
were. But his house was — It was off of Central Avenue.
It was east of Central Avenue around Wadsworth [Avenue] or
something like that, around Vernon Avenue.
ISOARDI: Yeah.
FARMER: But anyway, on the way home from school in the
afternoon, well, we just got in the habit of stopping by
his house on the way to where we lived at the time, which
was Fifty-fifth [Street] and Avalon [Boulevard]. And I met
43
Charlie Parker over there. He was a very nice,
approachable person. You know, to me he was not really a
monster at all; he was just a nice guy. I went by there
one day, and he told me, he said, "Hey, you know the
trumpet player — " No, Charlie Parker didn't tell me this,
but Gene told me, "Hey, a trumpet player named Miles Davis
came by here today. He was looking for Charlie Parker."
I said, "Oh, yeah?"
"Yeah." Well, we knew Miles because he had made some
records with Charlie Parker — "Now's the Time" and "Billie's
Bounce" and things like that. And he said, "Yeah, I came
out here with Benny Carter's band because I know Charlie
Parker came out here, and I'd go anyplace where Charlie
Parker was, because you can learn so much." He said, "I
would go to Africa. "Well, our image of Africa at that
time was people with bones in their nose, you know. Nobody
would have thought about going to Africa. He said, "I
would go to Africa if Charlie Parker was there because you
could learn so much."
And then where I actually met him was at the union,
[American Federation of Musicians Local] 767. I guess he
went there to file his transfer or something, because you
had to file your transfer if you were going to work on what
we'd call a location job, like to work in one place for a
week or two or something. And Benny Carter was working at
44
some ballroom somewhere. So Miles was there, and he was
talking. The first time I saw him, he was talking to
maybe a few guys. They were asking him questions about
what's going on back east. There was a trumpet player who
came out here with Tiny Bradshaw named Sammy Yates, and
Yates knew Miles from back east. And they were asking
him about various aspects of this new music, which was
still new to a lot of people. That's when I first met
Miles.
And like I said, I met Charlie Parker at Gene's
house. Charlie Parker was a kind of a nomad. This was
after Dizzy left, because Dizzy fired him and gave him his
fare home, gave him his ticket. He cashed the ticket in
and spent the money, so he was sort of stranded here. And
eventually-- Well, my brother and I, we had a sort of a
large room on Fifty-fifth Street and Avalon, and eventually
Charlie Parker was over there staying with us sometimes.
Like we had two twin beds and a couch, so he was sleeping
on the couch. He left there and he went someplace else.
Eventually he was working with Howard McGhee ' s band in what
we called Little Tokyo. He had just had a nervous
breakdown, and somehow the bed caught on fire in the hotel
room, and he went down to the lobby with no clothes on.
The next thing, he was in Camarillo.
ISOARDI: State hospital.
45
FARMER: Yeah. But my memories of Charlie Parker were all
very positive. I remember we used to — We would walk the
streets on Central Avenue. One night we went up to
Lovejoy's. He always had his horn with him. And he went
up there. There was one guy playing the piano like what we
would call an old-timer, playing music that would fit the
silent movies — stride music, or stride piano and stuff.
And he just took out his horn and started playing. After
that, well, then we were walking back to the house, and I
told him, "Hey, you know, you really surprised me playing
with somebody like that."
ISOARDI: He just fit into the guy's style?
FARMER: Yeah. I said, "You really surprised me playing
with somebody like that," because Charlie Parker was
regarded as the god of the future, you know. And he's
playing with this guy, what we would call like, you know,
just an amateur. And he said, "Well, you know, if you're
trying to do something, you take advantage of any occasion.
Go ahead, ignore that other stuff. That doesn't mean
anything. You have to concentrate on what you're trying to
put together yourself." So I always kept that in my mind.
And none of us had any money. My brother was working
sometimes because the bass players would get more work than
trumpet players, you know, because many little places would
have a trio. So sometimes Charlie Parker would say, "Loan
46
me five dollars" or "Loan me ten dollars. I'll pay you
back tomorrow." He always paid him back.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: Always. You know, he developed a reputation of
being a sort of a swindler and borrowing money and never
paying people and all sorts of negative things like that,
but that never happened.
And I remember one night we were walking on — We would
walk on Central Avenue and go to one of those movie
theaters, like Florence Mills or something like that, until
the last — Like, it was a double feature. Well, you wait
until the last feature had already started and then go to
the doorman and say, "Hey, man," you know, "we don't have
any money. Why don't you let us in to see the end of the
movie?" [laughter]
ISOARDI: Did it work?
FARMER: Yeah. [laughter] Yeah, it worked sometimes,
[laughter] So there was the great Charlie Parker, who
didn't have enough money to buy a ticket to go in a
movie. But he was a human being, you know. He was out
here just like everybody else. He was still in his
twenties. I guess he was about maybe ten years older than
we were then. The musicians, they recognized him for his
talent and his ability.
47
ISOARDI: Before they came out — Dizzy Gillespie and Parker
and their group — musicians were aware of bebop on Central?
FARMER: They were certainly aware.
ISOARDI: People were listening to it?
FARMER: Yeah. Yeah. I remember one day — There was a
drive-in there in that area on Central Avenue and they had
a jukebox, you know. And one day I was standing there
listening to this record, and he walked by and he said,
"What are you listening to?" I said, "Oh, this is your
record. This is 'Cherokee.'" He said, "'Ko-Ko.'" I said,
"No, it's 'Cherokee.'" He said, "'Ko-Ko,'" because he put
the name of it on as "Ko-Ko." So he called it "Ko-Ko."
[laughter]
ISOARDI: And you were arguing with him. [laughter]
FARMER: Yeah, because I wasn't concerned with this new
title. But the real [name] of the piece was "Cherokee,"
you know, and that was really his number. You know, that
was his "crip," we called it, because he could always deal
with that very well.
Let's see, what else about him?
ISOARDI: Did you hear them when they first played at Billy
Berg's?
FARMER: Yeah, yeah.
ISOARDI: When they first got in town, were you at the
first session?
48
FARMER: Yeah, I was there the first night. And some
nights we were able to get in, and some nights somebody on
the door would say, "No, you're too young." You know, they
had a rope there.
ISOARDI: What was the response? I mean, was the place
crowded during that — ?
FARMER: It was crowded at the opening, but then it kind of
fell off, because the music was too far advanced for the
general audience. And Billy Berg's, the club, had two
other acts there also — Slim Gaillard and a guy named Harry
"The Hipster" Gibson. And they were very, very
entertaining. Billy Berg decided to give this new thing a
chance, but when he saw the audience reaction, well, then
he — I think that he actually cut the engagement short a
couple of weeks. I think he paid them off or else gave
them a notice or something. So Dizzy went back east and
Charlie Parker stayed out here.
Oh yeah. I remember one time Howard McGhee had this —
He was like a part owner of a place called the Finale Club
in the Little Tokyo area. Howard McGhee worked there with
his band, and Charlie Parker worked there one time with his
own group, which Miles was in. Miles was working with
Benny Carter and Charlie Parker. Benny Carter had a job at
some dance hall or something. So there was a lady named
Althea Gibson, I think. She was working for a weekly black
49
newspaper called the Los Angeles Sentinel, I think, or
something like that. And she came and checked out the
group and wrote a review in the paper. Her boyfriend was a
swing-type trumpet player named Dootsie Williams, so he
told her what to say and she was very negative. She said,
"This group has this saxophone player who carries himself
with the air of a prophet, but really not that much is
happening. And he's got a little wispy black boy playing
the trumpet who doesn't quite make it," you know,
[laughter] Her boyfriend is telling her all this stuff.
"It has a moon-faced bass player with an indefatigable
arm," speaking about my brother. She didn't have anything
good to say about anybody.
Well, I saw that paper, and I went over there to where
"Bird" [Charlie Parker] was staying at Gene's house and woke
him up, you know, and said, "Hey man, wake up!" [laughter]
I said, "Wake up, man! You have to read what this bitch is
saying about you, man!" You know, he's still laying in bed
[laughter] Well, we couldn't get him to move unless you —
ISOARDI: He probably didn't care.
FARMER: No, no, it got him. You'd give him a joint. We'd
give him a joint to get out of bed, you know. You'd have
to baby him. Anyway, he read this. He said, "Well, she's
probably all right. Just the wrong people got to her
first." And then he got kind of in a self-pitying mood and
50
he said, "Well, Dizzy left me out here, and I'm catching
it." You know, "Dizzy got away, but he left me out here,
and I'm catching this from everybody." You know, he felt
for — That really brought him down, you know, because he
really thought his music should be — He didn't see nothing
strange about his music. His music was very melodic. And
for somebody to say something like that — You know, he was
proud to get good reviews. He liked that. You know, he
would send reviews to his mother.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: Yeah. You know, if somebody said something like
that, that hurt him. It was sad. So first of all, he
tried to take it as "Well, she's probably okay." He didn't
say, "Well, she's a dumb bitch," you know, "and she doesn't
know what she's talking about." He said, "She's probably
okay, but the wrong people got to her first." Then it
went deeper to him, and he said he was "catching it,"
catching hell, in other words. So that's how that turned
out.
So let's see. That was my introduction to bebop. So
when I went back east with Johnny Otis — When I left, I
think he [Parker] was already in the institution.
ISOARDI: When you left with Johnny Otis?
FARMER: Yeah, or else he went in shortly after that. And
the next time I saw him was when he first came back to New
51
York City, and he hadn't even started at Fifty-second
Street. But someone had fixed a job for him, a one-nighter
up at a place called Small's Paradise, in Harlem. So I
went by to see him. He said, "Hey, Arthur Farmer, we're in
New York, man. You can get anything you want in New
York!" [laughter] He was so happy to be out of
California. [laughter]
ISOARDI: [laughter] I'll bet.
FARMER: So everybody streamed up there, up to Harlem, to
hear the first appearance of Charlie Parker after his
adventures in California.
ISOARDI: Which I guess everybody knew about.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I would see Miles, you
know. I would run into Miles. He was always very
friendly.
ISOARDI: Did you ever run with him at all. Miles Davis?
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. We used to hang. Well, years later,
you know, after I met Miles out here, well, then I always
considered him to be like a friend, you know, sort of like
an older brother type of thing. And I would see him in New
York sometimes. Years later he actually fell upon hard
times, and he used to borrow my horn, which I would turn
into rental, because after I left Lionel Hampton's band in
'53 and I was living in New York in '54, I didn't have that
much work and he didn't have a horn. And sometimes he
52
would have a job and he didn't have a horn, so he would
come around the hotel I was staying in, and he would say,
"Let me use your horn. I'll pay you ten bucks." So I said,
"Okay." But I would go along with him, because if I didn't
go along with him he would have taken it and pawned it.
ISOARDI: Geez!
FARMER: So we were always friends. But then one time he
came by and he said he would like to borrow the horn, and I
said, "Well, I can't let you have it tonight because I have
a job." He said, "Well, I'm paying you for the horn,
man!" [laughter] And I'd say, "I know. I know you're
paying me, but I want to play too." And he'd say, "Yeah,
but I'm going to pay you." And I said, "Look, man, I'm not
in the horn rent business. I want to play!" You see. So
there was a moment of silence, and he said, "Man, I didn't
know you were like that."
ISOARDI: Oh, geez! [laughter]
FARMER: You know, as if I was really a creep. [laughter]
ISOARDI: Yeah, just because you wanted to play.
FARMER: Yeah. And then later on I was working with
[Gerry] Mulligan, and by that time he was really
straight. You know, this was like in the late fifties. I
was working with Gerry Mulligan, which was a good job. I
had made some records. And Mulligan came out here to do a
movie called I Want to Live. I can't remember her name.
53
an actress. Susan Hayward. She won the Oscar for that.
Anyway, it was a big movie. So I saw Miles a couple of
months later, just ran into him on the street, and he said,
"You know, man, I fixed that job for you, because they
asked me to do it, and I told them I wanted $10,000. I
only did that because I wanted you to have a chance to make
some money." [laughter]
ISOARDI: [laughter] Was that true? Do you know?
FARMER: I don't know. You know, he probably asked for
$10,000. I wouldn't put it past him. He might have asked
for $5,000. I wound up getting $1,500, which was big money
at that time.
ISOARDI: Well, maybe by the late fifties he thought he
could command $5,000.
FARMER: Yeah. Yeah, sure. He always had the sense of
self to ask for a big price. So like I said, I'd run into
him from time to time.
ISOARDI: Were all you guys pretty simpatico musically down
on Central, I guess when you were — ?
FARMER: Yeah, sure.
ISOARDI: Pretty much?
FARMER: Almost 99 percent of the younger guys really loved
this new music. The disagreement came with the older guys,
some of the older guys, who were more firmly entrenched in
the swing era, and they just couldn't see anything else
54
happening .
ISOARDI: Well, I've talked to people who I guess were from
the older generation. They were in high school in the
thirties and they went in the service, and so many of them
have said they came back in 1945 —
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. [laughter]
ISOARDI: And the way they described their reaction when
they first heard bebop is just incredible.
FARMER: Yeah, right.
ISOARDI: It just turned 180 degrees. You either throw the
instrument away or you start over.
FARMER: Yeah, absolutely. That's what happened. Well,
you see, our minds were open because we didn't have this
other influence so firmly entrenched in us. And as it is,
you know, when you're very young, first you go for the
thing that's most popular at that time. It happens now
that kids, they come into music and the first [thing] they
go into is pop. And then later on they find out that the
pop isn't giving them enough of a challenge, enough
satisfaction, so they gravitate towards jazz. But for us,
well, we went towards bebop.
But I have to say that my first attraction wasn't
bebop because bebop didn't exist then to my knowledge. I
just loved the big bands. But bebop was an outgrowth of
big band, because all those guys had worked with big bands.
55
and they went into bebop because they were able to play
more. It presented more of a challenge to them. If you
played in a big band, you didn't get that much chance to
really play. You know, you jumped up every now and then
and played a short solo. But if you were working with a
small group, well, you had much more time to play, and you
could play different kinds of tunes that were more chal-
lenging. There was more flexibility than in a big band.
But there were sessions, jam sessions, on Central
Avenue, I guess which you've heard about.
ISOARDI: Some, yeah. You're talking about after-hour
jams?
FARMER: After hours, yeah. Of course, they had the Sunday
matinees.
ISOARDI: Like the Downbeat?
FARMER: Yeah, the Downbeat and Last Word [Cafe]. Monday
night was the off night, so there was always a session on
Monday night in these clubs. Then the after-hour clubs
were — Lovejoy's was an after-hour club. And then there
was a place called Jack's Basket Room, which was farther
north. Say, that was somewhere around in the twenties or
thirties. And that was a big session place. And farther
north from that, there was a little place called the
Gaiety. I don't know if anyone ever told you about that.
ISOARDI: It's come up a bit. Was that just a regular
56
club? Oh, that's the one that became the Jungle Room, or
vice versa.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. No, that became the Jungle Room. At
that time it was called the Gaiety, when I first came
here. There were some sessions there sometimes.
ISOARDI: Where would you hang out? Or would you just go
from club to club?
FARMER: We'd go from club to club. And the police started
really becoming a problem. I remember, you would walk down
the street, and every time they'd see you they would stop
you and search you.
ISOARDI: You're kidding.
FARMER: I remember one night me and someone else were
walking from the Downbeat area up north to this Jack's
Basket Room or the Gaiety or some other place like that,
and we got stopped two times. And the third time some cops
on foot stopped us, and I said, "Hey, look, you guys are
going the same way. Do you mind if we walk with you?"
[laughter] We'd been stopped so many times we were getting
later and later. [laughter] So they said, "Okay." But we
didn't have anything. It would be insane to be carrying
some stuff on you on Central Avenue, because you'd get in
trouble. You could get put in jail. You didn't have any
money for a lawyer. If you had one marijuana cigarette,
you could get ninety days.
57
ISOARDI: No kidding.
FARMER: Yeah. And if you had one mark on your arm, you'd
be called like a vagrant addict. I don't know if that
still exists or not, but that was automatic: ninety
days. So you don't want to throw away ninety days for
something stupid.
ISOARDI: Well, you weren't there earlier, but was there
like an increase in police harassment after the war or had
this been going on?
FARMER: I think it was — Well, I wasn't aware of it until
after the war, because I came here — When I came here, it
was just a few weeks before the atom bomb fell. And as you
know, when that fell, the war was over in a week or so. I
remember seeing this newspaper with this big headline, you
know, about bombing Hiroshima and stuff. I had just been
here maybe a few days, actuallly. But then the whole
thing started falling apart, and the police were, as I
said, very obnoxious around there.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: I suppose it was mostly white policemen.
FARMER: Mostly, but it wasn't just whites. There were
blacks, too. With the place we were staying there on
Fifty-fifth and Avalon, we had a room, and down the hall
from us was a police officer. He was a young black guy.
58
He might have been in his late twenties. So he was a
bachelor, had a room there. He said, "I would arrest
anyone who was breaking the law. I would even arrest my
own mother." [laughter]
ISOARDI: [laughter] Hard case.
FARMER: To us, we just laughed at him, because there was a
community icebox there where the tenants would put their
food. He'd put his food in there — we'd steal it and eat it
because, you know, we didn't have that much money
sometimes. [laughter] Sometimes we were hungry. We'd
just go in there and take whatever. [laughter] I don't
know if he knew it or not, but anyway, we didn't take him
too seriously. [laughter] One day we're in there, and we
heard a gun go off. Pow!
ISOARDI: In his room?
FARMER: Yeah. He was cleaning his gun. [laughter]
ISOARDI: Oh man! [laughter]
FARMER: He was lucky he didn't kill anybody or something.
ISOARDI: Or himself.
FARMER: But there's Charlie Parker in that place, and
there he is, too. He didn't know about that. Charlie
Parker was supposed to be a drug addict. Well, at that
time he didn't have any drugs, you know, and he was in
pretty bad shape. I remember one night there was an
incident, and he was about to have a nervous breakdown. We
59
were on the second floor. There was like a French window,
a window from the ceiling to the floor, and he opened it
up, and he was standing there like he was going to jump
out. And before that he'd been taking off, putting on his
clothes, and taking them off and putting them on, taking
them off. He was just going off, you know. So I took him
out of the window and I said, "Let's go for a walk." So he
put on his clothes and we went right across the street. It
was Avalon Park. We went and walked in the park. And he
had a bad cold, you know, really, like his lungs were
falling apart. I said, "You ought to do something about
this." I said, "What are you going to do about this
cold?" He said, "Not a goddamn thing!" And he was just —
I mean, he was really down. We took him back to the room,
and he finally went to bed, and that was the end of that.
But he was having a hard time.
And then when we went to Lovejoy's or when we went in
the movie, he was starting to come apart, because he had
nervous ticks. You know, he'd be like [mimics Parker's
movements], you know. He'd be playing his horn —
ISOARDI: Snapping his neck?
FARMER: Yeah. You know, his nerves were really shot. I
guess it was just what we'd call stress from the
withdrawal, because he didn't have any drugs at that time,
but he had had drugs before. When he came out here he was
60
strung out. But then he just ran into hard times. And he
wasn't working. No money.
But these jam sessions were a great part of the life,
you know, because that's the way you learn. That's one way
of learning how to deal with that kind of situation,
because in a big band-- A big band was much more
disciplined. Everybody had their solo written. If it was
the time for the trumpet — When the trumpet solo comes,
well, he can only play the time that he's supposed to play,
and then he's got to sit down and someone else takes a
solo. But on a jam session, you'd play as long as you
wanted to play.
ISOARDI: Do you remember any in particular? Any stand out
in your mind?
FARMER: No. I don't remember any that stood out in my
mind, really.
ISOARDI: No? I guess they were usually well attended.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. They were well attended, and they
were part of the — It was still a part of the — I would say
the music was still a part of the ordinary people's
community. You know, people would come into the jam
session. They liked music. You'd go into a restaurant and
you'd have the jukebox there. You know, if you sat in a
booth, well, they'd have a little thing there where you'd
pick the numbers. There would be bebop tunes on the
61
jukebox and tunes by swing bands and things. So we still
hadn't reached that gap where the general audience sort of
lost interest. So it was a different thing, you know,
because now the average person doesn't know anything about
jazz at all, or they know very little. So, yeah, we hear
about it, but they're really not that interested. They go
to a place like the Playboy Jazz Festival, Hollywood Bowl
for the spectacle. Because the Playboy Jazz Festival will
hire whoever is the big star, and that's what really brings
the people in.
ISOARDI: A friend of mine went to the — I don't go to the
Playboy Jazz. I just don't like that kind of a throng, and
half the time you can't hear the music.
FARMER: Yeah, right.
ISOARDI: And this friend of mine went, and I told him,
"Look, it's going to be a circus. Why spend all that
money?" So he went there, and he came back and he said,
"You're right." You know, he told me during one number
that was soft, people started doing the wave. You know
that thing they do at football games? [laughter]
FARMER: [laughter] Yeah. That's the way jazz festivals
are. I played one in New York at a place called Randall's
Island years ago. Every attraction was given a bulletin
about what to do and what not to do. It said, "No
ballads." [laughter]
62
ISOARDI: Oh, no! Really? [laughter]
FARMER: "No ballads."
ISOARDI: Oh, man. [laughter]
FARMER: So that's jazz to many people. They might go
there, and they figure — And then this Hollywood Bowl, that
holds a few thousand people.
ISOARDI: Yeah.
FARMER: But if there's something really big happening, the
Hollywood Bowl can hardly take care of it. They have to go
to the [Great Western] Forum theater or something, you
know.
ISOARDI: Yeah.
Weren't you saying yesterday, I think just before I
left, that a lot of the cops down there were from the South?
FARMER: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Sure. That's still
happening. You know, L.A. has this Rodney King [police
beating] case. A lot of these guys are either [Ku Klux]
Klan or Klan sympathizers or something. They don't have
any empathy for minority races at all. And even the blacks
in the police force — they know that, and they have trouble
inside of the police force. Mayor [Thomas] Bradley used to
be a member of the police force himself, and he wouldn't
say anything different from that. That's just a fact of
life.
ISOARDI: Did you encounter any kind of Klan-related
63
activity back then around Central?
FARMER: No. No, I hadn't. I heard nothing about any Klan
at all. Nothing like that. My only experience with the
police was like I told you. But I heard indirectly — I
remember working at a place some years later — Say it was
somewhere in the fifties on Main [Street] or Broadway, like
that. It was a nice club, what we would call black and
tan, because black people and white people went there
too. I was working with a band that was led by Teddy
Edwards. It was maybe about a seven-piece band. It was a
successful place, you know. People went in there, and we
could have stayed there a long time, but then the manager
said we had to go, because the police said that they didn't
want this racial mixing there, and if the club didn't
change its policy there was going to be trouble.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: Yeah. So they could have certainly made trouble.
ISOARDI: About when was that?
FARMER: This was like in the late forties or the early
fifties, say, like '49 or '50, '51, something like that.
ISOARDI: Had you noticed anything like that earlier when
you first came out here? Where cops were going in and
really trying to break up the integrated atmosphere of the
clubs?
FARMER: No, I hadn't actually seen it. I couldn't say
64
that, because I wasn't aware of it when I first came here,
and I was hanging out in the Downbeat and places like
that. I heard that the police were around and were thick
in the neighborhood because they wanted to abolish people
smoking marijuana. And the story was like some of the guys
would take a walk on their break and walk around, take a
walk off of Central Avenue on a side street, and they might
light a joint or something, and the police would jump out
of a tree. [laughter]
ISOARDI: Oh, man!
FARMER: I don't know if that was an exaggeration or not.
ISOARDI: Well, from what I've heard of Chief [William H. ]
Parker, it probably wasn't! [laughter]
FARMER: But at that time those guys thought that marijuana
was something that you should be put into the jail for,
which is nothing compared to what came later.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: You know, like when you think about these guys —
Like these rock and rollers, like the Rolling Stones and
things like that, say, "Yes, yes, we smoke pot. So what?"
[laughter] It was completely harmless compared to what's
going on now: all this crack and all this murder. It's
just awful.
ISOARDI: Did you notice hard drugs as much down there?
FARMER: No. They were available, because Charlie Parker
65
was a junkie, of course. That was the only — At that time,
in the forties, he was the first guy that I heard of that
had a narcotics habit.
ISOARDI: Really? So it was mostly grass.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. But all the younger guys I knew,
there was nobody that was into hard drugs in the forties,
at least at that period when they first came out here. But
it happened later, certainly.
ISOARDI: Did you ever — I guess you did with Floyd Ray and
Horace Henderson — play in areas of Southern California away
from Central Avenue?
FARMER: Yeah, we played San Diego. I first went to San
Diego with Horace Henderson. And my brother and I and
another young guy, we walked across the border to
Tijuana. Then we looked at the clock, and the time told us
it was time to get back. And then we crossed the border
again, and we saw there was a difference in the time. We
still had another hour to go, so we went back again. The
second time we crossed over, the customs people said,
"Hey!" [laughter] They gave us a thorough search.
ISOARDI: [laughter] Yeah, I'll bet. I'll bet.
FARMER: I remember that very well, because they made us
take off all our clothes and everything. They thought for
sure that we had gone back that second time to pick up
something, you know, but we didn't have anything. We were
66
young, but we weren't really that stupid to figure you
could go over there and buy something. We figured that the
Mexican that sold you might turn you in and get a couple of
bucks that way, you know.
ISOARDI: That's right, and maybe get his stuff back.
[ laughter ]
FARMER: Yeah, right. [laughter]
67
TAPE NUMBER: II, SIDE TWO
NOVEMBER 23, 1991
FARMER: And we played some other places, like of course
San Francisco, San Jose, El Centro, and other places in —
ISOARDI: What kind of clubs were you playing?
FARMER: Well, it was not really clubs. Well, in San Diego
I played a club with Floyd Ray called the Black and Tan
[Club].
ISOARDI: So it was an integrated club in San Diego?
FARMER: Yeah. It was mostly dance halls, because people
were still dancing to swing bands at that time. So that
was the main thing. Some years later I played some clubs.
I played a club with Jay McShann in San Francisco. But
with Horace Henderson, Floyd Ray, Benny Carter, and Roy
Porter, we only played dance dates. The concert thing
hadn't even started then. You know, like now you play
concerts in a concert hall.
ISOARDI: Yeah.
FARMER: The Roy Porter band was important to us, to the
younger guys. Roy Porter was the drummer who had played
with Howard McGhee when I first heard Howard McGhee on
Central Avenue at the Downbeat. Then later on Howard
McGhee went back east again and Roy Porter organized a big
band. And of the big band, the members were younger guys
like myself mostly. A lot of us had gone to Jeff. And
68
this was more a rehearsal band than a real ongoing
commercial band. We would get together and rehearse maybe
two or three times a week at a place on Vernon Avenue. It
was off of Central Avenue near San Pedro [Street], I
guess. Every now and then we would get a job, and
sometimes we would get paid and sometimes we wouldn't get
paid. But Eric Dolphy, who became a very well known jazz
figure, was in the band at the same time I was in the band.
ISOARDI: Oh, really?
FARMER: There were other good players, but they didn't get
the prominence that Eric and I got. But they were good.
So that was like a training ground, also. After leaving
high school, well, then that was the next period for me
where I really got to learn something.
ISOARDI: What were the charts like? Was it just swing?
Or was it — ?
FARMER: Well, they were patterned after Dizzy Gillespie's
big band.
ISOARDI: It was, aha.
FARMER: Because by then Dizzy Gillespie had come out to
California with his big band, and that was the next
earthquake. [laughter]
ISOARDI: Yeah. So you guys were pretty progressive.
FARMER: Yeah, sure, sure. Absolutely. Well, some of the
kids that had gone to Jeff who learned how to write
arrangements at Jeff were writing arrangements for this big
69
band. And we made some recordings for a company called
Savoy Records, which was located back east and was one of
the main record companies as far as recording jazz. They
used to record Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and people
like that.
ISOARDI: And they recorded this band of Roy Porter's?
FARMER: Yeah, yeah.
ISOARDI: With you and Eric Dolphy?
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: Absolutely. You should talk to —
ISOARDI: Did they release the records?
FARMER: Yeah. They've come out now in an album called
something like Black Jazz in California or something like
that. You haven't spoken to Roy Porter?
ISOARDI: No.
FARMER: Yeah, well, maybe you could talk to him.
ISOARDI: Yeah, he's on the list.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah.
ISOARDI: No question. His autobiography [There and Back:
The Roy Porter Story] just came out.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. I read it a couple months ago.
Yeah. And it's truthful. You know, he has his own
opinions about things, but there were no lies in there.
ISOARDI: Yeah.
70
FARMER: And nothing that to me — Everything I read in
there, that's the way it was.
ISOARDI: What was Eric Dolphy like?
FARMER: Oh, Eric was a prince. You know, he was an
angel. He really lived for music. He lived for music and
he loved music. Twenty-four hours wasn't long enough for
him. During this time I remember that he had a Model-T
Ford. [laughter]
ISOARDI: In the late forties? [laughter]
FARMER: [laughter] In the late forties he had a Model-T
Ford.
ISOARDI: Oh, boy!
FARMER: The guys, you know, we all had these old cars.
They were going along with prayer. We had a mutual aid
society. You know, like if one car stopped you would have
to call up your buddy and say, "Hey, I'm stuck over here at
so and so," and we would all come to each other's aid.
Eric was always a very enthusiastic guy, but he was one
hundred percent about music. He was a nice, nice,
friendly, warm person, but he just loved to play.
ISOARDI: Yeah, I heard some stories about him I guess in
New York — the intensity of his concentration, his
practicing, was phenomenal.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he was one hundred percent.
Because like during that time I didn't feel it was necessary
71
to spend all that time playing. I figured it would just come
naturally. [laughter] I figured if I spent a couple of
hours on it, why, heck, that's great. Somebody like Eric
would practice all day long. All day.
ISOARDI: Did you have a chance to talk with him much about
musical ideas? Or did you notice in his playing at all any
indication of the direction he would go later?
FARMER: Well, at that time, no, no. At that time he was
very much involved with Charlie Parker. He was very much
under the influence of Charlie Parker, as all the young
guys were. Then later on, when he went back east, I think
he got involved with Charles Mingus and I think Mingus
broadened his boundaries. It wasn't that he didn't stop
loving Charlie Parker, but he started being interested in
more of a less structured type of music thing. He used to
imitate the sounds of birds and things.
ISOARDI: Eric Dolphy? On his horn?
FARMER: On his horn, like on his flute. He'd listen to
bird calls and play them, do things like that. But, you
see, some guys that got involved with what we called the
avant garde, it was like a — To them it was like a way out,
because bebop music was more difficult to master, so they
got into that, where they could say, "Well, we are the
avant garde. We don't have to pay attention to the
rudiments of music." But Eric wasn't like that. No, Eric
72
was really firmly founded. He had a foundation of the
elements of music, the elements of music which would be
recognized and respected by anybody, regardless of where
you were, regardless of whether it was jazz or whatever it
was. He had studied with good teachers and studied at [Los
Angeles] City College. So when he went into this less
structured thing, well, he had the musical background. He
was serious about it. It wasn't just a way out to avoid
studying or avoid learning.
ISOARDI: Yeah, yeah. Right.
FARMER: He got hooked up with John Coltrane, and John
Coltrane was the same way. It was like his wife said: he
was ninety-five percent saxophone. [laughter]
ISOARDI: Yeah, yeah. I heard stories about the two of
them having marathon practice sessions that would go around
the clock.
FARMER: Yeah, they were really kindred spirits.
ISOARDI: Did you ever bump into Mingus on the avenue at
all?
FARMER: Yeah, well, I bumped into Mingus back east,
sure. I never played with him in California. Never.
ISOARDI: Oh?
FARMER: I knew him. That was the first bass player that I
heard of when I got here. They said, "Yeah, there's a guy
73
here named Charlie Mingus. He's got a bad temper, too."
[laughter] They said, "Last week he took his bass stand
and chased the vocalist off the stage with it."
ISOARDI: You're kidding! [laughter]
FARMER: That was the first I heard of him. He must have
been nineteen years old or something.
ISOARDI: Why did he chase the vocalist off? Do you know?
FARMER: He didn't like the way she was singing,
[laughter] He was a bad boy. [laughter] So nobody messed
with Charles Mingus. Everybody was afraid of Mingus. I
never played with him out here. But then when I got back
to New York, boy, I started playing with — I developed a
reputation of being able to play anything that anybody put
in front of me. So there was a certain group of guys back
there who were getting — The music was getting very
difficult, and they were stretching out. I mean, they were
venturing into areas where it wasn't just ordinary jazz,
you know. And I developed a reputation that they could
call me and I would really give it an honest effort.
That's how I happened to have hooked up with Mingus out
there, because that's the way his music was. You just
couldn't play it the way you played everything else. You
really had to work with it. You had to have the time to
give it, which I did, because I wasn't working all the
time, anyway. So I met him and played on some jobs with
74
him.
I remember one night he came into a place where I was
playing. He had this fearsome reputation. And he was
sitting in this club, and he hollered up to the stage,
"Hey, Art Farmer, play a C scale!" And I'd say, "Oh, man."
I didn't want to get any stuff. And I hollered back down,
"I really don't know how you want it played." I got out of
it some way. And then I found out later that he had told
some people there with him, he said, "This guy here, he can
play a C scale and make it into music," you know. But at
that time I was very, very apprehensive about it. And I
played with him on other jobs. But the main thing, my main
musical experience with him-- There was a school in
Massachusetts called Brandeis University that had a music
festival one year. They commissioned three jazz writers
and three contemporary classical writers to write music for
this festival. And they had a small band to play it. I
was one of the members of this band, maybe about ten pieces
or something. And Mingus wrote a piece for this event
called "Revelations." And it was a great piece.
ISOARDI: Subsequently recorded, I think.
FARMER: Yeah, it was recorded. One of the classical
composers was a guy named Milton Babbitt, who was really
highly ranked in contemporary classical music, which is a
far cry from Mozart and Beethoven, for sure.
75
ISOARDI: A far cry.
FARMER: Yeah. [laughter]
ISOARDI: It's usually for academics, I think.
FARMER: [laughter] Right, yeah.
ISOARDI: [laughter] It's so removed.
FARMER: Absolutely. But that's the kind of stuff we
played. And you really had to be able to go for now and
forget about everything that you ever knew. You had to
look at that music, and this guy had this vision. It's
like playing with blinders: you know, like you see a
horse, and it's got these blinders on so he doesn't see
what's going on on the side? You had to have blinders on
your ears, because if you listened to the guy sitting next
to you, you'd get completely confused. You had to play and
concentrate on exactly what's on the paper. And it seemed
like one thing didn't have nothing to do with the other.
And I remember he said, "I'm counting on you guys to put
the soul in it,"
ISOARDI: Oh, geez! [laughter]
FARMER: He was a nice guy, you know. He was a nice guy.
ISOARDI: Well, he was being honest.
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: Much of modern classical doesn't have any.
FARMER: And there was a guy named Harold Shapero and some
other guy there. But anyway, Mingus wrote a piece and —
76
Let's see, the conductor was a very highly respected guy
named Gunther Schuller, who was doing a series of concerts
based upon a long, extended work Mingus wrote that they
just found a few years ago.
ISOARDI: "Epitaph."
FARMER: Yeah. So that was my main experience with
Mingus. But I'd appeared on some records with him. I
remember one record was a Quincy Jones record called This
Is How I Feel about Jazz, and Mingus was the bass player on
that. And we were on some other things with some other
people. We did a TV show, the Steve Allen Show, one night,
things like that.
ISOARDI: When you finally got back to Central, I guess
that must have been the late forties then?
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: Were you here for long before you were off on the
road again?
FARMER: Well, I got back around sometime in '48, and I
stayed in Los Angeles until '52, when I left with Lionel
Hampton.
ISOARDI: For a while, then.
FARMER: Yeah. So during that time, that's when Central
went into history.
ISOARDI: Yeah.
FARMER: I remember the Alabam was still going, and I heard
77
Josephine Baker there one time.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: "Sweets" [Harry] Edison was the musical director.
ISOARDI: At the Club Alabam?
FARMER: Of her show.
ISOARDI: Oh, of her show.
FARMER: Yeah, he was touring with her. That was probably
one of the last big events at the Club Alabam — that I was
aware of, anyway. And things were just thinning out
generally.
ISOARDI: What was that doing to you? Where were you
playing then?
FARMER: Well, I was working with Gerald Wilson or Benny
Carter or whoever had a job. Dexter [Gordon] or Wardell
[Gray] or Sonny [Criss], Frank Morgan — people like that.
You see, the downfall of Central Avenue was more than
anything else economics. When the war ended, people didn't
have money to be going out into clubs, you know. There was
a period in the forties when this war was going, everybody
had a job. And this was before the days of television. So
when they got off from work, they wanted to go up and have
some entertainment. But in the forties when television
came into being, and people didn't have the money that they
had during the war, they would go home and watch TV. So
these clubs would become — The attendance became sparse and
78
they eventually had to close. And also there was a
migration from the east side to the west side. See, we
would call Central Avenue the east side. The people who
had work and had some kind of equity and property in that
part of Los Angeles, they made a step up the ladder and
moved to the west of Los Angeles, say, around Western
Avenue or Normandie [Avenue], places in that part of
town. And what was left on the east side were people who
didn't have the money to move.
ISOARDI: So the area was changing quite a bit.
FARMER: Yeah, it was changing.
ISOARDI: It was no longer, I guess, the commercial
business center then in the black community either.
FARMER: Yeah, right. That's right.
ISOARDI: Other places to go to shop and —
FARMER: Yeah. Because, see, the people who were able to,
they were buying houses in what had until then been
exclusively white neighborhoods. And there were a few key
cases that opened the thing up. There was something out
here called a restrictive —
ISOARDI: Covenant.
FARMER: — covenant, yeah, and that sort of was eventually
beaten up, so people were able to buy in other
neighborhoods. And they got out of that neighborhood
there. Then there were some clubs opening up over there on
79
the west side, like there was a place called the Oasis on
Western Avenue and some other smaller clubs.
ISOARDI: But still not the same as Central?
FARMER: Oh, no. It was nothing like Central Avenue,
because Central Avenue was more compact, you know, in this
little area between Vernon [Avenue] and Washington
[Boulevard]. That's where everything was going on. The
real center was located around where the Alabam and the
Dunbar Hotel and the Downbeat were. Yeah, that was the
real center. But then after that, as Los Angeles is, you
have one place here and another place thirty miles over
there, so there's nothing like Central Avenue.
ISOARDI: Did you do any studio work at all? Because then
it was starting to open up a little, wasn't it?
FARMER: Yeah, it was starting to open up, but it was far
out of my range. You know, the only guys that were doing
studio work were like Lee Young, who was a drummer — the
brother of Lester Young — and Buddy Collette was in there.
But they were the main ones. And some others got some
work. But the only time I went in the studio was like I
went in the studio with Jay McShann's band playing some
backup music for a singer. And I went in the studio with
Roy Porter, as I said before. This was like in the late
forties. Gerald Wilson got a job on [KTTV] Channel 11.
There was a series that lasted for thirteen weeks, I think
80
it was, and the band was fronted by a guy who had a radio
show — named Joe Adams — at that time. He was like the band-
leader. He wanted to be a singer, you know, where he was
part of — Without him in the front we wouldn't have been
there, anyway.
ISOARDI: So it was thirteen weeks on TV?
FARMER: Yeah. And they would bring in stars. Like one
week I remember they had Stan Kenton, and one week they had
Nat King Cole — you know, that kind of thing. But it was
strictly a local show, so you probably couldn't see any of
that anyplace now.
ISOARDI: Right, right. Well, before I bring up a couple
of other things and get too far from Central, I wanted to
ask you, do you remember what some of those clubs looked
like?
FARMER: Yeah, well, they were not large. The Downbeat and
the Last Word were the main small clubs there. They were
not large. They might hold maybe a hundred people at the
most, at the most. I would say the Last Word might have
held a hundred; the Downbeat might have held around seventy
or eighty, something like that.
ISOARDI: Gee, there doesn't seem to be much room for an
audience once you put in musicians for a jam session.
FARMER: No. Well, see, that's why they'd have the session
masters, so there wouldn't be too many guys trying to cram
81
themselves up on the stage at one time, you know. No,
these were small places. And the stage might hold six,
seven at the most.
ISOARDI: Including the rhythm section?
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. And they had a bar. There was no
dancing in these little places.
ISOARDI: Just tables?
FARMER: Yeah, just tables. So they would call them a
lounge, the Downbeat lounge.
ISOARDI: Were most of the clubs like that, kind of on that
order? I guess except maybe for the Alabam and the
Plantation [Club], which I guess were a lot bigger.
FARMER: Yeah, right.
ISOARDI: But most were clubs like that.
FARMER: Yeah. I guess this place out here, Billy Berg's,
might have held around 150, something like that. But there
wasn't anyplace any larger than that as far as I recall.
And the clubs, they started at nine o'clock, and they went
until one. But then after they finally realized that the
war was over, well, then they allowed the clubs to stay
open until two o'clock.
ISOARDI: For economic reasons?
FARMER: Yeah, well, they had the clubs closing at one
o'clock for some reason to do with the war or something. I
don't know what it was all about. And there was a 10
82
percent entertainment tax that the U.S. government had on
clubs, and they lifted that finally. They hoped that that
would keep these things alive, but it really didn't help
that much, though.
ISOARDI: They would have to pay a 10 percent tax on their
gross to the government?
FARMER: Yeah, entertainment tax to pay for the war,
because, you know, it took a lot of money out of the United
States in one way. >■
ISOARDI: Yeah, yeah.
FARMER: But see, the population of Los Angeles generally
was — There was a gigantic increase in population, as you
probably know from the history. When this war came, all
the people from the South came in, and they brought their
racial prejudices with them. And that's why we've had the
problems here. You know, these people come from Texas and
Oklahoma and Alabama and wherever. And as customs were at
home, well, that's the way they wanted to keep them here.
And this mixing thing, this thing about white women and
black men, was really a hard issue.
ISOARDI: I guess I've read stories about — I think Howard
McGhee ' s wife was white.
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: And they just had a real rough —
FARMER: They were hounded. That would be the word.
83
hounded, you know.
ISOARDI: By the police?
FARMER: Yeah, by the police. And then there was a lot of
prostitution going on. There were some cases where black
men were pimps and the white women were prostitutes, and
the police, they would rather kill somebody than to see
that happen. And every time they saw an interracial
couple, that's what they thought was going on, which was
not the case.
ISOARDI: They assumed it was prostitution?
FARMER: Yeah, sure. Yeah, you know, because these white
women, they would have a period in their life of what we
would call sowing wild oats. They would come out and do
what they wanted to do, and when they had enough of it,
they'd go back on the other side and get married and raise
a family, you know. [laughter] But it was just something
that — It was a phase that they went through. But the
police, as far as they were concerned, the only thing they
saw anytime they saw any interracial thing going on was
crime. This was a crime. If it wasn't a crime on the
books, it was still a crime as far as they were
concerned. So their main worry was this interracial
mixing, because it was a crime leading to prostitution and
narcotics. You know, they weren't worried that much about
robbery, because that was — Like everybody worries about
84
getting mugged or something like that, but that wasn't the
problem then, because people were working. The economic
picture was better then than it is now. The people had a
chance to get a job, but now it's —
ISOARDI: It's not even possible.
FARMER: It's not impossible to get a job, but it's
different, you know.
ISOARDI: Yeah.
FARMER: And more people had what we call the work ethic.
You know, people would rather get a job that they were
overqualif ied for than not to work at all. You know,
things have changed now. There's a lot of people that have
second-generation families that never have had a job. That
wasn't the case then. Things have really changed. The
members of the black community felt more then that it was a
disgrace not to have a job. That was just something — And
to stand around like you'll see people standing around now,
"Have you got any change?" — you didn't see anybody like
that. You didn't see anyone like that. This just came
here in the past ten years or so. So there's a whole
different outlook on it now. But the social thing then was
everybody had a job, everybody was working, and if they
were working they figured that they should be able to enjoy
the fruits of their labor, and that would include
entertainment, you know, going out. There were no TVs. TV
85
came into being, say, like around '47 or something like
that. But until then, the clubs were thriving.
So, you know, like Johnny Otis's band would go into
the Alabam and stay there for months. [laughter] At Joe
Morris's Cotton Club [the Plantation Club], well. Count
Basie would come out and Billy Eckstine would come out.
These were big stars, you know. And they were supported by
the community. Some white people would come in, but the
white people were not enough to keep this going. They were
really the fringe. It was the black audiences that
supported these places. You know, you might have maybe two
or three white people in the place, but everybody else
would be black. And they were there because they were able
to afford it. So now if you go into it — Well, you can go
into these discos; you have black people in there. They're
working. But you go in the jazz club, you hardly see any
black people at all. You see maybe 10 percent who are
black; the rest of them are white. They say, "Yeah, I like
jazz, but I can't afford it. The cover charge is too
high," you know, all that kind of stuff. But jazz has
always been sort of treated in a strange way by the middle-
class blacks, as I told you. You know, I think I mentioned
that the —
ISOARDI: In what way?
FARMER: Well, when I was still in Phoenix, the principal
86
at my high school one day said, "Don't be a barnstormer
like Louis Armstrong." My family is mainly back east — like
I have a lot of relatives in Chicago and Detroit, and
they're all very middle-class people. Like I said, it was
a custom that there was a piano in the house. Well, these
people studied music, you know. They learned to play. One
cousin of my mother [Hazel Stewart Farmer] was like in
charge of the music department in the city of Chicago at
one time in the grammar school system. But their attitude
was always, "Well, study music but play for your own
personal pleasure. Don't make a career out of it, because
it's a stupid thing to do." You know, "Do something
else. Be a doctor."
ISOARDI: Because they perceived you wouldn't make money at
it?
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: You couldn't make a livelihood?
FARMER: Yeah, right. "Be a doctor or be a lawyer or a
minister or a schoolteacher." And that's what they are. I
have a cousin in Chicago who is a surgeon. When I have to
have an operation, that's where I go. [laughter] He can
sit down and play Chopin and Mozart and anything like
that. He doesn't play any jazz.
ISOARDI: None at all?
FARMER: No. And I have one in Detroit. She's the most
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energetic woman that I ever saw in my life. She has a
pathology lab that employs about eighty people. And she
teaches at a university there. She works for Wayne
County. She also sits down and plays classical piano.
There's one guy, the only one other than me and my brother
that became a professional, a man in Chicago who used to
play trombone with Earl Hines's band. And he did that
until he got through college, and then he became a
teacher. He just retired a couple of years ago. No,
longer than a couple of years ago — he's eighty-five now and
he still gets an occasional job playing the trombone. And
when I go to Chicago he always comes by. But he was
playing with Earl Hines's band like in the thirties or the
late twenties or whatever.
ISOARDI: Did they at least listen to your albums?
FARMER: Yeah, sure. [laughter] But the attitude was that
jazz was something that — It's like the attitude that
middle-class people had about entertainment, about show
business. You know, like actors and — These people are
supposed to be immoral.
ISOARDI: Right.
FARMER: You know, that kind of thing. Like if you were an
actor, then you were just a step above being a whore,
[laughter] So there's just the idea about the thing.
ISOARDI: Let me ask you about the union. You mentioned it
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a couple of times; we haven't really talked about it yet.
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: I guess you joined [American Federation of
Musicians Local] 767?
FARMER: Yeah. Well, see, I joined the union in Phoenix
first, and I even had a problem getting in the union in
Phoenix because of race. The local number was 586 or
something like that. And when me and my brother and other
guys had this little band and we were getting jobs, well,
we decided we wanted to be in the union. You know, we
figured that's part of being a professional musician. So
we went there and told them we wanted to be in the union, and
they said no. There were no blacks in the union.
ISOARDI: So it was a completely white union.
FARMER: Yeah, in Phoenix. So we wrote to the
headquarters.
ISOARDI: In New York or — ?
FARMER: In Chicago. That's where "Caesar" [James C]
Petrillo's office was.
ISOARDI: "Caesar" Petrillo? [laughter]
FARMER: Yeah. We wrote there and told them that they
wouldn't let us join the union, and they straightened it
out. They said they have to let us join the union. So we
joined the union there in Phoenix, because the federation
told the local that they had to let us in if we were
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qualified. So we got in. Then, when we came over here,
well, then we — In order to work with these bands, you had
to be a member of the union, so we transferred to Local
767.
ISOARDI: Were you surprised that there were two unions?
FARMER: No. [laughter] No. In our life, there was
always two, black and white, you know. We had gone to a
completely segregated school system there.
ISOARDI: But there must have been other black musicians in
Phoenix. They were simply nonunion?
FARMER: There were no local black musicians in Phoenix
when we started playing. There were guys who came there to
play in a lounge or something, but they came from back east
or something, or from here.
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: But there were no local black musicians making a
living as professional musicians.
ISOARDI: So the question of a separate union didn't even
arise.
FARMER: Didn't exist, no. Didn't exist. So we came over
here, and we joined the union here. The first time I heard
Gerald Wilson was at — See, they had this house there. It
was the second floor, and the rooms up there were used for
rehearsal rooms.
ISOARDI: And the union offices were downstairs?
FARMER: Yeah, they were downstairs. And the union
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executives were very nice people, as far as I remember.
There was a guy named Paul Howard — he used to play
saxophone many years ago, like in the twenties or
something — a guy named Elmer Fain, and another one named
Baron Moorehead. And there was a lady named Florence
Cadrez. When the unions were amalgamated, well, then these
people went to 47 and they kept their jobs there. But at
first they were kind of apprehensive because they thought
they were not going to be able to keep their jobs. But the
whole union thing, the whole amalgamation thing was — A lot
of credit should go to certain people that were really
involved with it. Benny Carter was very involved with it,
for one thing. Buddy Collette, because he was working with
a guy named Jerry Fielding, and Jerry Fielding was a studio
band. And Buddy was on that band and they were involved
with it very much. There was an organization called the
humanists which played a big part in this. It wasn't the
communists but it was called the humanists and I've heard
this name in other places.
ISOARDI: Oh, that was the orchestra that they put
together? Was that the one?
FARMER: I don't know.
ISOARDI: Because Buddy told me that they had an orchestra.
They decided to create an integrated orchestra [Community
Symphony Orchestra] to play Humanist Hall.
FARMER: Okay.
91
ISOARDI: And this way they thought they could get the
black and white musicians together, because they figured if
they called meetings nobody would come.
FARMER: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay, because you know
what happened — by that time things had moved kind of west,
and there was a place at Jefferson [Boulevard] and
Normandie which was like a dance hall, and they had these
rehearsals there. And white guys from the Hollywood area
would come there and we would play classical music, like
try to play symphonies and things like that with a
conductor. And I never had had any experience like that.
That was a —
ISOARDI: Oh, SO you were playing in the orchestra.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah, I was playing there. Yeah. And that
was the first time I ever played with a conductor without
somebody in the front saying, "One, two, one-two-three-
four." Instead of that, you have the guy out there with a
stick saying [gestures], and you had to play. [laughter]
So that was my introduction to that. These guys would come
out of their part of town and come down there and give us a
new perspective on music. They opened up new avenues to
us. And they also said, "If anybody wants to study, well
then, we have teachers." They assigned me to a teacher for
which I didn't have to pay one nickel.
ISOARDI: Who did? I mean, was this — ?
92
FARMER: This orchestra, this whole thing.
ISOARDI: The orchestra as a group?
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: Oh, really?
FARMER: Yeah. And they assigned my brother to a
teacher. And you could study, I mean, get some — This was
my first real teacher in the West.
ISOARDI: You're kidding.
FARMER: I could get some classical training. Otherwise we
were scuffling trying to keep from starving, you know. We
couldn't have any money. At least we didn't think we had
any money to be paying for lessons and things. So it was
really a completely beneficial thing. And I never heard
anything about — Well, what they would call it now, they
would say, "Well, certainly this was a left-wing
organization," you know, but I never heard anything about
that.
ISOARDI: As Buddy told the story, it was a way of getting
musicians from the two locals together to begin building
the base for merging the two unions.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. Well, that's the way it started.
ISOARDI: Did you play with them the whole life of the
orchestra? Was it a couple of years?
FARMER: No, no. I remember going over there for a few
rehearsals, but I was in and out, you know, working with
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bands, going here and there and whatever. So it wasn't a
thing where you — I wasn't there for years or anything like
that.
ISOARDI: Right. During the time of the amalgamation, were
you involved in that at all?
FARMER: No. When I left here with — I left here finally
in the fall of 1952 with Lionel Hampton, and the
amalgamation hadn't really happened then. It was moving in
that direction, but certain people were putting obstacles
up on both sides. But it really hadn't happened.
ISOARDI: You were supporting it?
FARMER: Certainly I was supporting it. Everybody from a
certain age group was certainly — They didn't see any
reason not to support it. Because it was a matter of
territory, also. You see. Local 47 had the larger part of
Los Angeles. It was like — I don't know if it was written
or — It was kind of official. There were certain
territories that were allotted to each local. And we
figured if we were all in the same local, then we would be
able to play anyplace in town. And this whole studio
thing, like the movie studios — that was the Local 47
territory. In order to work in the studio, you were
supposed to be a member of Local 47. But if you were
black, then you had to be in Local 767. So you had guys
like Lee Young. There was a guy named Barney — I remember
94
reading in Down Beat--Barney Bigard who used to play
clarinet with Duke Ellington. He was from New Orleans,
where he was what we called Creole. You know, he was a
very light-skinned guy. So in Down Beat magazine I
remember the big headline, "Barney Bigard says he is not a
Negro, he says he ' s a Creole." [laughter]
ISOARDI: Was he trying to get into 47?
FARMER: Yeah, yeah. [laughter] He was trying to get into
47, you know. Because, you know, like with Floyd Ray's
band there were black people and white people — black,
white, Mexican, whatever. The white people could come and
work on Central Avenue, but the blacks had trouble coming
to work in Hollywood. They could work in some places, but
there would have to be some kind of special dispensation or
something I think, you know, to work like at Billy Berg's
or a place like the Swing Club or whatever the club's name
was in this area.
ISOARDI: I know some white big bands, for instance, played
down on Central Avenue in the clubs. But do you remember
any sort of young white musicians, young kids, who would
hang out on Central or anything like that or participate in
jam sessions?
FARMER: Well, there was a trumpet player named Kenny
Bright, and he used to be much involved with the black
groups, because we worked together with Dexter Gordon's
95
band and he was on the scene a lot. Kenny Bright. And
then there was a trombone player named Jimmy Knepper who
lives back east now, and he was around.
ISOARDI: I didn't know he was out here. I guess he must
have hooked up with Mingus probably when he was out here.
FARMER: Maybe so, maybe so. I think Jimmy's from out
here.
ISOARDI: Oh, really?
FARMER: I think so. But he was one of the first white
guys that I met. There was a piano player who became
pretty well known named Joe Albany that was playing the
piano with Floyd Ray at the time I was playing with him.
In the Johnny Otis band there was an alto saxophone player
named Rene Block, who was the lead alto player. I think he
was a Mexican kid. And with Floyd Ray's band there was a
Mexican trumpet player named Ruben McFall, and there was a
trombone player named, I think, Chico Alvarez or Chico
something or other, who eventually got his own radio show —
a disc jockey.
96
TAPE NUMBER: III, SIDE ONE
NOVEMBER 23, 1991
FARMER: I remember, getting back to Central Avenue, one
time — About jam sessions, one night I was in the Downbeat
[Club], and Big Jay McNeely, Cecil McNeely, was working
across the street at the Last Word [Cafe]. And part of his
thing was going out in the street with his horn.
ISOARDI: So he wasn't playing bebop anymore.
FARMER: [laughter] No, no. He had made the big jump. He
came out in the street with his horn and came all the way
across Central Avenue and walked into the Downbeat with his
horn, you know, playing it, honking —
ISOARDI: While you guys were playing?
FARMER: No. Well, it was on the break, on the
intermission. He walked in there with his horn [mimics
McNeely 's playing] honking, you know, whooping and
hollering. [laughter] And the little owner, a little guy,
he must have been about seventy years old. I think he was
an immigrant, European Jewish guy, you know, with a heavy
accent. A little small, bald-headed guy. He said, "Get
the horn! Get the horn! Someone get the horn! Get the
horn!" [laughter] It was like the Wild West, you know.
[laughter] Like, "You've got to shoot this guy down!"
[ laughter ]
ISOARDI: Oh, that's great!
97
FARMER: [laughter] That was the funniest thing,
[laughter] Because the Downbeat was the bebop club that
night, and this guy — he was like the enemy! [laughter]
ISOARDI: Oh, boy. Well, it sounds like Jay certainly
wasn't bashful.
FARMER: Oh no, he wasn't at all. Not at all. [laughter]
I remember working with Dexter [Gordon] and Wardell [Gray] —
Well, Jay, part of his act was complete, total abandon, you
know. It was like somebody who had become completely
possessed by the music. He throws off his coat and throws
that down, then he jumps on his back, and he's playing the
horn, he puts his legs up in the air, you know, and he's
playing all the time. So there was a place called the Olympia
Theatre where he would play on Saturday night, a midnight
show. I'm working with Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray —
they had a band — and these are highly respected jazz stars,
you know, and I was working with that band. So we got a job
there one Saturday night, and we figured, "Well, gee, this is
a step up." [laughter] And so Dexter, he decides that he's
going to pull a Big Jay. So he's up there, and he's playing
his thing, and all of a sudden he starts to come out of his
coat, and Wardell had to help him out with the coat. So
Wardell takes the coat and very civilly takes it and folds it
and puts it on his arm. And there's Dexter, and he's honking
a la Big Jay, and he finally gets down on his knees a la Big
98
Jay.
ISOARDI: Oh, no, really?
FARMER: And then the people in the audience, these kids,
these teenagers, are looking up there like, "Gee, when is he
going to do something?"
ISOARDI: Oh, really?
FARMER: [laughter] He stayed down there so long like that.
He stayed down there on his knees like he's praying, like he
didn't know what to do then. So he finally got up off his
knees and the show went on. But later on — See, I played with
Dexter a lot in Europe, so I would sort of rub it in.
[laughter]
ISOARDI: You reminded him regularly about this? [laughter]
It was probably the only time he'd ever done something like
that.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did it kind of tongue-in-cheek,
too, with Warden holding his coat and all that. I remember
one time Dexter said, "You know, like, you have the nerve to
give me a hard time about that, but listen to some of those
funny records you make for CTI [Records]," you know.
[laughter] Because I made a couple of crossover records for
CTI.
ISOARDI: Right, right.
FAFIMER: He said, "I don't see how you've got the nerve to say
anything to me." [laughter] But that Big Jay, he was
99
something else.
ISOARDI: You know, I saw him just — gee, I don't know — six
months ago or something like that. It was down at the Long
Beach Jazz Festival, jazz and blues. Jay gets up and he
starts wailing away, and you know, with those portable mikes
now, you can go anywhere. [laughter]
FARMER: Yeah, yeah, right, right. [laughter]
ISOARDI: And he takes off. I don't know how old he is now,
but he takes off, and he's just going through the audience,
and he finds this rather large older woman, and he sits down
on her lap.
FARMER: Yeah. [laughter]
ISOARDI: And he's just blowing away.
FARMER: And he whips the people into a frenzy.
ISOARDI: Oh, geez.
FARMER: He always got them. He always got them wild.
ISOARDI: Nobody can believe it.
FARMER: Yeah, he always got them crazy.
ISOARDI: But he's still doing it.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah, he's still doing it. Still doing it.
Yeah, Big Jay. Well, see, he and Sonny Criss had this group
together — Sonny Criss the alto player — called the — I don't
remember the name of it. Something about bebop.
ISOARDI: It was a bebop band?
FARMER: Yeah. Quintet.
100
ISOARDI: Really?
FARMER: When we were in high school. And he was getting gigs
then. But then his brother came back from the army and told
him that he was going in the wrong direction. So that's when
he—
ISOARDI: By playing bebop?
FARMER: Yeah. He said he wouldn't be able to make a quarter
playing that. He was always kind of a — He never had any real
balance. You know, it was either one thing completely —
Because when he was playing bebop, everything was — It was
extreme. You know, it was either everything had to be the
hippest or the most corny with him. We called him "Bebop"
because everything he played sounded like bebop, like he
didn't give a damn about any other aspect of music other than
that, you know.
ISOARDI: Oh.
FARMER: So he changed. He made a radical change.
ISOARDI: One hundred and eighty degrees, then.
FARMER: Yeah, right. Yeah. But Sonny was strictly a jazz
player.
ISOARDI: Fine player.
FARMER: Yeah. But the trouble with Sonny is that he never
really studied. You know, he took some lessons from Buddy
Collette, I remember that, but he never really learned how to
read that well. You know, he never learned how to read good
101
enough to play with the big bands and things like that.
ISOARDI: That makes it tougher.
FARMER: Yeah, he figured that he shouldn't have to do that.
He said, "I shouldn't have to do that. I'm a jazz player."
So that just closed down a lot of possibilities, because if
you play jazz, well, a lot of your income is going to be from
making records. And you go into a studio, you have to be able
to play whatever is thrown in front of you. You can't take
time because time is money. If they call you one time and if
you hold up the thing, they're not going to call you anymore
regardless of how great a solo you play. So that was one of
the things that really was a great handicap to him. It didn't
have to be that way, but he just felt that he should be able
to — And then another thing: Most saxophone players double.
They play flute or clarinet or something. He said, "Well, I'm
an alto saxophone player." Well, you know, that's it.
ISOARDI: That's all he ever played, then, yeah.
FARMER: "Why should I have to play flute? I'm a saxophone
player." So he didn't get as far as he should have.
ISOARDI: Recently I saw you play with Frank Morgan, and you
guys have cut an album.
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: I guess Central Avenue Revisited is the album, in
fact.
102
FARMER: Yeah, right.
ISOARDI: So you must have met first on Central, then.
FARMER: Yeah, around then. When I first met Frank was in the
late forties, and I guess Central Avenue was on its way down,
but there were still some things happening then. Frank was
about sixteen years old. Frank went to Jeff [Jefferson High
School] also, as you know. He was about sixteen years old at
the time, and his father was a professional musician also, who
now lives in Hawaii. So we were quite close. But then, when
I left here in '52 with Lionel Hampton, after then, well, then
he started getting involved with narcotics and really got too
deep into it, you know, and spent a lot of time in the
prison. So when we made this album. Central Avenue, that was
the first time that I'd seen Frank since 1952.
ISOARDI: No kidding. That's the first time you guys have
gotten together?
FARMER: Yeah. Because every time I came out here he was in
prison.
ISOARDI: Geez. Well, it must be nice to see him with the way
things are going now.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah, it is nice. But, you know, the tragedy
is that a lot of guys didn't survive this narcotics thing.
Too many. You know, between narcotics and the prejudice thing
and I don't know what — The prejudice thing might have led to
the narcotics in some cases, you know, just feeling like the
103
avenues are blocked anyway, so we might as well get high, you
know, that kind of thing.
ISOARDI: You know, there was a film I saw on Louis Armstrong,
a documentary, and somebody — it may have been Dexter Gordon
when they interviewed him — was saying that Armstrong smoked
pot every day of his life, and he said it was the only time he
could escape from the prejudice.
FARMER: Yeah, it might be. But anyway, the pot didn't kill
you, but there's other things. Guys spent years and years in
the prison, and then they're just out of the music thing
completely. Or else they take an overdose and they're dead,
you know. So a lot of guys didn't survive. Of the students
who went to Jeff in [Samuel] Browne's band, when they left
there a lot of them got hooked on narcotics, and they just
fell by the wayside. Talented people.
ISOARDI: Yeah, so much wasted talent.
FARMER: Yeah. Frank, although he spent years in prison, he's
finally out now and able to — He's still playing. He's still
playing.
But the narcotics killed white people, too, some white
talented people. Like, for instance, there was a saxophone
player named Art Pepper. I used to make some gigs with Art
Pepper sometimes. We'd work like in the Latin bands around
Los Angeles sometimes. We'd wind up in the same band playing
montunos and things.
104
ISOARDI: I know he wrote some things like "Mambo de la
Pinta."
FARMER: Yeah, [laughter]
ISOARDI: Things like that that were Spanish.
FARMER: Yeah, well, he got hung up in narcotics, you know.
ISOARDI: Yeah, sad. I read his autobiography [Straight Life:
The Story of Art Pepper] .
FARMER: Oh, yeah.
ISOARDI: Sad reading.
FARMER: Yeah. Yeah, it was sad because he said, "I'm a
junkie, and I'll be a junkie till I die." You know, that's
it. That's the reality.
ISOARDI: Yeah, whether it's smack or methadone.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah.
ISOARDI: Bill Green told me that he played with him at one of
his last gigs. I think it was out at UCLA, in fact. And he
said he saw him backstage, and at one point he rolled up his
pants or something, and he said his legs were so discolored
and he looked so terrible. When he got out on stage, though,
and he had the mouthpiece in his mouth, he was transformed.
But other than that, for a man who wasn't even sixty yet — he
was in his fifties — he looked so bad.
FARMER: And Chet Baker is another one, too. I met Chet and
guys like that in coming into this part of town to participate
in jam sessions, you know.
105
ISOARDI: So you'd met Chet much earlier on?
FARMER: Yeah. I met Chet in the forties, too, in the late
forties.
ISOARDI: Did you know Art Pepper when you were on Central?
FARMER: Yeah. In the late forties or early fifties, before I
left here, that's when I met Art Pepper. Art Pepper used to
hang on Central Avenue years earlier. But then when he worked
with Stan Kenton and Woody Herman and people like that, well,
he wasn't hanging on Central Avenue then. I met him after he
left those bands, at a period when he was living here and
working casual jobs. That's when I met him, on some one-
nighter playing with a Latin band. That's when I actually met
him.
But these guys, they got hung up on drugs. It was a
scourge. And it was a thing that didn't have that much to do
with — It had to do with luck in a certain sense, you know,
because it's like if you do the wrong thing too many times,
you'll just get hooked. And some people were able to break
the habit, and a lot of them couldn't. They'd get hooked and
they'd get arrested by the police. You go to jail, you come
out, you have a record, and if the police want a promotion,
then they arrest other people. They know who to come to.
Like if they want to put another star behind their name, they
look down the list and say, "Oh, here's so-and-so. He's been
arrested before. Well, we'll go see what he's doing." And
106
sometimes they might even manufacture some evidence, because
you already have the record. So if you go before the judge
and you've already been arrested for narcotics and the police
say, "Well, we found such and such a thing in his pocket," the
judge is going to believe the police before he believes the
criminal who has this record of being a narcotics offender or
whatever. So guys started going in and out of jails. And the
next thing they know, it's all over, because the music is
highly competitive, and you have to be able to do what you're
supposed to do. It's hard enough then, you know. But if you
lose a year here and a year there, it's just impossible.
So Frank — I give him credit for at least being able to
survive somehow, because he was a rare one from California.
ISOARDI : To come back like he has after thirty years is
remarkable.
FARMER: Yeah. Absolutely.
ISOARDI: Well, we're hoping to interview him. I did a sort
of pre-interview meeting with him about a year ago out here,
and he told me that there were something like three studios
negotiating for his life story or something. So good things
are coming in bunches.
FARMER: Yeah, they are. They are. Yeah, yeah.
ISOARDI: At last.
FARMER: Yeah, but he's got scars. He's not without scars
from all the stuff he's been through. It's changed him.
107
Because he's not the sixteen-year-old kid that I used to
know. You know, after you spend some years in San Quentin
[prison], you develop something else.
ISOARDI: You get a lot taken away, I suppose, that you never
get back.
FARMER: Yeah. He's hardened. He has hardened a lot, which I
guess you'd have to do in order to survive. But he still
plays very well, though. He plays very well.
ISOARDI: Yeah. There's a lot in his music, a lot of feeling
in his music.
FARMER: Yeah.
ISOARDI: I know a lot of people who study saxophone and are
students. I mean, they would much rather hear a Frank Morgan
than any Marsalis record just because of the feeling in it and
what the music says. It doesn't sound like it's just come out
of a music school. There's something more in there than just
the technique.
FARMER: Yeah, yeah.
ISOARDI: So I think he's got a lot to give that way.
FARMER: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, well his experience has given him
more of a certain kind of resonance, a certain seasoning,
flavor, to his music, which is — I wouldn't recommend that to
anyone. [laughter]
ISOARDI: Those are heavy dues for a little seasoning.
[laughter ]
108
FARMER : Yeah .
ISOARDI: Well, there are two big questions that I always ask
at the end, and you touched on one already, and that was why
Central Avenue declined. But the other big one is, looking
back, what was the importance of Central Avenue both for you
as well as for American music and jazz? What would you say
Central Avenue gave?
FARMER: Well, to me personally. Central Avenue was the
neighborhood place where I could go and hear people play and
meet people. If they were playing in Hollywood at Billy
Berg's or at the Orpheum Theatre — I wouldn't think about
going backstage to meet somebody at the Orpheum Theatre. I
went to hear Count Basie there, and I heard Duke Ellington at
the Million Dollar Theatre. I wouldn't think about going
backstage and introducing myself and saying, "Hi, I'm trying
to learn how to play," or something like that. But on Central
Avenue these people were more accessible. So they were part
of the neighborhood. And I got to meet people there and got
to hear them play, and I could go there any night and stand
around and listen and see what was going on.
As far as importance in jazz overall, I would say it
would be this possibility that for me existed — for other
people as well — and that was the importance that I could
see. Other than that, I know that Dexter Gordon used to work
on Central Avenue, and other people, they got experience
109
there, too. There was one place I didn't mention called the
Elks — We just called it the Elks.
ISOARDI: The Elks hall?
FARMER: Yeah, Elks hall. And big bands used to play there
sometimes. It was a matter of getting experience, too.
Learning, listening, playing, experiencing — Yeah, learning
and listening and playing. And you could get that on Central
Avenue more than you could get it anyplace else in this area
or in this part of the world. Central Avenue was the main
thing for Los Angeles. After you left Los Angeles, you had a
long way to go to go to Chicago or New York City. By the time
you got there, you were really supposed to be ready. But here
you could start off. At least that's the way it was to me; it
was a way to start out.
I think Central Avenue was important also to groups that
were really not regarded as jazz groups — say, like Roy Milton,
blues groups, things like that — because they had a lot of
work. I wouldn't want to give the impression that Central
Avenue was just a jazz place, because it really wasn't. You
had Roy Milton and Pee Wee Crayton and T-Bone Walker and Ivory
Joe Hunter, Big Joe Turner. You know, bands like that were
playing in these lounges, also. And they were much more
successful than the jazz was, without a doubt. [laughter]
This was their happy hunting ground. [laughter] But you see,
groups like that had jazz players playing with them. Jazz
110
players would take a job with them if they had no other
resort. But they didn't use too many trumpets. They used
mostly tenor saxophone and guitar and piano and drums,
bass. But that was certainly a big part of the street. But
that's about all that I can think of.
ISOARDI: Well, do you have any final thoughts or anything
else you want to say or bring up that maybe we haven't touched
upon?
FARMER: No. My final thoughts would be more like this Ernie
Andrews thing [Ernie Andrews; Blues for Central Avenue] . It
was kind of sad, because when you go there now, I feel like
I'm stepping into a graveyard. It's very emotional to see
something that played such a large part in your life, and now
there's nothing left there. Nothing would give you the
impression that this place had ever been anything other than
what it is right now. And you have to stop and ask yourself,
well, is it all an illusion? Is it all an illusion? And
that's the big question. You know, I'm sixty-three years old,
and when I first went there I was, say, sixteen or something
like that, and what happened then at that age has influenced
me until now. But if I look at that street now, what could
have influenced me? What was there? There's nothing there
that would influence anybody now. Nothing at all. Not one
brick. I mean, there's no sign of anything ever happening of
any value or importance to anyone in the world.
ISOARDI: It's a tragedy. It's a loss for the community for
111
the next generation who doesn't know what —
FARMER: It is. It's a loss, because the kids come up and
they don't have any idea. All they know is crack and shoot
somebody, you know, that kind of stuff. Basketball.
Basketball is okay, but there's more to life than
basketball. You know, everybody can't be six, seven feet tall
and make a million dollars playing basketball.
So the kids come up, and their role models are so limited
that they don't see any alternative to what's before them.
And what's before them is almost totally negative, almost
totally negative, in the black community. That's the pity.
That's really the pity. And not enough is done to make the
people aware of what could be, of what was and what could be,
you know. If you don't live in the United States, you live
someplace else, you come back here from time to time, you see
the way people live, and people feel this is the only way it
can be. But it doesn't have to be this way. But they don't
get any input on any other possibility, or very little.
They're much more aware of the negative things, you know, of
the dope dealers and the robbers and all these kinds of
negative things. Because at this period — well, we didn't
worry about crime. We didn't worry about people breaking in
your house or stealing your car. I'm not saying that crime
didn't exist, but it certainly was no comparison to now.
There have always been gangs in L.A. Before I even came over
112
here I heard about gangs, you know, like the Sleepy Lagoon
case, that type of thing. In fact, I was going to come over
here a year earlier, but this whole thing came up.
ISOARDI: Oh, the Zoot Suit Riots?
FARMER: Yeah, the Zoot Suit Riots came up, and my mother
said, "No, not now, not now." [laughter] So that has always
been a part of the scene here.
Watts was a real middle-class place. You know, everybody
in Watts had a job. When I worked with Horace Henderson, he
was living in Watts. He had a very nice little bungalow, and
I went out there and talked to him. We didn't rehearse there,
but I talked to him about rehearsal and jobs and things like
that. Sonny Criss was living in Watts. A lot of guys lived
there. But it was regarded as — Nobody said [adopting
horrified tone], "Watts — Man!" It was just another
neighborhood.
But things come and go. There's ups and downs in
societies as there are in people. About the only thing you
can be sure of in life — well, life is change. Whatever exists
today, you can be sure it's not going to be existing forever
this way. You know, things change, and we can't anticipate
what's going to bring it on. Sometimes it takes a movement,
but a movement is usually led by one person or a few people,
and we don't know what's going to happen or who's going to do
it. But we can be sure it's not going to stay the way it
113
is. And you can't live in the past, of course. You can't
take things back to where they were. Things move forward for
better or worse. And it's worse now, but it won't stay this
way. Whatever is going to happen in the future, I don't know.
People bug me a lot. If they don't know anything about
jazz, they usually wind up asking me, "Well, where do you
think jazz is going anyway?" [laughter] They don't even know
anything about where it is or where it was, but they worry
about where it's going. And I know everything is going
somewhere, because that's life. It's change. Without change,
there's no life. There has to be change. So we go ahead and
do what comes to our minds and do it the best we can, just
like you do, you know, musically or anything else.
And one day the things that happened here will be looked
on with more interest than there is now. But the people who
did it will be long gone. But that's the way the world
goes. So you just have to live with it, accept it, and do the
best you can do. That's all. Some people make a contribu-
tion, like [Samuel] Browne made a great contribution. He is a
good example for others to live by, to try to do something to
pass on some knowledge to people who didn't come in contact
with it. And that's about the best thing that we can do.
ISOARDI: Art, thank you very much.
FARMER: Well, thank you.
114
INDEX
Adams, Joe, 81
Albany, Joe, 96
American Federation of
Musicians: Local 47, 91,
94-95; Local 586, 89;
Local 767, 44, 89-92, 94
Anderson, Ivie, 11
Andrews, Ernie, 29, 111
Apollo Theatre (New York),
39, 42-43
Armstrong, Louis, 6, 13,
87, 104
Babbitt, Milton, 75-76
Baker, Chet, 105-6
Baker, Josephine, 78
Barranco, Wilbur, 27
Barrelhouse (club), 38
Basie, Count, 11, 15, 36,
109
Berg, Billy, 48, 49, 82, 95
Bigard, Barney, 94-95
Billy Berg's (club), 48-49,
82, 95, 109
Black and Tan Club (San
Diego), 68
Block, Rene, 96
Bradley, Thomas, 63
Bradshaw, Tiny, 45
Brandeis University, 75
Bright, Kenny, 95-96
Brown, Tiny, 27
Browne, Samuel, 15, 23, 25-
27, 32, 104, 114
Cadrez, Florence, 91
Caliman, Hadley, 29
Carter, Benny, 44-45, 49-
50, 68, 78, 91
Club Alabam, 11, 17, 36,
77-78, 80, 82, 86
Cole, Nat King, 81
Collette, Buddy, 80, 91,
93, 101
Coltrane, John, 73
Community Symphony
Orchestra, 91-93
Crayton, Pee Wee, 110
Criss, Sonny, 29, 78, 100-
102, 113
CTI Records, 99
Davis, Miles, 41, 43, 44,
45, 49, 52-54
Dingbod, Bob, 11
Dolphy, Eric, 69-73
Downbeat Club, 11, 13, 17,
34, 42, 43, 56, 57, 65,
68, 80-82, 97, 98
Dunbar Hotel, 11, 80. See
also Club Alabam
Du Sable High School
(Chicago) , 23
Eckstine, Billy, 12, 36, 86
Edison, Harry "Sweets," 78
Edwards, Teddy, 11, 43, 64
Eldridge, Roy, 6, 7
El Grotto (club, Chicago),
39
Elks hall, 110
Ellington, Duke, 6, 15, 95,
109
Ernie Andrews: Blues for
Central Avenue (film),
111
Fain, Elmer, 91
Farmer, Addison (brother),
1, 2, 3, 9, 10, 18, 30-
32, 40, 45-47, 50, 66, 93
Farmer, Hazel Stewart
(mother), 1-2, 18-19, 31-
32, 38, 87
Farmer, James Arthur
(father), 18
Fielding, Jerry, 91
Finale Club, 49
Gaiety (club), 56-57
Gaillard, Slim, 27, 49
115
Gibson, Althea, 49-51
Gibson, Harry "The
Hipster," 49
Gillespie, Dizzy, 12-13,
27, 41, 42, 45, 48, 49,
51, 69
Goodman, Benny, 6
Gordon, Dexter, 78, 95-96,
98, 99, 104, 109
Gray, Wardell, 78, 98, 99
Green, Bill, 22, 105
Griffin, Johnny, 23
Hampton, Lionel, 23, 52,
77, 94, 103
Hawkins, Coleman, 42
Hawkins, Erskine, 24
Henderson, Fletcher, 19
Henderson, Horace, 19-20,
37, 66, 68, 113
Herman, Woody, 106
Hindemith, Paul, 15;
Elementary Training for
Musicians, 15
nines. Earl, 39, 88
Howard, Joe, 29
Howard, Paul, 91
Hunter, Ivory Joe, 110
Ivie's Chicken Shack
(club), 11
Jack's Basket Room (club),
56
James, Harry, 6
Jefferson High School (Los
Angeles), 19-34, 38, 68,
69, 103, 104
Jones, Quincy, 77
Jordan High School (Los
Angeles) , 34
Jungle Room (club), 57
Kenton, Stan, 6, 81, 106
King, J.D., 11
King, Rodney, 63
Knepper, Jimmy, 96
Last Word Cafe, 11, 13, 17,
56, 81, 97
Liggins, Joe, 13; Joe
Liggins and the
Honeydrippers, 13-15
Lovejoy's (club), 10, 11,
46, 56, 60
Lunceford, Jimmie, 6, 14-
15, 24
McFall, Ruben, 96
McGhee, Howard, 11, 18, 42,
43, 45, 49, 68, 83-84
McNeely, Cecil "Big Jay,"
33-34, 97-100
McShann, Jay, 13, 40, 68,
80
McVea, Jack, 13, 17
Million Dollar Theatre, 109
Milton, Roy, 110
Mingus, Charles, 72, 73,
74-77, 96
Montgomery, Gene, 43-45, 50
Moorehead, Baron, 91
Morgan, Frank, 78, 102-4,
107-8
Morris, Joe, 86
Mulligan, Gerry, 32, 53
Nance, Ray, 23
North Texas State
University, 24
Oasis (club), 80
Olympia Theatre, 98
Orpheum Theatre, 109
Otis, Johnny, 31, 36-40,
51, 86
Parker, Charlie "Bird," 12-
13, 41-52, 59-61, 65-66,
72
Parker, William H., 65
Pepper, Art, 104-6
Petrillo, James C.
"Caesar," 89
Plantation Club, 82, 86
Playboy Jazz Festival, 62
Porter, Roy, 11, 68-71, 80
Ray, Floyd, 19-20, 37, 66,
68, 95-96
116
Robinson, James, "Sweet
Pea," 29
Rushing, Jimmy, 11
Savoy Records, 70
Schuller, Gunther, 77
Shapero, Harold, 76
Shaw, Artie, 6-7
Small's Paradise (club,
Harlem), 52
Stewart, Abner
(grandfather ) , 1
Swing Club, 95
Tatum, Art, 42
Thigpen, Ed, 29
Turner, Big Joe, 110
Walker, T-Bone, 110
Wendell Phillips High
School (Chicago), 2.3
Williams, Dootsie, 50
Wilson, Gerald, 78, 80, 90
Works Progress
Administration (WPA), 3-4
Yates, Sammy, 45
Young, Lee, 80, 95
Young, Lester, 80
117
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