© -Steven Cerra. Copyright protected; all rights reserved.
"The cerebral content of music gradually emerges to change its whole function. The minuet was the movement of symphonies; it was taken right out of dance music. And as soon as the composers did that, it lost its appeal to the guy on the street. And that's exactly what happened to jazz.”
- Allyn Ferguson, composer, arranger, bandleader
If you worked as a studio musician for any length of time in Hollywood, CA from about the early 1960’s to the late 1980s, you were bound to run into the arrangements of Allyn Ferguson.
Whatever the medium of expression - television, motion pictures, radio - Allyn’s writing always turned up.
Even education films, which is where I worked with him, were a constant context for his skills as a composer-arranger.
In the later years of his career, Allyn also managed to find time to give the Count Basie Big Band a fresh sound.
THE BOY IN THE P-38
December, 1999
Jazzletter
Gene Lees, editor
“As the major bandleaders of the swing era have stepped off into what someone called the Great Perhaps, efforts have been made to keep their music alive. Commerce, of course, enters into it. Somebody stands to make money on these "ghost bands", as Woody Herman was apparently the first to call them. He avowed that after his death, there would be no Woody Herman ghost band, but his resolve weakened at the end and there is a Woody Herman band.
As with all the ghost bands, the flesh may be willing but the spirit is weak. Whatever animated those bands died with their leaders. How the presence of a man in front of it could inspire a perceptible and specific personality in a band no matter who wrote its charts and who might be in its personnel is one of the imponderables.
Of all these bands, the most disappointing (to me) has been Basie. It seemed that there could be no Count Basie band without two critical elements: Freddie Green and Basie. Without Freddie Green to pave that smooth highway-to-the-horizon with his almost inaudible guitar chords and Basie to smile his genial and slightly stoned smile and go plink-plink on the piano and somehow, awesomely, supercharge the whole band, it wasn't the same.
Of late that has changed. This is evident from two CDs released by the MAMA Foundation, an alas obscure label founded and funded by Gene Czerwinski, who made his money manufacturing studio-quality loudspeakers, and set up the foundation in memory of his wife. The first of these albums, Count Plays Duke, won a Grammy Award in 1999. The album is quite marvelous, and so is the second, called Swing Shift, nominated for a Grammy in 2000.
A number of factors contribute to the quality of the new Basie band. One of them is its current leader, trombonist Grover Mitchell, veteran of the band in Basie's own time and of the Los Angeles recording studios. Mitchell is a lovely lead trombonist. And he is obviously a superb organizer (lead players by the nature of the responsibility tend to be that way), who has assembled an exceptional body of musicians.
Another major factor is the principal arranger on these albums, Allyn Ferguson. He wrote the charts in the Ellington album, and for Swing Shift contributed seven original compositions and arranged three standards. (Bob Ojeda, who plays in the band's trumpet section, wrote the rest of the album, and he's no slouch either.)
A few jazz lovers know Allyn Ferguson for his writing for the Stan Kenton and Buddy Rich bands, others for his long-ago Chamber Jazz Sextet, and some for his association with writer and poet Kenneth Patchen in the poetry-and-jazz movement that never found enough audience to sustain it. Still others will recognize at least the Ferguson part of his name from television scores, as a participant in the Elliott-Ferguson organization, for such shows as Charlie's Angels, Barney Miller, and Starsky and Hutch. And still others will know him for scores to a long series of high-quality films produced by Norman Rosemont, including The Man in the Iron Mask and All Quiet on the Western Front.
Allyn Ferguson's is not a high-profile name. You rarely see it in print. He is unmentioned in the 1988 New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, although the late Leonard Feather and I quit counting when we reached 110 major omissions, from Guido Basso to Peggy Lee. But Ferguson is unmentioned as well in the new Leonard Feather-Ira Gitler Biographical Dictionary of Jazz (Oxford University Press).
He seems not so much indifferent to publicity as unaware of it. He has been a friend of mine for twenty-five years, and I have never written a word about him. His abilities creep up on you, and only recently did I pause to realize: This is one of the most interesting persons and musicians in my experience, disciplined and learned, a heavy reader and a close observer of the society around us.
He is a man of sturdy trim build, a full head of gray hair and a gray beard, and, at seventy-five, of remarkable vigor and intellectual energy. He lives at Malibu, California, where I spent several recent afternoons with him, on a patio overlooking the Pacific.
He was born October 18, 1924, in San Jose, and has spent his entire professional life, excepting a period during World War II and another when he was a student in France, in California. Thus, if anyone can accurately be called a west-coast jazz musician, he's it.
"My father owned music stores," Ferg said. "He was a self-taught bass player, trombone player, piano player, and he loved music. He worked at the old Orpheum Theater in San Francisco with Phil Harris and Morey Amsterdam and all those people. Then he got out of the music business and into the retail business. My mother was a pianist and elementary school teacher. One of my father's best friends was Red Nichols, and we were close to the Nichols family. Red's father was an old Mormon bandmaster, from Ogden, Utah. Red had a sister, Dorothy Nichols, who was a fine cellist and was on staff at the radio station in San Jose.
"I started studying trumpet when I was four with Red's father, Loring Nichols. He took an old wooden coat-hanger, which he used as a prop for my knee and put a ruler on it with a slot in it so that the trumpet would stay up. I couldn't hold the weight.
"I played trumpet until I was about six. Then I started piano lessons. I had a fine piano teacher. My mother would sit with me an hour a day on the piano bench and make me practice, because I would rather play baseball. Had it not been for my mother, I'm not sure I'd have been a musician. She saw to it that I spent the time at that piano whether I liked it or not. I don't know why she did it. Probably it was her own ego. The fact is that she did do it.
"By ten or eleven, I was giving concerts, playing pretty good piano literature, Mendelssohn's Rondo Capriccio and things like that. Showy pieces that I could do. There was no depth in it; I had it all in my fingers. But for a kid that age, I had astonishing technique. Yet I never liked to play for people very much. I didn't like the fact that I could play perfectly at home and go in front of people and make mistakes. I could never have been a concert pianist,
"When I was about twelve I started writing charts for a little band that I had. It was almost Lombardo but not quite. Hal Kemp, that kind of thing. I didn't want to study piano any more. I got into popular music, which led almost directly into jazz. By the time I was fourteen, my favorite bands were Lunceford and Erskine Hawkins.
"When I was about fifteen, I worked for eight weeks in the summer with Sonny Dunham. I did that with Charlie Barnet too. And a lot of territory bands. To be in California in those days, in San Jose or Palo Alto, was tough, because that was not where anything happened. I never had any eyes to go to New York. I was a Californian, and I was going to stay.
"I played in a band with a clarinet player who thought he was Artie Shaw. He couldn't play a note of jazz, but he could play anything Artie ever played if you wrote it down for him. I took almost every contemporary Artie Shaw record off the 78s. I didn't even know what a score was. I'd put the needle down and get the first five notes of the lead alto, for example. Then I'd go back and get the second alto part. And the tenor and the next tenor."
"Could you slow the turntable up?" I asked. "Some guys used to do that to do take-downs."
"No, I couldn't. I just did it. I didn't study writing in those days. Years later, when I had a record contract with Archie Bleyer, Benny Carter told me,'I learned to write for three or four saxophones from Archie Bleyer stocks.'
"I said, 'What do you mean?'
"Benny said, 'I used to put them on the living room floor and study them, how he wrote for three saxophones.' This would be the 1920s. So Benny Carter learned the same way I did."
I said, "Bob Farnon told me he did that too, until Don Redman showed him how to lay it out in a score."
"We all did. Benny Carter was very good to me, by the way."
(For those unfamiliar with the term, "stocks" were arrangements of their songs commissioned by publishers. These stocks were sold in music stores all over America. They were so structured that they could be played by large bands or, with the selective elimination of parts, by small groups. Every arranger I ever met who grew up in that period mentioned studying stocks. But what is amazing, in retrospect, is that there were so many regional bands in the cities and towns of the U.S. and Canada that the extensive publication of these stocks was profitable. Archie Bleyer was an important writer of stocks, as was Spud Murphy.)
"Anyway," Ferg continued, "I took down Concerto for Clarinet and What Is This Thing Called Love? for this clarinet player. And years later, when I went over to study with Nadia Boulanger in France — there was no solfeggio study as such in America in those days; we just didn't understand that, and we didn't do it — we were taking four-voice dictation and so forth, and finally she said, 'How are you good at this? I don't understand.' I said, 'I don't know.' And she said, 'And you never studied solfeggio?' And I said, 'No. Not at all.' Taking those things off records was just ear training. I can remember when I was probably five, walking to school, singing a tune and in my pocket fingering the trumpet. And that's a form of solfeggio — associating the fingering with the notes. But Boulanger was amazed that I could do that." [Solfeggio is a music education method used to teach pitch and sight-reading.]
I told Ferg a story. Around 1962, when I first lived in New York, riding one afternoon on the subway, I noticed that the guy sitting next to me was moving his fingers in patterns. I said, "Are you a trumpet player?"
He said, surprised, "Yes. How did you know?"
"Watching your hands," I said. And he introduced himself. That's how I met Johnny Carisi.
"Yes. And that's why I tell you that. When I got to France, that training — I didn't know I was doing anything, except writing for a guy that didn't pay me — made me a star in four-voice dictation. None of the American kids could do it.
"After I wrote for that guy, I had my own band in San Jose. Big band. I was sixteen. We played all the old Basie stocks. Sent for You Yesterday, One O 'Clock Jump. We played dances and so forth. Then when I was seventeen, Pearl Harbor.
"The next morning I went out and enlisted in the air force. Some people said, 'What do you want to do that for? You're a musician, why don't you get in an army band?' I said, ‘I don't think that's the way to win a war.' So I became a fighter pilot."
"Percy Heath was a fighter pilot."
"I didn't know that. So was Skitch Henderson. He was at the same base I was, a class ahead of me.
"I should say that from the time I was twelve, when I stopped taking piano lessons, I was really a teen-age rebel. I raced cars. I almost cut my foot off with a motorcycle. I did crazy shit. By the time I enlisted in the air force, I figured I could win the war all by myself. And those were the kind of guys they wanted flying fighter planes.
"I was court-martialed three times for buzzing. I really was crazy. I didn't think anything could happen to me. The first time, I was still a cadet.
"I learned to fly in a Stearman biplane. The old Stearman PT 13. Still a great airplane. On TV just this morning, I saw four of them in the Ohio air show. All fixed up. They're still wonderful acrobatic airplanes. I had about forty hours in a Stearman, and I had just learned basic aerobatics. I had a girlfriend at Scripps College. I was at Ontario, California. It was a primary base. I knew she was playing ground hockey and I was getting some solo time in the airplane. I went and buzzed the field. The whole field flattened, I was that low. I pulled the airplane up, and I did a snap roll. I wouldn't even think about doing that today. But I was going pretty fast and I got away with it. They never caught me. One of my instructors thought it was me, but nobody ever copped.
"I graduated and went to Marana Air Force Base in Arizona, between Tucson and Phoenix. You went to basic training in the BT-13, which we called the Vibrator. It had fixed gear."
"I was in an experimental class where we were to move directly from Stearmans into AT-6's, which were advanced trainers. They wanted to cut out the Vibrator. That meant you went immediately into variable props, retractable landing gear, and flaps. But they tended to ground-loop. When you come down and you're drifting to the right, when your right wheel hits, it spins the whole plane around. That class I was in, about half of them washed out right away. I didn't. I was getting in some time before going to advanced. I buzzed again. I don't remember where. One of the instructors saw me do it and reported it. And here I was, I had just finished basic training, and I was one of maybe twenty guys out of a class of a hundred who had made it. That's the only reason, I think, that I wasn't washed out. I was court-martialed and sent to advanced with diminished salary. They sent me to Williams Air Force, where Skitch Henderson had been."
I said, "In the RAF, they looked for the crazy kids. The sober, adult, steady ones they wanted for bomber pilots."
"I know it! So did the Americans! I went through with a friend. I had enlisted with him. We'd look around and say,- "That guy's not going to make it, he's gonna kill himself.' We could point to the people who weren't going to make it. They were afraid to fly, they had no guts, they got airsick, whatever the reason. In those days, fighter pilots were the cream. You wore the crushed hat. You were the pick of the military."
"Don't you think it was the old knighthood image? The two men with lances?"
"Yeah. Exactly. We were the knights. That's why I wasn't washed out. When I got to advanced, I went to P-38 training. That was a stepped-up program. And I did the same stupid thing. But this time I buzzed a bus.
"I was buzzing a long dirt road in Arizona. A huge cloud of dust rose up behind me. I was down on the deck. I must have been fifty feet off the ground at the most. There were power lines on either side of the road. And a bus came toward me. I saw it, and I wasn't going to hit him. But by the time I got to the bus, he had gone off the road, and he was out and shook his fist at me as I went by. I kinda got a laugh out of that, and rolled it into a chandelle, which is a climbing turn. I caught the wing on a power line, and lost about two feet of my right wing."
"Scared you to death?"
"Oh! Oh! I climbed to about ten thousand feet, and said, 'I've got to find out what this thing's gonna do when it lands.' I dropped the gear and pulled it back, and simulated the stall as you land. A P-38 landed at about 120 miles an hour. I got down to about 130. Of course the air was rarefied at 10,000 feet. It did a violent snap roll to the right. I said, 'Holy mackerel, I've got to land this thing a lot faster than 120 miles an hour, or it'll snap roll right on the ground.'
"If you test the control surfaces, if you are too rough on them, they just stall out. The airplane is no longer flying. It's just a missile. You've got to get your surfaces back into a flying condition. The way you recover is to give it opposite control. Anyway, I cleared Williams Field. I said, 'I'm coming in. I've got a problem, and you'd better clear the field.' I almost was going to bail out. I thought, 'Well, they're going to hear about the incident with the bus, they're going to find the airplane, they're going to see what happened. I'd better at least bring the airplane back.'
"So I came in about 130 miles an hour, which was really hot. I hit the deck and blew out a tire. But I saved the airplane. As I taxied up to the line, people were running out. I'll never forget my court martial. The judge said, 'Lieutenant Ferguson, why do you do these things?' And I said, 'Because it's fun.'
"He said, 'Don't you realize you could kill yourself?'
"I said, 'That never occurs to me at all.'
"I was in Section 8 — mental — for a long time. They had me in a hospital. Interestingly enough, one of the doctors on the ward was from San Jose. He knew me and my father. He came in one day and said, 'Allyn, I'm going to intercede, if I can, but they really think there's something wrong with you.' I said, 'What's wrong with a guy who wants to have fun?' It was all I could think of.
"He interceded, and they sent me down to Ajo, on the Mexican border in southern Arizona, a big gunnery school. I taught gunnery for about nine months. With P-38s. There was one with twenty-millimeter cannon and four machine guns. Later, there were other variations."
"They had contra-rotating props, right? And that obviated torque."
"Yeah. How do you know those things?"
"Because," I said, "you guys were flying them, and I was a kid in school devouring aviation magazines and Metronome and building models. And I thought the P-38 was the prettiest of all the fighters. I've read that they were marvelous to fly."
Ferg said, "What a feeling. You sat at the end of the runway with your feet on the brakes. They had turbos on the top of the engine. They kicked in, as I recall, about 3,800 rpm. So you sat with the airplane braked, just raring to go, until you saw both turbos kick in, because if you went on a take-off run and one of the turbo wasn't kicked in, it flipped you right over. The worst thing about a P-38 is if you ever lost an engine on takeoff, it was really tough.
"Another pilot and I just about caused an international incident. We went out one day just to shoot up the landscape. It was such wild country down there. He's still a good friend of mine. The two of us went out, just looking for trouble. He spotted a shack in the mountains. Just a little shack. I followed him down, and we buzzed the place, and there was no action of any kind. So we thought, Oh, it's an abandoned shack, let's shoot it up. We climbed back. He made a pass, and I was right behind him, and he gave it a burst, and people came out of this shack like ... kids and dogs and ... oh, they came running out. And I'm right behind him and I had my hand on the trigger, and I thought, 'I can't get my hand off this thing!' It seemed so long for the nerves to transmit. And I didn't give it a burst, but I nearly did.
"We got the hell out of there.
"We didn't know it, but we were no longer over Arizona. We were over Mexico. Nobody knew that it was us. There was so much traffic in the air that day that they couldn't figure it out. They thought it must be somebody from Ajo. But there was another base at Gila Bend, north of Ajo. We never got caught, and thank God nobody got killed.
"I guess what I'm trying to say to you is that I was really a little nuts. I was gonna go and win the war by myself."
I said, "I remember reading that somewhere over the Pacific, in a descent, somebody got a P-38 up to something like 460 miles an hour."
"Oh more than that. I did that myself," Ferg said. "You could get it up close to the speed of sound. There were several ways you could do it. But the airplane would shake so hard. We thought it would explode."
"Well," I said, "there was a theory at one time that they would never be able to exceed the speed of sound, that the plane would come apart."
"That's exactly right," Ferg said, "Absolutely. We were very careful about approaching the speed of sound. But the P-38 could have done it. We thought it would be like hitting a brick wall. I was flying a P-38F or G."
"So. Did you go overseas?"
"No. By then the war was nearly over. And because we were good at gunnery, we were put into jets — the first American combat jets, the P-80s, which are now used as trainers
"In those days, there were no dual controls in jets. You got into it for the first time and flew it, alone. And I firewalled the thing and nothing happened, it started out really slow, and I wasn't used to that." He laughed. ''I got about halfway down the runway, and thought, This damn thing isn't going to take off. I looked down in the cockpit to pull up the landing gear, and by the time I had my head up, I was 'way out, two or three miles from the runway, going like hell, about fifty feet off the ground. It scared me to death.
"I was assigned to teach gunnery in the jets. We had a group of Chinese cadets. About thirty-five percent of them would kill themselves in gunnery. They brought them over here, and they really didn't know how to fly yet. God, I watched a lot of them get killed. I tried to pull one of them out of a burning aircraft. His arm came off in my hand. Weird things used to happen in the war that nobody talks about.
"We had orders to go four days later to the South Pacific, but the war ended, and I was out of the army in two weeks.
"I was not yet twenty-one, and I'