Feb. 17, 1973: The Professors

 

A band with quite a pedigree. See the Footnote. 

Feb. 17, 1973

‘The Professors’ Offer Musical Variety with Style 

WHEN STEVE WILLIS doesn’t have to play vibes or flugelhorn, he’s standing back a bit, rocking from one foot to another in severe reverence like a Zen wrestler waiting for a gong.

          Waiting until the solo section swells to meet the main theme again, ready to move in with it, right on with every velvet note, drawing them from some mandala of perfect sounds that’s revealed only to the most dedicated.

          When the music dies, he’s speaking into the microphone with the painful gentleness of those Keeper of the Mystic Light jazz deejays from the early ‘60s:

          “Today … I was watching the Merv Griffin Show … and this well-known en-ter-TAIN-er … got up and did this next song by Antonio Carlos Jobim … we’re doing it … so that somewhere today in the United States . . . it will be played right.”

          Steve calls an incredible variety of songs to the other three members of The Professors – bossa nova, familiar jazz tunes from 10 and 15 years ago, old standards, latter-day Top 40 tunes like “Brandy,” a thing from Sly & The Family Stone.

          It’s not so much what they choose to play as how they play it. As Steve says: “It’s not a compromise if you consider yourself a craftsman. Not a laborer but in the sense that somebody asks you to do something and you do it well.”

          That wouldn’t be a bad credo for the growing jazz revival. It isn’t so much experimental jazz that’s coming back, but well-performed soft jazz, more like The Crusaders or Chuck Mangione, players who are picking up the lost following which couldn’t fly with the hard improvisers.

          “When you talk about jazz,” Steve says, “you’re not talking about a type of music. You’re talking about an approach to music. It’s in the improvisational abilities.”

          Despite their electric bass and piano, The Professors have essentially an acoustic sound and they need a room where they can go loud without overpowering, soft without evaporating.

          For this, Steve considers David, the grotto-like, six-month-old Elmwood Avenue club between North and Allen, a virtually ideal spot. The group has a standing engagement there Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

* * *

LANDING AT David in October, The Professors have been allowed to develop and flourish in relative freedom. Other musicians drop by regularly to check them out, including such veteran local jazzmen as Tommy Mundi, Herbie Griffin, Charlie Migrow and Elmer Cavelli.

          In the declining hours of Saturday morning, Steve recounts some of the stops in his search for the mandala of perfect sounds as he, pianist John Hasselback and bass guitarist Dave Rostetter have breakfasts of shells with sauce at an all-night Italian restaurant near the club. Drummer Ray Domenski orders coffee.

          Steve began on trumpet. As a boy in Niagara Falls, the only vibes player he heard was George Shearing and that didn’t compel him to buy a set of vibes.

          It took a record by jazz vibist Don Elliott to do that. “He played brilliantly,” Steve says. And then he discovered Milt Jackson. By the time he was 13 or so, he was out playing in Falls jazz clubs.

          “At that time there were barrels and barrels of jazz players,” he relates. “I went to jam sessions three times a week. Even the union hall had sessions.”

* * *

HE LEFT FREDONIA State, where he was studying music, to hit the road for Florida with the house band at Jamestown’s Paramount Grill, a stop for major acts in those days. Steve toured with several bands, including Buddy Morrow’s, after Florida turned sour.

          Next was a master’s degree at Rochester’s Eastman School, then he was back at Fredonia, becoming somewhat of a maverick music faculty member and leading stage bands to three successive collegiate jazz championships.

          “I think they were really afraid it would get too big and they’d be looked on as a jazz school like North Texas State,” he says. “It wasn’t supported by the music school. The stage band was always a student government thing. That’s how I met him,” he nods at Dave Rostetter.

          Dave was not only student government president, but also bass guitarist for an 11-man soul-rock band, a junior edition of Wilmer & The Dukes called Malcolm & The Young Brothers. This happy combination sent the stage band to Mobile one year, riding on cash raised in a special benefit show by Dave’s group.

* * *

STEVE LATER was to be with Dave in another Fredonia-based rock band called Hard Luck, which traveled all over Western New York in its two-year life. It was Steve’s first experience playing rock and he didn’t like it much.

          “It was like trying to grasp the aesthetic of Indian music,” Steve says. “It took me a year before I figured out what was going on. There’s an entirely different set of values. The rock joints got on my nerves something fierce. And moving equipment. We worked a lot, so we moved a lot.”

          Hard Luck dissolved about a year ago (former members will have a reunion this weekend at David) and Steve, who had been talking with John about putting together a group using elements of jazz and rock, decided to revive The Professors.

          Steve also was determined to play music which pleased whatever audience happened to be listening, although sometimes, like one night last year in Silver Creek, the compromise can be too much to bear.

* * *

“BILL SANG ‘Please Release Me’ and all he knew,” Steve recounts, “was ‘please release me, let me go.’ So we just repeated that over and over. It was a total parody. They gave us a standing ovation.”

          Steve, now 33, married with four children and teaching music at Lake Shore Central School in Angola (he left the Fredonia faculty in 1970), says the group has had a few attractive recording offers, but he feels their on-stage work is more important.

          “The real improvement,” he says, “takes place right out there on the bandstand. Recording stops something in the middle of development. I hear things I did 10 years ago and I can’t stand ‘em. It’s like looking at yourself in out-of-style clothes. You wouldn’t want people to think you’re that way now.”         

The box/sidebar: 

A History Which Began in ‘50s 

          A history of The Professors would begin in the late ‘50s, back before Steve Willis joined them during his final undergraduate years at Fredonia State. One by one, the other members quit, leaving Steve to carry on.

          John Hasselback was a junior, studying piano, when Steve came into the music faculty. He took John into the group and they’ve been together off and on ever since.

          John, now 27, married and father of two, is a music teacher at East Aurora High School. He started on piano when he was less than a year old in Staten Island. “My mother was taking lessons over TV and I used to push her away from the keyboard,” he says.

* * *

HE’S SWITCHED to a Fender Rhodes electric piano for club dates to avoid the punishing idiosyncrasies of club pianos. “Some owners buy an old beat-up thing,” he remarks, “and by the end of the night your fingers are bleeding from the broken keys.”

          Dave Rostetter, 25, legally blind because of optic nerve damage from a gas leak in his Staten Island home when he was a kid, came to Fredonia as a trumpet major, then decided he didn’t want to be a music teacher and switched to political science.

          He’d played upright bass in high school and when a singer in his freshman dorm wanted someone to play bass, he said he’d do it. At the gig, they gave him a bass, but it was electric.

* * *

“I DIDN’T know how to play it,” he says, “so I kept the volume down. I was embarrassed. And then afterwards the cat came up and asked me to play steady.” He joined with Steve after Hard Luck broke up.

          Ray Domanski, who came to the group in November, is 20 and a graduate of Dunkirk’s Cardinal Mindszenty High School. He played with Hard Luck in its final months, then went to New York City to study with Peter Nero’s drummer.

          “This band changed me around,” he says. “I didn’t own a pair of brushes until I joined.”

          “I never thought of it so much as Professors being teachers,” Steve says of the name. “I think of it as professing, you know, expressing a point of view.”

          They tried to change the name last year (Dave wanted Presto & The Cosmic Kisses) and even ran an extensive ad campaign around Dunkirk but, Steve notes, “People just kept calling us The Professors. It really doesn’t matter now.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: From left, John Hasselback, Dave Rostetter, Steve Willis and Ray Domanski.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: We’ve run into Ray Domanski playing jazz gigs in Jamestown in the 20-teens. A preview article notes that Ray played with saxophonist and pianist Chu Nero in the Hard Luck band, that the drummer with Peter Nero who he studied with was named Joe Cusatis and that he played in the pit band at Melody Fair before heading to the West Coast, where he played with another Buffalo legend, Don Menza, along with Pepper Adams and Joe Romano. It also mentions that he has returned to Dunkirk, his hometown, and accompanied Lucie Arnaz at the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival.

          Dave Rostetter, make that Dr. David J. Rostetter, is a retired associate professor in the Ralph C. Wilson School of Education at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, where he taught courses in inclusive education and diversity. He also played in a band there with other professors. Until the mid 1980s, he worked for the U.S. Department of Education in Washington, D.C., then became a consultant to educational agencies. He specializes in helping schools comply with consent decrees to provide court-ordered special education programs.

          John Hasselback worked with Maynard Ferguson and Cab Calloway and taught for many years in the East Aurora schools. He also is patriarch of a jazz dynasty. His son, John Jr., is a trombonist and his daughter-in-law, John Jr.’s wife Lisa, is a jazz pianist. Both are teachers and both have topped a number of local jazz polls. And their son, John III, a trumpeter who is making a splash in the New York City jazz scene, is doing graduate work at the Eastman School of Music and just released his first album in April. The three generations gave a concert together in the 2016 Summer Jazz Series at the Albright-Knox.

          I had a tough time digging up Steve Willis until I discovered that his name actually was Wieloszynski. During his 22 years at Lake Shore Central, he developed an acclaimed string program and wrote string orchestra arrangements for Kendor Music (subject of the April 22, 1972, column). From 1984 to 1986, he was New York State Music Association jazz ensemble chairman. He also played horn in bands and stage productions locally. I suspect that he regularly got called to play in that pit band at Melody Fair by the musical contractor for visiting artists there, Jack Lis, who was one of his standout students at Fredonia State.  

I further suspect he was Stephen Wieloszynski Jr., son of Professor Szczepan “Stephen” J. Wieloszynski, whose parents were Polish immigrants in Niagara Falls. A violin virtuoso who opened a music store in the Falls, he was founder of the Wieloszynski Orchestra and gave lessons to generations of youngsters. The professor was inducted into the Niagara Falls Music Hall of Fame in 2018.   

          Meanwhile, Steve’s oldest son, who also is Stephen J. but goes by the name Jay Willis, followed his dad to Fredonia State and became an audio engineer, working with Pink Floyd, Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Talking Heads, Tom Petty and Aretha Franklin, among others. He followed that with a stint at CBS Sports and has gotten three Emmy Awards. He lives right on Chautauqua Lake in Lakewood and performs occasionally on keyboards in the Buffalo area under his own name or with a band called Rush Hour, which has appeared at Pausa Art House.

          Steve died unexpectedly in his home in Lakewood in 1997. He was 58. Small world side note: Turns out I went to Fredonia High School with his wife, who was two years ahead of me. She was Pat Civilette, one of the cheerleaders.