March 9, 1974: Jazz sextet Trigger Happy

 

Spyro Gyra’s Jay Beckenstein wasn’t the only top-notch jazz player in the UB Music Department in the 1970s. 

March 9, 1974 

Trigger Happy Fires Variety of Themes 

THE THEORIES that clear the way for new musical express routes don’t always drop down from on high like John McLaughlin and his new Mahavishnu Orchestra descending from 25,000 feet for a concert with the Buffalo Philharmonic.

          More often than not, they bubble up from below, from basements stuffed with equipment much like this curtained-off one nearly Humboldt Parkway on Buffalo’s East Side, from the practice sessions of intense, open-ended bands like this sextet called Trigger Happy.

          Aside from having one of the more evocative group names around, Trigger Happy is loaded with theory, as only a band with five UB junior and senior music majors could be. But first let us define our terms.

          “Jazz-rock is a bad term,” says Art Levinowitz, the saxophone player. “I think WPHD is calling us that in the commercials. It’d be better if you just call it ‘Trigger Happy music.’ Besides, if you call it jazz, people won’t like it.”

          Douglas (Trigger) Gaston, whose family’s basement this is, stops his hands from tumbling in silent riffs quick as kittens on his unplugged electric piano and ups the theoretical ante.

          “Who wants to play straight jazz anyhow,” he proposes, “‘cause who can play it?”

* * *

“THAT’S A THING everybody’s got mixed up,” explains Albert (Tico) Furness. “It’s my personal opinion, I don’t want to inflict it on anyone, you know, but jazz just symbolizes a spirit, that’s all, of anything that’s powerful, that’s very moving, of things that come up and hit you in the face.”

          “I think everything’s jazz,” says guitarist Joel Perry. Joel is about the only one in the group to pass up the McLaughlin concert. Thinks he’s too mannerist. He prefers Grant Green or Jimi Hendrix or better yet, George Benson.

          “That’s ‘cause people have to have names to call things,” says conga drummer Ron Witherspoon, the only non-student (he’s a quality inspector for F. N. Burt Co. in Cheektowaga). “It’s art music, American music in a romantic style is what it is.”

          Theory and practice held up well for them in a month of Saturdays just ended in Stuart Little’s in North Tonawanda, though they’re still searching for a new gig to apply it to.

          “This past week,” Trigger says, “things just went up in our theme song end there where I want the ‘Trigger Happy’ at the organ to be like a spaceship.”

          “We need a bit of theatrics,” Ron proposes, “to put it over a little bit.”

          There’s a suggestion theatrics might prostitute the music. Trigger thinks differently: “You’re not up there on stage bein’ yourself.

          “Miles Davis has theatrics. Maybe Coltrane didn’t prostitute himself, but you know even Vladimir Horowitz does. For certain things he plays.”

          Rock, jazz and classical figures collide all the time in Trigger Happy’s conversation. Trigger, who’s had nearly 16 years of classical piano training, points for instance to Black concert pianist Andre Watts as an inspiration.

          But it hasn’t been all classical music. Trigger and Ron played jazz in the old Campus Lounge and the Pine Grill when they were in high school, doing George Benson, Jimmy Smith.

          “On organ,” Trigger notes, “Jimmy Smith said it all.”

* * *

NOR HAS IT BEEN all classical for the group’s four New York City natives. Art played three summers in the Catskill Mountain Borscht Belt. Tico was a rock drummer.

          The four gradually came together at UB, first Art and Joel, then Tico, then bass guitarist Murray Kohn, who’s attending a class at UB this night. The result was an experimental jazz group called Lo Coco.

          Trigger Happy was born in November, after a previous pianist quit and the band had a concert that one of Joel’s friends lined up at the State University at Binghamton. The group tapped Trigger and he brought Ron in.

          “‘Cause he’s got a car,” Art says.

          But Ron’s congas also add much to the group’s rhythmic qualities. Tico, who doesn’t take solos because he hasn’t achieved his desire to be as good as Elvin Jones, feels another drummer is a good idea.

* * *

CLASSICAL training showed up in their rehearsals too, helping them work up a repertoire that’s 75 percent original.

          “My first year of college,” Trigger says, “I’d come down here and play and play and play and wasn’t doin’ nothing. Then my piano teacher showed me how to practice. Now I can do an hour a day and get out of it.”

          Trigger Happy’s big, and at the moment only, upcoming date is April 26, when they lead off a mini jazz festival at UB before Herbie Hancock and Weather Report come on.

          “I’ll have to be there to believe it,” Joel says.

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: Douglas (Trigger) Gaston at the piano and, standing from left, Ron Witherspoon, Albert (Tico) Furness, Art Levinowitz and Joel Perry. Missing is bass guitarist Murray Kohn.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: Douglas (Trigger) Gaston is a Buffalo jazz mainstay, heard for many years at the original Anchor Bar with Jimmy Gomes and the Jazz Example and holding forth these days on Friday evenings in Jazzboline Restaurant and Bar in Amherst. But he’s also ranged far afield.

According to a Burchfield Penney Art Center website bio (he’s appeared there several times), “Pianist Douglas ‘Trigger’ Gaston, a prolific composer and performer based in Buffalo, has been featured nationally and internationally with a diverse cross-section of musicians, including jazz players Frank Foster, Clifford Jordan, Delfayo Marsalis and Jerry Gonzales, rhythm and blues artists Brook Benton, Mary Wells and Eddie Kendricks, and actor-comedian Redd Foxx.”

Writing about him in The Buffalo News in 2005, Seamus Gallivan noted that Gaston was teaching at Illos Music and playing Sundays at St. Martin DePorres Church. Gallivan also observed: 

“… with the Jazz Example, the resemblance of (Bilal) Abdullah and Gaston to Coltrane and Tyner is stunning. Like Coltrane, Abdullah is a deeply spiritual player who bows at the altar of the saxophone and blows it far beyond the clouds. Gaston dexterously steers this whirlwind with Tyner’s impeccable touch, at times as delicate as a feather, others as powerful as an anvil.”

Art Levinowitz went into education, but first he toured with Latin and disco bands, including a year with disco star Carol Douglas. He settled into teaching junior high school music in Brooklyn from 1977 to 1986, then became a school administrator on the local and state level in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He’s currently president of the Pennsylvania School Board Association.

Art holds a doctorate from Temple University in the psychology of music and continues to be a musician and composer. In an interview with the Upper Dublin (Pa.) Patch while running for the Upper Dublin Board of School Directors in 2018, he declared, “My first love is music and I continue to play my saxophone. I enjoy sitting in with both the middle school and high school jazz bands. I also perform with a band when I find the time.”

His wife Lili is a music professor emeritus, a researcher into music and brain development, and the impetus behind a program called Music Together, which fosters parent-child musical experiences. It’s offered in 2,500 communities in more than 40 countries.

Joel Perry also went on to an outstanding career. The website of the New Jersey Association for Jazz Education, which gave him its Achievement Award in 2016, praises him as “one of the premier guitarists and musicians of our time.” It notes that he played Carnegie Hall and did a State Department tour of West Africa with Johnny Copeland. It adds that he performed with Lavern Baker, Joni Mitchell, Rosemary Clooney, Al Hibbler and Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others.

But mostly he was a teacher. On the NJAJE website, he tells how he taught guitar at a settlement house while attending the High School of Music and Art in New York City. He taught guitar at UB as an undergraduate, and at Buff State, Villa Maria and Niagara University.

Back in New York City, he taught jazz at La Guardia Community College and played solo guitar in the Rainbow Room five nights a week. He made an instructional video with Johnny Copeland, then went to Jersey, where he hosted a live radio show Sunday mornings called “The Jersey Bounce” on WFDU-FM at Fairleigh Dickinson University in Teaneck. He reported that he was teaching vocal music K-5 in West Orange in 2016, adding, “I insist on including blues and jazz and improvisation in my curriculum for every grade.” He died in 2017.

Murray Kohn, the one member of Trigger Happy I didn’t meet, got a master’s degree from the Juilliard School, was a faculty member at Ithaca College in the early 1980s, graduated from Northeastern University Law School in 1987 and is a senior staff attorney at the Committee for Public Counsel Services in the Boston, Mass., area. He’s also still playing bass. A web search shows that 10 years ago he was in the house band at the Acton Jazz Café in Acton, Mass., and in 2017 he was part of a gig at the Java Room in Chelmsford.

Alas, I can’t locate percussionist Albert (Tico) Furman anywhere. As for conga drummer Ron Witherspoon, I have a feeling he might be the UB alumnus I found on LinkedIn who’s been systems analyst and production supervisor for the Mentholatum Co. for the past 28 years, and a production supervisor for Bristol-Myers Squibb for 15 years before that.