Nov. 22, 1975: Buffalo's jazz revival

 

Buffalo’s great  jazz revival of the 1970s, right when it was starting to pick up speed. 

Nov. 22, 1975

It’s Electronic and Funky – But It’s Still Jazz 

TAKE Tuesday night. A regular sight in the Bar with No Name on Elmwood Avenue. You have people all jammed round the band and the joint just gets grooving.

          But what’s moving things isn’t the Buffalo shuffle or boogie or blues or some new disco hustle. It’s jazz. From the hip of UB to the heart of downtown, it’s the hottest new sound around.

          The band in No Name this night is the James Clark group. They’re simply sitting in, taking solos on jazz standards of a decade ago.

          The kids sandwiched next to the door are impressed. They’re two rock guitarists down from Kitchener, Ont., for a fling.

          “We’re into Hendrix and Clapton,” they say, “but when we get back we’re going to have to pick up on some of this jazz.”

          More and more folks here are picking up on jazz. A year ago only one room in the city booked jazz. Now there’s at least eight.

* * *

THE BIGGEST is Downtown at the Statler Hilton where, as WEBR jazz deejay George Beck would say, the likes of Bobby Hackett, Earl (Fatha) Hines and Buddy DeFranco can be caught six nights a week.

          One weekend last month there were four touring jazz shows in town. Even the city government’s gotten in the act, backing 25 free outdoor concerts this summer in which some 31,000 persons heard the Buffalo Jazz Ensemble.

          At least four local radio stations program jazz regularly now. Furthest committed is WBFO, the public FMer based at UB, where jazz reigns for 29 hours between midnight Friday and 8 a.m. Monday. And there’s plans for more.

          It begins to shape up as a jazz revival that could ultimately rival the palmy period of the early ‘60s, when Monk and Miles and Coltrane played the Royal Arms and Buffalo had its own annual jazz festival.

          One big factor in the comeback of jazz is the present stagnation of rock. Serious-minded rockers are turning to jazz to nourish their heightened sensibilities with its textured complexities and instrumental attainments.

          “But you know, these aren’t like the old jazz fans,” observes Bob Lawson, who with his brother Ed operates the Tralfamadore Café at Main and Fillmore, where there’s jazz Fridays and Saturdays.

          “We tried a group that played Miles Davis and other stuff from the early ‘60s and it didn’t go over. These are kids who grew up on rock and got into jazz through the Mahavishnu Orchestra. They have to have electronic instruments and the beat.”

          The Tralfamadore, nestled into a cellar that used to be a beer-and-rock emporium called Dirty Dick’s Bathhouse, has the leisurely ambience of an early ‘60s club, halfway between a coffeehouse and a jazz spot.

* * *

THIS NIGHT it’s packed for one of the city’s best new jazz groups, Birthright, which is recording numbers for a second album. A friend remarks that they sound like early Chick Corea.

          Birthright, once a trio, now a septet, is one of Buffalo’s longer-lived jazz groups. The rosters of others like Flight and New Wave have been less constant, due to economics. There’s simply not enough places to play.

          Beside the aforementioned rooms, you can count places with jazz nights on one hand – Papagayo in Allentown, the Ericson Lounge in the old Royal Arms, where Birthright plays tonight and tomorrow; the Cotton Club on Niagara Falls Boulevard, the Bona Vista on Hertel and Jack Daniels on Forest.

          Still, it’s better than when pianist John Hunt came back from Miami University in Ohio a September ago with a jazz quintet called Jive Soup, doing a little Monk and Coltrane and a lot of originals.

          “We understood there was some jazz around,” he says, “but we went to see Grover Washington Jr. and, good as he is, there only three people there. And one of them was the club manager.”

* * *

JIVE SOUP broke up in Buffalo. Hunt cut his hair and took a job selling real estate. But his heart was still in jazz.

          He talked to Bill Wahl and got to write record reviews for Wahl’s Buffalo Jazz Report. Then he took over as summer replacement for Wahl on WBFO.

          A few weeks ago he became the station’s coordinator of jazz programming, which is becoming a big job. One thing he does is assemble a list of who’s where in town for “This Is Radio” Friday and Saturday about 3:30 p.m.

          He’s involved in BFO’s Nov. 30 to Dec. 7 fund drive to improve equipment and the jazz record library. The Buffalo Jazz Ensemble will help with a benefit concert Dec. 2 in UB’s Norton Union Fillmore Room.

          When WEBR and WREZ are sold and they change their format,” he says, “Buffalo may be looking at BFO as a jazz station.”

* * *

HUNT AND WAHL also are trying to improve the city’s terrible jazz image. Buffalo can claim a healthy share of new jazz artists, Hunt points out.

          Grover Washington, keyboard man Ronnie Foster, now with George Benson; Juini Booth, bassist for McCoy Tyner; Mel Lewis of Mel Lewis and Thad Jones; guitarist Jim Hall, now in Toronto; Bob Militello and Mike Migliore with Maynard Ferguson; Lonnie Liston Smith.

          “I think jazz has arrived here,” Hunt says. “But it’s sporadic. That’s why I’d like to get into putting on concerts and starting a record company. The Buffalo Jazz Report has a circulation of 13,000. That indicates to me that people are really interested.

          “The change in jazz here has happened because of the change in jazz nationally. Hancock, Davis, Corea, Hubbard, they’ve all decided to become more accessible.

          “They’re using electric instruments and that heavy funky beat, but they’re still playing improvisational music. And that’s what it’s all about.”

* * * * *

IN THE PHOTO: The James Clark group at the No Name Bar.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTE: John Hunt put Buffalo on the map as a jazz center after he became music director at WBFO in 1976. At its peak, the station programmed more than 70 hours of jazz every week and John produced shows that were aired on National Public Radio. His untimely death from brain cancer in 1985 at the age of 33 was loss that is still felt. He was inducted posthumously into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 2006.

          The Tralfamadore Café outgrew its subterranean birthplace and when underground construction of Buffalo’s Metro Rail forced them to close it, the Lawson brothers accepted an offer to move downtown into a new building, Theater Place in the heart of the Theater District. It opened in 1982, a dream of a showroom, one of the best in the nation, with perfect sightlines and fabulous acoustics. I loved going there.

          By the mid 1980s, however, these two pillars started crumbling. After John Hunt’s death, the sound of jazz gradually faded on WBFO as the emphasis shifted to NPR news and talk. By the time the station was sold to WNED in 2012, it was gone completely.

          The Tralf faltered. After the Lawsons left in the late 1980s, it went through a series of ups and downs, rising under the stewardship of jazz saxophonist Bobby Militello in the 1990s, crashing after a new landlord turned it over to an inept young entrepreneur in 2002, returning to viability after 2006 as the Tralf Music Hall under booking agent Tom Barone.

It looked like the end all over again in May 2021 when the lease ran out and Theater Place owners announced they were turning everything into apartments (the building’s award-winning atrium design had long ago been desecrated with a tunnel leading into the club). Barone said he would find new quarters for the Tralf. As it turned out, the Tralf got to go back into its old quarters in September. Plans now are to expand it.

As for the Buffalo Jazz Report, Bill Wahl started a Cleveland edition, which became more successful than the local version. Bill closed down in Buffalo and moved to Cleveland in 1978. It became the Jazz & Blues Report in 1987, went online in 2003 and stopped issuing print editions in 2007. Bill moved on to San Diego and continued to produce it online with a national and international outlook.