Two Great Jazz Violinists...

The two great jazz violinists -- Grappelli and Venuti

While I was running the power plant at the University of Oklahoma in 1971, a young man named Adam Granger applied for a job as a night shift operator at one of our chilled water facilities.  This job was an entry-level position at a small subterranean facility at the southernmost end of the campus.  It involved taking and recording readings on a number of gauges and meters every hour and monitoring the operating equipment, looking for overheating bearings, listening for unusual sounds, etc.  Yet, when Mr. Granger came in for an interview, he brought a formal résumé.  This was definitely unusual.

As I looked over his credentials and past experience, I learned that Adam had lived in Nashville for the previous year, had worked as a studio musician, and had earned substantially more than I could afford to pay him.  Nonetheless he wanted the job.  He was living at that time very modestly and wanted a job during which he could compose music, write, and draw cartoons (he had published several in National Lampoon).  He soon became the night attendant of Chilled Water Plant No. 2.

In my normal routine of checking the various locations for which I was responsible, I got to know Adam quite well.  He had been raised in Norman, son of a respected Professor of English on the university's faculty.  He was an accomplished guitarist, and also played the banjo more than passably.  He was also a songwriter.  And Adam was a close friend of a member of the art department faculty, John Hadley, who also wrote songs.

It wasn't too long before Adam and John and I occasionally got together to jam informally.  We even played as a group, joined by another musician, Dudley Murphy, at the first Woody Guthrie Memorial Festival for the Huntington's Chorea Foundation, held in Oklahoma City.

As I became better acquainted with Adam, I learned an interesting thing.  He said that he was completely retraining himself to play the guitar!  He had become immersed in the guitar repertoire of Django Reinhardt, a Belgian-born, Romani French jazz guitarist and composer, regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century.  Here was Adam, an accomplished and skilled musician, so influenced by Reinhardt that he was starting from scratch to re-learn his instrument.  I had never heard of Django Reinhardt when Adam shared this with me.  I had to learn more.

Stephane Grappelli and the great
Django Reinhardt in the 1930s

What I learned first was that Django had died in 1953 in his mid-40s.  I also found out that he and violinist Stéphane Grappelli had formed the Paris-based Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934.  They were among the first to play jazz that featured the guitar as a lead instrument.  Additionally, I learned that Django had lost most control of two fingers on his left hand in a fire in his youth.  He developed a modified technique to overcome this disability and went on to forge an entirely new 'hot' jazz guitar style.  I promptly bought a couple of vinyl records of the Quintet's music.  I wore those records out playing them over and over.  The music produced by that group is incredible.  I also pursued research on other jazz instrumentalists and among others, learned of Joe Venuti, another master jazz violinist of the '20s and '30s.

It occurred to me that Stephan Grappelli was still living.  So was Joe Venuti.  Wouldn't it be a treat to hear their playing?  I began to follow their careers.  I continued to keep track of them even after I moved away from Norman and lost touch with Adam Granger* and John Hadley.**

In late 1977, while living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, I learned that Joe Venuti would be playing a one night engagement at a cocktail lounge in the Hyatt Regency Hotel in New Orleans.  I immediately called for reservations.  I was disappointed to find that it was a small venue and that the limited number of tickets had already sold out.  I then asked the hotel representative if I could be placed on a waiting list.  I suggested that I would come to the hotel with a guest (I had just gotten engaged to Margo Burge), and that I would be in the hotel's rooftop revolving restaurant where I could be reached if they had a last-minute cancellation or no-show for the Venuti concert.  Fortunately, they accommodated my request.

The evening of the show, Margo and I arrived at the hotel in plenty of time.  I stopped by the lounge and reminded the maître d' that we were the couple on a standby list and that we would be at the bar on the top level of the hotel.  We were anxiously waiting when, at about 8:50 PM, we were notified to go down to the lounge where there had been a couple of no-shows.  We paid our cover charge and were directed to a front-row table!

Joe Venuti, in a three-piece pin-striped dark blue suit, was followed onto the small stage by a bass player.  They alone produced some truly memorable jazz over the next hour or so.  Then Venuti informed the audience that he had a friend in the crowd, a local dentist who also happened to be an accomplished jazz trombonist.  Soon, the Doctor was on stage with his trombone and they were joined by a drummer.  The concert went on for another couple of hours with a couple short breaks.  The music simply seemed to flow from the instruments effortlessly.  At the end of the evening, Margo and I knew that we had experienced something very special.

Not long after this concert, we learned that Joe Venuti was suffering from cancer.  He died the following August.  We were very blessed to have witnessed his superb talent in person, even for one fleeting evening.

Stephan Grappelli

I continued to follow the travels of Stephan Grappelli.  In about 1988, I learned that he was going to be performing in Nashville at a performing arts center.  Margo and I got tickets and went along with a couple friends.  The warm up act was a guitarist who had won the Jazz Performer of the Year for the British Isles the previous year.  He was spectacular, but he was merely the lead-in act for the real show.  After a brief intermission, the curtain opened.  In the center of the stage was a single folding chair.  Soon, a couple of stage hands were leading an elderly man from the wing onto the stage.  The crowd erupted.  He looked extremely frail as they half-supported, half-guided him to his seat and handed him his violin.  My thought was that we had waited too long to see this great artist, that he had passed his prime, that the performance was about to be disappointing.  I couldn't have been more wrong.

The man adjusted his seat, placed the fiddle beneath his chin, and it erupted with "Red, Red Robin."  The entire hall was energized beyond words.  For the next ninety minutes, one great hit after another emerged, each more powerful than the one before.  Blue Moon, Someone to Watch Over Me, Autumn Leaves, Uptown Dance, Stardust, How High the Moon -- the hits kept coming.

The album cover from the Grappelli-
Clements collaboration

At one point, after a very brief respite, Maestro Grappelli looked at the audience.  In very broken English, he said, "I understand that my good friend, Vassar Clements, is in the audience."  Vassar stood up, near the front of the auditorium.  Soon, he too was on stage with his violin.  The crowd loved it.  Only a year earlier, the two had collaborated on an album, "Together at Last," which had met with a fair degree of success.  So here they were, ready to perform many numbers from that album -- Alabamy Bound, Tennessee Waltz, Danny Boy, It Don't Mean a Thing, and several others.  Too soon, the curtain closed on the evening.  We drove home reminiscing about all that we had experienced.

I have reflected often on the fact that I got to see and hear these two incredible musicians from another era.  The fact that Adam Granger needed a job in Norman, Oklahoma, seems so remote, and yet it is the initiator of a unique string of events that made it all possible.  And I'm eternally grateful for the joys and memories that resulted.

* Adam went on to have a successful musical career.  The Web site of mandolinist and vocalist Dick Kimmel describes it this way: "Adam Granger has played guitar for more than 50 years.  His 1970's LP recording with Dudley Murphy, "Twin Picking" (Grass Mountain Records), was a monumental early step for flat-picked guitar. Soon thereafter, Adam released a second landmark for flat-picked guitar, "Granger's Fiddle Tunes for Guitar," a collection of guitar tablatures for more than 500 tunes from the USA, Canada, and the UK.  Adam is a regular columnist for Guitar magazine. 

Adam's guitar playing reached a wide audience with the legendary Powdermilk Biscuit Band.  During the 1980's, this band  performed regularly for "Prairie Home Companion," a popular public radio program in the USA for which Adam performed, wrote scripts, and substitute hosted.   During the 1990's, Adam co-hosted and was a regular performer for The Cedar Social, a television program featuring bluegrass, folk, and ethnic music."

** John Hadley continued to teach at the University of Oklahoma for many years, but also had a productive "second life" as a songwriter.  Some of his many songs have been recorded by the likes of Roger Miller, Sammi Smith, George Jones, Country Gazette, Dean Martin, The Nashville Bluegrass Band, Waylon Jennings, Joe Cocker, Trisha Yearwood, Wynonna, the Dixie Chicks, Linda Ronstadt, and Tim O'Brien,.