Stacy Rowles and her father, Jimmy Rowles, playing a gig on Melrose Avenue in the 1980s.

f course, he knew Billie.

"First singer I ever played for was Billie Holiday," pianist Jimmy Rowles remembers. "When I first met her, she was in great shape and, boy, was she beautiful!

"But then after she married this one guy, he got her on this (he pantomimes an injection of heroin). She could still sing, but she was pretty out of it. That thing had her hooked, she was like a trout."

Jimmy knew Lester Young, Billie’s sidekick and the President of the tenor saxophone.

"I used to play with Lester every night. This was at Billy Berg’s (in the early 1940s) when it was on Pico near La Cienega. The band was called the Spirits of Rhythm, with Lester on tenor and his brother Lee on drums. Billie used to sing with us."

Unlike Billie, Pres didn’t shoot up, Rowles remembers.

ll he did was smoke pot and drink. Boy, could he drink! At the time I worked with him he was drinking Old Schenley 100 proof, bottled in bond, straight. He’d take a thing like this beer mug full and knock it back, whssht, like a glass of water. But he could get a beautiful sound."

Lester did not play on any of the landmark records Jimmy made with Billie at Radio Recorders studio on Santa Monica Boulevard. "It was usually Ben Webster, Sweets Edison, Benny Carter on horns, and the rhythm section would be Alvin Stoller (drums), sometimes Larry Bunker, John Simmons (bass) and Barney Kessell (guitar), mainly.

Rowles was honored at the Hyatt Regency in Los Angeles on the day after this interview, Sept. 14, 1986, with a star-studded "Jimmy Rowles Day" concert sponsored by the Los Angeles Jazz Society.

He is a droll and impish man who’s played with Benny Goodman, Woody Herman, Peggy Lee and Carmen McRae. For 17 years he was the pianist with Henry Mancini’s orchestra, which recorded the delightful sound tracks for the Pink Panther movies, among many other memorable movie projects.

owles’ conversation is as fey as his playing, and as he spins his yarns, he sometimes sounds as if he’s sitting on a split-rail fence rolling a cigarette. Like the time he visited his old pal Ben Webster, Duke Ellington’s great tenor saxophonist, in Copenhagen.

"His friend was there, Bengt Hallberg, the tenor player," Rowles begins, "and Ben used to call his horn Betsy, and Betsy was laying over here, see, so Bengt says, ‘Can I play your horn?’ "

Rowles snorts.

"He couldn’t get a sound out of it! Ben had the reed almost an inch from the mouthpiece! ‘Give me old Betsy,’ Ben said, and he grabbed that horn. Hell, the whole room shook, but the sound was just like velvet. He got that from Hawk (Coleman Hawkins). He’d make the walls quiver, but he could play it so soft and tender that you would cry."

As he neared 70, Rowles, who died in 1996 at 78, was semi-retired. From time to time he would drop by Donte’s or Alfonse’s or the Money Tree where he often was prevailed upon to play some obscure old tune or other. You couldn’t stump him.

f he took a gig, it was usually to back his daughter Stacy, who plays the trumpet. There are quite a few father-son combinations in the jazz world – pianist Dave Brubweck and sons Chris, Danny and Darius, vibraharpist Terry Gibbs and son Gerri; saxophonist Al Cohn and son Joe, a guitarist, but a father-daughter combination is rare.

And Stacy, named after Goodman pianist Jess Stacy, is a killer hornwoman. She played in the trumpet section of the Ann Patterson Maiden Voyage band – the jazz chair, of course – and at the big Woody Herman 50th anniversary concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 1985, she and her pop tore it up with a surprise set that showcased her warm and lyrical ballad style.

The family story is often told about how Stacy took up the trumpet. Rowles, with his daughter at his side, tells his version.

"Well, I was sittin’ on the davenport in Burbank one day and Stacy come downstairs. She’d been up in the attic. I had these two trumpets up there, and one of them had been given to me by Pete Candoli, and one of them had been given to me by a fellow named Frank Beach.

"And she said, ‘Pop, can you play this thing?’

said sure. See, I had to play something in the Army. I started out with the cymbals and the bass drum and snare drum, but I wanted something that wasn’t hard to carry…."

"But there were two trumpets," Stacy interjects, knowing the ending of this story. "I don’t know what happened to the other one, do you?"

"I don’t either," Jimmy says. "We might have given it away to (drummer) Donald Bailey’s kids or something."

"Might have," says Stacy. "It had a hole in it. In the wrong place, I mean."

"The one you had, that was the one Pete had won, or he was playing it in Woody’s band when they won the Esquire poll, when they were playing for Wildroot hair tonic on the radio. That was the First Herd.

ut Stacy," he continued, "I showed her the embouchure and she got a sound right away, immediately!" This is said with a touch of fatherly pride.

"I was going to Emerson Elementary School in Burbank. I was 11, maybe 10," Stacy says.

"I showed her the chromatic scale. I said, ‘That’s about all I got to show you.’ And she started in the afternoon, practicing that scale and fooling around on that trumpet, and the first thing you know, she comes home one day and she says, ‘Hey, pop, I’m in the band.’ That was, I think your first year….

"In junior high school," Stacy finished. "I never really had a teacher. I took about six lessons from Graham Young, and I took about the equivalent amount of lessons from Uan Rasey, and I took some lessons from Charlie Shoemake, took some lessons from Jimmy Stamm, and I took some lessons from …."

"Me," says Jimmy. "I didn’t teach her anything about the trumpet, just chords and tunes and stuff, you know." He scowls. "I didn’t study much myself either. I got into a little Chopin and some Bach, but I hated to practice that stuff. I liked jazz. I had my windup record machine, and I used to slow it down and get those runs and stuff, you know."

native of Spokane, Wash., Rowles acquired his interest in music from his mother, who played piano by ear.

"But after my father died, when I was 3 months old, she remarried a guy who had a tin ear. He wanted me to be a lawyer, and I went to Gonzaga University, studying pre-law. I hated pre-law.

"I played in the pep band, the peck horn or the bass drum or some damn thing, I dunno, and then I met an Indian, a Blackfoot Indian. He was a helluva musician, from Browning, Montana, raised on a reservation. How he learned his music I’ll never know, he never told anybody.

"But he could take Jimmy Lunceford arrangements off the record, note for note. He never wrote a score, he’d just write the parts. So he made me listen to Teddy Wilson, ‘cause I was listening to Guy Lombardo.

"But anyway, I went to Seattle, hung around with all the black guys on Jackson Avenue, and I came back and went another half year to Gonzaga, and then I got to be 21 and I split.

"Marshal Royal had come through Spokane with Les Hite’s band, and he told me to get out of there.

"And so I went to L.A., and just bummed around, didn’t have any money… walkin’, walkin’, walkin’ out through the city. … Finally I got with Muzzy Marsalino and Garwood Vann, and then I went with Slim (Gaillard) and Slam (Stewart) and then Lee and Lester Young.

"And Ben Webster I had met when Ellington was in Seattle, and Ben Webster got me a job back East when Mel Powell had a fight with Benny Goodman and split.

ow Stacy, she just kept practicing, she just kept moving up, first thing you know she was playing second trumpet. And she just got to be hell on that trumpet, and the first thing you know I get this note, ‘Get me a flugelhorn for my birthday.’ So I bought her a Quesnon, and they started featuring her on solos and things."

"That was the Burbank High School jazz band," Stacy says. "We did quite a few jazz festivals in the L.A. area. Orange Coast College was a major one we went to all the time. We went down there when I was a senior and I played a flugelhorn solo and got an outstanding soloist award, which was another flugelhorn.

"This was 1973, and that summer I made the auditions and did the Monterey Jazz Festival with Dad.

"Oh, God, I had to face a lot of people up there. I played with the all-star high school band Sunday afternoon and then later that night Dad and I came out and did one tune for the theme which was family night. They had the Candoli brothers, Pete and Conte; the Heath brothers, Jimmy and Tootie and Percy; and the Jones brothers, Thad and Elvin."

"We played after the Candoli brothers and before the Jones brothers. I think. I don’t even remember, I was so spaced. I think I played ‘Moment to Moment.’ "

"She got a standing ovation," said Jimmy.

oy, I was scared. It was one of the major turning points of my life, it really was. Dizzy Gillespie came out and escorted me off stage. I don’t think I could have gotten offstage by myself, boy!"

"She’s real tight with Dizzy and Clark Terry and Thad … and who else?"

"I just learned from everybody, just picked up things. It was a real major point in my life, going to Monterey," Stacy said.

"But it wasn’t until a couple of years before Dad came back from New York three years ago that I felt like I was making some headway and learning some tunes.

"I used to go and see Clark at Donte’s, and I would sit way back in the corner. I just wanted to listen. And one time he took his flugelhorn and he passed it to the first person in the front row, and he said ‘I want you to pass it all the way back.’ And all of a sudden this woman turned around to me and said, ‘Here, Clark Terry passed this back and he wants you to go up and play!’ I said ‘No, I don’t want to go up and play!’ "

"But she did," growled her father.