'You
ain't never did nothing but play great'
Teddy Edwards remembers stuff in his little crib near LaBrea.
Victor, this guy that used to be
the maitre d' of the Polo Lounge, was
holding something for Teddy Edwards.
Victor is a New York kind of a guy, always wears a tie, knows how to
palm a $50 tip. So when he saw Edwards, who is also a New York kind of
a guy although he can't seem to get out of L.A., he palmed the card
and slipped it to him with a few words under his breath.
This happened on one of those nights on Melrose. Edwards slid
the card in his wallet and one day when he had a moment he looked at
it.
And that is how, after all the other things he had become since he
left Jackson, Miss., like the first resident be-bopper on the West
Coast, the author of an unproduced musical
for Frank Loesser and Benny Goodman, a man
whose portrait hangs on a wall with a Rembrandt in Antwerp, and the
toast of Proust's old neighborhood in
Paris, Teddy Edwards became a movie star.
''I call these guys up. They were looking for a saxophone player to
play a part in a low budget film. They were really happy and they said
man, we were waiting to hear from you.
'We set up a meeting, and Al Gomez, who was the producer and the
writer, who was Robert Diaz Leroy, they came by to see me.''
Soon Edwards was shooting the movie, ''River Bottom,'' about the
homeless in Los Angeles, but before that he made a few changes in the
script, not quite enough for a co-screenwriting credit, but then it
was his maiden voyage in the medium. ''I went through it and I marked
certain things and added this and that and the other, from my
experience.
After it was all over, they gave Edwards, who has a heartbreaking
death scene with a child actor, top billing, over the title.
The show, wrapped last year, is still previewing and awaiting
distribution, but that doesn't bother Teddy Edwards. At the time, he
was recording material from the musical he started for Goodman and
Loesser. It was going to be Goodman's swan
song. Originally titled ''Blue Clarinet,''it
was much developed and retitled for
the record ''Blue Saxophone.''
Now that record, a complex and soulful entity with a killer string
section, brasses, and a five voice chorus, is out on
PolyGram.
And this fall he's got a new one, recorded at the La Villa club amid
Proust's old stomping grounds in the St.
Germaine neighborhood of Paris, and due
out any minute. Produced by PolyGram Jazz
France CEO Jean-Phillipe Allard, it's got
a top flight Parisian rhythm section (Christian
Escoude, guitar; Thomas Bramarie,
bass; and Alain Jeanmarie, piano)
plus Betty Carter's drummer, Al Vester
Garnett, on it, and some ballad vocal tracks by Edwards' old friend
Spanky Wilson. Strings were added in the
studio, an unusual procedure for a jazz record.
''Tom Waits is the one who got me my conract
with PolyGram. He's wonderful, he's
America's best lyricist since Johnny Mercer. He came down to the
studio on the ''Missisppii Lad''
album, that's the first one i did for
PolyGram, and he sang two of my songs,
wouldn't accept any money, just trying to give me the best boost that
he could.''
The two met when Edwards backed Waits on a gig at the Troubadour
Edwards played on the soundtrack of the 1982 film ''One From the
Heart,'' in which Waits appeared. They toured Europe, Australia and
New Zealand together the year the film was released.
It was quite a trip,
and it began when Edwards, the boy, got
interested in jazz from listening to the radio down in Jackson, Miss.
''We had national hookups at different clubs like the Grand
Terrace in Chicago you could hear Earl Father Hines band at 11 o'clock
at night. Or you could hear Fletcher Henderson's band and listen to
Chu Berry and all these great guys. Then
there was Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington who used to come from the
Cotton Club.
''We didn't even have a radio at that particular time. I used to go
over to this ice cream parlor, and they had a little crystal set in
the window. and I'd go over there at seven o'clock every Wednesday and
listen to Benny Goodman.'' (He wound up playing with Goodman in New
York and California in the 1960s.)
He started playing with big bands in 1938, when he was 14, came to Los
Angeles with the Ernie Fields band in 1945, when Central Avenue was
roaring, with Lionel Hampton, Duke Ellington, Art Tatum and the like.
''Me and (pioneer trumpeter) Howard McGhee, we had the first bebop
band in the West. We had this band together before Dizzy and
Charlie Parker came to Billy Berg's, because Howard had been to New
York and knew what was going on at Minton's.
''McGhee talked me into playing the tenor, instead of alto that I'd
been playing with Roy Milton and his Solid Senders, a rhythm and blues
band. That was because he preferred the tenor and trumpet sound rather
than the alto and trumpet sound. Our first job was at the
Alabam Club on Central. I hit it right at
the peak of everything. It was heaven.''
Soon he began recording and writing, such records as the immortal ''Up
in Dodo's Room,'' with Dodo Marmarosa;
''The Duel,'' with Dexter Gordon, and his own ''Blues in Teddy's
Flat,'' which sold a million copies.
He backed Billie Holiday in the Bay Area in the 1950s and joined Benny
Goodman in the 1960s; he toured Japan with Milt Jackson in the 1970s
and went to Europe with Tom Waits in the 1980s. Now it's the 1990s and
he's a movie star or starlet.
But somehow, he never made it big.
Here's his take on that: ''A guy in San Francisco told me one time, he
says 'Teddy, you know why you never made it big?' I said no. He
said, 'Well, you ain't never did nothing but play great. You haven't
been busted for drugs. You haven't whupped
some woman's ass up and down the street. You ain't done
nothin'. You gotta do something.
But Teddy Edwards has done a few things they'll remember him for. He
gave a 7 1/2 hour interview to Rutgers University that's going on file
at the Library of Congress, and another one to the Smithsonian
Institution.
''In Belgium, outside of Antwerp, they have Billie Higgins and my
picture in the museum where Rembrandt's most famous painting is, The
Night Watch. They have our picture up on the wall with Rembrandt and
Van Gogh and all those guys.
''So I've had a lot of wonderful things that happened in my life and
I've made a lot of people happy around this world.''
Teddy tries out a few on his tenor.
