Tiny Grimes takes a chorus at the
Press Club in Los Angeles.
ne
of the senior legends in the jazz guitar game, Tiny
Grimes, came to town one night in 1987 for the first time since the long
lost evenings of the 1940s… nights when he used to jam with Art Tatum
down on Central Avenue or hang around at Lester Young's house digging Pres's sides and drinking and stuff.
Of course, the nights were not lost to Grimes, who
remembered:
"Lester had a house way out somewhere, and he used to
have stacks of records…I've never seen so many records. And we used to
drink – it looked like gin but it wasn't – and it wasn't vodka. I don't
know what theheck it was. It was a whisky, though. We would sit there
for hours, man.
"I was green. I had just started playing. I was just a
kid, hadn't been playing two years."
Nevertheless, the young Washingtonian, who reached
L.A. by way of New York, had landed a job with the Art Tatum trio. He
replaced or rather succeeded Slim Gaillard, author of "Flat Foot Floogie,"
when Slim ankled off to World War II military service. The bass player
was Slam Stewart.
hat
was it like working with the world famous pianist?
"A struggle," said Grimes, then 70 and a New Yorker
again. "I told everybody it was an honor but it wasn't no pleasure. He
never taught me nothing. I'd have been a much better guitarist if he
taught me something."
Actually, Grimes was one of your better unsung guitar
titans. He knew Charlie Christian from jamming with him at Minton's in
Harlem, but his sound is totally different: H ewas a pioneer in the use
of reverb, the electronic echo effect that is so often abused in today's
Fender ridden epoch. But as with Christian, everything Tiny does on
guitar stands out nice and strong and brings pleasure to the ear.
And in later years, before his death in 1989, it
began to get around that Grimes had been one of the founders of rock and roll.
His "Tiny's Boogie," made at WOR studios in New York on Aug. 14, 1946,
is described as the first recorded instance of the genre.
Grimes was interviewed on the eve of a 1987
performance at the Los Angeles Press Club where he appeared with an
equally venerable poet of the plectrum, John Collins – a fellow alumnus
of the Tatum trio and a familiar figure on L.A. bandstands before his
death in 2001.
he
two old acquaintances
planned to emphasize a repertoire of standard tunes.
"There ain't gonna be nothin' nobody don't know," Grimes assured the
listeners who were to show up the following night.
"But everybody better watch out for the song called
‘He'll Never Sweat,' " Grimes said. "It's a humorous song about a fish.
I call, ‘Don't care how fast a fish may swim,' and the audience says,
‘He'll never sweat.' "
Grimes wrote this song, and when he played one-nighters
in Europe, as he'd been doing for a dozen years or so before the Los
Angeles two-nighter, he enjoyed getting the whole audience --- Swedes,
Frenchmen, West Germans, whoever --- to sing along with him.
The concept has a berserk charm foreshadowed in the
group Tiny led in the 1950s, the Rockin' Highlanders. At one time or
another, he had Sonny Payne (who later went with Count Basie) on drums,
with Benny Golson or Red Prysock on tenor saxophones. Screaming Jay
Hawkins, a Grimes discovery, handled the vocals.
The ensemble appeared in tam-o'-shanters, authentic
plaid kilts, calflength spats and brogues, the moonlighting bebopper
Golson included.
ontrary
to their attire,
which cost Grimes a pretty penny and which they never
took good care of, the bandsmen sported a fiery rhythm and blues
repertoire. Although the played erstwhile bagpipe specialties like
"Annie Laurie" and "Loch Lomond," the real weight was supplied by the
raucous, honking tenormen on numbers like "My Baby's Left Me" and
"Frankie and Johnny Boogie."
The costumes were "just one part that was something
different," Grimes explains. "There was no other uniform that a black
man could put on that would be any funnier," is the way he figured it.
"If I'd had the right manager, it could have been a
million-dollar act," Grimes believes even today. "We had a whole show in
that thing -- entertainment, you know. We sang, told jokes, did dancing
and played good music along with it. We played Atlantic City, places
like that."
Yet for some reason, Benny Golson chose to write not
"I Remember Tiny" but "I Remember Clifford."
nd
Grimes found no better reward for giving a job to
another talented guy, Charlie Parker, the baddest bebopper of them all,
who he ran across in the 1940s when he was playing in the Apple with
gents like Coleman Hawkins, the tenor saxophonists, and Hot Lips Page,
the trumpeter.
"I had a little job with my quartet down on 52nd
Street, and Charlie Parker used to come in, and I used to let him play,
you know? He couldn't get a job nowhere because nobody at that time
understood the music. But I could dig it. I just couldn't play it that
well.
"But Bird was there every night. He was there so
often, they thought he was workin' there. And then when I got this
record date for my group, the producer at Savoy over in New Jersey – he
really didn't want him. I talked him into it. It was Parker's first real
record date, where somebody let him play.
"We made two records, one was ‘Red Cross' and ‘Tiny's
Tempo,' instrumentals, and I sang on one side of the other one, ‘I'll
Always Love You Just the Same.' I couldn't sing but I tried.
"But some jerk had the nerve to pan me because I
didn't let Bird play more! No lie! And I – damn! – I let the guy play,
he played damn near more than me, and it was my date!
nd
I got him off the ground. That was the record that
started him off."
In those years, Tiny and Jay McShann, the Kansas City
pianist and bluesman who Parker also blew with when he was starting out,
saw each other often on the stages of jazz-loving Europe, where they
were frequent visitors: two of a kind, you might say.
And Tiny was still playing his chosen guitar -- the
same four string model he had when Charlie Christian used to borrow his
instrument up in Harlem – instead of the six-stringers employed by the
rest of the jazz cohort.
"You could write that I could never afford the other
two strings," the former Rockin' Highlander suggested in his dry way.
