Jazz Hands and Second Dinners

Me with my faithful pet skunk named Flower,

In the very early days, the school bus dropped us off at the bottom of Arroyo Road, and it was over a mile to my house. Pete's house was about a quarter of a mile up from he highway. I was tired of walking, so I'd follow him home...I was also nearly a year younger than most of my classmates, so I was really a baby walking that long walk home.

Pete's mom, Chuck Sutton would feed us peanut butter sandwiches, and she sometimes gave me a ride home in the green VW bus. Peter never ditched me, though he could've, having two brothers. Even when they made a blanket fort and wouldn't let me in because I was a girl. I'm sure I was a pest. I remember building Lincoln logs with him. I'd never seen Lincoln logs, I was fascinated.

I was devastated when the Suttons moved to Lagunitas. No more free lunch. No more playmates. Nobody ever had any money in those days, and feeding the neighborhood kids was the norm. I remember eating cereal at 5PM with Adair Lara Dalys mob in Lagunitas too. Tony the Tiger. Roarrrrr!

Apparently I had a voracious appetite. I went from house to house grazing with the other kids. Scott Waver's mom made the most outrageous sugar doughnuts. Billy Joe Bianchi's grandmother fed me spongecake and raviolis, saying, "Mangia, mangia." "Eat, eat." And so I did, but I was a skinny kid, so skinny, Jimmy Bohman used to sneer and call me "Skinny" in eighth grade.

Stephanie Stone's blended family was so big, they never even noticed another ravening mouth at the table. Micaela Wall Marsden's stepmom Betty Lang Wall had an open larder policy too. I practically lived hat her house when we were tweenies. Then, I'd go over to another neighbor's house, usually our next-door-neighbor Agnes Vincilione's house for Second Dinner. I must've had a tapeworm or something. Now I'd love to be able to eat like that and still be called Skinny.

Pete Sutton's famous dad once played a concert for us at Lagunitas School. Kevin McConnell reminded me. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven....so cool. The original Loony Tunes. What were we, 2nd graders? We all danced and made jazz hands, little starfish hands keeping rhythm to the tunes. And Steve Tristano playing his dad's (Lennie) famous boogige-woogie chords on the piano afterwards, I thought Mrs. Burges was going to have a stroke. No wonder we were so delightfully warped.

Pete posted a ditty that spurred this memory:

Over in the meadow where the grass grows so even, 
Lived an old mother frog and her Little froggies seven. 
"Spring," said the mother, "We spring," said the seven, 
and they sprung all day where the grass grows so even.

The silly ditty. Think of the soundtracks of those old cartoons from the 50s, that was Pete's dad at the keyboard playing stride piano. Of course, he played more famous jazz tunes too.So what rainsong would Ralph Sutton play, if he was still with us, this morning? Was a time you couldn't find anything on him on the internet. Didn't realize he lived in Aspen. He's been rediscovered. I found references to Ralph on the internet, but (no mention of "Chuck.")

Katelin asked, Wasn't it Tristani?

Lennie Tristano. Another name out of childhood. When I was a kid, I thought all good piano players had to be blind, like Lennie, and also Kent Weaver (Scott Weaver's bro), so when someone offered us a piano (and lessons), I didn't want it. NO siree! I liked my eyes.

Lennie played cool jazz bebop, using chord progression. The Wiki article says Steve only met him once after 1956, but I remember meeting him walking down the road (SFD Blvd) to the Lagunitas store—two blind piano players and their entourage cut quite a swath in the imagination of childhood.

Sutton & Tristano

I stumbled upon a Facebook thread by a Lagunitas School classmate, Kevin McConnell, who posted a link to Pete Sutton's dad, Ralph Sutton. I'd totally forgotten that Ralph, who tickled a mean Maple Leaf Rag in his time, played some of his famous stride piano compositions at a school assembly concert when we were all very young. But after Kevin posted it, minute fragments drifted back from the imperfectly shelved memories of childhood.

What I did remember, was, being surprised to hear such a complex arrangement of chords and cartoon music churning out of the cranky old school piano. Magic music from a strange man dressed in a gray suit who looked more like a school principal (or maybe Willy Loman from Death of a Salesman) than a famous jazz musician. Kevin said that the jazz concert inspired him to become a musician. Me, not so much.

And the vague memory fragment of that concert goes a long way in explaining why my classmate Pete Sutton's best friend, Steve Tristano, was standing on the piano bench banging out a rollicking Boogie-Woogie on the piano at recess. We were all rockin' out. That music was so radically different than the somber proscribed chords of the  America, the Beautiful. The teacher, hearing the infernal ruckus, came bursting into the classroom, apoplectic. We were all so busted.

From this incident, I learned that certain types of music was forbidden, therefore delicious. I also feared our 2nd grade teacher, Mrs. Burge, was going to have heart failure right in front of us. I'd never seen such a show of emotion from our right-proper 50s school-marm teacher.

There was always a lot of counterculture going on in the San Geronimo Valley in the late 1950s, and early 60s. But we were so young and we knew no other life—living out so far from the towns and the growing suburbs. Many famous musicians and artists and writers took refuge in The Valley as the Marin Beat scene havens, including Mill Valley and the former fishing village of Sausalito, were beginning to erode into the effluent of mainstream acceptability.

Steve was born with his musical talent. Our 2nd grade Boogie-Woogie champ was the son of another famous jazz musician, Lennie Tristano. But great jazz musicians were also absenteé fathers—always on the road—or more notably playing the clubs in New York, where the real action was.

So to see Ralph Sutton was unusual as it was to see the blind piano player, Lennie Tristano. People often lumped Sutton & Tristano's names together, and said that they were famous jazz musicians in New York. But in retrospect, I can't imagine such a synthesis as they were both such very different musicians.

A bit of San Geronimo Valley apocrypha: Scott Joplin (with whom I share a birthdate) was said to have visited the Valley in the 1890s, and allegedly wrote Maple Leaf Rag at Frank "Speck" McAuliffe's bar in Lagunitas.

Don't know if there's any truth to the story—other than countless would-be ragtime piano players have banged out that archetypal ragtime hottie on every available piano in the Valley. But chances are pretty good Scott Joplin hammered out a rendition of it at Speck's. What was the bar called before Speck McAuliffe bought the place since this was before his time—Lagunitas Tavern & Livery?

Before you go, Whoa there, Nellie! Teddy Roosevelt had a cabin in Lagunitas—Argentina House—and used to water at the Lagunitas trough when he got all hot and bothered. And Joplin was no stranger to The Valley. (Nor were José Revere (Paul's kin), or Alexander Graham Bell—who set up the first telephone in the Dollar barn on Dickson Ranch.)

Teddy Roosevelt liked The Valley for its wildness and isolation. He famously exclaimed, "When I am in California, I am not in the West, I am west of the West."

Another Boogie-Woogied classmate, Adair (Lara) Daley once dubbed The Valley in her SF Chronicle column as The Valley that Time Forgot. Growing up in West Marin, we were all so far west of the west, we met ourselves coming and going. Often shunned by the townies, we were our own universe.

Tristano & Son (Amie Street)

NB: A double album called "Jazz Memories" came up on Amie Street Music. For pennies a song, I downloaded a veritable candy store of music: 31 tracks from the gods of jazz. And I'm not even a big jazz fan. Celtic music is more my thing. 

 But "Jazz Memories" is an extraordinary compilation from the great jazz masters including jazz divas Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, with jazz legends "Satchmo" Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, to name a few. These are all clean tracks of major hits from major labels—not muddied side B recordings. What's not to like?

(You can go to Amie Street News to read the review in situ. …Alas, Amie Street is no more—bought up by Amazon.)

Seeing the name Lennie Tristano on the track, "Judy" (perhaps named for Lennie's vocalist Judy Niemack?) startled me. My grade school classmate Steve Tristano's mom was named Judy too so the name Tristano took me down memory lane and I found myself enthusiastically recommending it on Amie Street despite the fact that I know nothing about jazz—which landed me a guest blog spot on Amie Street! I'm pretty jazzed by the whole thing. (Pardon the pun on oh so many levels!)

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Back to the Tristano memory lane: since my grade school classmate Adair Daley (Adair Lara) is off somewhere writing about her childhood days growing up in Lagunitas, and it looks like I'll have to wait for the next high school reunion in 2010 to see her as her SF Chronicle email bounces—by then, I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, that even more of our gray cells will be severely challenged—I thought I'd better contribute a few Lagunitas memories of my own to the great sphere of blogdada art now while I can still remember most of it.

Steve, b. in 1952, died Nov. 21, 2015

In the late '50s, I went to Lagunitas School in the San Geronimo Valley out in the wilds of West Marin in Northern California with many interesting, if not downirght quirky characters—including Lennie Tristano's son, Steve.

During recess, after a jazz assembly performance by stride pianist Ralph Sutton (Pete's dad), we found ourselves alone in the classroom, and Steve went over to the piano to strut his stuff.

We weren't allowed to touch the old carved oak upright so this was pretty big deal. Steve opened the lid (we gasped at his audacity) and then he gave it an experimental trill. Soon Steve was honkeytonking tunes on that piano for us like "Tea for Two" and Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag," and he played the rockingist "Boogie Woogie" you ever heard.