Most
drummers can trace back to when the beat first hit them and latched on. There
are umpteen assorted tales of banged up pots and pans or cardboard boxes and
fed-up parents and the undeniable urge to hit, to keep time.
Eighty-one-year-old
Eddie Israel is a jazz legend who has run with some of the greats. And yet his
storied past doesn’t have any of these youthful rhythm-driven accounts.
“Oh,
I wish I knew what started me,” he says in the den of his Corn Hill home. “I
really don’t know. The first thing I wanted to be was a doctor. And then I
wanted to be a trumpet player. I don’t ever remember goin’ round beating on things.
I just don’t know where it started. I wasn’t thinking of Gene Krupa at the
time.”
Somehow,
around the age of 15 or 16, Israel got to playing the drums in small jazz
groups in his native Long Island.
He
even auditioned for the Army band at the beginning of World War II. He ended up
serving as a truck driver for the Air Corps in the jungles of New Guinea.
“I
tried out in Oakland, California, with this guy that played with Glenn Miller
who was getting a band together,” he says. “And naturally I knew all the tunes:
‘American Patrol,’ all that. But I couldn’t read the charts. They found that
out in a hurry.”
After his South Pacific
hitch, Israel found himself stationed at Mitchell Field in Long Island driving
entertainers back and forth to New York City to entertain the troops. After his
discharge, Israel heard word Dizzy Gillespie was putting together a band and
fixing to hit the road. Israel met up with the group and signed on as a roadie
— a roadie who also played the drums.
He
almost immediately graduated from roadie to Gillespie’s personal valet after
Gillespie absentmindedly left his horn behind on the way to a gig in Albany.
“We
toured all down south and then Ella Fitzgerald joined the tour,” he says. “She
hooked up with us in Chicago. So we did these one-nighters with Diz and Ella.
She was like my big sister. She was the sweetest person. She was something
else. That was when she and Ray Brown got hooked up and they finally wound up
getting married.”
Israel
then graduated from valet to drummer on a few gigs while the group was
tentatively based in Dallas. Drummer Joe Harris had locked horns with
Gillespie’s wife and got canned.
“Everybody
in the group knew I played drums,” Israel says. “I knew the book. I still
couldn’t read at the time, but I knew the book backwards I’d heard it so
often.” This chance would lead to one of Israel’s shining moments in 1946.
“The
greatest thing for me when we got to New York City, The Savoy Ballroom,” he
says. Drummer Kenny Clark was apparently out carousing with the Cuban conga
player and was late for the gig.
“So
I’m out there, I’m feeling good, I’m home,” he says. “All my homies around, you
know? I’m in my glory. When Diz paged me from the bandstand I said ‘Oh man,
what happened? What did I forget?'”
Israel
played the whole show.
“Talk
about feelin’ good,” he says. “The Savoy
Ballroom. Right in my backyard, my home.”
The run with
Gillespie ended, and Israel moved back to Long Island as opposed to gigging in
New York, where he stood to be one of the greats. He regrets the choice.
“Here
I am, I’m an entrepreneur,” he says sarcastically. “I’m promoting dances and
shit instead of taking care of my business.” Though he promoted big shows like
Milt Jackson and Sonny Rollins, he wasn’t behind the kit.
“That
was another bad move,” he says. “I was in it but I wasn’t in it.”
Touring
with various jazz groups after that, Israel hit a dead end in Elmira, New York,
when the group he was with disbanded. He decided to head north. It was 1954.
“I
said, ‘I’ll go to Rochester. Things are happenin’ there,'” he says.
Israel
wound up playing drums seven nights a week in the house band at The Cotton Club
on Joseph Avenue.
“The
names would come there,” he says. “I was working with Jimmy Stewart. Ralph
Dickerson was the horn player. What they used to do was bring in a horn player
like say Bullmoose Jackson or Roy Eldridge or a singer. We were the house
band.”
Israel
even hit the road — inadvertently — with Jackson for a bit, “a big
mistake,” according to Israel.
“He
came in for a week at The Cotton Club and said he was putting a band together,”
Israel says. “He had Gene Keys on keyboards and Al Green was playing trombone
with him. He says, ‘Yeah man, I got 13 weeks in Atlantic City. We’ll be there
for a while.’ And that sounded good to me.”
He
soon found Bullmoose was full of bullshit. The tour ended up being a string of
one-nighters throughout Ohio that ended in New Jersey.
“Yeah,
we got to Atlantic City,” Israel says, “three weeks later.”
Israel left Rochester in
1959 but returned in 1977 for good. He put together the jazz outfit Thatt
Group, while also dabbling in what he calls his “blues phase,” after finding
the Flower City to be heavy in the blues.
“There
was more blues here than down in New York,” he says. “I didn’t know anything
about Muddy Waters or Lightning Hopkins — I used to hear the names — but I
never listened to B.B. King. I never listened to any of that.” But the styles
were kin. Israel fit right in.
“If
you don’t play the blues you don’t play anything,” he says. “You talkin’ ’bout
jazz, if you can’t play the blues you can’t really play jazz either. The blues
is the basis, where it all started. The blues. The jazz has got the
improvisation, but you gotta know the blues.”
Still
a jazzer at heart, Israel also remembers Rochester’s hot bed of jazz talent in
the late ’50s, centered around the late Pythodd Lounge on the corner of
Clarissa and Troup Streets. The Mangione brothers — “youngsters at the time”
— Ron Carter, Yak Johnson, Pee Wee Ellis, and countless others would gather
at The Pythodd Sunday nights simply to play.
“There
was no band, “Israel says. “We never got paid anything. But we was there just
like we was goin’ to work.”
Eddie Israel goes to work for his 81st birthday behind the drums with Thatt Group, Thursday,
March 3, at The Clarissa Room, 293 Clarissa Street, at 9 p.m. Call for tix.
325-5350
This article appears in Mar 2-8, 2005.
