Tom Hampson has been
an avid birdwatcher since he was a child growing up in Allegheny National
Forest. He’s been a jazz lover since his teenage years and a radio host since
his college days. But his listeners may still have been surprised the night he
did a show of jazz tunes based on birdcalls.
According to Hampson, Miles Davis’
“So What” is the song of a chickadee. Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo à la Turk” was
actually written by a tufted titmouse. And the song of the golden crown sparrow
bears an eerie resemblance to the standard “Gone with the Wind.”
Much of Hampson’s life has been made
up of unusual connections. When, as a lawyer, he represented a bookstore owner
in a banned-book case, he appeared to be involved in a bitter dispute with
then-District Attorney Jack Conway.
“During the Tropic of Cancer case, if all you read were letters to the editor
you would have thought that Jack Conway and I were mortal enemies, he
representing the forces of good and I the forces of evil,” Hampson says. “In
fact, Jack and I were good friends. We went off birding together.”
Over the past four decades Hampson
has been a ubiquitous figure in the cultural life of Rochester. While some
think of him as the music lover who has hosted Mostly Jazz on WXXI 1370 AM for decades, others remember him as the
lawyer who handled — and won — one of Rochester’s most important First
Amendment cases. Still others might recall his work with the Fair Campaign
Practices Committee, promoting fairness in political advertising.
Before his retirement, Hampson
practiced corporate law, serving as counsel to Birdseye Foods Inc. But his
frequent excursions into other areas, legal and musical, have taken him a long
way from frozen peas.
Long before his first radio show, Hampson had ambitions to be a jazz performer.
“Because of Artie Shaw and Benny
Goodman and the overwhelming popularity of the clarinet when I was a kid, I had
a music teacher in third grade who gave me a clarinet to try,” Hampson says. “I
couldn’t get a sound out of it, not even a squeak. He was so critical and not
willing to help at all that I fled into the night and never tried to play an
instrument again. It took me a long time to realize I wanted to be a drummer.”
“My hero was Buddy Rich because he
defined how to play drums with a big band,” he adds.
Between his jazz and legal work,
Hampson got to spend a lot of time with his hero.
One
night in the early 1970s, Rich had played two out of three sets at the Tower
Top of the Plaza, the nightclub that once occupied the top floor of Midtown
Plaza. “Suddenly,” Hampson says, “at each exit, four detectives from Buffalo
showed up complete with trench coats, snap-brimmed hats, and a warrant for his
arrest.”
Rich was accused of marijuana
possession and Hampson, the jazz-loving lawyer, got the call. The detectives
were detaining Rich, not allowing him to play the third set.
“They said, ‘You’ll go down and pop
off and there’ll be a riot.’ He said, ‘Well, if I don’t go down there and play
a third set, I can assure you there will be a riot.’ They let him play.”
Rich was to be arraigned in Buffalo,
so Hampson arranged for representation by a top-notch Buffalo defense lawyer.
Hampson was teaching at Cornell at
the time. Monday morning he laid out the case as an assignment for his
students.
“Buddy and the band had played in
Toronto and were playing the next night in Pittsburgh,” he says. “Buddy flew to
Pittsburgh; the band took the bus. When the bus got to the bridge at Lewiston,
the customs guys asked to see the leader’s bags. Someone had called and tipped
them off. They opened Rich’s bag and there on the top was a vial with just
enough marijuana to constitute a felony, with the name Buddy Rich across the
top of it — an obvious plant — probably by a bass player because he used to
fire a bass player once a week or so. The issue was, can you be guilty of
possessing something that you shouldn’t possess if it’s at Lewiston and you’re
in Pittsburgh?”
The answer was no; the charges were
dropped. To counter the negative publicity, Rich appeared on The Tonight Show Monday night to explain
the situation.
“Tuesday morning my phone rang and a
student said, ‘Mr. Hampson, we watched The
Tonight Show last night. The charges have been dismissed, do we still have
to do the assignment?'”
Hampson and Rich eventually worked
together on a PBS television program, Rich
At The Top. At the Top went on to
feature other greats including the Modern Jazz Quartet, Stephane Grappelli, and
Earl Hines.
Hampson, who turns 75 this month, has been around law and jazz since he was a child. Born in Ann
Arbor while his father attended law school at the University of Michigan, he
was six months old when his family moved to Warren, Pennsylvania. His interest
in jazz was spurred in his teenage years by a Boy Scout troop crazy about big
band records. Each member was assigned a different band to collect; Hampson was
responsible for Artie Shaw.
“That got me going in jazz,” says
Hampson, who was also listening to the great radio shows of the day on the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and other stations that could be heard from
hundreds of miles away. Hampson tuned into Dave Garroway from Chicago, Jean
Shepherd from Cincinnati, Bob Martin from New Orleans, and Symphony Sid from
New York. “I wanted to be an ABC staff announcer. That was the most glamorous
thing in the world in the pre-television days,” he says.
In the late 1940s he attended
Cornell University, majoring in government and preparing for law school. He
also jumped at the chance to host his first jazz show at the school’s radio
station, WVBR.
Because Cornell is a land-grant
school, Hampson was required to spend two years in the Reserve Officer Training
Corps program. He was not happy about it, but it turned out to be a lucky
break.
“In my senior year the Korean War
broke out and lo and behold the Air Force came around and said, ‘We need
administrative officers.’ I entered the Air Force as a very green second
lieutenant.”
Stationed at Mitchell Air Force Base
in Garden City, Long Island, Hampson spent two years as an information and
education officer. His job was to inculcate American values into the troops so
they wouldn’t be susceptible to brainwashing. But he really enjoyed his time
off.
“I spent a lot of evenings at the
New York City Ballet seeing world premieres of ballets by Balanchine,” Hampson
says. “When I saw Petrushka I
thought, ‘My God, Stravinsky lifted a lot of that from Woody Herman.’ Of
course, that was exactly backwards. In ‘Your Father’s Mustache’ Herman used a
lot from Petrushka.”
Hampson also haunted Manhattan’s
jazz clubs: the Half Note, the Village Vanguard, Birdland, and The Embers,
where he remembers hearing the Red Norvo Trio with Tal Farlow on guitar and
Charles Mingus on bass. A great band, but he was the only one listening. He
later learned that a high-class call-girl operation was being run out of the
club and he, indeed, was the only one there for the music.
One summer, while at Cornell, he
clerked at Rochester’s Harris Beach law firm. He liked the city and the firm.
Upon finishing school in 1955, he came to stay.
It wasn’t long before
Hampson found himself participating in Rochester business history. He wrote the
lease text for the first Xerox copier and the document itself ended up as a
center ad in Fortune magazine. And he
never shied away from lending his legal skills to a good cause, including a
pivotal First Amendment case.
Playboy magazine came out in the 1950s, shocking segments of the population and
spawning many imitators. In an effort to clean up the newsstands, Rochester’s
mayor, Peter Barry, appointed a committee to screen magazines each week and
decide what should be distributed.
“That thing finally died of its own
weight,” Hampson says. “The [pornography case] that stuck, though, was over a
book in the early 1960s, Henry Miller’s Tropic
of Cancer. Johnny Bunis, who ran the Clinton Bookshop wanted to sell it.
Jack Conway, then-district attorney said, ‘Absolutely not; I’ll prosecute
you.'”
Hampson joined forces with Audience
Unlimited, a group formed to protect Bunis. He came up with the idea of
bringing an Action for Declaratory Judgment, which brings legal questions to
the court for clarification. In this case, Hampson wanted to determine the
legal ramifications for Bunis if he sold the book.
He did this by filing a civil action
suit for Bunis against Conway. It got thrown out of court, but Hampson appealed
and got a ringing reversal.
“I established a new procedure for
the resolution of censorship issues by removing it from the process of criminal
prosecution,” Hampson says. “I didn’t want my client to be arrested and
arraigned with all the pushers, burglars, muggers, and thieves. So I had him
sue the district attorney in a civil action to determine whether he could
legally sell the book. Nobody had ever succeeded in doing that before and the
appellate decision approving the procedure received the ultimate accolade; it
was written up with approval in the Harvard
Law Review.”
Because Tropic of Cancer was under attack all over the country, Hampson
eventually went to the Supreme Court. Due to a clerical error, he was not
admitted at the usual time, with dozens of other lawyers on Monday morning.
Instead, he went by himself on Tuesday.
“[Chief Justice] Earl Warren leaned
across the bench and welcomed me to the bar. It was a nice moment.”
While waiting, he sat with Attorney
General Robert Kennedy, who was there to honor Justice William Douglas. When
the court took a Florida case validating the book, he didn’t have to argue the
case after all.
Hampson’s involvement in this case
led to his playing a key role in the formation of the local branch of the
American Civil Liberties Union. He also was involved in the founding of the
Fair Campaign Practices Committee, formed in the early 1970s when local
Democrats and Republicans decided that political campaigning had gotten out of
control. The League of Women Voters, Council of Churches, Advertising Council,
Chamber of Commerce, and Bar Association each designated members. Hampson
chaired the committee for 14 years.
“Our charge was to cry fair or foul;
we had no power to enforce anything,” he says. “But the news media covered it
and by and large I think we made some headway. The level of campaigning was
certainly better than it has been since we disbanded. Eventually the
Republicans pulled the plug on it. They clearly didn’t want to be encumbered by
any obligation to be fair.”
Hampson’s law career had proceeded nicely from the start. But life was not complete without a radio
show.
In the 1950s, according to Hampson,
Rochester’s commercial radio was junk. So, in 1960, he and several friends got together
and started their own station.
“Believe it or not we simply filled
out a form, applied to the FCC, paid $50, and got the license for WCMF. The
antenna was a pole sticking up from the Lincoln Alliance building. We had a
studio the size of a closet,” he says.
Back then, WCMF was more like WXXI
FM, with all volunteer DJs. Chemists and engineers from Eastman Kodak hosted
classical shows, a banker from Central Trust played baroque music on Thursdays,
and Hampson started a jazz show on Friday nights.
When the volunteer format ran out of
steam in the 1970s, the station went commercial. WCMF turned to rock, but
Hampson’s jazz show continued. In 1980 WCMF was sold for about $400,000.
Hampson’s share was enough to help put his kids through college.
In the 1970s there was a fair amount
of jazz on Rochester radio: Will Moyle (WVET), Bobby Lloyd (WHEC), and Bill
Ardis and Harry Abraham (WHAM). The competition was friendly. Hampson recalls
one night when he rang the bell while Abraham was on the air and asked if he
and a couple of guys could come up and talk.
Abraham said yes. The guys were
Buddy Rich and Jimmy Cobb, and they talked a lot about drumming on WHAM that
night.
Hampson also had a close personal
and professional relationship with the great composer Alec Wilder.
“Alec was a nomad. He had a couple
of suitcases and moved around.”
Wilder also moved between the worlds
of classical music, pop, and jazz.
“I remember standing in the back of
the Eastman Theatre with Alec and Stan Getz was rehearsing. Alec shook his head
and said ‘You know Zoot [Sims] swings like mad, but Stanley weeps.'”
It was Wilder’s eccentricities that
got Hampson deeply involved with his legal matters.
“Alec had a sport coat full of
necessities, one of which was his original will,” he says. “I suggested that he
put the original will in a vault, and carry a copy. When he was dying in 1980 I
got a call from Fran Miller [wife of Mitch Miller, of Sing Along With Mitch fame]. She found the will and went over it
with him. She explained to him that he was leaving whatever he had to five
people and he was not even speaking to four of them, so he ought to do
something.”
So Hampson was summoned to Wilder’s
bedside in Florida.
“I got there at 3 p.m. and he was
still alert,” he says. “I borrowed a typewriter and typed up his new will. I
went back up at 6:30 p.m. and went over it with him. I said, ‘You need somebody
to be your executor and carry out your wishes.’ I’ll never forget, he looked
like that World War I recruiting poster. He leaned up in bed, pointed a finger
at me, and said, ‘You!’ He signed the will at 6:30 p.m. and died shortly after
midnight.”
When a composer like Wilder dies,
his songs can go on making money for decades. But because his songs are no
longer in vogue, most royalty checks are small. According to Hampson, who still
oversees Wilder’s estate, there have been some notable exceptions.
“Thad Jones wrote a lovely melody
called ‘A Child is Born.’ Alec was so impressed with it he wrote a lyric.
Neither of them had any intention of making it a religious song or Christmas
song, certainly not Alec, who was a pretty aggressive atheist,” he says. “I
collect royalties [for Wilder’s beneficiaries] on that only when it’s sung.
Usually I get a check for about $12.47. When the royalties for 2002 came in,
there was a check for $3,600. It came from Billy Graham. The idea of Alec
receiving a check from Billy Graham is just hilarious — I can hear him
chuckling all the way from his grave down in Avon.”
Not even the Park
Avenue area home where Hampson lives with his wife, novelist Zena Collier, can
escape distinction. It’s a modest but handsome house designed by Rochester’s
greatest architect, Claude Bragdon.
The hallway in the basement —
lined with albums, tapes, and CDs — leads to a small studio where Hampson
records his radio show. Dominating the room is a drum kit. Hampson plays along
with albums every night.
“I’d rather play with singers than a
band,” Hampson says. “I want a song that has a structure that I can relate to.
I think of drumming as punctuation.” His favorite singer to accompany is Carmen
McRae, but he admits to “letting it rip” with Count Basie from time to time.
In his basement studio, Hampson reminisces about the
Rochester’s jazz scene of the 1960s and 1970s.
“It’s not quite what it used to be
in the days of the Pythodd and the Ridgecrest Inn,” he says, pointing to a
photo he took at a club called Duffy’s. On the stage are Wayne Shorter, Dave
Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Miles Davis, and Chick Corea.
Local players, he says, “are better
than we’ve ever had. I wish they had a place to work. The audience for this
just isn’t there. People will pay zillions of dollars to see some
country-and-western guy at the War Memorial and you just can’t turn them out
for this.”
Hampson’s been playing jazz on the
air for 40 years. Although each program is only one hour long (7 to 8 p.m. on
Saturdays and Sundays), Hampson usually comes up with a theme. He might focus
on a particular musician or instrument. These days, with jazz’s greatest
generation dying off, many shows are memorial programs.
While jazz and popular music were
closely aligned during Hampson’s formative years, he’s seen jazz slip farther
and farther from the mainstream.
“I find it very distressing. I think
people are missing so much,” he says. “This is vital, great stuff and one
reason is they don’t get a chance to hear it and it’s going to get worse with
the consolidation of the media. Thank God for public broadcasting.”
He’s also disappointed by what’s
happened to his favorite medium.
“Radio used to be a very important
medium,” Hampson says. “It’s turned into a right-wing hate medium. The right
wing is very well organized; they’re good at it. Most of us can’t cope with
change very well and look for some kind of certainty in fundamentalist religion
or somebody who spews simple solutions to complicated problems.”
But Hampson has been doing his part
to broadcast quality radio and support the music for five decades.
“The nicest thing that ever happened
was when I was broadcasting live,” he says. “In the middle of the program I got
a call from a guy who explained that he was a trucker who drove up and down the
East Coast and he’s a jazz fan. And he said, ‘You know, you’ve got the best
program on the East Coast.'”
This article appears in Feb 4-10, 2004.
