Musical Morsels for SF Trivia Buffs

Of late I’ve been reading through Gary Giddins’s and Scott DeVeaux’s Jazz, a stellar one-volume coverage of jazz in all its many shapes and sizes. Together with its accompanying 4-CD set, Jazz just might be your best bet for thorough grounding in jazz history and idioms. At least it’s the best I’ve ever come across.

I was intrigued by a morcel of info concerning a famous name in jazz history. He wasn’t somebody we would associate with the classical music scene in San Francisco, but there he was in plain English, his association easily confirmed with a bit of online research.

With that in mind, I offer a look at some famous folks who, despite being part of the San Francisco classical music scene at some point in their lives, owed their celebrity to something than Bay Area classical music. I don’t pretend to be writing any kind of comprehensive survey; these are just the folks that I happen to know something about.

Paul Whiteman
Bandleader, composer

It isn’t all that well known that Paul Whiteman—the man who commissioned Rhapsody in Blue from George Gershwin and who enjoyed a half-century career of music-making and recording—was a violist in the San Francisco Symphony from 1915–1918. That puts him at the beginning of Alfred Hertz’s tenure at the SFS, an era which saw a somewhat fragile local group turn itself into a solid ensemble that would become one of the first American orchestras to record extensively. Whiteman had begun his career in the Denver Symphony Orchestra before migrating west to the SFS. In 1918 he formed a local dance band influenced by the nascent jazz idioms of the day; he took the band to New York in 1920 and began recording on RCA Victor. Those records made the group famous; for the next thirty years they were an American institution.

Art Hickman
Jazz pioneer

Art Hickman was an all-around musician who founded a popular dance band (often heard at the St. Francis Hotel) that may belong to the very early stages of jazz history; whether they played jazz or not remains a bit controversial. Certainly Hickman himself wasn’t particularly fond of the term "jazz." Gigs in New York (particularly playing for the Ziegfield Follies) helped to cement the band’s reputation in San Francisco, where they became a local institution. Upon Hickman’s early death in 1930 a local newspaper referred to him as a "founder of jazz", even if Hickman himself probably wouldn’t have agreed.

Surviving recordings of Hickman’s group (there are many), reveal much more a late-ragtime kind of group, theatrical and dance styles, apparently all of it notated, and devoid of anything I at least would think of as jazz, even by WWI standards. Sure, it contained saxophones, but it still sounds much more ragtime-y than jazz-y.

The "classical" connection? Art Hickman received a Bachelor of Music degree from the King Conservatory in San Jose—in those days the only independent music school in the Bay Area or anywhere in California—in violin.

Clyde Doerr
Mr. Saxophone

Clyde Doerr was an important voice in creating the saxophone as an indispensable component of jazz groups. A member of Art Hickman’s band, he went on to Chicago and New York, where he played sax independently and led his own band.

Doerr eventually gave up music and became a precision machinist; he died in 1973.

Doerr, like Art Hickman, was also a graduate of the King Conservatory of Music—also in violin.

Music critic and journalist

He was an arch-conservative critic, lifelong enemy of 12-tonal and serialist music, and a winningly witty writer whose sparkling essays and reviews could be found in the New Yorker and other high-end publications; he also left us some delightful memoirs.

In his effervescent Geniuses, Godesses, and People, Sargeant regales us with insider stories about his life as a violinist in the San Francisco Symphony during Alfred Hertz’s tenure. It’s definitely a tell-all, dish-the-dirt affair. Probably my favorite tidbit has to do with the hapless junior players who were assigned to mop down the maestro after every concert—apparently Herr Hertz sweated like a prizefighter.

Meredith Willson
Broadway composer

Nowadays Willson is remembered primarily for The Music Man, that perennial Broadway hit of the 1950s that will probably live as long as musical theater. Another musical, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, did quite well in its day although it hasn’t had quite the amperage of its illustrious predecessor.

Willson composed concert music, and for a while served as the program director for San Francisco’s KDFC. What is less known is that he also conducted the San Francisco Symphony on a number of occasions, as a popular guest conductor for the lighter-fare summer concerts. In that guise, he was captured for posterity when several of his Standard Hour broadcast concerts with the SFS made it to 78 rpm archive discs. Not only did he conduct some of his own music—quite a nice performance of a movement from his California Missions Symphony—but also some of his friends and colleagues. A particular favorite of mine (and which I hope to get on the SFS’s centennial retrospective CD set) is a suite from Victor Young’s score for The Sun Also Rises.

Barbara Eden
Actress

"Jeannie" from the iconic 1960s show I Dream of Jeannie is almost a San Francisco native, having been brought here at the age of 3. Her actual birth name was Barbara Jean Morehead; under her adopted name of Barbara Huffman she was a voice student at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music during the 1950s, after he winning the "Miss San Francisco" beauty pageant, but well before her rise to TV fame.