Musicians Still Hear Paris’ Call

The Little Giant comes back to town on a winter day the color of cobblestones.

It’s a three-hour trip to Paris by car and fast train from the village where he lives southwest of the capital. After a childhood on the South Side of Chicago, a career forged in the smoke and din of jazz dens the world over, he has become a country gentleman. On the phone from his house in the rural Poitou region, he says, “You can’t get more country than this.”

Once, a crowd might have been waiting at Montparnasse station. When he first toured Europe four decades ago, he marveled at the photographers who turned out at airports as if he were an ambassador.

Not today. He stands on the emptying platform: a short, grandfatherly 77-year-old bundled against the chill of the cavernous hall, a wool cap pulled over his ears and down to his glasses. He carries a small suitcase. He’s here for another doctor’s appointment to repair the damage of a stroke, heart ailments, years of night work and hard drink.

“I’ve been in the hospital so many times,” he says. “I was falling apart.... I saw this heart doctor in Poitiers. He told me: ‘My advice to you is go back home, put your horn in the closet and you’re finished blowing.’ ”

Johnny Griffin, a.k.a. the Little Giant, is a titan of the tenor saxophone. He has played with the best of them: Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, Lester Young. Jazz books invariably mention his reputation as the fastest saxophone player of them all.

He grumbles a bit about that label, a mischievous grin lighting up his weather-beaten face.

“That stuck with me, so I shut up. Got the publicity. Why do they always say that? ‘Fastest gun in the West.’ If it’s a ballad, I play it slow. I didn’t always play fast.”

The taxi rolls into the Saint-Germain-des-Pres neighborhood on the Left Bank. Griffin stares at streets thick with memories, melodies, ghosts: the site of the now-defunct Blue Note, where a triumphant gig in 1962 set the stage for his move overseas. Le Chat Qui Peche, a club where he had some great shows and courted his Dutch wife. The Hotel La Louisiane, where the scent of red beans and rice filled the halls and his neighbor during his first months in Paris was the brilliant, tormented pianist Bud Powell.

Powell’s friendship with Francis Paudras, a fan who took him in and helped him fight his physical and mental demons, inspired the 1986 film “ ‘Round Midnight,” about expatriate jazz musicians. Griffin got to know Powell and Paudras and moved with them from La Louisiane to a notorious nightlife district.

“In Pigalle, I lived right across from Bud Powell and Francis Paudras,” Griffin says. “Third-floor apartments. I could step over my balcony and be on their balcony.... I was cooking on a little pad on my dresser. When I met my wife, she made me move.”

Leaving his suitcase with the maitre d’, Griffin maneuvers laboriously into a seat in a restaurant on the narrow Rue Saint Benoit des Saints-Peres near the former Club-Saint-Germain, another jazz haunt. Then he gets up again.

“Gotta get my pills,” he says with a sigh. “Old folks.”

Although they don’t know exactly who he is, the waiters and waitresses treat him with gentle deference. They sense that he represents a remnant of the history of the neighborhood, a musical Mohican.

“Have you got a good Bordeaux?” He peers slyly over the menu. “C’est bon? You sure? Let me look at your face.... Yeah, OK. I can trust you.”

Properly fortified, he tries to explain the allure of Paris for so many American jazz musicians during much of the 20th century.

“I made more money here,” he says. “Bought me a big house out there where I’m living. Bought houses in other places, sold ‘em.”

But it was more than the money. The French have always venerated jazz as an art form on par with classical music. For black artists who had endured the humiliation of Jim Crow laws touring the South, the sting of racism was softer across the Atlantic. As the character played by Dexter Gordon puts it in “ ‘Round Midnight,” “No cold eyes in Paris.”

Griffin recalls: “I liked the attitude of the people. They listened to the music. And the people liked me. It was not that they didn’t appreciate the music in America. Because they did. That’s where the music comes from. But it was such a hell of an experience....

“The people were friendly. Even if I didn’t speak the language, I could tell if somebody was not being friendly. I could hear it. Being a musician, I had that kind of ear for people being friendly or what.”

The expatriate tradition here dates to Sidney Bechet, the swashbuckling clarinetist and saxophonist whose first foray ended in 1929 when he and a banjo player got into a gunfight that wounded three bystanders. Bechet was deported, but he returned after World War II, established his band at the Theatre du Vieux Colombier and died a national hero in 1959, honored with a street, a statue and the nickname “Le Dieu” -- The God.

Other pilgrimages were shorter and less violent. Coleman Hawkins became a tenor godfather after a four-year visit in the 1930s when “he was really discovered and ... in turn, found himself,” according to the liner notes of his 1955 album, “The Hawk in Paris.” After Miles Davis played the postwar clubs, romanced an actress and hung out with existentialist philosophers, he said Paris had changed him forever.

Billy Strayhorn, the gifted composer and collaborator with Duke Ellington, recorded one of his few piano albums here in 1963. Strayhorn kept a separate address book for his beloved Paris, whose magic he evoked in “Lush Life,” the sweetest of sad songs:

A week in Paris will ease the bite of it

All I care is to smile in spite of it

The image could not sustain the reality. The music began to suffer in the 1970s, just as it did elsewhere. American artists ran into tax issues, union hassles, resentment from French counterparts.

Europe is no longer the jazz mecca it was, but it still helps pay the bills. Many Americans make a living by dividing their performance schedules between the U.S. and European circuits.

And, although in smaller numbers and with lower expectations, expatriates keep moving to Paris. Chasing the music and the mystique.

*

Tuesday night at La Fontaine: Rick Margitza’s quartet is preparing for the weekly gig.

The street-corner club fills up. The opening door brings blasts of cold air. It’s one of the few Parisian venues where live jazz can be heard all week, a raffish little joint with scarred wood, ancient linoleum. Records dangle decoratively on cords in the pale, smoky glow of red and yellow lamps.

The first set starts at 10 p.m. The tiny space is packed. The band plays a few feet from the audience of several dozen patrons. When Margitza makes way for the piano solos, he finds himself up against the door of the bathroom. He has to step aside when the door opens, patrons patting him apologetically on the shoulder: Sorry maestro, nature calls.

But during a soulful rendition of “Cry Me a River,” there are no distractions. He solos with his eyes shut, the saxophone so close that it reverberates in the chests of the audience. They are rapt.

Margitza, 44, was born around the time Johnny Griffin boarded the ocean liner in New York. He has a sparse goatee, an intent but unassuming air, the brooding features of ancestors who were Hungarian Gypsies, although he prefers the term Roma. Like Griffin, he’s a diminutive Midwesterner who made a big splash at an early age. His father was a violinist in the Detroit Symphony. His maternal grandfather played bass with Glenn Miller and with Charlie Parker, who became one of Margitza’s idols.

At 27, he was starting out in New Orleans when destiny struck. Miles Davis needed a sideman for a European tour. A producer played him a demo tape of Margitza over the phone. Davis said, “Tell him he has a job.”

“So now I’m moving to New York to play for Miles, with two major record companies bidding for me,” Margitza recalls. “And I was so naive, I didn’t realize it was a big deal.”

It sank in when he visited Davis’ palatial apartment overlooking Central Park. A sign on the door instructed visitors to remove their shoes. Margitza complied. And froze.

“I stood there, holding my horn in one hand and my shoes in the other, for like five minutes before I had the nerve to ring the bell.”

Davis opened the door. His torso was bare because he had been searching for a shirt in a walk-in closet almost the size of La Fontaine. Despite Margitza’s fears, the hoarse-voiced legend did not display his icy “prince of darkness” side.

“He made me feel really welcome,” Margitza says. “Big smile. The first thing he said was, ‘Where ... did you learn to play like that?’ And I said: ‘I’ve been listening to you.’ ”

Margitza soon made a name for himself. But even for a prodigy, New York lived up to the words of the shark-like manager played by Martin Scorsese in “ ‘Round Midnight”: “In New York, the music is better. That’s because it’s tougher. There’s tougher things going on here.... It’s not for everybody, New York.”

Except for a tiny elite, musicians could not find much work between the extremes of the legendary Village Vanguard and gigs that paid $20. Margitza would run into talented friends wearing tuxedos late at night, fresh from part-time jobs at weddings or Broadway shows they took to support their families. Things were drying up.

“New York was the center, and still is, of jazz,” he says. “But I found myself in the past four or five years coming [to Europe] to make a majority of my income....

“It was a combination of those things. And the dream of Paris. With one of my girlfriends, we always talked about it. It was a fantasy we had.... I felt that if I didn’t do it, I would always have wondered what would have happened if I had.”

He made the move in 2003 after being recruited by the Moutin Reunion Quartet, which is led by two French brothers who live and perform in both the U.S. and France. Margitza finds that the best musicians here are as good as elsewhere. The French state provides a better safety net for a precarious profession. Regional cultural centers and festivals offer job opportunities throughout the year and around the continent. A French label has released his latest disc, “Bohemia,” a foray into world music and his Roma roots.

“There is more respect for the arts, for jazz, experimental, classical,” he says. “At my age, the quality of life is more comfortable. The rents are a little cheaper. The energy is a little softer.”

He does not expect to get rich quick. The attention and the crowds don’t compare to the 1950s and 1960s when Griffin, Gordon and other big-name expatriates dominated the cultural scene in European capitals. Artists and aficionados here have struggled against the tides of rock and rap. But there has been a modest resurgence propelled by the city’s only 24-hour jazz station, TSF-FM, which began broadcasting six years ago.

Margitza lives near Place de la Bastille, not far from the studios of TSF. The area’s lively nightlife reminds him of New York’s East Village, although he misses the air-conditioned subways and the ability to order ethnic food at all hours. He hopes to learn French one day, although performing and composing tend to win out over language lessons.

“The French musicians, their English is getting better because of me,” he says.

At La Fontaine, where Margitza has a yearlong contract for Tuesday nights, his rhythm section is French. The crowd is more bohemian than bourgeois.

“It’s a younger, student vibe,” he says. “They just pass the hat. I like it.”

Margitza’s quartet plays in front of tall windows that are steamed up by the heat inside, traffic lights glowing in a collage on the fogged glass. On the other side of the pane, music students hunch in their coats on the sidewalk because there’s no more room inside. Two apparent bass players, tall instrument cases over their shoulders, stand silhouetted behind Margitza’s bass player, listening.

It’s like that scene in “ ‘Round Midnight” when the French jazz buff huddles in the rain by a vent to hear the saxophonist in the Blue Note, soaking up the magic American sound.

*

Griffin tries to remember a name.

“I am missing somebody. A pianist. My brain is stopped up. Damn. Who was the other pianist? That’s crazy....”

The stroke hurt his memory. But he cherishes long-gone moments like jewels.

He remembers a club in Chicago split into two venues, “the Persian Lounge downstairs, the Persian Ballroom upstairs.” He did a gig there with Lester “Pres” Young, who had the odd habit of addressing everyone as “Lady.” Pres noticed that Griffin was one of the up-and-comers who emulated the vibrato-rich sounds of Ben Webster and Hawkins, his stylistic rivals.

“Pres told me: ‘Gee, Lady Griffin, you don’t play anything like Pres.’ My friends fell out. I said, ‘Pres, I can’t play like you.’ ”

He remembers the night in the 1960s when a cigarette made him sick in London; he quit smoking on the spot. But alcohol remained a constant companion until recently. His drink was gin and grapefruit juice; they called it “the Griffin.” Addiction was an occupational hazard.

“They all were drinkers,” Griffin says. “It’s what was happening. Either drinking or drugs.... I just had to stop drinking or I was going to die. It was that basic. You see me now just drinking a little wine. But man, I was bar-to-bar. I knew all the bartenders wherever.”

He talks about his children and grandchildren scattered around the U.S. Some took up music, others didn’t, maybe because he pushed too hard. He doesn’t dwell on regrets. Despite the dire diagnosis that his blowing days were over, he still performs now and then thanks to the care of a doctor from Marseilles, an amateur jazz musician.

But in general, Griffin is content in the country house where he’s lived for 21 years, cultivating his vegetable garden a la Voltaire, although a gardener does the actual work these days.

“I don’t miss anything,” he says. “Right now, it’s hard to get me to leave home.... I haven’t been everywhere, but I have been a lot of places. The Orient. Scandinavia. I’ve been to Russia. I’ve been to Turkey. Haven’t been to Egypt. Wait a minute, I have been to Egypt. I remember going across the desert and seeing the Pyramids.”

After the long, late lunch, he gets into a taxi. He will spend the night at the home of an American friend, a painter named James LeGros. Looking tired as the cab cruises into the dusk, Griffin recounts an anecdote about trying to persuade the solemn, introverted Thelonious Monk to tell a drummer to keep it down during his sax solos.

“I can still see all those cats,” he says wistfully. “They are gone, but I can still see them like they were walking around here.”

His painter friend ushers him into the house, puts on a disc. Griffin perks up. He challenges the painter to name the tune. He’s stumped.

“You don’t know it?” Griffin croons: “Saa-vooyy.... Come on, man. ‘Stompin’ at the Savoy.’ ”

He grins his mischievous grin. He’s back in Paris.

And he remembers.