TOBACCO ROAD’S JAZZ IS ‘VINTAGE’

Sue Palmer is proud of the fact that her band, Tobacco Road, has been able to make a living in San Diego playing nothing but what she calls “vintage jazz.”

For the last three years, Palmer said, the group has been working as often as five nights a week--even though the newest song they play is at least 30 years old.

Like their Top 40 counterparts, they spend most of their time playing the local nightclub circuit. They appear regularly at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach and at the Old Time Cafe in Leucadia.

But unlike the rock bands with whom they compete, Palmer said, Tobacco Road has taken on some more eclectic bookings.

They have performed at the Julian Banjo and Fiddle Contest and have opened an exhibit at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art.

They also have entertained afternoon shoppers at Horton Plaza.

But getting the piano-pumping Palmer, 39, to explain exactly what she means by “vintage jazz” takes some doing.

She fidgets and she stammers. She hems and she haws. She stares at the ceiling and she gazes at her feet.

“Well, let’s see,” she says at last. “We play a lot of the music from the Great Depression, like boogie-woogie, so I guess you could say we’re like a 1930s jazz band.

“But then again, we also do a lot of stuff that came out before, like hot jazz, and afterward, like swing. So maybe that’s not really an accurate description, after all.

“We play the music that was popular between the two world wars--after Dixieland, but before modern jazz. . . .

“The music from that era has lots of feeling, soul and character. It’s lively and it’s up-tempo; it makes you want to dance. And the fact that we’re playing as often as we are is proof that this kind of music will always have an audience.”

Palmer might very well be right. Tobacco Road’s song list reads like a history book of jazz. There’s the “hot jazz” that originated in Harlem in the late 1920s and is characterized by syncopated horn arrangements, Palmer said, “unlike Dixieland, where the musicians are all playing off each other.”

“Hot jazz” standards that Tobacco Road plays include Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” Duke Ellington’s “East St. Louis Toodle-oo” and Lil Hardin Armstrong’s “Harlem on Saturday Night.”

There’s the festive boogie-woogie that was once the mainstay of impromptu “rent parties” during the Great Depression, Palmer said. Time-honored chestnuts that Tobacco Road plays include Meade Lux Lewis’ “Honky-Tonk Train,” Freddie Flack’s “Down the Road Apiece” and Pinetop Smith’s “Original Boogie-Woogie.”

There are “jump-piano” classics, also from the Great Depression, like “Boogie in the Barnyard” and “Early in the Morning.”

And there are smoother swing numbers from the late 1930s and early 1940s, Palmer said, such as Ellington’s “Cottontail,” Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump” and Cats and the Fiddle’s “Swingin’ All Day.”

Most of the other members of Tobacco Road, like Palmer, are recent converts to “vintage jazz.”

But 69-year-old Preston Coleman, who plays stand-up bass, is an old-timer: He used to be a member of Cats and the Fiddle, who were the house band at the legendary Apollo Theater in Harlem in the early 1940s.

“When we first put the band together in November of 1983, we needed a bass player,” Palmer said. “I went down to this little bar in Kensington, and Preston, who teaches a jazz class at the Educational Cultural Complex, happened to be there, too.

“He turned out to be a perfect addition to the band. He went to high school with Nat King Cole and Joe Williams, and he knows personally many of the same people whose songs we’re doing.

“The rest of us may like the music from that era, but here’s a guy who has actually lived through it.”