CHEATHAMS HAVE A BOND WITH THE BLUES

The concept of a new, contemporary-style blues band may seem to some like an anachronism in these days of funk, fusion and electronics. No less contradictory is the idea that a jazz group of any kind could make a broad, perhaps international impact while based in San Diego.

Jimmy and Jeannie Cheatham have beaten the odds. The veteran bass trombonist and teacher, in partnership with his blues-singing pianist-wife, started to break away from the localized image with an album, “Sweet Baby Blues,” for Concord Jazz, taped in late 1984. The reaction was strong enough to justify a second LP, “Midnight Mama,” released last summer.

“Things are finally beginning to happen,” said Jeannie Cheatham, a cheerful woman whose lyrics (“Finance Company Blues,” “Meet Me With Your Black Drawers On”) reflect her lighthearted approach to the blues tradition. “Last year, we played festivals around California--at Concord and Long Beach--as well as clubs in San Francisco and Los Angeles; we’re booked back into the Alleycat Bistro in L.A. Feb. 13-14. We have had feelers for next summer for festivals in Nice, Barcelona and Montauban, as well as calls from Jamaica, where they want us to lecture and play at a university, and Winnipeg, for a big festival in July. As for the East Coast, well, it would be nice if we played New York--I’m sure we’d tear it up there.”

Though the Cheathams have been married 28 years, their paths did not cross until both had enjoyed separate careers, hers mainly in Ohio and Canada, his in New York and Los Angeles. Born June 18, 1924, in Birmingham, Jimmy Cheatham was raised from the age of 3 in Buffalo. “At first I had no private study or formal training; I picked up a lot of knowledge from the older musicians in legendary bands like Jimmie Lunceford’s--his band lived in Buffalo for a while--and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers.

“I learned to pick out tunes at the piano, but it wasn’t until I came out of the Army that I studied seriously, at the Conservatory of Modern Music in New York and then with Russ Garcia at Westlake College in Hollywood, where he had a course for scoring films and TV.”

While at Westlake, Cheatham played with some of the young lions of the 1950s West Coast scene: Buddy Collette, Gerald Wilson, Wardell Gray. He composed a work for string quartet plus Collette on flute that was premiered at a Paul Robeson concert. “Then, in 1953, I returned to Buffalo and met Jeannie.”

Jeanne Evans, whose experience with music had begun at her mother’s Baptist church in Akron, Ohio, studied the classics for nine years. “I started going to Akron U., but there just wasn’t enough money, so I lit out and took a bus to Columbus. Got a job playing piano for a week in a club, and stayed three months. I didn’t bother with singing until years later; in fact, I played for a bunch of other singers.”

This experience was better than a college course in the blues. Among the singers she accompanied were Al Hibbler (“I was in junior high, the youngest in a community band, 12 guys and me, when we came to Akron and we played with him at the Armory”), Jimmy Witherspoon and Wynonie (Mr. Blues) Harris in Columbus, Joe Williams (“in a terrible snowstorm, one night in Buffalo”), Jimmy Rushing, T-Bone Walker (“We were the house band in a place in Buffalo that hired all the blues singers: Bo Diddley, T-Bone, Big Maybelle--so this really gave me a chance to know the blues”).

In Cleveland, she played for “The Queen,” Dinah Washington. “Everyone in our band was down with the flu, and she brought chicken soup for us all--people said she was mean, but she sure was nice to us.” Then there were dates with Odetta (“She was a grand old gal!”) and Big Mama Thornton--”Really a buddy of mine; I played with her off and on for 10 years.”

During a three-year period spent mainly in Canada, she recalls, “after our job was over Saturday night, all of us in the band would drive from Toronto, 90 miles in 90 minutes, to the breakfast-jazz set in Buffalo. That’s how I met Jimmy.”

Over the years, Jimmy Cheatham became more and more closely involved with academia, sometimes in tandem with his wife. “William Dixon, a composer, helped to get me a teaching assignment at Bennington College. Later, I followed Bill into a similar post in Madison at the University of Wisconsin.”

In 1977, the Cheathams decided to visit Los Angeles. “Jeannie had never seen this part of the world, and our friend Buddy Collette suggested we come out and take a rest. Not long after, I got the call to take charge of the jazz program at UC San Diego.”

In forming their band, the Cheathams took advantage of the presence in San Diego of two undervalued musicians: Charles McPherson, a brilliant alto saxman of the Charlie Parker school, and Jimmy Noone, son of the legendary clarinetist of the same name (1895-1944). The senior Noone, born in New Orleans, studied clarinet in Chicago with the same teacher as Benny Goodman. Noone fils clearly reflects his father’s influence.

To round out the group, there were such Los Angeles stalwarts as Red Callender, on tuba and bass; Curtis Peagler on saxes, and Snooky Young from “The Tonight Show” band on trumpet. Along with their original songs, the Cheathams relive blues history with Pete Johnson’s “Roll ‘Em Pete,” “Cherry Red” and “Piney Brown,” all of early Kansas City vintage, and others whose origin goes back too far to be traced: “C.C. Rider,” “I’d Rather Drink Muddy Water,” “I’ve Got a Mind to Ramble.”

Jeannie Cheatham’s blues vocals find a happy halfway mark between the sonorously incisive quality of the Bessie Smith generation and the lighter blues of 1950s vaudeville days. Her piano has some of the indigo elements of early Chicago and Kansas City blues. With her husband’s shouting bass trombones and aptly tailored arrangements, they bring back to updated life a genre that recalls the Apollo Theatre and Louis Jordan, as well as some of the pioneers with whom Jeannie paid dues as an accompanist.

They’ll be in the studios Monday and Tuesday cutting their third Concord album, finding still more routes through which to bring an old idiom to a new generation.

“We’re looking forward to doing much more traveling this year,” says Jimmy Cheatham. “We’ve been very fortunate that up to now the musicians’ schedule has been adaptable so we can hold the bank together. We just want to keep on operating, with our faith in the creator.”

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