Trombonist Was Symbol of Traditional S.F.-Style Music : Jazz Artist Melvin (Turk) Murphy Dies

Melvin (Turk) Murphy, whose driving trombone and devotion to inveteracy made him a lifelong symbol of traditional--as opposed to Dixieland--jazz, died over the weekend in San Francisco where he had owned clubs and appeared in hotels and saloons for nearly 50 years.

Murphy was 71 and, until a few days before his death Saturday night of bone cancer, had been broadcasting regularly on radio station KJAZ-FM in the Bay Area.

Murphy came out of high school in Williams, a small farming community near Sacramento, to briefly study composition and harmony before teaching himself first the cornet and then the trombone. It was in school that he gained the nickname “Terrible Turk” for his prowess on the football team.

He worked at car washes and as a mechanic while perfecting his craft with weekend club dates during the Depression. He played in the big bands of Mal Hallett and Will Osborne and both played and sang with Merle Howard before returning to San Francisco in 1939. There he teamed with trumpeter Lu Watters and clarinetist Bob Helm to form the eight-man Yerba Buena Jazz Band. That band has been cited as the source of the consummate ensemble sound, with each player working within the group and not as a featured soloist, that came to be known as San Francisco Jazz.

Murphy’s bands all disdained the long solos that characterized Dixieland playing, where musicians played as a unit only at the beginning and end of each tune.

And the tunes themselves were not those normally associated with old-time jazz. There was no “Muskrat Ramble” or “A Closer Walk With Thee” at the Yerba Buena performances or with the bands that Murphy went on to lead.

Instead, the music was that composed by Scott Joplin, King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton or a young Louis Armstrong. Murphy’s groups had a changing repertoire of more than 400 tunes, most of which he said in a 1975 interview with The Times “you try not to play the same way twice.”

They ranged from “Evolution Mama” (“Don’t You Make a Monkey Out of Me”) to “I Wish I Was in Peoria,” and Murphy found them on old records or in the Library of Congress.

His recordings on the old Jazz Man label in the 1940s gained him a measure of national recognition and he took his own Turk Murphy Jazz Band into New York City. In 1955 Murphy reached two milestones: he became part of the New Orleans Jazz Festival with that accompanying prestige and he arranged a song for Louis Armstrong from Kurt Weill’s “The Threepenny Opera.” The song, “Mack the Knife,” was a moderate success for Armstrong and later became a hit for Bobby Darin.

Murphy stayed mostly on the road until 1960, when he and pianist Pete Clute opened Earthquake McGoon’s, a dark hole of a room that once housed the William Tell Hotel and which they named for a character in the “Li’l Abner” cartoon strip. Among the customers were David Packard, the industrialist who would become an assistant secretary of defense, and semanticist S. I. Hayakawa, a future U.S. senator. McGoon’s closed a few years ago and Murphy since had become a favorite at the New Orleans Room in the Fairmont Hotel.

“We sell happiness,” Murphy once said. “It (the music) doesn’t have any message except to make people laugh. . . . People have enough troubles without burdening them with their entertainment.”

He is survived by his third wife, Harriet, and their son, Carson. Services are pending.