When Big Jay McNeeley Plays Sax, It’s a Nonstop, Face-to-Face Show

On a slow Thursday night in a restaurant lounge far off the musical mainline, a figure who had his first rhythm-and-blues hit nearly 40 years ago gets up to play the saxophone.

It is not unusual, in this sort of setting, to find vaguely familiar musical names, far past their performing peak, acting out the last, melancholy chapters of career entropy.

But what follows at Salvatore’s restaurant in Anaheim, in front of a sparse weeknight audience, has nothing to do with entropy. Big Jay McNeely, who once had a Top 5 R & B hit and toured with the likes of Little Richard, steps onto the low stage, bends his back, tilts the bell of his tenor way down low and begins to blow. He lets go a series of rude, raw honks, then pierces the lounge’s darkness with shrieking sustains. For the next 80 minutes, McNeely is a nonstop energy source.

A trim, solidly built man, McNeely wears a dapper suit with matching gold bow tie and cummerbund--the outfit of a performer with a strong sense of propriety about looking right on stage. He has a broad, almond-shaped face constructed of smooth, sculpted surfaces. A shock of thick, black hair springs over his forehead, while the graying sides are clipped short. At 61, McNeely looks at least 10 or 15 years younger than his age.

His performance makes him seem even younger than that. For starters, McNeely strays from his three-man band to take a 15-minute get-acquainted stroll through the audience. Playing continuously, he solos face to face for each of the 35 patrons in the house. Finding a lively party sitting around a table and toasting each other, McNeely favors them with extra-hot licks. Later, he’ll return to play for them from atop an empty chair.

While the music pours out without interruption, McNeely keeps his approach varied. He plays “There Is Something on Your Mind,” a blues-soul ballad from 1959 that was his biggest hit, turning the lyrics into a question-answer session with the audience filling in the blanks.

Next comes a comical jump-swing number, “All That Wine Is Gone,” which finds McNeely rolling his eyes and contorting his pliant face to accentuate the humor. McNeely shows off a sweetly lyrical side on Gershwin’s “Summertime,” but he still gets in his share of flashy, high-note cries. He stops the band with a dramatic wail, flourishing a free right hand--then kicks back into “Summertime,” repeating it as a fast cha-cha, complete with strictly ‘80s electronic effects that give his saxophone a whooshing, gliding tone. The dancers in the house are quickly enticed.

This goes on all the time, says Paul Chavira, the restaurant owner who has been booking McNeely four nights a week, Wednesday through Saturday, for the past four months. “He sometimes will play 2 1/2, 3 hours straight without a break, and he’s blowin’ all the time. He has a good time up there. That’s how he stays so young.”

As a youngster in Watts, McNeely, who still lives in Los Angeles, didn’t give much thought to playing music until he was 16 and got a job cutting up tires in a Firestone factory. “I decided, ‘There has to be another way of making a living,’ ” he recalled, sitting between sets in a dark, quiet banquet room. Around that time, his older brother and future accompanist, Robert, went into the Army, leaving behind a tenor sax. Cecil James McNeely grabbed it and started taking lessons. Early on, he had the makings of a precise, polished swing jazzman.

“I was beginning to sound real legit, like Glenn Miller,” he said. “But I was feeling very mechanized, like all my soul and heritage was gone.” In 1949, when a friend got McNeely a chance to do a session for Savoy Records, he went for an unfettered blues sound and came up with his first hit, “Deacon’s Hop.”

Told that Cecil wasn’t a catchy enough moniker for a hot sax player, he started calling himself Big Jay and booking his band, the Hollywood Four Flames, into late-night gigs for audiences of white high school kids. Quickly, Big Jay became the target of parental disapproval of the sort that later would greet early rockers like Elvis Presley and Little Richard.

“I played in Huntington Beach one time, and they said that a thousand white kids danced like Watusis,” McNeely recalled. Those who said so probably meant it as a racial slur toward the black men playing their so-called jungle music, but it was, in fact, a high compliment.

To further motivate unfettered behavior in dancers and onlookers, McNeely cultivated a flashy style of showmanship that included playing his sax while flat on his back on the floor.

“The first time I laid on the floor was in Clarksville, Tenn.,” McNeely said. “We played one night and the people just didn’t seem to get into it.” After intermission, he came back with stepped-up showman’s antics. “First, I got on my knees and played. Then I laid on the floor. It broke that spell. The people started screaming and hollering.”

Playing a club in San Diego one night, McNeely’s penchant for wandering off the bandstand got him in trouble with the law. “I was blowing my horn, and it was right at closing time. I got outside (playing all the while), and some off-duty cop came and locked me up.” McNeely said he bailed himself out for $50 and wound up pleading to a charge of disturbing the peace--getting off with a warning not to wander the streets with his saxophone again.

McNeely walked away from his musical career in the mid-1960s. The national circuit of R & B venues that he had played died out, and his commitment to attending nighttime Jehovah’s Witnesses meetings conflicted with playing the local club circuit in Los Angeles. McNeely wound up walking a route as a mailman.

“I had a route that looked like about 100 miles long,” he said. “It was tough. Don’t let anybody fool you--the post office is not an easy job.”

In 1983, after an 18-year layoff from regular performing, he began to play again. Since then, McNeely has toured Europe four times and, after finishing up this weekend at Salvatore’s, he’ll leave for a 10-day European tour.

In 1987, McNeely played his storming saxophone on national television as part of a big blues medley on the Grammy Awards show. McNeely said he did his fall-on-the-floor routine, and wound up blowing his sax from the audience while perched on singer Cissy Houston’s lap.

A new McNeely album, “Az Bootin’,” just came out on his own label, Big J Records. Recorded about two years ago, it is a simple, unadorned, mostly raucous effort featuring McNeely fronting an Arizona bar band, the Rocket 88s. For his next album, McNeely said, “I want to do some pretty things, like ‘Over the Rainbow,’ do it different than anything I’ve ever done.”

McNeely attributes his continuing vitality to clean living and a proper application of both the work ethic and the play ethic.

“I don’t drink, and I don’t smoke,” he said. “A lot of people who drink look three times older than I do. And smoking just tears you down. When I play I enjoy myself. I don’t get on the bandstand and jive and just pass the time. I work.”

Big Jay McNeely will perform tonight through Saturday beginning at 9 p.m. at Salvatore’s, 500 N. Brookhurst St., Anaheim. No cover charge. (714) 776-0500.

COACH HOUSE--THE SEQUEL: A new venture in Ventura County by Coach House owner Gary Folgner already is paying dividends for music fans in Orange County. Folgner recently began operating the Ventura Theater, a converted, 1930s-vintage movie house, as a dinner and concert venue along the same lines as his club in San Juan Capistrano. The Ventura Theater has a seating capacity of 1,000, compared to the Coach House’s 400 or so.

Ken Phebus, who books both clubs for Folgner, said he now has a stronger bartering position to bring bands that normally wouldn’t play a 400-seat club into the Coach House. If they are interested primarily in playing the Ventura Theater, Phebus said, he can counter with a package deal that also includes a stop at the Coach House. That, Phebus said, is how the Coach House landed upcoming shows by Gregg Allman (July 4) and Pat Metheny (July 25).

“It’s a polite way of forcing agents to play into our hands,” Phebus said.