Unsung Jazz Giant : Clarinetist Finds More Honor on Road Than in San Diego Home

Prophets and jazz musicians, it seems, are rarely appreciated in their own back yards. Bobby Gordon, one of the world’s finest jazz clarinetists, attracts no fanfare and only medium-sized audiences when he plays here twice a week in his adopted home town.

But when Gordon, 46, picks up his licorice stick at a concert in San Francisco, San Antonio, New York, Cannes or Paris, knowing jazz fans throng around him. When he plays, Gordon is a font of improvisational creativity, say musicians who know him.

“He’s a giant jazz soloist,” said Jim Cullum, a cornet player and band leader in San Antonio. “He is extraordinarily gifted as a soloist. He can play on and on and on, countless times through a tune and never repeat an idea. He has a beautiful sound, a beautiful tone.”

And yet Gordon is hardly known in San Diego, where most Wednesdays he appears with the Ken Kaiser Trio at the Horton Grand Hotel’s Palace Bar. On Sundays at 2 p.m., Gordon usually plays at the Jazzmine record shop on La Jolla Boulevard with such big-band greats as trumpeter Johnny Best and bassist Bob Haggart.

“To be very honest, he is as close, I think, as you’re going to get to genius today,” said Eddy Davis, a musician, songwriter, conductor and longtime friend of Gordon’s. “He is a natural musician. He can play the blues, which a lot of people say they can, but can’t.”

Gordon realized early that big bands were not his bag. He liked to swing, and reading charts in a big-band horn section was not his idea of swinging.

“Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, all of the big band clarinet players, played technically very well and they made a million dollars,” Gordon said, during a recent interview in his apartment in Pacific Beach. “Joe Marsala played better clarinet. He played more from the heart than they did. He did not have as much technique, but he was as good as they were in the smaller groups.”

Marsala was Gordon’s first teacher. He was also influenced by Dixieland great Pee Wee Russell. Though Gordon reads music better today than he did when he began playing in the 1950s, he still does “a lot of faking, you’d call it.” And his ideal is still “groups like Fats Waller’s and Eddie Condon’s--they were intimate kinds of groups, and they played great jazz.”

Gordon’s career looked extremely promising in the early 1960s. Decca Records signed him to a three-year contract as its premier clarinet soloist in 1962. The company already had Pete Fountain on its subsidiary, Coral Records, and Gordon’s presence gave the Decca label a comparable talent.

Backed by a string orchestra, he recorded an album of standards titled “Warm and Sentimental,” which promptly sold 25,000 copies, an impressive figure in 1962. He subsequently recorded “A Young Man’s Fancy” and “The Lamp is Low” for Decca. Those three albums, cut before Gordon had turned 25, received four Grammy nominations, including one for best instrumental.

There were also appearances on Mike Douglas’ TV show.

“He was the best young instrumentalist for three years in a row,” Davis said in a phone interview from New York. “He got awards for that. . . . If he had played in the ‘30s and ‘40s, he would be a household name.”

But Gordon came along at a time when the music and recording industries were going through major changes, Davis said. Rock began to roll jazz off radio station play lists. The record company execs who were signing talent and packaging albums didn’t quite know what to do with a pure musician like Bobby Gordon, Davis said. Unfortunately for Gordon, that situation hasn’t changed.

His talent isn’t appreciated in the musical world today because “the musical world is the entertainment world,” Davis said. “The business side doesn’t allow for the musical side. It’s strictly entertainment today; it’s visual.”

When rock began to replace the more intellectually oriented jazz music, record execs went with their hottest, most popular jazz instrumentalists. Exceptional younger talent could get little more than a cup of coffee at record company offices.

The experience does not appear to have embittered Gordon, however. If his solo recording career waned, he has always been able to find jobs, and playing--no matter where--is what it’s all about.

Though his jazz contemporaries prefer the staccato riffs of be-bop, Gordon remains dedicated to what he calls the Fats Waller school or the Chicago style of jazz that usually features clarinet, trumpet, trombone, tenor saxophone and maybe banjo or guitar.

Gordon has always played traditional jazz, but don’t ask him to define it.

“I don’t know what it is. I just like the melody. I like hearing the melody stated,” he said. “I’m not a Dixieland fan.” He quickly corrected himself. “I am a Dixieland jazz fan, but not the type with straw hats and garters and stuff like that.”

Showmanship that requires arm garters and Panama hats is not Gordon’s style. Pennsylvania band leader Leon Redbone says of Gordon: “If you want a bluesy kind of melody, he would be the first to call. He isn’t flashy; just the opposite--complete reserve. It’s subtle.”

Gordon uses his clarinet with restrained passion, creating a tantalizing tension on ballads and jump tunes that were once performed in speak-easies during the ‘20s and ‘30s, songs like Louis Armstrong’s “Big Butter and Egg Man” or Fats Waller’s “Honeysuckle Rose.”

Though Gordon grew up during the seminal years of rock ‘n’ roll on New York’s suburban Long Island, the music of Bill Haley, Elvis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard held little appeal for him.

“I didn’t like rock ‘n’ roll too much. I was in my late teens when Elvis Presley became famous,” he said. “That wasn’t my scene.”

Instead, the teen-aged Gordon learned music at the feet of the great traditional jazz clarinetist, Joe Marsala, who also lived on Long Island.

“Practically every weekend when he went to play (in New York City), he’d take me on the Long Island Railroad with him, and I’d watch the other guys play,” Gordon said.

On Saturdays, Marsala, who was a friend of Gordon’s father, went to the Gordon household to give him a clarinet lesson.

Gordon’s father was the president of the Seeburg Corp., a company famous for its jukeboxes. He moved his family to Chicago about 1960, where Gordon immersed himself in a rich Chicago music scene. There he met Davis. The two--both banjo and clarinet players--were the first musicians signed at the Plugged Nickel, a club on Wells Street.

For Gordon, Chicago was a magical musical kingdom where he could jam in clubs, then continue in someone’s apartment for days. In these informal after-hours sessions, he and Davis played with a variety of musicians, from Jose Feliciano and Sergio Mendes to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company, to Elaine McFarland (later known as Spanky) who formed Spanky and Our Gang.

Gordon made his first album with McFarland in 1960--when both were just 19 years old--backing blues singer and piano player Little Brother Montgomery. The album received five stars from Downbeat magazine.

“Any group would accept Bob,” Davis said. “Whether modern or rock ‘n’ roll, he seems to break the barrier and get through to any form. But it still was Bobby. It was his sound.”

Gordon joined Muggsy Spanier’s group and toured with it through a circuit of jazz clubs in Chicago, Cleveland, Toronto and Pittsburgh. He later moved back to New York, where he was a regular at the famed traditional jazz club Eddie Condon’s. He has “sessioned” on 35 albums, including Redbone’s 1986 “Red to Blue,” named top traditional jazz album of the year by the Independent Record Producers of America.

Gordon’s career was sidelined in the late 1970s when he and Redbone narrowly escaped death in an airplane accident after a concert at the University of West Virginia. Their plane took off in a snowstorm, then crashed, flipping upside down and sliding to a stop 30 feet from the edge of a precipice.

“Upside down in your seat belt, it’s hard to get out,” Gordon said.

Several passengers were killed, but Gordon and Redbone received only minor injuries. The emotional trauma, however, added to Gordon’s already hectic touring and playing schedule, was enough to put him in the hospital.

“I was told by my doctor that I was completely burned out . . . and he said to come out here and join my family,” Gordon said. “I guess it all caught up with me at once.”

Gordon moved to San Diego nine years ago and is overcoming a fear of flying that for a time limited his touring to cross-country train rides.

Last week, he flew to New York to record a compact disc in New York with guitarist Marty Grosz for Jazzology Records. A few weeks before that, he recorded a Christmas album with Redbone’s band while playing a gig with the group at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

Besides playing, Gordon writes songs--popular and country, as well as jazz. His most popular song to date is “Malta,” a jazz bossa nova piece that was popular in 1964 in Los Angeles.

On Friday, he will play with the Chicago Six Combo at the Hotel del Coronado at a $125-a-ticket eye-care fund-raiser. On Tuesday, he will play a free concert, sponsored by KSDS FM (88.3), at 8 p.m. at the San Diego City College Theater.

One of the best places to hear Gordon is at the Horton Grand, where you can find him sailing off on “Body and Soul” and “Embraceable You” or knocking off 30 choruses of “C-Jam Blues.”

But he misses hanging out and the all-night jams.

“Unfortunately in San Diego, there aren’t that many places you can go after you finish a job,” Gordon said. “In Chicago, at the hootenannies, we were out almost every night. We’d go places we’d get paid for playing, but the more fun seemed to be where we weren’t paid for playing. When I play with Johnny Best, people call us up to go over to somebody’s house. That’s always more fun that working for money to me.”

Davis recalled Gordon’s artistry with undisguised envy:

“When you watch him lean forward and get that stance (balancing on one leg), he’s off in musicland someplace, rather than watching the audience or wondering what they’re going to play next.

“He can play three notes and make it sound like somebody else playing five choruses. That’s what Louis Armstrong could do. Bobby can do that. Being around him is good for you. It makes you want to try.”