Red Rodney: From the Pits to the Peak

“I think I’ll take December off,” says Red Rodney. Spoken by a musician, a member of a profession in which most months off are involuntary, the statement was remarkable. Uttered by the rubicund trumpeter, whose life for years veered between success and cataclysmic drug-induced self-destruction, it was doubly surprising.

Although his name has been brought to a far greater audience through the movie “Bird” (in which he was portrayed by Mike Zelnicker while Rodney himself played on the sound track and served as a consultant), the fact is that the 1980s have seen the Philadelphia-born bop veteran working more steadily and profitably in jazz than at any other time in his zigzagging career.

Be-bop, rather than swing music, was the first idiom to interest Rodney as a teen-age musician.

“Dizzy Gillespie was my hero,” he says. “He was the first jazz star I wanted to be like. I was working at the local radio station with the Elliot Lawrence Orchestra, doubling at night with a small group in the Down Beat Club, and Dizzy would come home every so often to visit his mother.

“Every time he was in town he’d listen to me. At first I knew maybe six tunes and had no idea of what I was doing, harmonically. But eventually, after six months, he said: ‘Now it’s time for you to come to New York and listen to this quintet I’m leading.’ So he took me to New York and sat me down in the front row at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street.”

Although Gillespie had affected him, Rodney found an even more powerful influence in the group’s other horn player, Charlie Parker. The details of their association differ somewhat from their depiction in the movie, which had them meeting in California.

“Dizzy introduced me to Charlie that night. The first thing he did was borrow money from me--10 bucks. Then I heard him play the first number and totally freaked out. Here I was, an 18-year-old, having my ears opened up, in a daze, enthralled. I couldn’t get enough! I stayed until they got through at 4 a.m.

Gerry Mulligan, who had been writing for Lawrence, soon joined Gene Krupa’s band as saxophonist and arranger. When Mulligan recommended Rodney to Krupa, there was a brief hesitation on the trumpeter’s part--”but then I heard from Dizzy that he and Bird were going to California, so I decided to join Krupa, just as a way to get to the West Coast and be close to them.”

Los Angeles was a heavily segregated city in 1945. “I remember Miles Davis and I almost got arrested on Hollywood Boulevard just because the police were suspicious of a black kid and a white kid walking down the street together. Miles told the cop, ‘Look, he’s with Gene Krupa,’ and they let us go. Soon after, I went back to New York, stayed with Krupa another year, then became a real jazz player--you know, one-night stands on 52nd Street, weddings and bar mitzvahs, anything to support myself. . . . Then (later), after some more 52nd Street dues, I went with Woody Herman.”

The Herman band was playing at the Howard, Washington’s black vaudeville theater, when a call came backstage for Rodney. “It was Bird. He said Miles was leaving him; he wanted me in the band. I told him I’d love it but I didn’t feel I was ready--besides, people like Fats Navarro and Kenny Dorham were available; and in any case I’d have to give Woody two weeks notice.”

Parker told Rodney, “Ask Woody if he’ll let you go for me.” Herman acceded; two days later Rodney was on the stand at the Three Deuces alongside the foremost pioneer of the new jazz era.

“I was petrified, because Miles and Fats Navarro were in the audience. The first tune Bird stomped off was ‘52nd Street Theme,’ at a lightning tempo that I wasn’t used to.

Somehow I got through it, and at the end of the set Miles and Fats came over and said ‘Hey, man, great.’ It was wonderful to feel accepted.”

Parker was a father figure to Rodney. “He became a good teacher without even trying. After the job, while the others went their separate ways, he and I would hang out; we became really attached.

“He was badly strung out at the time, and I wasn’t; in fact, in the Woody Herman band, while so many of them were fooling with drugs, I was the clean young kid. But now I was with this giant, hearing him create these outpourings of genius, and my young, immature mind was saying, if I crossed over (into drug use) maybe I could play that good.”

It is true that Parker at first discouraged Rodney (“Do as I say, not as I do”), but before long he was hopelessly entangled.

After the Parker experience, Rodney worked with Charlie Ventura’s big band, eventually conquered his drug habit, and by the late 1950s was turning his life around musically by booking groups on society club dates, playing mostly pop music. For more than a decade he was off the jazz scene, spending most of the 1960s in Las Vegas.

Sooner or later his jazz credentials had to catch up with him. During the 1970s he toured Europe extensively, recorded with a group called Bebop Preservation Society, and by the dawn of the 1980s was working full time with his own jazz quintet.

“It’s odd,” he says, “but my greatest period musically has been between the ages of 50 and 60--the past 10 years! I’m playing better than I ever played in my life, and the reasons are simple: I’m healthy, I’m happy, I have a good home life, I’m earning a steady living, I have the maturity to put all my past mistakes behind me.”