Saxophone’s Prodigal Son : After Career Change, Tom Margitan Returns to First Love--Jazz

Like a lot of people in their early 40s, Tom Margitan felt it was time for a career change. So, in 1983, after 28 years of making a living as a saxophonist, Margitan got into the piano business.

“I was very proud that my marriage had lasted while I spent all that time on the road,” says the saxophonist who appears Friday and Saturday at Vinnie’s in Costa Mesa.

“There was one six-year stretch where I was gone eight months of the year, every year. But my daughters were getting older and I reached a point where I thought I needed to be more responsible and look for a day gig.”

Margitan began selling pianos, learned the business quickly, and was soon elevated to the position of sales manager at a Cost Mesa piano store. But, like being a musician, the job had its demands.

“Although I never stopped playing the saxophone altogether, I had to start turning down gigs, and there was one two-year period where I hardly played at all. I was becoming a workaholic. If the piano department didn’t make a profit, we didn’t eat. I was working 14 hours a day, and driving everyone around me nuts.”

So last year, at the age of 52, Margitan returned to the saxophone. “I realized that I had spent more time with my kids when I was on the road (as a musician) than when I was in the piano business. It’s a little scary to switch careers at my age, but I can’t tell you how fulfilling it is.”

The first leg of Margitan’s career began when he joined the school band in his home town of Trenton, N.J., at age 14. “I did pretty well on a musical aptitude test, and they asked me to join the program. I wanted to start on the saxophone, but they said they already had too many saxes. So I said I wanted to play electric guitar, but they didn’t use guitar in the band. So they gave me an oboe. It really built up my chops.”

Within a year, the young musician had taught himself to play saxophone as well. After high school, Margitan was ready to jump right into playing--”If I’d had my druthers, I would have taken the horn to New York to become the next Charlie Parker,” he laughs--but his parents encouraged him to continue his education. He enrolled in the music program at Wooster College in Wooster, Ohio, where he studied classical piano and composition.

“The establishment was firmly entrenched in those days,” he explains, “and teaching jazz was unthinkable. They still had that ‘noble savage’ notion of jazz players. They thought that you were born with huge ears and played by instinct. A classical player could read fly specks on the page, but couldn’t improvise if his life depended on it.”

*

Margitan kept his saxophone chops up by playing jazz gigs in nearby Akron, Cleveland and Mansfield. He left Wooster after three years and began directing a music series in a converted farm building near tiny Killbuck, Ohio, known as Jazz at the Barn. “We were attacked by pigeons on the opening night,” he recalls. “But people came from all over Ohio to hear jazz.”

The venue gave Margitan the opportunity for regular work with a variety of sidemen. One of them was Grover Washington Jr. “Grover came in several times to play. Even then, he was scaring everybody to death.”

The two saxophonists first met in 1960 when Margitan went to see an organ trio that Washington was working with. “There were tons of B-3 (organ) groups in those days, playing jazz and R&B.; Working with them is where I really learned to play,” Margitan says.

Margitan was drafted in the mid-’60s and spent a number of years playing in Air Force bands, first while stationed with a traveling ensemble based at Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha, later in Puerto Rico and at March Air Force Base in Southern California. Like his association with Washington, he credits the stint with vastly improving his abilities.

Once out of the service, Margitan played the Riverside-San Bernardino area, as well as Las Vegas, with DeVonne Armstrong’s band--a group, he says, modeled after pianist Ramsey Lewis’ trio. When Armstrong’s combo played the now-defunct Silver Slipper casino in Las Vegas, they opened for the likes of Harry James, Zoot Sims and Carl Fontana. Margitan took every opportunity to sit in.

Later, he spent time touring with singer Ann Richards, the wife of Stan Kenton, and Kenton himself, in a brief tour during the late ‘60s that was the fulfillment of an early dream.

“I remember seeing Kenton at the Marine Ballroom in Atlantic City in the late ‘50s,” Margitan recalls. “It was there, listening to Kenton, that I decided I wanted to be a jazz musician.”

In the ‘70s, Margitan co-founded Fire Sign, a three-piece outfit with a big sound and an even bigger playbook. “Between the three of us, we played 14 instruments. I doubled on keyboards, Ronnie Scott played bass guitar with his left hand, and drums with his feet and right hand. Charlie Bee played guitar and trombone. We’d do three-horn arrangements where I’d be playing sax with one hand and Fender-Rhodes piano with the other. It was an extremely versatile group.”

Though not strictly a jazz band--the trio arranged a number of pop tunes for three-part harmonies in the style of the Four Freshmen--the group played standard and be-bop tunes as well as numbers pulled from Miles Davis’ band, such as “Walkin’,” “Solar” and “Footprints.” “We even did some Weather Report tunes,” the saxophonist says.

Fire Sign stayed busy playing Southern California and the resort towns of Nevada. But by 1981, Margitan was ready for a change.

“I didn’t feel we were growing as a group any longer. To stay alive, I was willing to play virtually any type of music. But jazz was my first love.”

So the saxophonist formed another band, Fresh Wind, a quintet that included keyboardist Charlie Otwell. Fresh Wind stayed together even after Margitan started selling pianos.

*

Now that this prodigal son of the saxophone is back on the scene, he’s found no lack of opportunities for work. He was an infrequent guest at the now-defunct jazz series at El Matador in Huntington Beach, including a tribute to the late Stan Getz and a New Year’s Eve appearance where he went toe to toe with sax man Wilton Felder of the Crusaders. “It was just like one of the jam sessions from the old days,” he enthuses. “Wilton is a giant.”

For this weekend’s appearance, Margitan will work with pianist Jim Stevenson on Friday, and keyboardist Les Czimber on Saturday.

“I play duo dates with (pianist) Ron Kobiyashi at Mr. Stox in Anaheim,” he says, “and it’s one of the most satisfying things I do. You’re reduced to the essence of the music, improvising on the spot and using a lot of creative interplay. So (at Vinnie’s), we’ll be exploring the possibilities between two musicians and get into a more intimate style of play. But that isn’t to say that we won’t be doing some hard cooking as well.”