Touching all Basses

The other day, Gary Chen-Stein, with the help of a big man in a blue cap named Ted who plays in Ray Charles’ orchestra, was trying to distill the meaning of something he had just said in his music shop, Stein on Vine.

“Ray charles has been good to me,” was what Chen-Stein had said.

“He likes you,” replied Ted, adding clarity to the statement.

“He likes my prices,” countered Chen-Stein.

“He likes you because your’re not in his band,” said Ted, nailing the sentence down.

Gary Chen-Stein is the kind of guy who will often say casual things like, “I didn’t know that until Herb Alpert called me up and told me.” (On that occasion, Alpert was passing on a favorable review of Stein on Vine’s instrument selection.) This of course, doesn’t mean that Chen-Stein makes it his business to know people like Herb Alpert--or Ray Brown, or Wayne Shorter, or Herb Ellis, or even Ray Charles, all of whom he does know. It means jazz musicians make a point of staying in touch with him because of his business, which for almost 50 years has been selling and repairing anything a player could want.

Gary Chen came to America, to Boston’s Berklee Music School, with his guitar and his savings in 1978. In Taiwan, Gary Chen and his guitar hnd is rhad been something of a pop sensation; he had his own club and played on television. But he was bored with pop music. He bagan asking friends who were flight attendants to bring back jazz records from the U.S. One day, Miles Davis disembarked from a China Airlines flight ensconced in a recording of “Kind of Blue.” Not long after, Chen and his guitar boarded a jet for the Eastern Seaboard, where he spent three years learning jazz theory, and then a second jet for L.A., where he was hired by Maury Stein to help run Maury’s shop--what he calls “My first gig in the U.S.”

“I remember the day Gary first came in here,” said Lou Levy after Ted and Chen-Stein had settled their Ray Charles debate. Levy, who worked for years as a pianist for Frank Sinatra, had just walked in with some old pictures, some recent CDs and this morning’s bagels. “Gary said, ‘Do you need any help?’ and Maury, he had some instincts, he looked up and said, ‘Come back tomorrow at 10.’ That was it. Gary became an extension of Maury in a lot of ways.”

It’s true that any jazz player who’s been around long enough can tell you about the great Jewish meals Maury Stein once cooked for his customers when he took them to his house for dinner; or the incredible plates of Chinese food that Chen-Stein brings out today when musicians stop by his house to watch the fights. “There were always a lot of guys floating around, and some of them floated in here,” said Levy, sitting on his stool, recalling the jam sessions that used to go on in the shop’s back room--how Stan Getz and Zoot Sims and Ernie Watts and Freddie Hubbard and whoever would stop by at any time with instruments. “They were wonderful times. Today, jazz is like the U.N.: Nobody agrees on anything and everyone’s in the same boat.”

When Maury Stein died in 1987--”I lost him almost 10 years ago,” Chen-Stein says today like a bereaved son--his counterman gave up his dreams of becoming a jazz musician in America, bought Stein on Vine and settled into Maury Stein’s worn seat, becoming the old man’s extension. He was still Gary Chen when he took over Stein on Vine, but the jazzmen had begun calling him “Gary Chen-Stein,” and after a while he took the name himself. “It’s my store,” he says, “but it’s always Maury’s.”