Drummer Slauson Dies

Ed Slauson, a Baby-Boom generation drummer who abandoned the music of his own era when he became hooked on early jazz, died Friday after a bout with cancer. He was 44.

The Fullerton resident had played frequently in Orange County clubs even while undergoing chemotherapy. In an April interview with The Times, he said there were periods when he was in constant pain--except when he was playing drums with the fellow early jazz enthusiasts for whom he provided tastefully swinging backbeats.

Playing music, Slauson said, “was such a powerful thing. When I play with good musicians, my pain is gone.”

After intensive chemotherapy treatments last year following the removal of one lung--though he was not a smoker--his cancer went into remission for several months. But in the spring, doctors warned him that it was showing “new activity,” said Janice Guthrie, of the New Orleans Jazz Club of Southern California, for whom Slauson’s groups sometimes performed.

He started experimental treatments at City of Hope in Los Angeles after doctors determined he was unable to withstand another round of chemotherapy.

Guthrie said he experienced “a bad immunological reaction” to the treatment that left him in such pain that doctors gave him equipment so he could self-administer pain medication.

“He had this little fanny pack he’d wear, and he was still playing through four to six weeks of this,” she said. “He was mentally fine and clear-minded. He put all energy into this.”

Saxophonist-clarinetist Roger Neumann, a frequent associate, played a date with Slauson the night before surgeons removed his lung. “We couldn’t believe it,” Neumann said in April. “He was going in for this serious surgery the next morning, and he decides he’d rather play than sit around at home.

“It was an amazing evening; he played great, and the band all hung together during the breaks,” Neumann said. “Ed talked about what he was going through.

“Even more amazing is that today he’s playing better than ever,” Neumann added at the time. “It’s as if it’s cleared his head and let him focus on what’s important.”

The Long Beach-born, Orange County-reared musician often struggled to find venues that would book his groups, whose membership rotated depending on who was available for the various dates and places.

“The bigger hip clubs won’t book me because my music concentrates on pre-bop jazz,” Slauson said in April. “And the traditional-jazz societies think we’re too modern because we’re not playing Dixieland.”

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Slauson’s love was jazz of the ‘30s and ‘40s--that of Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman and others--before Charlie Parker and other bebop innovators came along after World War II to revolutionize the music.

Slauson is survived by his wife, Nancy, and 6-year-old twins, a son and a daughter.

Funeral services have not been set.

Randy Lewis can be reached by e-mail at Randy.Lewis@latimes.com.