New Score, Live Ensemble Heighten ‘Side Man’s’ Authentic Tone

There is a particularly gripping passage in the play “Side Man” in which the music of Clifford Brown takes center stage. The piece is “Night in Tunisia,” and it is the now-classic version recorded only a few hours before the gifted trumpeter died in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

In the play, the scene takes place in the 1950s, shortly after Brown’s death, with three big-band trumpet players--side men--sitting transfixed as they listen to the recording. For nearly four minutes there is no dialogue at all, only the reactions of the actors, playing musicians who are hearing the final creative pronouncements of a jazz god.

It’s hard to recall any scene in a major dramatic production--on stage or screen--that so effectively captures the jazz milieu.

“Side Man” was written by Warren Leight, the son of a big band-era musician. The original New York production of the play, which featured actors Edie Falco (“The Sopranos”) and Frank Wood, received 1999 Tony Awards for Leight’s script and Wood’s performance. “Side Man” makes its Southern California premiere on Sunday at the Pasadena Playhouse with Mare Winningham and Dennis Christopher playing the leads.

Unlike the New York production, which relied upon recorded music throughout, the Pasadena version makes an even stronger effort toward authenticity by including a newly written score by jazz drummer-composer Peter Erskine. Instead of using recordings by Brown, Donald Byrd and others as a representation of the playing of the lead character, Gene Glimmer--confusing, at best, to most jazz fans--this production employs a basic jazz quartet playing music and arrangements by Erskine.

“When [director] Andy Robinson met with Leight,” explains Erskine, “he insisted that this production be done with an original score. I knew we had to have the character Gene’s trumpet parts played by the same person to really get an authentic feeling. And I got really excited about the possibilities. I thought, ‘Hey, this is great, we could do it here. Jack Sheldon would be the perfect guy, or Bobby Shew would be the perfect guy.’ ”

Erskine gathered a batch of recordings by trumpeters to offer various options to Robinson. But when he tossed in a recording of a five-trumpet feature number by the WDR Big Band from Cologne, Germany, he received an unexpectedly enthusiastic response.

“When Andy heard this one trumpeter,” says Erskine, “his eyebrows went up, he pointed at the speakers and said, ‘That’s our Gene Glimmer; that’s our trumpet player.’

“Since I was going to be in Germany for a couple of weeks, I decided, ‘Well, he likes this guy, so maybe I should just do the recording overseas. Which explains why I didn’t record it with somebody here in town, even though that was my original impulse--to use real-life musicians whose lives might have mirrored those of the characters in the play.”

As it turned out, the trumpeter, an Austrian named Andy Haderer, was an excellent choice on several counts. The first was his insistence upon connecting his playing with the character.

“You know how it is when we do most film scores and the like here in town,” says Erskine. “We park the car, we walk into the studio, and maybe they tell us a little bit about the scene. But it really doesn’t matter, because we just play when the red light goes on. But Andy wanted to read the play before we did the recording. He really wanted to understand where the character was coming from.”

Equally important, Haderer, like the Gene Glimmer character, is a lead trumpeter with ambitions to be a soloist.

“He studied with Bobby Shew a bit,” continues Erskine, “and he’s a bebopper at heart. But he was very specific in terms of the bebop vocabulary he used, and in having his playing reflect the fact that the character also played lead, as Andy does.”

Although none of the actors are musicians, there are passages in the play in which they must simulate playing instruments to the music of the Erskine quartet (and quintet, in some cases). With guidance from Erskine and some of his musician friends, the illusion becomes extremely effective.

“I tried to give them some tips in terms of musician body language,” he says. “One of the actors was fond of snapping his fingers, but his 2 and 4 snaps always seemed to become a 1 and 3. But you have to give them credit. For this play they’re doing musicians; on the next one they could be brain surgeons. And by the time they worked it out, they got it together so well that they really do evoke musicians to me. It’s like, ‘Wow, these are guys that I’ve toured with.’ ”

Copies of Erskine’s music were so much in demand in the early stages of rehearsal that he decided to press 1,000 copies and issue the score on a limited-edition CD via his Fuzzy Music label (available from his Web site at https://www.petererskine.com).

But jazz fans should first of all experience it within its original setting, as music that frames and enhances an intimate view into the life and lifestyle of the players who produced the musical soundtrack for a substantial portion of 20th century American life.

“The Clifford Brown recorded performance is the real focal point,” says Erskine, “not just for Act 2, but for the whole play, because it really defines what it is that makes these guys tick. I tried to reflect that in my score with a sort of hard-bop East Coast approach, although I couldn’t resist doing a little bit of a Gerry Mulligan-Chet Bakerish sort of vibe too.

“But the important thing was to have the music reflect who these guys really were--the kind of guys I worked with when I was on the road with Stan Kenton and Maynard Ferguson. And to give them a musical voice to match the message of the play.”

* “Side Man” opens Sunday and runs through June 17 at the Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Information: (626) 356-PLAY. On June 2, the playhouse presents a free Jazz Symposium on the set of “Side Man.” Three consecutive panels will discuss Jazz in Hollywood, Women on the Road and Swinging With the Cast of “Side Man.”

Women in Jazz: The Kennedy Center’s “Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival,” in Washington, D.C., this weekend, features three evenings of performances by female players, as well as a variety of seminars and workshops. The key event, however, will be the honoring of Los Angeles jazz artist Vi Redd, who will receive the 2001 Mary Lou Williams Women in Jazz Festival Award in honor of her lifetime of service to jazz.

“I’m so proud of this,” Redd said before taking off for the East Coast. “Particularly because Mary Lou was so special. And I’m glad I had the opportunity to meet her in the late ‘60s, and to talk with her often prior to her illness and death.”

In August, Redd will be one of the principal artists in this year’s “Instrumental Women” concert at the John Anson Ford.

Passings: I first saw and heard Billy Higgins during the now legendary Ornette Coleman Quartet performances at Manhattan’s Five Spot Cafe. The last time I saw him was in January, at a concert in his honor at South-Central’s Bones & Blues club.

On both occasions, his trademark smile was omnipresent. At the Five Spot it was the beaming countenance of a young man just coming into his powers, his drive and enthusiasm serving as the engine for a trailblazing new form of jazz. At Bones & Blues it had a more wistful quality, deeply tempered by the knowledge that the liver transplant he’d received five years earlier was failing, and that he would have to somehow receive another transplant if he was to have any chance of survival.

As it turned out, the second transplant never took place and Higgins died last week at age 64.

But as I reflect on those two recollections of Higgins, and recall the many times I heard him play in the intervening years, the primary thought that comes to mind is astonishment at the level of his musical versatility and the life survival force that carried him through so many valleys of adversity and distress.

It wasn’t an easy life for Higgins, and many of the difficulties he encountered traced to his personal demons. But what is most amazing about that life is the fact that his music reveals no signs of those difficulties, of the adversity and distress he experienced at so many points in his passage. And I firmly believe that’s because Higgins’ soul was in his music. Like the Buddha, the smile that enraptured his face when he was behind his drum kit was an expression of sheer enlightenment--in Higgins’ case, the enlightenment of a total involvement in the creative process of making music.