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•  martin  banks

Martin Banks - Trumpet, Flugel horn.
	With an incredible personal connection to the historical legacy of American Jazz, Martin Banks has played and recorded with Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Dexter Gordon, and Sun Ra just to name just a few. Originally from Austin, Texas '...home of the Crazy Asylum', he has returned from his stints on the both coasts and points beyond to be a hometown source of inspiration for players of all ages and levels in the region. He can be heard all over Austin with the Jazz Pharoahs, trumpeter Ephraim Owens, among many others, and will be going to New York to guest in the Clark Terry Tribute at the Blue Note. In addition, he enjoys playing a very popular guru and griot to many neighborhood school children by being a guest artist in creative workshops designed for them. Martin's noble sound, hard swing and legendary status, contribute immensely to the Orchestra's unique vibe and timbre.

The one, true note An article by Brad Buchholz American-Statesman Staff Sunday, January 28, 2001

The room is thick with the spirit of jazz. The murmur of midnight. Elbow to elbow at the bar. A splash of brass and a broken glass. And in the smoky light of a basement bar known as the Elephant Room, there is Austin jazzman Martin Banks and his tarnished trumpet. Onstage, in the company of a local quintet known as the Worthy Constituents, Banks looks like jazz - conveying an aura that is both elegant and outrageous. He's long and lanky, and his skin is black. There are sly dashes of gray in his jazzman's beard. He wears a richly patterned tunic, orange-on-black, tucked into bloomy black slacks. As always, he has donned his trademark fez - a solid, dark one this night, from East Africa. "Dizzy Gillespie gave me my first one, my first fez...", says the Jazzman. It happened long ago - in 1959 - when Banks was just a kid, playing his very first show in New York City at the Apollo Theater with the Ray Charles band. Gillespie, the godfather of bebop, walks in. Sits in the first row with trumpet master Lee Morgan. "Goodness, I was scared", recalls Banks, smiling at his own expense. "When I walked out to play that first solo, my hands were shaking." "After the show, I'm walking toward a backstage staircase - and who comes in the stage door but Dizzy Gillespie. He says to me, 'I think you should wear this.' Then he takes off his fez, and puts it on my head!" Dizzy was right. The fez suits him - for Martin Banks is all about jazz. The hat. The horn. The history. A son of East Austin, Banks left town in 1953 in pursuit of a 'musical' life - eventually landing in New York during a golden age of East Coast jazz. Count Basie. Lionel Hampton. Dizzy Gillespie. Dexter Gordon. Duke Ellington. Sun Ra. Archie Shepp. Over the course of 30 years, Martin Banks played with them all - in big bands, in quintets, in concert, in recording studios, in the after hours. Along the way, Banks performed in the Broadway musical "Hair". He roomed with Marvin Gaye and played behind the Supremes on the inaugural Motown road show. In the realm of blues and R & B, Banks backed King Curtis, B.B. King, James Brown, Freddie King and Hank Crawford. And would you believe? There were nights when he hitched a ride home with a guy in a funky, painted Rolls-Royce named John Lennon. The Jazzman is 64 years old now. He's not the fastest player in the Elephant Room, nor is he the most acrobatic. But no one knows tonight's song list more intimately. Randy Weston's "Berkshire Blues"? Man, Banks played that one, in Weston's band, when the song was new. A Clifford Jordan ballad: "Through the Years"? Oh, yeah: Banks was there when Jordon wrote the thing in the 1960s. Martin Banks has never been "famous". He has never fronted his own band. But the man looks like jazz because he has lived a rich, jazz life. And as the hour grows late, and the tempo swings low, we're reminded again when he raises the trumpet to his lips and plays that note. The one true note. The one that says: "I know. 'Cause I was there..." Austin blues T he Jazzman was born in segregated East Austin - less than two miles from the Texas Capitol - in a tin-roofed house that still stands near 16th and Chicon streets. As a boy, he roamed with his BB gun in open land near Manor Road. There was no interstate highway. Banks attended all-black schools, read all-black newspapers, watched color cartoons at the all-black Harlem Theater. "A lot of guys my age were behind me in school, because their families were cotton-pickers", recalls Banks. "They let 'em stay out of school until December, so they could pick cotton." Banks grew up with music in his blood. His aunt gave piano and voice lessons for more than half a century. One uncle played trumpet, another trombone. He barely knew his father - Martin Buford Banks Sr. - a traveling musician who played trombone in a Chicago-based 'territory' band known as the King Kolax Orchestra. The band's saxophonist: a kid named John Coltrane, who would become one of jazz's great visionaries. "I was forced to begin with the trombone when I was 4 years old, because my father was a trombonist. But I didn't like it,'' says the Jazzman. "My arms were too short for me to reach the seventh position, the D note, way down on the slide. One day the band teacher - Mr. Joyce - said, 'Just take your foot and push it down there!' The cats in the band just cracked up!' Well, that was it for me and the trombone. I hid it in a sewer pipe that day, walking home from school. My mother said, 'Where's that horn?' And I said, 'I don't know. I gotta get me a trumpet.' The Jazzman's voice is its own delight: rich and musical, full of inflection. He loves to tell a joke at his own expense. During random moments of joy, he'll cry out to the day: "Whoooooo-whee!'' He's full of the spirit right now, remembering the instant - that first glorious instant, around 1950 - when he heard the jazzy strains of Texas trumpeter Kenny Dorham on a late-night radio show hosted by Austin disc jockey Dr. Hepcat. "I said to myself: `That's the sound I want to learn how to play' ", recalls the Jazzman. "And though I kept listening and listening, I never heard that sound (on the radio) again." Austin has great jazz roots. Teddy Wilson, the legendary swing era pianist and Billie Holiday confidant, was born here. Kenny Dorham grew up in East Austin. Yet their legacy was invisible to the young Banks. His band at the old Anderson High School didn't swing; it marched. Most churches thought of jazz as "devil music." In time, the Jazzman got booted from the band for playing jazz licks. He took his first "professional job"as a dish washer at the University of Texas Student Union. Five dollars a week... "We (blacks) weren't allowed to go to the university. The only thing I could do was come in the back door and wash dishes - and then go out the back door. I caught a cross-town bus on Guad-a-loop that used to let me off on 19th Street and Chicon. And I didn't know anything else about the University of Texas. Except that. "It was just sparkles. Sparkles in front of your eyes,'' he says of UT in the days of segregation. "That's all it was." Like his father before him, the Jazzman knew it was his destiny to leave home. At age 16, he boarded a train and headed west, to California. In search of the song... Improvisation The Jazzman doesn't write many tunes. But the spontaneous, freewheeling song of his musical youth is the composition of a lifetime. It starts in San Francisco in 1953 and reaches its climax in New York during the 1960s. Throughout, it is rich with improvisation. The opening stanza: The Jazzman moves in with an uncle, the trombone player. He studies music. He wins a city tennis championship. He joins a band whose weakest link is an unknown pianist who plays everything in the key of C. The guy's name: Johnny Mathis. When the San Francisco scene fizzles, the Jazzman follows the music to East Los Angeles. Suddenly, he's hanging in the company of young lions. Don Cherry. Billy Higgins. Charlie Haden. Harold Land. By 1956, he's a member of the Zebra Lounge house band and playing with the brilliant tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon - who, in his 30s, is down and out, in trouble with the L.A. law, fighting to save his career. "I was so young: I had no idea that I was peeing in high cotton!'' says the Jazzman. "I didn't even know who Dexter was. You dig?" Dexter Gordon goes to jail. Comes out. Goes back in. Meanwhile, the young Jazzman joins Earl Bostic's quintet. Sits in with sax man Frank Morgan. Tours with Ray Charles. Then, in 1960, he's invited to the recording studio - to back Gordon, in Los Angeles, for an album. It is a dicey proposition. Gordon's comeback record. "Whoooooo! I was nervous,'' says Banks, still very much the kid in his memory. "I walked into the studio. Leonard Feather is back there in the control room. And Shorty Rogers. All of them was back there. So I go in - and I'm, like, `Well? What are we going to play?' "Dexter has some manuscript up on the music stand, and he's pointing at it. But (as I looked at it), I saw there was nothing written on the paper! He said, quietly: `We're gonna make up this date, because they've already paid me for the music. And I've done spent the money already.' Imagine! My very first time in the studio!'' The album - "The Resurgence of Dexter Gordon'' - re-ignites Gordon's career. In the meantime, Banks moves permanently to New York, where he has already found his niche as a "professional sideman.'' He becomes a regular with the Apollo Theater house band. He befriends Dizzy. He plays hard bop in Randy Weston's small band and swings with Lionel Hampton's big band. He cuts a celebrated record with the mercurial saxophonist Jimmy Woods. He performs with his idol - Kenny Dorham - in Lloyd Price's blues band. "Whoooo-whee!'' To be young and alive and touring with Count Basie! Leaving New York City, he'd lash his trumpet onto the back of his motorcycle and lead the band's bus out of town, wind billowing, as the jazz caravan crossed the George Washington Bridge and rolled toward possibility. Count it down. One. Two. Three marriages. Four. Five. Six children. In L.A., he'd been a clean kid. Dexter's designated driver. But in New York, he began to drink. He played the cool cat and smoked the stuff. Experimented with heroin. No way with cocaine, though; it made him play too fast. "Slow down!'' Jimmy Heath yelled to him onstage, the one night he tried it. "Slow down!'' "I was kind of a Dennis the Menace in the Basie band,'' says the Jazzman, remembering his on-again, off-again stint with Basie in the 1960s. "I made the statement once: 'Why don't you guys play some Thad Jones arrangements?' Boy! That was a no-no!'' The eclectic bandleader Sun Ra telephoned him at home once, asking if Banks could fill in on trumpet the next night - in Munich, Germany. "Sun Ra called me his Bad Son. 'Lucifer.' Something like that,'' says the Jazzman. Don't know why. Maybe it was because he liked Sun Ra's old, old "Ellington'' sound of the mid-1950s - and told him so. While based at the Apollo, the Jazzman played most of New York's legendary jazz clubs: Minton's Playhouse, the Five Spot, the Metropole. Hey, Martin: ...Meet Sugar Ray Robinson. Meet Malcolm X. Meet Alex Haley. Man, You can see all the way to the Hudson River from Miles Davis' house. Hot dawg! Remember the night Duke Ellington walked into the Metropole? Lionel Hampton stopped his band in midsong - leaving Banks hanging at the edge of a note - just to honor the Duke with words of welcome. "Can you believe it?'' says the Jazzman, his voice rising, rich and joyful with wonder. "I got to play with all them cats!" 'Ask Me Now' When the music changed - and his teeth started giving him trouble - the Jazzman came home to Austin in 1988. I first met him in 1993, on a day Banks traveled to Georgetown to speak to a jazz appreciation class at Southwestern University. To my delight, we rode together in Banks' vintage Cadillac, which was not quite green, not quite brown. The colors in Banks' fez matched the colors of the Caddy. It was the Day of a Thousand Stories. The jazz students wanted to know about Miles and Monk. They wanted to know about the genius of Charles Mingus. "Mingus was a weird, weird guy,'' the Jazzman told them. "I was asked to play in his band once, to sit in for a young trumpet player named Lonnie Hillyer. I'd heard a lot of talk about Mingus, see, so I went down to the Five Spot, before a set, just to see what they were going to play. 'Cause I was playing (with them) the next night. "While I'm waiting for them to start playing, a kid comes in with a bass. He wants to know what Mingus thinks of it. Mingus starts playing with it, you know, 'Plum. Plum-plum.' And then he gets all violent with it, starts breaking it apart! And I'm watching this, saying to myself, 'I don't think I'll be going too far with this band.' What of the spirit of jazz, its legacy, its future? Banks took issue with the word "jazz'' itself - noting that Duke Ellington preferred the phrase "black classical music.'' And then the Jazzman played a few tunes, accompanied by bass and piano. Ellington's "Satin Doll.'' A Coltrane blues. And the best of all: Thelonious Monk's "Ask Me Now." "Ask Me Now'' is a ballad. But in Monk's hands on solo piano, you get a song that - in his genius - is given wings, then broken down, then considered in fractured light, and at last walked out on a high wire. But for the students, Banks went a different way. He took the essence of Monk's sweet melody, accentuated its melancholy spirit, and - with only the most subtle accents - made it his own. It was simple and lovely and distinctly sad. "The man plays this one as if he's lived this one,'' I wrote in my notebook. On the ride home, the Jazzman speculated about the origins of his horn - believing it once belonged to Dorham, for its gold lacquer had been scraped away in the "Dorham style.'' He talked about his days as a part-time mailman in New Jersey - delightful days, considering Dizzy Gillespie and Sarah Vaughan were on his route. He remarked that Sammy Davis Jr. gave him his first camera, with which he shot a cover photo for a Charles Lloyd album. But all the way, I was thinking about the connection between life and song. As we said goodbye in a UT parking lot, I finally brought up "Ask Me Now.'' Surely, that song had meaning. Surely, he'd played it many times before... "No. Not really,'' he said. The sheet music just happened to be in the trumpet case. "But now that you mention it,'' said the Jazzman, "I did play that song at the funeral of one of my wives. I never really liked the song, to tell you the truth. But boy, did she like it. So I played it at the funeral. Ever since then, the song just kinda slipped away." I suppose it had - except for the enduring note that echoed the passion and the passing of a great, lost love. A love supreme. The Jazzman has few mementos. His favorite record albums and photos were stolen years ago in New York City. But in the living room of his South Austin home, next to the sofa, there is a tree of hats. A fez from Madagascar. A fez from Nigeria. They come in the colors of jazz. "Look at this,'' says Banks, digging into a money pouch he wears around his waist. He produces a folded piece of newsprint, which has been carefully tucked behind the cover of his passport. It is a quotation from James Reese Europe, a World War I solider and bandleader whose jazz was so popular the French paid him to stay behind and play after the war: "I have come back from France more firmly convinced that Negroes should write Negro music. We have our own racial feeling, and if we try to copy Whites we will make bad copies.'' Martin Banks believes there are few things more tragic than the musician who betrays his craft - or the sound in his own ear - for the sake of commercial interest. At least that's the conventional way to phrase it. The Jazzman says it more colorfully, referring to those wayward souls as "cats that fall for the okey-doke.'' For the Jazzman, that's how the song comes 'round after so many verses, having passed that familiar bridge. Style? "I don't know what I was doing back then,'' he says with a soaring laugh. "And I still don't know.'' But whatever his faults - or his lack of genius - Banks has always been faithful to the heart of the music. It's a holiday. Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And there's still so much to talk about: Miles. B.B. King. His music in the movies. His current work with Tina Marsh's Creative Opportunity Orchestra in Austin. But the Jazzman has gotta run. Banks teaches now, and he's got a prized student waiting for him in South Austin. "I got a little girl, man. She's gonna be a monster,'' says Banks. "She's already a monster. She's first trumpet in the jazz band and the big orchestra. It's fun, teaching her how to hear..." Donning a brown fez, Martin Banks grabs his horn case and heads for the door. He's no saint, the Jazzman. But in the spirit of love, he hits the road - eager to share the elusive beauty of that one true note.

Martin Banks' Selected Discography: Dexter Gordon, "Resurgence of Dexter Gordon" (Jazzland, 1960); Jimmy Woods, "Awakening" (Contemporary, 1962); Rahsaan Roland Kirk, "Slightly Latin" (Limelight, 1965); Hubert Laws, "Flute By-Laws" (Atlantic, 1966); Harold Land, "Take Aim" (Blue Note, 1969); Hank Crawford, "Indigo Blue" (Milestone, 1983); Tina Marsh and the Creative Opportunity Orchestra, "WorldWide" (CreOp-Muse, 1998); The East Side Band, "No Sleep" (Prevatt, 2000) Martin Banks' Upcoming shows: With the Jazz Pharoahs, 8 p.m. Thursday, Jazz on Sixth Street With the Worthy Constituents, 9 p.m. March 3, Elephant Room.