Gene Ammons

Eugene Ammons was born in Chicago on April 14, 1925, and for the first twenty-four years of his life he was the less famous Ammons. His father, Albert, had played boogie-woogie at the Club DeLisa, cut "Boogie Woogie Stomp" for Decca in 1936, and stood on the stage of Carnegie Hall at John Hammond's "From Spirituals to Swing" concert in December 1938. Ira Gitler, writing on the back of Blue Gene in 1958, remembered an Apollo Theater caption from the forties that identified the son as "Eugene Ammons, tenor-playing son of Albert Ammons." That is how it read until December 2, 1949, when Albert died at forty-two.

The tenor came from Lester Young. Ammons chose the saxophone over his father's instrument after hearing Young, and at DuSable High School, according to the Down Beat obituary, he even copied the way Young held the horn. DuSable's bandmaster was Captain Walter Dyett, who ran the most productive high school music program in the country and did not suffer prodigies gladly. Von Freeman, who came through a few years later, said Dyett was hard on him because he had already put up with Gene Ammons, who was "a little hotshot around the school," and greeted Freeman's arrival with the words "Oh, another little hotshot." Johnny Griffin, who came out of the same program, first saw the hotshot in 1941 at his own grammar school graduation party at the Parkway Ballroom on 45th and South Park. Ammons was already on the stand, playing in King Kolax's band, and Griffin decided on the spot that this was what he wanted to do. Griffin also did not think Ammons ever bothered to graduate.

Ammons went on the road with Kolax in 1943, at eighteen, and Freeman's summary of what followed is the shortest good biography of him: he went out with Kolax and never came back, then Eckstine, then "Red Top," and he never looked back. Billy Eckstine formed his big band in 1944 and sent to Chicago for the kid. The saxophone section he joined had Leo Parker on baritone and Dexter Gordon on the other tenor, with Sonny Stitt arriving on alto a few months later, and on December 5, 1944, in New York, the band recorded "Blowing the Blues Away" for DeLuxe. It was Ammons's first time in a studio. The arrangement is six choruses of blues with the two tenors trading, and it ends with twelve bars each. Jan Evensmo, who has catalogued every recorded Ammons solo, calls the date one of the most memorable occasions of early modern jazz and refuses to pick a winner.

Gordon picked one, and it was not himself. His widow Maxine Gordon has said that Ammons was Dexter's favorite tenor player among his contemporaries, and she remembered Dexter's description of the nightly contest: he would play everything he knew, and Gene would come up, play it all back, and then play a low B-flat. Bob Porter, who produced Ammons's last records, adds that Lester Young, on hearing the DeLuxe side, told Gordon that Jug had copped his stuff. The nickname came from the same band. The version in the New York Times obituary is that the musicians wore straw hats, Ammons could not find one big enough, and Eckstine told him he had a head like a jug. Porter's version is cruder and probably closer to what was said. Either way it stuck for thirty years.

He stayed until Eckstine folded the band in February 1947, then went home and made his first record as a leader for Mercury in Chicago on June 19, 1947. The third title was "Red Top," a riff blues with Gail Brockman on trumpet that sold well enough to be remade twice and later got a King Pleasure vocalese. Seven weeks after that, on August 6, 1947, he walked into the same studio with his father. Albert Ammons and His Rhythm Kings cut "St. Louis Blues" in three takes, and Evensmo, who has heard everything Ammons recorded, says it is the record he would take to a desert island.

Gitler heard it by accident and never forgot it. In R.O.T.C. at college, walking to drill, he heard a tenor over the loudspeakers that he took for Allen Eager, ran to the field shack, and found a sergeant playing "St. Louis Blues" by the Ammonses, father and son. Two years later Albert played Harry Truman's inauguration. Ten months after that he was dead.

In the spring of 1949 Ammons took Stan Getz's chair in Woody Herman's Second Herd. He left only two studio solos behind from the whole stint, and one of them, "More Moon," cut for Capitol in New York on May 26, became a band favorite, and it is the one Evensmo calls authoritative. The number Herman actually featured him on was Johnny Mandel's "Not Really the Blues," taken faster in person than it ever was on record, per Gitler's notes to Jammin' With Gene. Then he was gone by the end of the summer, after three or four months by one count and six by others, and by October he was back in Chicago recording ballads for Mercury with Jimmy Mundy arrangements. Twenty-one years later, asked in a Blindfold Test to identify a Herman record, he said that big bands were really his first love and gave it five stars.

Then came Stitt. The two had met years earlier in Detroit, in a club with sawdust on the floor, when Ammons was with Kolax and Stitt, by his own account, was with a big league band. By January 1950 they had a group at Birdland, and Gitler, who was at the club's opening show at Christmastime 1949, remembered Ammons doing a single that night with a borrowed rhythm section, then coming back a year later to battle Stitt on "Blues Up and Down." The first studio version of that tune was cut for Prestige on March 5, 1950, in three takes, with Duke Jordan, Tommy Potter and Jo Jones. It is on All Star Sessions, and Gitler's notes to that record lay out the family tree: the tenor battle began with Ammons and Gordon on "Blowing the Blues Away," was carried on by Gordon and Wardell Gray, and was "carried to a sort of culmination" by Ammons and Stitt, who built a whole band around it.

What it was like to be in the room comes from an unexpected witness. LeRoi Jones, who was not yet Amiri Baraka, wrote the liner notes to Boss Tenor in 1960, and he opened with a memory of the Masonic Temple in Newark when he was fourteen or fifteen. Ammons had a big band then with Stitt in it, and every set had at least one battle. The crowd took sides. Jones, wistfully and with apologies to Gene, admits he was a Stitt man. The cries were "Go, Gene, get it, baby" and "Cook, Sonny, burn," and he could never remember anyone actually saying "Go, man, go." The tune was usually "Blues Up and Down," and the two horns playing the head in unison sounded to him like a single enormous tenor saxophone playing out of a sound truck.

Ammons was also, quietly, a hit maker. On May 2, 1950, in Chicago, he recorded "My Foolish Heart" for the brand new Chess label with echo added for the jukeboxes. It is usually said to be Chess 1425, the first record the label put out, with Muddy Waters's "Rollin' Stone" as 1426, and it reached Billboard's Black pop charts, which is not where a bebop tenor player expected to be in 1950. Chess kept those masters; it was a pair of Ammons LPs cut for Chess's Argo subsidiary in 1961 and 1962 that Prestige sued over and won. Gitler, in his 1955 notes, was matter of fact about where all this put him: Ammons's combo had followed "more of a rhythm and blues pattern" though the jazz in it stayed strong, and there were good and bad rhythm and blues, unlike rock and roll, which Gitler in 1955 considered "really only bad rhythm and blues."

Gitler's best picture of him is from the old Apex studio on West 57th Street, between takes: Ammons marching all around the room, blowing the whole time with that big, fat sound, the rhythm section just sitting there digging him, and the cutting machine, in the days before tape, not running. The Stitt band lasted two years, and its last session was for Decca on March 24, 1952, with J.J. Johnson on trombone, after which each of them, in Gitler's phrase, decided it was time to have his own band.

Something else happened around that breakup. The whole time he was with Woody and with B, Ammons said later, he was not using anything. Then another musician, very strung out, got him started, and on the road they had to score enough to keep that man straight or he could not work. Ammons never named him.

The first arrest came in 1958, for possession. He did, in his words, a two-to-three-year sentence and was paroled in about June 1960. That same month, on June 16 and 17, he was in Van Gelder's studio making Boss Tenor and the session that became Angel Eyes, and by Bob Porter's count "Angel Eyes" turned into one of the biggest records he ever had. Then the parole system caught up with him. His Chicago parole agent, he told Feather, did not want him getting back into the music thing, and kept stalling on the consent Ammons needed to work in clubs. So he got his horn and started working on his own. That was a violation. He went back to finish the five months he had left and came home on a discharge in January 1961, and the run of records that followed, including the reunions with Stitt, is on the Boss Tenors page.

He stayed straight, by his own account, from January 1961 until about June 1962, and then started dabbling again. The bust that followed is the one Porter, forty years on, called a case built with all the subtlety of an inquisition, and one that in a later era would clearly have been entrapment. Ammons had played a job in Kansas City and met some men he had known a long time. Months later they turned up in Chicago and asked him to get them some narcotics. He said he did not sell. They pointed out that he used, and asked him to get it from wherever he got it. After two or three days he agreed, and one of the men with them turned out to be a state narcotics agent. He was arrested in September 1962. The warrant, Porter says, read possession with intent to sell.

Illinois law on a second narcotics conviction allowed anything from ten years to life. The judge gave him fifteen to life. His lawyer won a new trial, and the same judge, who told Ammons personally that the first sentence had been a little excessive, vacated it and gave him ten to twelve. The press shorthand ever since has been "a fifteen-year sentence," which is what Down Beat and the Chicago Tribune both printed in 1969. The number Ammons used was different and more exact.

All of it was served at Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, and all of it was served with his horn. The prison had a band, and the officials, he said, respected him for his talent, so they put him in charge of everything in the music department. He directed the band, played in it, wrote for it, taught, ran the annual variety show, and played in church services, things like "The Lord's Prayer." The concert band was thirty-five to forty pieces at its largest, dwindling to twenty-five, completely interracial, and kept as a little unit off by itself, away from what he called the hard-line criminals. For the last year and a half he ran the prison radio system with a tape recorder, a record player, his own television set and a radio, which is how he kept up with the Chicago jazz disc jockeys, Daddy-O Daylie, Sid McCoy until McCoy moved to Los Angeles, and Yvonne Daniels. The visitors were a short list: a Chicago guitarist named Leo Blevins came often, his wife came every couple of weeks, and once, when Sonny Stitt was in town, Stitt drove out to see him.

He tried every legal channel to get out sooner, and when that failed he made up his mind that he had to be there. The worst of it, he said, was not having your freedom and having to be in that environment. Outside, Bob Weinstock did something that other label owners might not have. Ammons had recorded heavily in 1961 and 1962, and Weinstock put the tapes on the shelf and parceled them out an album at a time for seven years, to keep something going in his name. Those are the records on the Vault Sessions page, and when Ammons came out he thanked Weinstock for it publicly. The tune "Madame Queen," recorded on his first session back in November 1969, was written for his daughter Rosalyn. She was nearly eight when the Feather interview ran. Then, as he put it, one day he looked up and it was time to go home.

He was paroled from Stateville around Friday, October 10, 1969. On October 22 he opened a two-week engagement at the Plugged Nickel in Chicago, and the trumpet player in the band was King Kolax, the man who had taken him on the road in 1943. Down Beat's headline was "Gene Ammons Back; Opening Night a Gas." The magazine reported a standing ovation and said Jug had preached some sermons that proved him still the king of soulful tenors. Ammons told the reporter he had played practically every day inside, that there had been a lot of changes in the world since he went in, like day and night, and that the avant-garde would not fit his bag, though he might try a free lick here and there. He wanted a seven-piece band of young players, and he had a line ready about it.

On November 10 and 11 he was at Van Gelder's in Englewood Cliffs with Junior Mance, Sonny Phillips, Buster Williams, Bernard Purdie and Candido, and Prestige had The Boss Is Back! out fast enough for Dan Morgenstern to review it in March. Morgenstern called the return one of the most welcome recent events in jazz, thought the studio group and the tempos failed to give a complete picture of what Ammons could now do, and said "I Wonder" and "Here's That Rainy Day" were worth the price of admission on their own. It reached number 174 on the Billboard album chart.

What Morgenstern wanted was the Chicago band, and that spring he got it twice. At the University of Illinois Circle Campus, a crowd that had paid to see Nina Simone was told she was ill and that Gene Ammons would play instead. Morgenstern reported a groan, since most of the young audience had no idea who he was, and then, a few numbers in, someone shouting that nobody cared Nina had not shown up, and cheers. When WTTW taped the quintet for television, Ammons asked to skip the run-throughs on the grounds that rehearsal would rob the music of its spontaneity, got his twenty-six minutes, and stomped off the tempo. Morgenstern thought ten rehearsals could not have improved the pacing.

New York was another matter. In February 1970 he went east for a two-week stand at the Club Baron in Harlem and lost it to a ruling by the New York State Liquor Board that a parolee needed the board's permission to perform anywhere alcohol was served. The Village Vanguard booking went with it. He stayed in town and made a record of Nat King Cole tunes instead. The Baron rescheduled him for March 10, and the board refused again. Some of the biographies say he was barred from New York for good, which is not true. The Baron opening finally happened in February 1971, a year late, and by 1972 he was back there without incident. But the immediate result was an offer from Redd Foxx's club in Los Angeles, two weeks in March opposite Sarah Vaughan and then Herbie Mann, which is where Leonard Feather caught up with him. The interview ran in June under the cover line "Troubles I've Seen," and it is the reason this piece can be written in Ammons's own words.

What he said about the music is as plain as what he said about prison. He loved the modal thing from the first time he heard Coltrane do it, and thought it got monotonous without ideas. Free jazz lost him. He went back, he said, to the school where if it did not swing it did not mean too much, and he would leave the free bag to the cats who were doing it, though his guitarist George Freeman did some of it and made it fit. Asked whether he would simply go straight ahead from where he had left off, he stopped Feather: no, do not quote me as saying that. He would keep his ears open, and periodically, when he felt it, go off the side of the board. Selmer had given him a new horn and a Varitone; he used the amplifier when the microphones were bad and the octave effect on ballads, and that was all.

The summer of 1970 delivered the reunion the story needed. On July 26, the same night Miles Davis played the Civic Opera House, Joe Segal put Ammons and Dexter Gordon on a bandstand at the North Park Hotel with Jodie Christian, Rufus Reid and Wilbur Campbell. It was the first time Gordon and Ammons had recorded together since the Eckstine band, and Prestige released the two-tenor pieces as The Chase! Down Beat's reviewer heard Ammons that night as an experienced gladiator challenging lions, trading eights and fours with Gordon and, at one point, the "Blowing the Blues Away" riff itself, twenty-six years on. In December the magazine's readers voted him the sixth best tenor player in the world, his first appearance in the poll since his return. He and Stitt were working Sundays together again by the autumn, and would keep doing it, as the obituary put it, right to the end.

He worked almost without rest for four and a half years. Porter, who produced him through most of them, describes the act: Ammons talking to the crowd while the organist swelled soft chords behind him, then dropping into one of the jukebox ballads, and the club going wild, with Houston Person and Pharoah Sanders in the audience watching closely.

The records came at a Prestige pace, and the reviews split. Brother Jug! drew four stars in Down Beat and a note that "Didn't We" was an archetypal Ammons solo; The Black Cat! drew two, and a reviewer's observation that the tone had changed, a little harsher and more grainy. Porter is blunter. He had come out of Stateville with an enlarged heart and emphysema, he smoked heavily against doctors' orders, and from 1972 the tone had lost some of its fullness. He had lost weight and looked old beyond his years.

In late May 1974 he broke his arm on a job in Oklahoma City, cancelled his bookings and flew home. During a hospital stay in mid-July the doctors found bone cancer. He contracted pneumonia, re-entered Michael Reese Hospital on July 23, and died there on the morning of Tuesday, August 6, 1974, at forty-nine. The Jazz Showcase had already printed its schedule for the end of the month: Gordon, Ammons and Stitt, August 28 through September 1, billed as the tenor battle of the century. Brasswind, his last record, was in the shops, and Down Beat would review it in November as desultory by his standards, with arrangements that showed no sensitivity to him at all.

The funeral was on Saturday, August 10, at Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, in the rain, and Porter was there and wrote it down. Lou Rawls's father, Dr. Louis Rawls, gave the eulogy. The Reverend Edsel Ammons paid a short tribute to his brother. Prince James played "The Lord's Prayer" on tenor, a tune Ammons had played in the Stateville chapel, and Sonny Stitt played "My Buddy." The recessional was "Red Top," with James and Stitt over a rhythm section of Amina Claudine Myers, Pete Cosey and Ajaramu. There were flowers from Ray Charles and from Miles Davis. The front pews were divided, the family on one side and the companion of his last years on the other, with an empty row between them, and the birth date on the program was wrong. Porter counted a hundred and fifty people and thought it slim for such a favorite son. The alto player Carlos Ward, who had worked a West Coast trip with him, said none of the radio stations said anything when he died.

Stitt went into the studio the following July and made an album called My Buddy: Sonny Stitt Plays for Gene Ammons, and put "Red Top" and "You Can Depend on Me" on it, the tunes from the Birdland years. Morgenstern's summary, written for a collection of his essays, is the one the site keeps coming back to: a big, gentle bear of a man who played the tenor with a sound and feeling synonymous with soul, whose life was scarred by injustice and misfortune, and who, with his music, remained whole to the very end. The other epitaph is Porter's, and it is the blues line: if it wasn't for bad luck, he wouldn't have no luck at all. Between the two sits the thing Dexter Gordon could never do and spent a career admiring, which is to walk up after all the notes have been played and play one, low, and settle the room.