Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the September 1984 issue of Memphis magazine. This week, the Memphis Flyer features Herman Green in its cover story, “A Living Legend.” We thought our readers would be interested in see how that legend developed over the years.
Paul Dagys
Herman Green, 1984
Some night Herman Green will tell you the whole story himself … in one saxophone solo. It might start as a medium-temp blues, but when he’s feeling right, Herman moves quickly through a hint of swing into a cascading double-time bepop line that sounds like Charlie Parker sitting in with B.B. King. Closing his eyes against Club Handy’s amber stage lights, Herman turns another corner into an angular chorus a la John Coltrane, then comes back home with a final funky flourish.
The packed club give him a big hand; Herman smiles gently. In three choruses he’s summed up his own musical journey, from Beale Street 1947 to Beale Street 1984. With a lot of streets in between.
“I got my first paying gig in 1945 with Phineas Newborn Sr.’s band,” Green remembers. “We played at the old Plantation Inn in West Memphis from 9 p.m. ‘til 4 am. By the time I got home I could maybe catch a few hours sleep before it was time to get up and go to school. He was a 15-year-old high school student at the time.
Those were exciting times to be a young musician in Memphis. The city was entering its most fertile jazz era, the post-war decade would produce scores of gifted young players. Most of them came, like Herman, from Booker T. Washington High School or the city’s other black high school, Manassas. “Professor W.T. McDaniel brought us all up,” Herman stresses. “He was the music teacher, half a week at one school and half a week at the other. He started us all off on the right foot.”
Beyond Professor McDaniel’s orbit, Green and his peers found plenty of opportunities for on-the-job training: “There were all kinds of big bands in town then. I remember playing for Al Jackson, Luther Steinberg, Andrew Moody, and Willie Mitchell. And then there was our other school … Club Handy.”
Bandleader Bill Harvey’s group at the original Club Handy had become the musical magnet for serious local players and out-of-towners passing through. The club’s stringent jam-session standards were a great opportunity and a great test for the youngsters who came to play head-to-head with their elders. “You really had to know what you were doing to get up on that stand. If you couldn’t play ‘Cherokee’ at their tempo, you’d get laughed out into Beale Street.”
With all the practicing, jamming, and playing — including a two-year stint with an up-and-coming local bluesman named B.B. King — Green still kept up with school. He graduated from Booker T. Washington in 1948, and grabbed his first opportunity to hit the road, with a traveling musical revue called the Charles A. Taylor Show that played Beale Street’s Palace Theatre that summer. But after two years spent crisscrossing the country, Herman Green stepped off the bus in the city he’s always known was his real destination: “New York was where it was all happening.”
The musicians’ grapevine quickly led him to a small club in Harlem. Minton’s Playhouse was the crucible of modern jazz — the place where people like Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, and Charlie Parker created and refined the intricate new style called “bebop.” If you wanted to be taken seriously on the New York scene, you had to stand up in Minton’s and prove that you deserved it.
That’s what Herman Green wanted, so on his first Sunday in town he headed up to West 118th Street with his horn. He quickly found that it was a faster track than at Club Handy. “After I played, Sonny Stitt [the legendary saxophonist] took me aside and made it very clear that I had a lot of practicing to do if I wanted to make it in New York.”
Landing a bandleader job in nearby Asbury Park, New Jersey, gave Herman the opportunity to prepare for the big leagues. For two and a half years he played and practiced, often returning to the city to listen, learn, and hang out on the scene. He felt he would soon be ready to return to New York on his own terms, when Uncle Sam intervened. Happily, the Army recognized that Herman was better suited to the bandstand than the rifle range and assigned him to Special Services. He played his way through a two-year enlistment, touring in Japan and Korea.
On his way home from the service, Herman passed through San Francisco, and the city’s charms diverted him from his plans to return to New York. “I came back to Memphis long enough to buy a car, and I headed straight back.” He was eager to make up for lost time; within a year he was leading the house bands at both Bop City, an after-hours hangout, and at San Francisco’s premier jazz showcase, The Black Hawk.
During how two years in San Francisco, Herman Green came into his own as a jazz player. Word of his skills quickly spread beyond the Bay Area, as the cream of America’a jazzmen were booked into the Black Hawk and heard him play. Many became friends, especially the seminal saxophonist-composter John Coltrane.
Dave Gonsalves , Herman Green, John Coltrane, and Arthur Hoyle
Herman headed back East in 1958, for a time leading a group in Chicago with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. Later that year came a call that led to the longest professional relationship of his career. The caller was fames vibraphonist Lionel Hampton; within weeks, Green had joined his big band as tenor saxophonist. The featured spot with one of the country’s top bands gave Herman’s career quite a boost, and the gigs were good ones. But after four years the incessant travel began to pale, and in 1962 Green made his long-delayed return to New York.
This time, no one had to pull him aside for advice. He was a top-level pro, and soon the Herman Green Quartet was headlining the city’s jazz circuit, playing rooms like the Five Spot, the Village Vanguard, and Birdland. As their friendship grew, John Coltrane became a major influence on Green’s music.
Lionel Hampton called again in 1964, persuading Herman to return to the road. For another three years he was featured with Hamp’s band at most of the country’s top jazz spots, and in concert at Carnegie Hall. Herman had reached the position he’s worked so long to achieve — well-known among his peers, in demand, playing his best.
But professional concerns soon how to bow to personal ones. He mother, long ill, had become an invalid. In 1967, with a family in tow, Herman Green came home to care for her. Memphis still had a few jazz clubs in those days, and he formed a group that worked steadily into the Seventies at rooms like the Music Box, the Living Room, the Sharecropper, and Pierre’s. He regularly played recording sessions at Stax and American studios.
The late Seventies, though, were tough for jazz in Memphis. Green made a two-and-a-half-year side trip to Birmingham, Alabama, where work was more plentiful. An occasional road trip would reunite him with old New York cronies like Yusef Lateef and Cannonball Aderly. During one period in Memphis, he worked days as a food and beverage supervisor for Holiday Inns to subsidize sporadic club and concert work.
The sparse gig picture cleared up for Herman last fall. Since Club Handy opened on Beale Street, he has been its musical director and leader of the Club Handy Blues Band.
With his professional history, the question often arises: Why stay in Memphis? “I was really getting ready to move back to New York when Beale Street opened,” Herman says. “But now, as long as I do my job and the club’s there, I’ll be there.”
It’s obvious that he gets this question a lot. “People think that if you’re around town, you can’t do any better. They can’t understand that some folks just like to stay home.”
Herman tells me this in his quiet, comfortable Midtown apartment; the loud, cramped, overpriced Manhattan flats we’ve both inhabited come to mind. “People don’t necessarily leave town to make a name — they leave to make a living. I found I could stay and make a living. I don’t see why I should go back to New York to please the people who think I should, just so I can come back home and have them say I’m a great artist. I think I can stay here and be an artist.
If you’ve heard Herman play nearly as much as I have, there’s no doubt that he’s an artist. A jazz artist. But the Club Handy gig involves mostly blues and pop material. “It’s really taking me back to my roots,” Herman says. “It gives me a chance to discipline myself, to realize there’s other good music around. I like any music that’s well-constructed. It’s junk music I don’t have time for.”
Herman keeps his jazz group, the Green Machine, ready for the occasional concert and festival gig, and remains one of the city’s biggest jazz boosters. “We’ve got to expose people to music. I’d like to see a weekly TV show, maybe a radio talk show. Jazz doesn’t penetrate, it infiltrates. In the music I’m playing at the club, I like to introduce some jazz sometimes into the music the audience is more familiar with. People have to be exposed, and they have to listen.”
He may be staying home these days, but Herman Green’s legacy is spreading. “Since I’ve been back, I’ve tried to help some of the young players the way I was helped on the way up,” he says. “So when they go out, they won’t run into the same problems I did.” In his private teaching and by hiring promising young players for his band, Herman has had a lasting influence on a generation of Memphis jazz musicians.
I know this part of Herman’s story well. When I was a member of his band for a good part of the Seventies, Herman persisted in trying to make me a good trumpet jazz player. He taught by explanation, by example, and occasionally by force. If he gave you a new tune, you learned it quick, because he made you play it the next night. (I still get damp in the armpits when I remember being obliged to solo on Coltrane’s fiendish “Giant Steps.”) But he was always encouraging when you played well. Then he’d blister you with a few choruses that let you know how much farther you had to go.
Other Herman Green alumni show his influence to better advantage. Pianist James Williams, drummer James “Stix” Baker, and trumpeter Bill Mobley have all served on the faculty of Berklee College of Music in Boston, and become fixtures on the East Coast jazz scene. Williams has been featured with Art Blakely and the Jazz Messengers, and is now one of the most sought-after freelancers in jazz. Mulgrew Miller, another pianist, moved from Herman’s group to the Duke Ellington band, and now holds Williams’ old chair with Blakey. Drummer Tony Reedus left Green to back up one of the finest contemporary trumpet players, Woody Shaw. Local stalwarts George Caldwell, Sylvester Sample, Ed Finney, and many others have also matriculated at the Herman Green College of Bebop Knowledge. And new ones keep coming up. The guys in his current band are perfect examples.
Musical careers are rarely as cyclical as Herman Green’s — from growing up on Beale Street in the Forties to raising up Beale Steet in the Eighties. And few men in their fifties can say they’ve made a living doing what they love best since they were 15. I think Herman is a happy man. And he still plays his ass off.
Here’s my suggestion. Head down to Club Handy any night but Monday. Firmly request some bebop between the blues. Then sit back, open your eyes, and let Herman tell you the story more eloquently than I just have.
