Pretoria

Sergeant-Major Bornman surveyed me from across his desk. His face creased into the sweetest, most angelic of smiles. No village thespian could have over-acted a smile any better.

“Would you like some coffee?” he asked, unctuously. Rich voice, familiar Afrikaans accent.

A National Service orderly hurried to get coffee, and we got on with the interview.

“So. You read music?”

“Well, kind of, maybe need brushing up.”

“Do you sing, are you a f—, er, a singer?”

“No.”

“Excellent.” Bornman was happy, and slid some forms across his desktop.

Coffee was brought, terrible weak instant coffee with milk, brown powder floating. Taking a sip, I may have shuddered. Completed forms now in the Sergeant-Major’s hands, he scanned, shuffled, peered closely, pointed.

“Your signature?”

“Yes. My signature, yes.”

He handed them to a National Serviceman, saying “To Hallmark”, and looked at me.

“You didn’t drink your coffee?”

“I take it black.”

He signalled to the orderly, who took the coffee away.

“Will he bring me another, black this time?” I asked.

“FUCK YOU, YOU ARE IN THE F— ARMY NOW. WANT COFFEE, GET IT YOUR F— SELF.”

There was a round of laughter. I turned. Several uniformed men craning heads in the doorway were grinning. I got it. I was set up. My first good laugh in my new job.

I left for the Quartermaster stores with a National Service guide. Later that day, in uniform, I re-entered the building.

“HA! You! Feerthy Capitarist Plick! Me intellogaat you!”

said a man, blocking my way in the passage of the old wood and iron SADF Entertainment Group HQ. He slanted his eyes intensely, pulled out a torch, shone it an inch from my left retina, then the right. Two seconds passed. “Schultz,” he said, pocketing the torch. He turned and walked away.

The following week, he repeated this routine, ending “Johann.” Now I had two names: Johann Schultz.

The Schultz episode was replicated a week later, save for “Schultz” being replaced by “Swanepoel.” I now had all the names I would ever have for Johann “Schultz” Swanepoel. I would end up in a few bands in my time there, one of which featured Schultz on trumpet and vocals. He was good at both. I learned also that nearly everybody similarly had a daily laugh routine. Most are unprintable.

In the end, I spent the best bit of 3,000 days in the SADF Entertainment Group. “Half day pay for half day job” was how we put it. The hope was to augment that half-day pay with one’s own gigs, or whatever side hustle, and by and large that is what happened. No one could have guessed my agenda, which to be fair was not fully mentally conceived anyway. An aptitude test in London made me believe (ignorant as I was of IT) that I could migrate over to army intelligence, a dream that persisted for eight years, but was destined to be dashed strangely. Mostly, they were a pleasant few thousand days, notwithstanding the alienation I suffered, which I deal with at the end of this Pretoria chapter.

Mornings began with roll call. Sgt Moneyhouse was late again. Obliging, the front row rather carefully made space and ushered him into position four.

“From the right, numbaaaah!” would come the order.

“One” (baritone voice)

“Two” (tenor voice)

“Three” (alto)

“Fffff. Fff. FFFFffffff” (tenor)

Crunching the gavel, WO Wilkinson bellowed (ill-concealed grin):

“AS. YOU. WERE! From the right, NUMBAAAAAAH!”

Iterations ensued. Sgt Moneyhouse struggled with certain sounds. “F” was just one of the difficult phonetics. Senior NCOs, now lined up grinning on the elevated wooden planks of the veranda, had emerged, vestigial smirks on their faces. Sgt Moneyhouse was often late, so there were varied numerical and phonetic failures to be witnessed (dare I say enjoyed?). It was a setup. Nobody wanted to be in the front row anyway, so the second and third rows were always full. Moneyhouse had no alternative than to find a place in the front row, where the count would happen, and there appeared to be a well-rehearsed routine of ingratiating space-making, a place made for him. He fell willingly in.

You can guess now what positions four and five wrought. Six, seven, were:

“SS.” “SSsss.” “SSSSSSSSSsss.”

Bandleader George Hayden was followed by the guttural:

“AS. YOU. WERE—FROM the right, NUMBAAAAAAH.”

Was this why it was called the Entertainment Group? Moneyhouse was ok at one, not bad at two and three, eight and ten. The exaggerated politeness at slotting Moneyhouse into the front row was beyond the call of duty. I began to “click” to the jostling and milling about, getting into a certain order in the morning sun. Moneyhouse was allowed only certain positions. Nine was a nightmare.

“Nnn.” “NNNNnnnn.” “Nn.”

And so it went, for months and years. Then, something happened, and life would never be the same again.

Milling around in the chilly midwinter morning air, we watched as Moneyhouse roared into the dusty parking lot next door, late again. Slamming his car door, he cantered toward our parade ground. Positions were jostled and assumed, and position four was again the sole available option. Moneyhouse came running and slotted in. The “Numbaaaah” command came.

“One.” “Two.” “Three.” “Four.” “Five.”

Stunned NCO faces cracked a double take on the veranda. The count continued snappily.

“Six.” “Seven.” “Eight.” “Nine.” “Ten.”

Three rows of ten. All present and correct. There was a long silence. The NCOs stared from the stoep, obdurate, mute.

Moneyhouse’s diction lessons were working.

That was the last of the “FFFfff” mornings. After that morning’s faultless delivery, the NCOs sullenly slid back inside. They never filed out for roll call with grins on their faces ever again. The roll-call count routine continued, brisk and snappy from that day forward, with perhaps a handful of mirthful reprieves, up to and beyond Moneyhouse’s transfer to Natal Command.

Time went by, and I slipped into the musical life at the Entertainment Group. It was absorbing. I began to study. There was a fair amount of material to look at and learn from, and rehearsals every day kept the chops in, and honed my sight-reading.

Wright and Baleson Brothers

I made friends, more especially with two familiar faces from Pietermaritzburg, Alan and David Wright. They were both quick-witted, a tad intense, and enamoured with revolvers and “quick-draw”, one brother holding the record of a tenth of a second drawing and hitting a target. The brothers had grown up in the Salvation Army, and the younger, Dave, is still a pastor in that church as I write.

Friendships with the Baleson brothers, pianist Ralph and trumpeter Hymie, followed. There were four Baleson brothers, all musicians, but I knew only these two. It is impossible to quantify what I learned from the Balesons, George Hayden, and Alan Wright over the eight years in their company.

I was aware of my musical challenges. “Corny” phrasing was one, corrected over a few weeks by Ralph and Hymie. Intonation was another. They had to tell me about that, because I was blissfully unaware of it. It hurt at the time, but truth hurts, and I am glad for their warmth and guidance. I would certainly not have had a longer career in music without them.

Once you get it right, you can’t play out of tune anymore. Your ear won’t allow it. You have to play correctly. It’s like the old Karoo oupa whose grandchild asked: “Oupa, do you sleep with your beard on top of the sheets, or under the sheets?”

The grandpa arrived at breakfast cleanshaven. “I tried it on top, then under, then on top again. And so on, for hours and hours. I couldn’t sleep. So, I got up and shaved that thing off.”

For years up until then, though, I’d happily “just played” naturally and unthinking, on an instrument that was out of tune (I could have tuned the valve tubes better, but not perfectly. It was a student horn, and I had to live with it). It took a little time to accustom myself to good intonation, but it was a life changer.

Many years later, while with the AJP, intonation was a big problem for some years. Don’t make a mistake: it was a living hell. In the end, though, patience paid off, and our tuning problems were addressed in a funny (for me) way, not so funny for the perp.

In an earlier chapter, I wrote about the “six degrees of separation”—a theory that came to us via Cathy Shallis while she was working for an under-secretary to Lord Bertrand Russell. I was reminded of it again as Major George Hayden walked down the long indoor passage. He passed a piano room, where Gerrit van Wyk was trying out chord voicings on piano.

“G-flat minor thirteen flat ninth!” shouted Hayden, without breaking his pace as he passed.

Gerrit’s jaw dropped. George had perfect pitch and an incredible musical ear. It was amazing to think that I knew someone who knew Count Basie and Neal Hefti. George was that person. He told of being a ghost writer for Neal Hefti on the Atomic Mr. Basie recordings. We even had arrangements (not via George) of “Li’l Darlin’”, “Whirly Bird”, “Flight of the Foo Bird”, and “Splanky” in the big band charts collection.

Hefti, George said, would move down lines of desks, from ghost writer to ghost writer, dashing off a lead line for them to harmonise. Later, he would return to change the ghost writers’ voicings to his own preferred instrumental combinations, lines, and voicings. “That,” said George, “is how Hollywood works. A veritable production line.”

George lived in the US for some years. He had a USA passport, apparently from inheriting some land from a grandfather. For about eight years, he ran a gig band in LA with some heavyweight sidemen: Bud Shank, Bob Cooper, and Ted Nash on reeds; Dick Nash on trombone; Conte or Pete Candoli, and/or Don Fagerquist on trumpet. I forget who his bassist/s were. He may have used Shelly Manne and Alvin Stoller on drums at times. I was and am a solid Stoller fan, especially for his studio album Sweets, with Harry Edison and Ben Webster. What a swinging album! I was with my brother Al in Durban when he collected that vinyl (bought based on a favourable review in DownBeat or Jazz Journal) from Mel Narumski.

One day, as I played a ballad—it may have been a Flippie van Vuuren number (I remember the tune, but nothing else) on trumpet, down near the fence of the property—I heard a voice. Turning, I saw George on the veranda, his arms outstretched theatrically.

“TUNES!” he called. “Nobody plays TUNES any more!” He gave a little theatrical bow and returned indoors.

Boy, was I pleased at that compliment! Given that George hired Don Fagerquist, and that (I read somewhere) Frank Sinatra would not record with a big band unless Harry “Sweets” Edison or Don Fagerquist was available for solo trumpet work, I felt in pretty good company! Talking about pretty, I love pretty trumpeters, have a long list of them in my memory (see Pretty Trumpeters in Appendix), but of all of them, Don Fagerquist takes the prize for the most sublime, silver-toned prettiness in that West Coast idiom, and for a wonderfully even-tempered, spectacular-toned high range.

Thinking back now of those days, we Dad’s-army fatties and dronkebroers would not have put the fear of death into an enemy (I know this from forbidden chats with a Cuban POW in detention barracks next door to us), but we had a huge array of talents beside our music. Balance, for example. After a long day’s travel from the old Western Transvaal, Sysie Marais tripped on the disselboom of a trailer, fell flat on his face, and regained his feet without spilling a single drop of whisky from the glass in his right hand, and, wiping gravel from his lips, finished re-telling the gag about the Pope. Are there stunt men who can do that? I didn’t think so.

I had a special affinity for Major George Hayden, dating from the day he asked me, in a rehearsal: “Who is your favourite big band lead alto player?”

The answer was, and is, Willie Smith. He turned out to be George’s favourite too.

“Big ears,” George said approvingly, pointing at mine. “Everybody always says Marshall Royal.”

Well, Marshall Royal is a great choice, really. It is true, though, that I had done a lot of listening to big band, and Willie Smith leading the Harry James big band sax section came out tops for me. George never forgot.

“Genius” is a word thrown about a fair amount in SA music circles. We are a very small music fraternity, and quite big fish in a quite small musical bowl, really. George, however, is one of two people I can instantly associate the word with, in my own experience. The other was Lionel Martin Pillay.

The word was used repeatedly about Bra Victor Ntoni. Without meaning to take anything away from Bra Vic, however, he was simply not in the same league as George and Lionel, both of whom, just for a start, were blessed with perfect pitch. I feel lucky to have known and worked with some heavyweights, not least, for example, the wonderfully funny Danie Gerber, who described himself super modestly as “an old Samro hack”. He was also a genius, a shade behind George and Lionel, with a way of listening to music and “seeing” the chords on a mental keyboard. None of those three are with us as I write, and it is lonely without them, musically and otherwise. Without feeling particularly pressured to justify my opinions, a few anecdotes will do. George Hayden

My first few rehearsals in the SADF Entertainment Group were conducted by Vic Wilkinson. Apparently, Major George Hayden, the usual conductor, was away on leave. It was a tough challenge for me to get to grips with the reading. I had not read music since I was a teenager, and my hand-eye coordination was woefully slow. By the time George was back in charge, though, I had gained a little speed, but you can imagine I was a little stressed, not knowing George, when his first actions on fronting the band were to stare us down, and then saying:

“I am tired! Tired of SNEAKING SAXES!” (sneering)

“Tired of TRAUMATIC TRUMPETS!” (ducks as if dodging missiles)

“Tired of BUNGLING BONES!” (casts eyes to the heavens), and (turning to the rhythm section)

“WRONG RHYTHM! TIRED! DEPRESSED!”

The whole band laughed fit to bust, and we got on with the rehearsal. Oh. Kay. Joke. I soon learnt how much fun it was to work with the Major. His nickname for me was Bluto, from the Popeye comics. I had a black beard at the time. Quite apt.

Quicker By the Dozen: George Hayden

Perhaps a year later, I was seated in a full big band, waiting for musical director George Hayden, in Studio M4 in the SABC buildings on the skyline of Auckland Park. He was, unusually, late. When he arrived, he was flustered. Addressing us, he revealed that he’d driven off from home in his green Fiat 124, having placed a briefcase full of arrangements, scores, and parts on the roof, and in his hurry, forgotten to place the briefcase inside the car. Realising a few minutes later that the briefcase probably fell off the car when he pulled off, he raced back to Cyrildene, but the briefcase was not found.

“This is what we are going to do,” he said. “You are all welcome to head to the canteen, have coffee, breakfast, whatever. I will begin re-writing. Be back in half an hour. Ralph Baleson will direct, once I have the first arrangement done, and we will see how we go from there.”

We did as he wished, were back in half an hour, and found the first arrangement’s parts on our music stands. Ralph directed, we ran it a few times, went for a take, and it was soon “in the can”. George, in the meantime, while this big band was wailing away, was bent over a timpanum a few metres away, writing parts by hand in pen and ink. He finished the second score about when we got the first one done.

And so it went, throughout the day. George re-wrote twelve big band arrangements, part by part, transposed, without rewriting the scores, and we got them all in the can in three (morning, afternoon, evening) sessions. That was exactly what was budgeted for, so there was no extra cost implication, and it was quietly done. Nobody else I know comes close to that degree of musicality, speed, and professionalism.

I apologize about that! Here is the clean version with all of the proper section breaks, blockquotes, dialogue formatting, footnotes, and bulleted lists fully restored.

I learnt more from George Hayden than anyone else, but, more particularly, the gems came in quietly, unannounced. They were all surprise bonuses. For example:

“You don’t breathe through your nose. Not on ANY instrument.”

That does not apply in rare cases, for example when one is doing circular breathing. And that is another example of something learnt from George—on how to learn to do circular breathing:

Fill a glass with water, insert a drinking straw in your mouth. Now, blow bubbles with the drinking straw, while breathing in through your nose when you need air. You’ll pick it up very quickly.

An alto player in the band was concerned about his jazz improvising. He asked George what he could do to improve it. George half-crouched, adopted a sort of Groucho Marx stance, raised his arms theatrically, and with a little moue said:

“Play…
Something high
Something low
Something fast
Something slow”

That is all I would ever want to be sure to do in a solo, and luckily I kind of knew it already from listening to all the greats. He could have added:

“Something loud
Something soft”

…but those would have been tough to rhyme!

He also explained why practising scales, arpeggios, and chords was so important:

“You make good habits. You want to reduce a scale to a single gesture, a chord to a single gesture, an arpeggio to a single gesture. You don’t want to be slowed down with the parts that make up the whole. Everything becomes simple gestures.”

He was right, I found. A few years later, I was able to whip up and down through the scale of F major on trombone as two simple, snappy gestures:

First, going up the scale, was a single gesture, shooting the arm outward, from closed position to sixth position.
Then, down the scale was a single gesture, shooting the arm back inward, from sixth position to closed position.

Other scales followed. As Bob McChesney showed, with enough practice, it doesn’t really matter what you do with the slide.

Marcus Wyatt and Romy Brauteseth came by for a visit. I told Marcus something about George Hayden. He later wanted to know more. This is, more or less, what I told him (lifted from a WhatsApp chat):

He played piano, clarinet, all the saxes. He played trumpet as a teenager, & never forgot it, joined me in the section once & did fine. He was completely self-taught. His family spent a lot of money on his sister’s/s’ piano lessons, & they gave up once they had passed RCM Grade 8. George was the youngest, so they weren’t falling for spending on music lessons any more. He started, younger than ten years old, copying Art Tatum & Oscar Peterson.

He was not a jazz great. He did not set about to be original. What he liked was arranging & composing. He learned a lot of his arranging from Roy Martin, who was a Glenn Miller fan & a Miller arrange-alike.

When he went to the US (he could do that, he had a US passport because his grandad had left him a plot of land in the US, I don’t know what state. His son also got US citizenship from Geo, & now lives in the US) he was hired by Neal Hefti as a ghost writer, notably working on the Atomic Mr. Basie album. Neal Hefti was mostly writing film scores for Hollywood movies. George said the setup was a “half a town hall” sized room with tall desks, where ghost writers, working standing up, waited as Hefti moved through the rows of desks, writing lead lines on manuscript paper, & saying “Harmonise that”. They worked in pencil. He would return later, making small changes, voicing things his way.

This way of working was standard Hollywood film practice, he said. Sinatra, in a TV interview, revealed that Quincy Jones worked the same way, so I am guessing it was how things were done. Production line. George said he learned everything he did about arranging from Roy Martin first, & then from Neal Hefti, but also picked up a lot of voicings along the way because he had perfect pitch & an incredible ear.

He walked down a passage in our headquarters once, passing a guy named Gerrit van Wyk, who was practising chords, & said:

“Gm13 flat 9”
…leaving Gerrit gobsmacked, because he was right. He nailed the exact chord, with tensions.

The only other person I have known with similar attributes was Lionel Martin Pillay. Lionel was the better piano player, George the better arranger. The thing about George was his speed. I told you how he rewrote an entire 12-number recording session standing at a tympanum in Studio 4.

When he returned to SA, he became one of a group of six arrangers, a clique, working in the SABC basically full-time, doing transcription music. He had gig bands here in Johannesburg too. Cleverly, he wrote in such a way that he would front a septet, a 10-piece, & a big band without changing the lead parts, just calling in more or less players as the budget suited.

He did a lot of film music, & TV when that came along, but his ambition was to be a successful commercial bandleader & arranger, not an original. I worked as a copyist for him many times, but he was so fast, he mostly did his own copying. Back in those days, SABC paid R550 for a score, parts paid R1.60 per page. Most of the SABC work was for full orchestra, so 70 musicians, meaning R550 + 70 x 2pp parts at R1.60 per page = (70 x R3.20) = R224. R550 + R224 = R774, & he did that a minimum of 3 times weekly. So, while most people were earning around R600pm, George was pulling in R9,984.60 just from the SABC alone. Call it ten grand. He was so fast. He wrote 12 arrangements in a morning, pitched at the SABC, put them all in the can in two or three three-hour sessions, and of course picked up extra money for conducting & musical direction, plus sideman & doubling fees if a sax player did not pitch. They would overdub him.

He made some albums under the name “MacMillan & His Yakkity Sax”. The album cover said that MacMillan was a Cape Coloured from the CT townships. Several Coloured guys over the years made a good living saying they were MacMillan, & George met & played with some of them! He made a hit as MacMillan. It was a number called “Chicken Rock”. I think it might have been a local cover of an American hit.

For some years, George was General Manager of EMI Records. That’s as much as I can think of for now. Oh, he was, he claimed, a US citizen because his grandad, the one who owned land, arrived in SA on the ship Alabama. I don’t know if he was serious about that story, though. He confided his grandad “had” to leave the US, but I don’t really know.

He was very comfortably off, but worked a LOT. I should have said, he paid cash for his Cyrildene house, from the proceeds of the MacMillan hit. He used to call his house “The House That Mac Built”.

I never forgot any of the off-the-cuff gems that George brought. Tips on breathing, lip placement, arranging tips like “sub-tones”¹ and that baritone sax almost always doubled the lead alto, but an octave down.

Also, a thing that saved a lot of time when copying a score was to copy the baritone part straight to bass clef trombone on the many phrases that baritone sax shared with bass trombone. The notes, although the bari was in Eb, were the same as trombone on concert bass clef. I just had to be careful of accidental notes. George worked like that: almost always, bass trombone on the score was “Colla Bari”, and bari was always “Colla Alto I”. You had to watch relative pitch, though, for an octave down in concert pitch, but not when the score was already transposed, something that George did fairly often. He hardly ever made a mistake. My nemesis was “Horns in F”, but transposition, to George, was just another day in the office.

I enjoyed hearing George’s stories of his gig band in LA. He used the Candoli brothers, Conte and Pete, on trumpet, or Don Fagerquist when they were not available. Commonly his alto player would be Bud Shank, tenor would be Bob Cooper, trombone would sometimes be Ray Simms, Zoot’s brother, although he was a little dismissive of Ray Sims. He used Shelly Manne on drums sometimes; for the rest of the lineup, they were all busy LA studio players. George was pianist and leader.

In his LA days, he told me he made a good living arranging too. American wealth, and willingness to spend on music for occasions, meant that he was often commissioned to do arrangements for functions, and he built up a huge book for use with his bands. LA was where he started out writing lead parts that could be used in small or medium combos or big bands.

Danie Gerber

Danie was the keyboard player in the Pretoria band “Sounds Exciting”. He also played flute, clarinet, alto sax, and tenor sax in the band, and we all sang harmonies. Not only that, he wrote arrangements for our band, and thought nothing of grabbing my trombone when I was on flugelhorn or trumpet. He played left-handed, and had a great, fat trombone sound. On the German “Oompah band” stuff, he could “out-whack” me any time.

After George and Lionel, Danie had, within my experience, the biggest ears of anyone I knew. His day job was at SAMRO, where he started out writing lead sheets for composers registering songs, and later taught himself coding, working his way into computer programming and analyst work. He was so useful, I doubt he did only one thing there. It was his job for life, and he probably knew everyone’s ropes.

He had incredible knowledge of local musicians, reminding me of Albert Ralulima at Gallo, whom he of course also knew, and without whom I wonder how Gallo would have got by when it came to honouring commitments to their recorded musicians’ intellectual property. He had an enormous skyscraper of data in his head! Danie and Albert were two of a kind, and I wonder how well their respective companies looked after them. I miss them.

Willie Boshoff

A long time ago, I read in a jazz magazine about a lead trumpeter for Count Basie. It was probably Reunald Jones. He told a story to illustrate the special leadership style of Bill Basie. What happened was that Jones fell off a high F during a performance or rehearsal. Basie stopped the band, then addressed Reunald Jones more or less as follows:

“Somewhere, out there, is a lead trumpeter who can play high F all night, and never fall off.”

Reunald Jones got that message, alright. He said that Basie did not admonish, or display anger. He just said what he said. If anything, his facial expression was kindly. Jones took whatever steps he needed, saying later that he never had a problem with high notes again. He attributed this to a certain magic in Basie’s leadership style—that Basie conveyed that he believed in Jones, and therefore Jones could never ever again disappoint Mr. Basie.

Sounds Exciting

I had a similar experience with Willie Boshoff, during my eight years with him in Sounds Exciting. He had this amazingly easy leadership style. It was my practice on trumpet to go for a high F (to be clear, that’s concert pitch Eb above the staff, up there in the ledger lines). This wasn’t always easy after a long night of playing all three of trombone, flugelhorn, and trumpet, but I usually made it. One night, though, I did not. Well, I did, but fell off the note, something generally accepted as far uglier than not making the note at all!

Willie stopped singing, stopped the band, and then addressed our audience, a large hall full of happy dancing couples. Saying they had probably noticed I had fallen off that high note, he went on to say that I usually got it, and we were just going to have another go.

Well, I should have been ashamed, but confess I was too taken up with the charm of Willie’s frankness about the high note disaster, and found myself tolerant and even amused. How I was going to get up there again was a daunting thought. My chops were like pet’s mince, my front teeth ached, the cheeks felt totally blown.

Willie counted us in again. All the band members were smiling as we went for the last phrases again. Of course I hit the note, clear and bright, and hung in there for a rather screaming finish. Willie was happy, so was I, and the audience seemed to like being involved. Just as with Reunald Jones, I never had a problem with that high note ever again. Willie had this talent for drawing things out of us.

There was another instance, this time about singing harmonies. As we headed for the stage after a break in sets, Willie said to me, not sternly, but firmly: there was not going to be an argument!

“In this band, we sing harmonies.”

I had done very little singing in my life. It was mostly to do with my nerve deafness. Pitch association between voice and ear really was a problem. However, there was something so definite about how Willie put it, I knew there was nothing else for it but to have a go. After all, what he really had meant was “In this band, we ALL sing harmonies”.

For several gigs, I had a go, finding a voice for myself between the other guys’ voices, and it came together. In a few short weeks, I discovered it was not so difficult at all. On a recent visit, Willie countered that his impression was that I “got it” much quicker. He was being very kind. I had not found it easy. He remembered me just falling in with harmonies without a problem. Nice to know, after all these years! It is true that back then I was racked with self-doubt and poor self-image, so it’s quite possible that I was not as poor at it as I feared.

Once again, it was an example of amazingly good natural wisdom and leadership. Willie simply had the force of personality, or talent, or magic, or whatever one can call it, to draw these things out of one. Perhaps that is why I feel those eight years were so happy and memorable. That band played good music well. What else is there?