No, not a RIP thread fortunately. At 95, he's still at it. Thought some of you would be interested in this...
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Posted on Sat, Jul. 05, 2003
KC legend 'Fiddler' Williams keeps on playing
By MATTHEW SCHOFIELD
The Kansas City Star
The legend shuffles these days.
Legs that leapt, feet that tapped out rhythms, with such energy, so well, for so long, scrape the carpet as he walks a short hall. He stops to rest halfway, smiles at a visitor, then fixes eyes on the nearest seat and starts again.
"Claude, why don't you sit in your chair, honey," says Blanche, his wife. Her words are firm, but her voice is sweet. She's pointing at a stuffed chair on the far side of the small room.
Half a minute passes before Claude "Fiddler" Williams settles into his easy chair, topped by a heated pad. He rocks back, rolls his head back toward the visitor, smiles again, and speaks.
"So what do you want to know?"
It hardly seems news that a 95-year-old man is slowing down, becoming forgetful, scaling back a work schedule. But with Williams...
"Look, he is the complete history of jazz, walking around town, still playing every now and then," said Chuck Haddix, area jazz historian who heads the University of Missouri-Kansas City's Marr Archives. "It's hard to think that he'll ever slow down. He is the legend."
A legend. True, but it has to be carefully defined. Among players, certainly. He's a musician's musician. He brought a Southern feel -- a pure American sound, a saxophone's soul -- to the violin. He created a style of play, and nobody who heard it forgot the sweet whine of his fiddle.
Among Kansas City historians, yes, he's a legend. Williams was a fixture in Tom Pendergast's city, a wild, crowded, jumping city with a national reputation for prosperity even in the Depression, prosperity said to be based on sin, on jazz.
Jazz fans -- including former President Bill Clinton -- well, they write notes praising him for being a genius, an innovator, one of the last living links to the roots of jazz.
But to everyone else? Try buying recordings of his music in area stores and you hear: "We don't have that." "We don't carry him." "He's country, right?"
When he goes out to eat, even near his house, over at The Peach Tree on Eastwood Trafficway, waitresses and customers don't make a fuss. He stands in line, waits his turn, eats in anonymity.
This is understandable. Williams made his home in Kansas City. Kansas City isn't a jazz town anymore. Jazz, really, isn't a big deal anywhere in America, anymore. Not like the 1930s through the 1950s. America's gift to world culture, to the world of music, is largely forgotten here.
What's more, he's called Fiddler because he plays a violin, an instrument with which the jazz world has never been at ease. The saxophonists, the trumpet players, the pianists, the Parkers, the Armstrongs, the Basies -- they are remembered.
The fiddlers are in the background, even the great ones such as Stephane Grappelli and Joe Venuti and, of course, Claude Williams.
Born in Oklahoma
Williams was born in Muskogee, Okla., in February 1908, making him three months younger than the new state. He was the son of a blacksmith, and, as a little boy, he listened to his brother play the piano and watched a brother-in-law play the mandolin and banjo.
"My brother could play that piano," he said recently, smiling at the memory. "Man, he could play. He died when I was real young. I started playing strings."
By the time he was 6, he was playing the mandolin. The first song he learned was what is now a classic: "You've Got to See Your Momma Every Night (Or You Can't See Your Momma at All)."
His brother-in-law taught him to play by playing. Claude watched the fingers flipping on and off the strings, racing down the neck. When a piece would end, he'd grab the instrument, and mimic what he'd seen. By the time he was 10 years old, he was playing the mandolin, guitar, banjo and cello, and making money doing it.
"We played at barbershops. Sometimes we played on a person's front porch, or just on the street. And for pay we'd pass the hat. I remember we'd make six dollars a night sometimes. That was good money back then. Man could work all week for six dollars in those days. That was good money."
Born to fiddle
Today Williams lives in a simple ranch-style house on Kansas City's East Side, up a little hill from Brush Creek. The walls are white, decorated with concert posters, with photos -- of the fiddler playing, of Blanche and Claude with Bill and Hillary Clinton, and with plaques of city and state and national honors.
The dining table, next to an open kitchen, is cluttered with old photos.
Claude is in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease and doesn't live in his house. In May, his second wife, Blanche, 65, learned she has cancer and now undergoes weekly chemotherapy sessions. Because Blanche is busy with her illness, he's been staying in a nursing home.
Still, he comes home. When she's able, having a good day, she picks him up. If he's having a good day, they talk about life, what's going on today, what's coming up, who's sick and who's visiting.
If he's having a good day, he'll wrap his fingers around the neck of his violin, tuck it into his neck and play, staring at the strings. Sometimes he'll play for hours. He'll play for a while, then talk about how his brother-in-law taught him this song when he was a teenager. He'll play a little longer, then recall how saxophonist Lester Young would just kill that song. He'll play, and he'll smile, and he'll chuckle, and he'll sing.
And Blanche will smile, and talk about how he's "95 years old and still playing. Sometimes it's sad. We talk about his old friends and so many of them are dead and gone, and here he is still playing. Someone told us that he's lucky, he played the violin. If he'd been a trumpet player, or a saxophone player, his lip would be gone by now. But he can still play the fiddle.
"There's something to that. But it's not luck. That man was born to play the fiddle."
Listening through a fence
Williams doesn't remember how old he was when he first heard the great Joe Venuti play the violin, but he's pretty sure it was sometime between the end of World War I and 1920. Venuti was playing in Muskogee, as the main event at a community concert in the city park.
Williams, because he's black, was not allowed in the city park. Black people in Muskogee weren't allowed to come any closer to the concert than a wire fence would let them. Williams hung on that fence and listened. He'd never heard anything like Venuti. He stood at that fence from the first notes through the last.
Then he ran home and told his parents he was going to play the fiddle, play it like Venuti. He'd need lessons, they said. The next day when he got home from school, his cello was gone and a fiddle was on his pillow.
"Maybe for a year or so I took lessons, from this man in town who played." He chuckles and adds, "I figured I knew it all by then."
He was playing the fiddle professionally and took a job in a band that traveled around Oklahoma and sometimes left the state for gigs.
That was T. Holder's band. Williams says he was making $50 a week, a fortune for a young man. Until one week, when Holder gambled away the band's money. After that, they become the "12 Clouds of Joy," with Andy Kirk as leader and a young woman named Mary Lou Williams on piano.
In the late 1920s, they left Oklahoma and moved to the spot for music in the heartland -- Kansas City.
`King of Kansas City'
Most of the photos, the concert posters, the awards, the programs, are in plastic boxes, on shelves in the basement.
And the photos tell their own stories. There's a black and white photo of of a young man in a stylish overcoat and fedora, in the late 1920s, walking on a sidewalk, carrying a paper grocery sack.
"Doesn't he look handsome there," Blanche says, smiling. "I think that's my favorite photo. I'm pretty sure it's also the last time he ever helped out with groceries in his life."
Williams looks fit and prosperous in the photo. He was a young man on his way up. Later, he'd title a CD "King of Kansas City," and in that photo, he looked it.
In his mid-20s, Williams heard from a bass player named Eddie Cole that his band, playing at the Yellow Front in Chicago, might need a few players.
When he got there they asked what he played. Fiddle and guitar, he said. "They kind of smiled."
"And after I'd played the guitar, I played a piece on the fiddle. They hadn't played with a fiddle before. But I played that first song and they told me to put away the guitar. I'd be playing fiddle with them."
The band was playing the Regal Theater, which was a good paycheck. Williams says it was one of the best collections of musicians he ever played with. The best of the group, however, might have been the piano player: Nat Cole, or simply "King" as Williams now calls him.
"King sure could play that piano," he said. "Best damn piano player in Chicago. He didn't sing back then, though. Didn't think he could."
The band wore white jackets and made a lot of money for a while. And then the gig at the Regal ended.
They went to Louisville, Ky., where Cole promised them work. When it fell through, he begged Williams to stay.
" `I can't afford not to get paid,' I told him. `I'm heading back to Chicago.' I did need to get paid. He did all right without me."
Williams headed back to Chicago, where another band leader was interested in the way he played the guitar. The Barons of Rhythm, led by William "Count" Basie. They also played the Reno Club, near 12th Street and Troost Avenue in Kansas City.
In 1999, Williams told jazz historian Haddix that the Reno Club was, "a small place, really a hole in the wall where you had to step down a few steps to enter...Lester Young, Walter Page and Jo Jones were in the band, and Basie sent for Herschel Evans in California."
The Barons were an amazing collection of talent, and he went with them to New York. Williams recalls that when the reviews would come out, his guitar playing was praised. And when he played his fiddle, the crowd always cheered.
"He wasn't just a hanger-on with the Basie band," Haddix says. "He was a soloist. He was very well received."
But the band was managed by John Hammond, and Hammond didn't want a fiddle-playing guitar soloist in the rhythm section. Only months before the Barons were to become a household name, Hammond told Basie to fire Williams.
"Claude Jones was out eating with them and the next day he told me, `I about fell off my stool when I heard that. Can you believe Hammond would say that?' I told him to believe it, that I had the pink slip in my pocket."
Williams left New York for Kansas City. He could have gone back. He was well-liked. The reviewers and audiences praised him. A lot of folks think he could have found a place in New York.
But he stayed in Kansas City. Part of it was that he was angry, bitter. Basie's Band was getting more famous each day, and he was feeling more and more like a footnote. He was so angry, he put the violin away for a year.
One of the world's top violinists today, and a student of jazz history, Marc O'Connor, said other violinists had similar experiences. O'Connor, best known for his Oscar-nominated score for "The Patriot," his Grammy and the music behind the six-part PBS documentary on the American Revolution, says there is no doubt that Williams is one of the great, original musicians of the 20th century.
"I remember hearing him for the first time at the Berlin Jazz festival in 1988," O'Connor says. "I was totally captivated. I got the feeling I was watching a legendary performance on the fiddle, and yet not too many people had access to his music."
Grappelli, Venuti and other jazz violin greats also struggled, had decadelong gaps in their careers, periods when they seemingly vanished from the scene.
But they didn't vanish. Williams still played. It's just that at the same time, Williams became a family man, married to Mabel, who died in 1991. He even got a day job in a local title company.
"Look," Haddix said, "he had to make a decision everyone makes at some point in their life: Work or family. He picked family, and that meant staying close to Kansas City."
He didn't stop making music. He had gigs. Soon after returning, he had a regular gig at Lucille's on 18th Street.
"Man, that joint used to jump," he says. "Every night, it was packed."
It was his band, and they played for years. Weekends, their performances were broadcast locally.
He traveled some to play, as well. In the 1950s, he hooked up with Roy Milton's Solid Senders in Los Angeles. In the 1960s, he started playing with Jay McShann, a fellow jazz legend and a Muskogee native.
"I met him after I got out of high school, back in Oklahoma," he says. "He really went to work on that violin. But we didn't work together much back then, not until later on."
They played the Midwest, sometimes ranging farther out. In Toronto, in 1972, when Williams was 64, an executive with the Sackville Recording Studio approached McShann and asked whether they could record him.
The album is called "Man From Muskogee." It's McShann's album. But for Williams, at retirement age, it re-launched a national and international career that, 30 years before, had seemed to vanish.
At 65, he was more famous than he'd been at 35, playing jazz festivals and recording albums. By the time he was 75, he'd surpassed himself at 65, taking his violin to Paris with Black and Blue, and touring Europe. At 85, he'd moved onto Broadway, played Lincoln Center, played for President Clinton, and always to loud applause and rave reviews.
Now he's 95. And he's slowing down.
"Claude's music is amazing; he created a style of playing that's purely American, not out of the Southern fiddle or the Northern classical, but a pure jazz sound," O'Connor says. "He deserves every bit of praise he gets. But I wish it had come 15 years earlier. I just wish he'd had more time to realize the lasting effect his music will have on all of us."
First song I ever learned
Williams is sitting in his easy chair when Blanche opens a fiddle case. The violin back is golden, streaked by ribs the color of caramel, like shadows from light passing through a window with open blinds.
Fiddler leans forward, reaches, carefully, and Blanche lays it in his cupped hands. She hands the bow.
"He still plays, you know," she says, noting performances at the Blue Room on his birthday, the Gem Theater this spring. "He still plays beautifully."
Williams nestles the violin under his chin, stares forward at his hands on the strings, makes a swipe with the bow and produces a screech. He does this again and again, for a minute, two minutes, screeches and squawks.
Then he pauses.
"First song I ever learned was `You Got to See your Momma Every Night,"' he says. "You know that one?"
And again he's swiping the bow across the strings, but this time he's smoothing it out, filling in the cracks. The sound starts out chaotically as before. But something changes, and the sounds come together and form a tune, piercing and pure.
A low, gravelly rumble joins in and he's singing as he plays.
"You got to see your Momma every night, or you can't see your Momma at all.
You got to see your Momma every night, or she won't be at home when you call.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Show me a woman that a man can trust.
You got to see your Momma every might, or you won't see your Momma at all."
The song ends. He stops singing. His lips curl into a smile. And he keeps on playing.
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Audio of Claude "Fiddler" Williams
These first two tracks were taken from the cd "Claude Williams, Live at J's Part 2" Copyright 1993 by Arhoolie Productions Inc.
"Don't Get Around Much Anymore"
http://multimedia.realcities.com:808...uch_anymore.rm
"Fiddler's Dream"
http://multimedia.realcities.com:808...dlers_dream.rm
This last number is from the cd "Claude "fiddler" Williams, swingin' the blues" Copyright 2000 by Rounder Records Corp.
"Somewhere Over the Rainbow"
http://multimedia.realcities.com:808...the_rainbow.rm
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To reach Matthew Schofield, senior writer, call (816) 234-4303 or send e-mail to
mschofield@kcstar.com
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