Bill Perkins RIP

[Gordokae]

Bill died today in Sherman Oaks, CA.

[J.A.W.]

Another sad loss

[JSngry]

DAMN it.

[The Mule]

Man, it's been a rough year for jazz...

This was one of my favorite reissues in the West Coast Series

And I had just picked up this one last month...

[catesta]

RIP Bill.

[jlhoots]

Give 2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West a spin in memoriam.

His playing is just gorgeous on it.

[Jim R]

I'm sorry to hear this, but what a nice career he had. Just thinking about all the people he played with... I only have about three sessions by him as a leader, but he's all over the place as a sideman on sessions led by the likes of Chet Baker,

Bill Holman, Tal Farlow, Dizzy Gillespie, Paul Chambers, Woody Herman, Carmen McRae, Lennie Niehaus, Anita O'Day, Joe Pass, Gerald Wilson... and many more. I still remember his occasional features on the Carson show as well. Gotta spin some Perk today...

[John L]

Listening to Bill Perkins, the word "beautiful" continually comes to mind. His sound was genuinely beautiful.

RIP

[Chuck Nessa]

I still remember his occasional features on the Carson show as well. Gotta spin some Perk today...

I remember one night Doc introduced him as Geppetto. The whole band fell out. He looked the part.

Arno Marsh is starting to look like a sole survivor. Go Arno!

[brownie]

Sad news. Another of the Pres descendants with a very distinctive sound.

Will go with jlhoots recommendation and play the 2 Degrees East 3 Degrees West

album.

[mikeweil]

Give 2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West a spin in memoriam.

His playing is just gorgeous on it.

I certainly will after I get up in the morning.

RIP, Bill. Lyrical and swinging forever in our memory.

[BruceH]

Sorry to hear about this.

[king ubu]

Give 2 Degrees East, 3 Degrees West a spin in memoriam.

His playing is just gorgeous on it.

A nice reissue of that one could be a nice tribute to the man... never heard it, read how good it is again and again.

sad news! rip

ubu

[JSngry]

That 2 DEGREES... album was one of the first jazz records I ever owned. I bought it because of Chico Hamilton, whose work I had been digging, both with Mulligan and his first Quintet LP. This would have been early 1971. There had been a gigantic purge of the Liberty labels in '69 or '70, and stuff was all in the cutout bins for dirt cheap, so I was just buying everything.

This album hit me like the proverbial velvet fist, especially Perk's solo on "Almost Like Being In Love". That solo, and the fours he trades with Chico just floored me - I hadn't heard Prez yet, but I knew ABOUT him, and the whole lineage thing, and I couldn't believe that Prez could be any better than THIS. Oh lord, I learned that solo, I played that solo, I sang that solo, I wrote down that solo, I slept with that solo, I did everything but become that solo.

A lot of the things that floored me when I was first discovering jazz have lost their allure to one degree or another. Some even are repugnant to me now. But not that solo. If anything, I marvel at it even more today than I did then, because I now KNOW just how heavy it was.

Perkins was always a fine player, but for a little bit there in the mid-50s, he was in a ZONE. Some of the solos he played on Woody's Capitol sides have that same heavy floating quality to them too, like Prez at his most etherial taken one step beyond. Supposedly there's an airshot of an "Early Autumn" that was on an early 70s Columbia big band compilation (one I've never heard) where he plays a solo that supposedly eclipses the famous Getz original (Getz was quoted around the time as saying, "Right now, Perk's playing more than all of us", and Getz was not a man given to superficial praise). This would not surprise me.

Perkins was definitely in that zone when he made 2 DEGREES..., and he was in the zoniest of zones for "Almost Like..." A guy touches you like that in a formative stage of your life and it stays with you. When the thing that touched you continues to grow in magnitude with the passing of time, that REALLY stays with you. I'll not pretend that I'm a Bill Perkins completist, or that everything he's done has knocked me out like that one solo did. I'm not, and it hasn't. But the guy has a place in my heart that is very, VERY special, and he always will. He gave me a gift, a lasting, meaningul, profound gift, and I can never forget that. I WILL never forget that.

Thank you, Bill Perkins, and rest in peace.

[Guest youmustbe]

Hell of a sax player, and Jazz musician. Overlooked. So many great players from 50's especially from West Coast, in Stan's or Woody's bands, have been ignored. Understandably, a lot of stuff happened in Jazz. Not like today when absolutely nothing happens! But still,....!

Anyway, I had the pleasure of talking to Bill some months ago, regarding my book. Funny stories about the 'old days'! As I told Bill, when I first saw his picture on album covers in 59 when I started listening to Jazz, I said to myself...' Wow, Chet isn't the only Hip looking White guy!'in Jazz'

[Larry Kart]

Lovely, true thoughts Jim. I had a similar response to "Almost" (though I don't recall sleeping with that solo) and the rest of Perkins' work on "2 Degrees" back when it came out, with that very West Coast-looking girl on the cover. Try to track down the interview Perkins did with Cadence that ran in Nov. 1995. As I recall, he speaks about being in that mid-'50s "zone" but also about his need/desire to leave it, in part because he didn't think he was tough enough rhythmically or harmonically compared to other players on the scene. He had a lot of self-doubt as a player and speaks of this with honesty and insight. It's among the most revealing accounts of what it was like to be a white West Coast guy of that era, not that Perkins wasn't very much an individual.

[JSngry]

He had a lot of self-doubt as a player and speaks of this with honesty and insight.

Yeah, I had a chance to chat briefly with Claire Fischer at a clinic he did at NTSU back in the 70s (longer than briefly, actually, Fischer LOVES to talk, or at least did that day), and he got going on critics and how they don't know how adversely they can affect some players. He used Perkins as an example - the DB review of THESAURUS was not kind to Perkin's bari playing on his feature number, and Fischer said that Bill was just DEVASTATED about that for months on end. I remember reading that review (yeah, I was a library geek too), and I don't remember the comments being THAT bad, certainly not cutting or anything like that. Truth be told, I didn't dig it that much either.

Mr Kart, did YOU write the review that bummed out Bill Perkins?

[JSngry]

As I recall, he speaks about being in that mid-'50s "zone" but also about his need/desire to leave it, in part because he didn't think he was tough enough rhythmically or harmonically compared to other players on the scene.

Now THAT is tragic, because that zone was one of the DEEPEST places that anybody has ever inhabited. You wanna talk "free"? How about playing in the beat only when the urge hit, and otherwise just floating, literally floating, over it the rest of the time? How about starting and stopping phrase any damn place you felt like? How about lines that begin with an ending and begin with an ending? THAT is free, and Bill Perkins was THERE, if only for a relative moment or two.

Yeah, Lester opened the door, and Warne went inside to the deepest recesses, but Perkins seemingly wandered in and made himself at home like HE built the place. The fact that he "looked down" (to use a personal favorite analogy vis-a-vis Wile E. Coyote) is just TOO damn sad, but hey - the lessons of Eden are forever, I suppose...

[Late]

The little solo spots Bill Perkins has on the soundtrack to The Subterraneans fit that "starting with an ending" description. Some of the hippest "short" solos out there. Also dig his contributions to Chet's big band album. For as much self-doubt as he may have had, he could deliver.

[Larry Kart]

Yes, Jim, I did write that review of "Thesaurus" for Down Beat back in '69. What I said about Perkins' bari playing was: "'Calamus' features Bill Perkins on baritone, trying to sound tough. I admire his tenor playing, but I don't think he has yet mastered the larger horn."

I wonder if Clare Fischer might have been "projecting" a bit, as they say in the trade -- the review did make some very snotty, smart-alecky remarks about his writing, which I wish I could retroactively dial-down about a third, in part because a remastered CD reissue of the album eventually went a long way toward clarifying some of the close-voiced reed textures that on the LP sounded very muddy.

Why Perkins left the "sound" behind and, as I think he admits in the Cadence interview, tried to get tough, is a story that's pretty much told in the music he made, as well as in the interview. The most successful latter-day Perkins I know is on the two Fresh Sounds albums he made with Lennie Niehaus, because Lennie's extremely oblique harmonic and rhythmic thinking makes Perk's more off-the-wall forays sound less ... I think "gawky" would be the right word. Niehaus and Perkins are very effective when soloing simultaneously. Also, there's the late album "I Wished On the Moon" (Candid), where Perk played with Rob Pronk's string-laden Hilversum Orchestra, and as he says "the sound" suddenly came back to him.

In the Cadence interview Perk says that on an unreleased 1958 date of Jimmy Van Heusen tunes that he did for Dick Bock, he "sort of played a half-baked imitation of Sonny Rollins, without getting into Sonny Rollins, and Dick was really disgusted.... But then I felt the urge to change because the thing is at the time I really hadn't studied the music....I was starting to hear the Sonny Rollinses of this world ... and trying to play like that, but I had no idea what they were doing. Now I think I have a good idea of what they wwre doing."

[clandy44]

A thoughtful, if belated, obituary of Bill Perkins. Most surprising is that he held an engineering degree from C.I.T., one of the country's most prestigious colleges and certainly every bit as competitive as M.I.T.

Jazz Saxophonist Bill Perkins, 79

By Adam Bernstein

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, August 14, 2003; Page B06

Bill Perkins, 79, a saxophonist who was taken with the "palm tree gentleness" of West Coast jazz in the 1950s and later became a member of the Doc Severinsen "Tonight Show" band, died Aug. 9 at his home in Sherman Oaks, Calif., of complications from cancer.

Retiring in personality and delicate on his horn, Mr. Perkins was one of those musicians always being described in the music press as chronically underrated.

"I'm a born follower," he said. But he followed in some of the most technically dazzling big bands of the 1950s and early 1960s, including Woody Herman's Third Herd, Stan Kenton's progressive outfit and Terry Gibbs's Dream Band.

Mr. Perkins, a worshiper of sensual saxophonist Lester Young, emulated him on ballads such as "Blues for Brando," recorded with trumpeter Shorty Rogers in 1954, and as a featured soloist on "Yesterdays" on the Kenton album "Contemporary Concepts" (1955).

Starting in the 1960s, he used his early training as an engineer to get sound-production work. He also held instrument patents, including a synthesized saxophone and trumpet.

William Reese Perkins Jr. was born in San Francisco and as a child accompanied his father, a copper mining engineer, to Chile. His companion was the Victrola, and after his father's death his mind was set on engineering and making music.

He grew up with his mother in Santa Barbara and later received an electrical engineering degree from the California Institute of Technology and a music degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Originally trained on clarinet, he switched to saxophone at 15. During his career, he mastered a variety of woodwind and reed instruments.

While with Jerry Wald's band in 1951, he received a call from Herman's manager asking if he could fill in for his main sax player, who had been fired. After first sloughing it off as a practical joke, Mr. Perkins accepted and soon he was dazzling the leader with a tenor solo on the standard "Perdido."

Besides steady jobs with Herman and Kenton, he also performed on acclaimed albums with pianist John Lewis ("Two Degrees East, Three Degrees West") and saxman Art Pepper ("Art Pepper Plus Eleven").

Among his studio work was playing in a band led by Duke Ellington to record the soundtrack for the Frank Sinatra film "Assault on a Queen" (1966).

"I think I took the studio work too seriously," he told interviewer Steve Voce in the mid-1980s. "I'd go to each job with the attitude that it was supposed to be a work of art, and I'd wind up going home almost on the point of tears because I thought I'd played badly. But, as my dear friend [saxophonist] Ernie Watts pointed out, it's not art, it's craft at best, and if you look at it that way it won't be so painful to you."

Starting in the early 1970s, he spent two decades with Severinsen's band. He also toured widely with saxman and arranger Bill Holman, his colleague from the Kenton group.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

[DIS]

If you want the definitive portrait of Bill Perkins, see Steve Voce's extensive interview at

http://jazzinstituteofchicago.org

You have to click on JAZZGRAM,

then click on PEOPLE,

then scroll down to, and click on Bill Perkins.

[mmilovan]

People,

do you have some good Perkins CDs to recomend to me. I listened to him on Barney Kessel "To Swing Or Not Swing" disc yesterday, and was completly knocked out. Man, he was among them greatest, his ideas was so fresh and clean.

[brownie]

Milan, two essentials Bill Perkins are the John Lewis/Perkins Pacific Jazz date 'Grand Encounter' and another Pacific Jazz album 'Bill Perkins Octet on Stage'.

There are more excellent dates with him but these ones are just great.

Bill Perkins was marvelous.

[JohnS]

Sad news indeed. Bill was one of the first people I heard when I first got into jazz in the 50s through those great albums on Pacific Jazz. I've been fond of his music ever since.

I saw him for the first time a few years back when he toured UK as a solo artist. He was still playing well.