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would venture to wake Sly up," Ria points out. "No one else would dare,'cause he would wake up swinging. I don't know what that was all about. But I would go into his room and just sit on the edge of his bed and sing to him. He'd go, `I'm asleep!' and I'd go, `No, no, it's time!' And he'd just get up, sweet as pie."

The bond between Ria and Sly held after his graduation, and hers two years later. The Viscaynes, though, didn't continue long enough to follow up after hitting the KYA charts in the fall of'61. Frank threatened to leave the group after the L.A. experience had revealed that he was in effect working for nothing, for shady management. The management then threatened to sue his parents for breach of contract, and Frank joined the Air Force, where he expected to escape persecution. Charlie went off to a university, while his younger brother, Vern, and Vern's classmate Ria, finished high school. Charlene got a job and got married. Sly, though, had already sensed that his fate lay in music, and he was determined to stay on course.

You Have You

to Complete

1961-1966

Do you know what the secret of success is? Be yourself and have some fun.

-TITO PUENTE

LY STAYED AROUND VALLEJO and expanded his interests and skills with a variety of keyboard and stringed instruments, and harmonica, working them in a number of R & B bands. Shortly after graduating from Vallejo High in 1961, he also decided to focus on continuing his academic education, studying music theory with David Froehlich at Vallejo Junior College. David and Sly developed the sort of studentmentor relationship on which so much great achievement has been built, throughout the histories of both Western and Indian classical music, folk traditions, and more recently in jazz and pop. With uncharacteristic magnanimity, Sly has credited David for this again and again, on the liner notes to his albums, in his rare print interviews, and in TV appearances. And although they've spent practically no time together since those college days in Vallejo, the affection seems certifiably mutual, still treasured by David in his Vallejo home, where he now stays up to speed on jazz piano and ready for the occasional gig, long past his retirement from the educational system.

David grew up south of Vallejo, in Oakland, in the 1930s and '40s, when he'd pay thirty-five cents to see and hear and maybe later chat with Count Basic, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Lunceford, Fats Waller, and other black jazz greats visiting Oakland's Sweet's Ballroom. After becoming a skilled pianist and being discharged from service in World War II, David entered a junior college in San Bernadino on the G.I. Bill and met his own mentor, a theory teacher named Russell Baldwin. "He was so deeply sincere about the value of music," David remembers about Baldwin, "and about how fortunate we were to be into such a field, which I've always believed since." Baldwin inspired his student to proceed to graduate study at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, from which David returned to the Bay Area, which in the '50s, looked and sounded quite hospitable to both jazz players and fans. Clubs abounded in San Francisco's North Beach, Fillmore, and Tenderloin districts. To help pay for his pleasures, David found stable daytime employment teaching music theory and English to a multiracial mix of high school graduates in Vallejo and leading their college dance band. "They were beaten, some could hardly read," he reflects, "but we had fain together."

In the early 1960s, David was approached by an intense young man he'd seen around campus, playing guitar at student assemblies. Sly Stewart told the teacher that he "wanted to do more, to become a professional. And he was in the position I was in when I started school in San Bernadino, never having heard the nine symphonies of Beethoven." For David, the classics of the Western canon were treasures he was eager to share, because "the longer we live, the more we realize their greatness, their truth, their majesty." The teacher made the old masters work for his pupils.