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By Root 1360 0

to stretch out and play the solos I wanted to play or the tunes. I kept thinking how nice it would be to play with just a rhythm section in a jazz club where I could be the whole thing and do all the creating myself. As far as the money went, the money never changed. I was one of the highest paid guys in the band, especially among the saxophone players; Stan didn't think that sax players were the same caliber as brass players or rhythm, and we had to play exceptionally loud and work real hard because we had ten brass blowing over our heads. Also the traveling got to be unbearable. At first I enjoyed it, but after a while, being nine months out of the year on the road, one-nighters every night ... Sometimes we'd finish a job, change clothes, get on the bus, travel all night long, get to the next town in the daytime, check in and try to get some sleep, and then go and play the job. Sometimes the trip was so long we'd leave at night after the job and be traveling up until the time to go to the next one. We'd have to change clothes on the bus and go right in and play.

Also I became more and more hooked and I went through some unbelievable scenes-running out of stuff on the road, not being able to score, having to play, sick, sitting on the stand spitting up bile into a big rag I kept under the music stand. I guess I looked sort of messed up. People started talking. Kenton became more and more suspicious. I imagined he knew I was doing more than drinking and smoking pot. So it seemed best that I leave the band and try to do something on my own, and I gave my notice. A lot of us quit at the same time. Shelly Manne quit. Shorty Rogers quit.

At first I was apprehensive. I had a lot of bills and I had a habit, so right away I did some recording with Shorty. One was Shorty Rogers and His Giants, and on one of the sides, "Over the Rainbow," I was featured all the way through and got great reviews. It became one of the most popular things I've done. Then I formed a group of my own. I got Joe Mondragon and on drums Larry Bunker, who also played vibes. We worked out some things which we could do without the drums while he played vibes, or if he did a ballad I'd sit in on the drums and play a slow beat with the brushes. I got Hampton Hawes, an exceptional pianist. It was just a quartet, but it was very versatile.

Because I had my own group, I wanted to do my own material, tunes that would express my personality, not just standards. I had fooled around writing little things out when I was with Kenton. Now I tried writing seriously and found I had a talent for it. I wrote a ballad for my daughter, Patricia, probably the prettiest thing I've written to this day, and I wrote a real flag-waver, a double-fast bebop tune, very difficult, and I named it "Straight Life."

We worked at the Surf Club and got a great review in down beat. In that same issue, announcing my starting a group of my own, I was written up in another article with another new leader who was going to throw his hat in the jazz band ring and see if he could make it, and that person was Dave Brubeck. We all know now, anyone that follows jazz, that Brubeck became, and still is, one of the outstanding leaders of a jazz group, but at that time, if you read the articles, I was the one they felt was more talented and the one that would make it bigger and make more money and be more popular. I was more of a jazz player. I swung more.

Everything was perfect. I bought a tract house on my GI bill. I had finally gotten to know my daughter and was just mad about her, really loved her. We had a little white poodle named Suzy, and I had a car. I had everything. I was making good money and I didn't use any of that money on my habit-I was dealing a little bit of stuff to musicians, friends of mine, to support my habit. And I felt that I wasn't doing anything wrong because I wasn't taking food out of my child's and my wife's mouths by using. But I was really strung out.

I realized I had to get away from the stuff. In the latter part of '51 there began to be newspaper stories about dope.