Farewell Blues for Bozy White
A while ago you may recall on this blog I mentioned that 78-yeard old jazz historian Bozy White had been missing since February. This evening I learned the painful and tragic outcome of this through a letter I got from one of Bozy's friends:
Uncle Dave Lewis -
I am a former neighbor of Bozy White. Bozy has been missing since
February and we've all been very concerned. We have just learned that his body
was discovered in his basement and people to whom he had let rooms have
been arrested. I was not sure if you were aware of this - sorry for the sad
news if you are hearing it for the first time. We are all grieving the loss of this interesting man.
(I have withheld the name of the writer.)
So there's the word. Believe me, I sincerly feel for anyone who'd considered Bozy a friend. I didn't know him that well, and this is terribly sad even unto myself. Word has it that the louts who killed him were selling off his stuff for quick cash as well. I'd imagine Bozy White's house in Oakland would've been like a g_ddamn museum - hopefully the police have sealed it off by now.
Bozy wrote a book on Bunny Berigan that is the state of the art text on this player. Bozy truly was the ultimate authority on Berigan - he could tell you what Bunny had for breakfast on April 26, 1941. The discography in the back of the book was deliberately sketchy, as Bozy was writing that as a separate work. Unless you have had some deep contact with Berigan, you'd have no idea how unbelievably prolific he was as a recording artist, not only in the many studio recordings made under his own name, but those made with other leaders (like Benny Goodman), radio recordings, you name it. Bozy's discography was recently finished and as this is written is in the galleys at the publisher, ready to be printed, although it looks like now Bozy won't be able to correct the proofs himself. What a pity!
Bozy took me to task once in a major way. Like my late friend Frank Powers, who was much closer to Bozy than I, he didn't like anything that smelled like "bullsh*t." When I was working in the Raymond Scott collection at the Marr in Kansas City in 1998, I happened to meet a fellow who was working on a book about Joe Venuti. I pointed out that a 1934 radio transcription of Raymond Scott's group The Instrumentalists had a fiddle solo which I thought might be Joe. We gave it a spin, and the author couldn't rule Joe out as he could place Joe in New York in September-October 1934 when the recording was made, though by November Joe was on board ship headed for Paris.
A couple weeks later I get a really
ANGRY email -- from Bozy White. Where did I get off saying the violin on this Raymond Scott record was Joe Venuti? What's my evidence? Am I out of my mind? etc. I wrote him back and told him that to me it did sound like Joe, owing to some mannerisms that are familiar from Blue Four recordings like "Running Ragged" for example.
Well, about a month later I get another letter from Bozy, the tone of which was completely different. He had heard the recording and a similar, second one of the same piece ("Here Comes the King," by the way). He'd identified the trumpet as Bunny Berigan, whom I had missed identifying anyway - "very good Berigan, and good violin, though not-in-a-million-years Joe Venuti..." Bozy did thank me, however for the tip, however indirect, on these Berigan recordings with Scott, which he had not heard and could not have imagined existed.
Frank, who was highly amused by the whole affair, suggested that perhaps Scott's violinist was a fellow named Bruce Yantis, a little-known hot player who appears in some early Vitaphone jazz shorts. I still don't know that anyone has really nailed down who the violinist is, and as the Instrumentalists' output is not addressed on the recent Scott re-issue "Microphone Music" even the folks at Basta have yet to weigh in on it. I'm wrong, I guess - but it still sounds to me like Joe Venuti. Nonetheless I was happy to help introduce Bozy to the seven
great 1934 and 1935 Bunny Berigan recordings in the Raymond Scott collection. Berigan, playing with Scott, sounds like a 1930s version of Don Cherry, swingin' in the stratosphere, full of wild notes, shouts, exclamations, sounds for effect, tootin' thru the roof....
Bozy interviewed guys like Saxie Dowell and Gus Mayhew - crazy cats who played in the Hal Kemp band along with Berigan. Both were heavy drinkers who died in the 1950s. And somehow Bozy got to them, collected their stories before they croaked. No one in the 'fifties gave a tinker's dam about these players, but they'd played with Bunny and that was all that mattered to Bozy.
Bozy didn't share my views on the Kemp band. My feeling has been that they were the absolute greatest of the so-called "Sweet bands," the one group that really mastered the soft-focus approach to Big Band jazz without making it sound corny. Bozy felt that Kemp's group was a "funny hat band" that eventually turned into a "mickey mouse" ensemble. But I never needed Bozy to like what I like - after all, I wasn't there and know everything in this period from recordings, so my outlook is bound to be different.
Mike Montgomery said after Frank passed, "You know the terrible thing about when these guys go is that you can't ask questions of them anymore." And when an old-timer goes like Bozy did, stuffed into a corner of his basement, his precious artifacts going out the door and into some pawnshop, that really hurts. That someone could be so stupid and heartless to disperse and scatter the things that can help to answer some of those questions in the wake of the loss of a major historian is to take away something of value to each and every one of us, our children and our children's children. May the California courts throw the book at these folks!
By the Way, Allisyn is Better
Thanks for all your cards, letters and prayers folks. Although she's battling depression, nausea. occasionally in pain and dealing with limited mobility, Al is finally on the mend. Thank God!
Uncle Dave Lewis
udtv@yahoo.com