We - Greg and I - recently had a rare opportunity to sit down, chat and reminisce a little bit with saxophonist Chuck Peterson, who is one of the San Francisco jazz scene's more enduring (and endearing) figures from that 'Golden Age' of jazz music back in the '50s and '60s.
We visited Chuck in his rustic cabin, nestled deep within the bowels of the Sonoma wine country's bucolic rolling hills, far removed from the noise and strife of city life, where a man can, if he so desires, practice on his sax to his heart's content, and the resident neighboring wildlife utters not a sound by way of complaint. Chuck, incidentally, still plays regularly at a book/record store in San Francisco, that goes by the unlikely name of 'Bird and Beckett'.
We recalled - with more than a little nostalgia - venues like the Jazz Workshop, El Matador, Keystone Corner, Jack's on Fillmore, Bop City, the Say When Club, the Havana Club, Fack's, Basin Street West, Roland's, and probably a dozen or so more that have been long since forgotten, and have all gone the way of the zoot-suit and the bebop beret.
(Click on Photo Album to identify players)
Our three-way conversation drifted from one topic or one subject to another - from remembering this tenor player or that drummer, and who was the guy who played with whatsisname, and where and when and who's still alive and who's not. Finally we got around to Brew Moore, another SF jazz relic from the past. Why Brew Moore? Well. it seems that Chuck and Brew were pretty good personal buddies, and so Chuck has a fair amount of 'inside baseball' stuff to share about this relatively obscure, unheralded tenor player from the 1950s. 'I wouldn't say I was his closest personal friend', Chuck told us, 'but we played a lot of gigs together, and since he didn't own a car - he was either too broke to buy one or too drunk to drive one - I usually would end up driving him home after the gig.'
Brew Moore, jazz buffs may recall, was a tenor saxophone player in the Al Cohn/Zoot Simms mold - two legends who were, not incidentally, contemporaries of Brew's, and who were good friends as well. He is recognized by many of his peers as perhaps the best tenor player never to have been one of Woody Herman's 'Four Brothers'. He did, however, become the fifth brother when he recorded Five Brothers, Four and One Moore with original 'brothers' Stan Getz, Al Cohn, Zoot Simms and fellow 'brother' newcomer, Allen Eager; and which, over the years, has become, in the true sense of the word, a jazz classic. Imagine, if you will, these five great tenors straight out of Lester Young's school of cool, playing the arrangements of Gerry Mulligan and Al Cohn. It doesn't get any 'cooler' than that. In fact, one of the cuts on this album, Cohn's Battle of the Saxes was originally titled For Cool Tenormen Only, but alas, 'cooler' heads prevailed and, thankfully, it was never released under that title.
Brew is often remembered for one of his more enduring images - standing on the stage, mouthpiece off to one side of his mouth and his body contorted with his neck twisted to such a degree that, to any normal human being, would bring much discomfort - if not outright pain.
Chuck is still firmly convinced that 'Brew could have stuck the mouthpiece in one ear and let the wind blow through the other, and he would have probably still sounded pretty good'.
(Brew and Lou Levy at the Tropics in SF. Click on photo to enlarge image)
Brew moved to San Francisco in the early '50s after a short stay in New York, having migrated there from his native Mississippi. It wasn't long before he became a fixture on the local jazz scene and he would appear frequently in many of the clubs mentioned earlier. One time in a radio interview, when he was asked the question, ' What brings you to San Francisco?', he replied, 'A 1939 Buick.' Chuck later learned that he had, indeed, bummed a ride to the West Coast with a couple of friends in their battered old car - a 1939 Buick, to be precise.
Chuck, no slouch himself as a reed player, recalled how they would jam with guys like Al Oberdinski, Tom Reynolds and Al Planck down at the old San Francisco Playboy Club, back in the days when Hugh Hefner's plush dens of iniquity were the big thing all across the country. He remembered how Ralph Sharon - later to become the leader of the trio that backed up Tony Bennett - was a regular 
entertainer there, as was bassist Ron Crotty, who at one time was part of the Dave Brubeck Quartet.
(Click on Photo Album to Identify players)
Chuck, with a wistful smile, told of how Brew was almost always broke - side musicians in those days weren't what anyone could ever describe as being 'overpaid' - and his wife - Chuck thinks that her name might have been Nancy, and she may not have really been his wife, but only a girlfriend, but then he never could be sure because Brew almost never talked about her - was ragging on him that she was tired of his always being broke and why didn't he go out and find a 'real' job that produced a regular paycheck. Here was a guy who had been a musician for all of his adult life and now he was being asked - told - to start thinking nine to five.
Chuck says that Brew, amazingly, did manage to find a job as a school custodian. But after about a week he decided that cleaning toilets was not what he wanted for his life's work, and so he quit.
Sundays were spent jamming at the Tropics, a little hole-in-the-wall jazz club out on Arguello and Geary. And whenever jazz notables happened to be in town, on hearing that Brew Moore was a 
regular at these sessions, would cruise by and sit in. Chuck remembered the time Milt Jackson showed up. The playing area for the musicians was so small and cramped that squeezing in a set of Milt's vibes would have been impossible, even if he'd had them, which, of course, he did not. So 'Bags' did the next best thing - he played piano. Not a grand piano, or even a baby grand. He sat down and played on a little beat up bar-room upright
(Photo: Brew Moore jams)
Chuck says he was in awe. He says Jackson played the piano as beautifully as he played his vibes. 'You haven't lived', he says, 'until you've played Bags' Groove with the 'man' himself. But with Brew, it was just another day at the office. After all, he, by this time, had already played with most of the jazz legends of his day, and without realizing it, was fast becoming one himself. But Chuck says that he (Chuck) was so nervous playing with Jackson that his knees would be shaking.
Brew was noted within his tight circle of friends for a pithy philosophy that was sometimes loaded with unintended sagacity and Yogi Berra-esque wit. He was being interviewed for a job and the interviewer asked him what kind of tunes did he play? 'I play long tunes and I play short tunes', he answered in his Mississippi drawl. There's no record of how the iterviewer responded to that.
Brew was an unabashed admirer of Lester Young, whose tenor style he had admittedly adopted, and he once remarked, ' If you don't play like Lester Young, you're wrong'. Swedish piano player Lars Sjosten told about the time they had gone to an apartment in Stockholm where the musicians would gather and enjoy a few beers after their gigs. It was very crowded and there was no place to sit, until one guy got up to go to the kitchen, whereupon Brew immediately plopped down in the vacated space. When the guy came back to reclaim his seat, Brew said, as if it were some kind of a written law, 'If you rise, you lose'. Lars said it sounded to everybody like 'a very important and familiar quotation' so no one raised a fuss.
In 1961 he was on the move again, this time to Denmark. At that time, American jazz was catching on big time in Europe, especially in Scandinavia, and it wasn't long before Brew was playing to big audiences with some of the brightest jazz stars outside the U.S. Among them were players like Lars Gullin, Nils Orsted Pedersen and Sahib Shibab. He organized and led a quartet that was comprised of Lars Sjosten, Sture Norden and Frank Noren, and they would frequently tour Scandinavia as well as other parts of Europe.
Brew's discography is comparatively short since he worked mainly as a sideman, preferring to let others suffer the slings and arrows that often came with band leadership. His last recording session took place in Copenhagen with his quartet, cutting the album that was titled, ironically, No More Brew. It was one of only three recording dates (all live) after 1962.
Chuck never saw him again. In 1972, Brew fell down a flight of stairs at the Tivoli in Copenhagen and broke his neck. He died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, only a week shy of his 49th birthday.
L.A.
Album: New York Swing Tributes Cole Porter
The Quartet opens with What is this Thing Called Love, originally written as a mournful ballad, but here becomes an upbeat vehicle for Pizzarelli to strut his stuff (which is considerable) on acoustic guitar and allows Bunch to show how strongly his style has been influenced by Teddy Wilson.
