Just getting hold of the book about Warne Marsh was episodic.
Copies of his book “An Unsung Cat: The Life and Music of Warne Marsh” by Safford Chamberlain sell for $80 and up on eBay and Amazon — if you can find it. My interlibrary loan request snagged me a copy— the book came to Seaside, Oregon, from the Evansville, Indiana, University Library.
My road to Warne Marsh comes to me from loose connections from the Lennie Tristano school.
Tristano was a college of learning for the hundreds of students who passed through his doors and those of his disciples, of whom tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh, along with his alto saxophone cohort Lee Konitz, are the most well known.
When I was living in NYC in the ’80s upstairs a woman named Alex Damien — a stage name for Roslyn Pribulski — enlightened me to Sal Mosca, a pianist living in Yonkers. An actress, she worked as a waitress at the Yonkers Raceway. A formidable woman — mid-60s, short but wide, buxom, huggy, cat-loving, creative, a real (non-religious) Jewish mama-slash-artiste. I lived on the third floor; she lived on the fifth. I often ended up toting her bags the final two floors on her way upstairs.
If it was tough going on the stairs of our walk-up, it wasn’t easy for Alex to walk from 46th Street and Ninth Avenue crosstown to Grand Central to catch the train for her weekly pilgrimage via Metro-North to Mount Vernon for a piano lesson. I remember my amazement when she plunged through on the heels of a 1978 snowstorm.
There were no holidays when it came time for a lesson. I got the feeling if she didn’t show, she would be allowed to show the following week.
The Tristano Method
Characteristics of the Tristano method started with the concept of singing the notes, vocalizing before improvising.
Chamberlain describes how students would learn to identify keys and “to play everything in every major and minor key.”
Rhythmic complexity and harmonic and melodic development were key elements of the pedagogy, with a “self-conscious insistence on jazz as a fine art, the strong classical influence, the purist attitude toward commercial music, the Freudian orientation, the cultist atmosphere.”
The Tristano method from the 1950s, Chamberlain writes in “An Unsung Cat,” was more intimate than many student-teacher relationships.
By introducing psychoanalytic concepts into his teaching and by playing the role of guru and father figure, Tristano “created a cult-like atmosphere, attracting some and repelling others.
Chamberlain describes how students would adopt Tristano’s “whispering” style of talking, his preference for black coffee, his way of holding his coffee cup, even his way of sitting.
The repertoire was limited to what were already “corny” standards: 1940s chartbusters like “Out of Nowhere,” “It’s You or No One” and “All the Things You Are” among the typical springboards for improvisation.
Years later, my son’s music teacher, the record producer Dan Fiore, extolled the Tristano/Mosca method, much to Sam’s 8-year-old frustration at suddenly diving head-first into the deep end of musical aesthetics. Fiore nudged Sam into “The Preacher,” by Horace Silver, and “Honeysuckle Rose.” They were decent first choices but Sam craved more variety.
Fiore later archived and produced works from Mosca and his circle, with an invaluable catalog of treasures from the Greenwich, Connecticut-based Zinnia Records.
Whether the Tristano method is the dharma of music is debatable. It’s certainly one of the paths that great musicians take on the way to comprehensive study and performance skills.
Singing solos, a focus on melody, polyrhythmic studies, a selective, limited repertoire and all-key practice are common in many learning methods.
There were some who thought it was cultish but for those who embraced it, it was a calling.
Founding Father
In the canon of Lennie, Warne Marsh was the Founding Father of tenor saxophone.
His father was a famous Hollywood cameraman, his mother a studio musician, his aunt Mae one of the original silent screen starlets.
Warne grew up in Los Angeles in the 1940s when the city was buzzing with great jazz men of all backgrounds, from Dexter Gordon to Eric Dolphy. Described as a loner, he made his name playing with Tristano, alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, Shelly Manne, Hampton Hawes and others. A phenomenal reader, Marsh’s technical virtuosity later led him to his most commercial venture as a member of the Charlie Parker tribute band “Supersax.”
But that was uncharacteristic of a musician and teacher who lived most of his life on the down low.
Marsh studied with Tristano for eight years, during which time he avoided commercial work, recorded little, received a minimum of press or rarely performed without members of his Tristano or his circle.
“Whatever Lennie said, Warne would agree with it,” Chamberlain quotes a musical colleague. “Whatever Lennie says goes.”
Like others in the Tristano school, Marsh held a “deep antipathy” to commercial music and club dates. With that came a resentment to club owners, business managers and publicists. He disliked recording studios. Much of his best work was never recorded.
Yet his work, propelled by his albums with Lee Konitz and Tristano in the 1950s, “had gained the respect of discriminating fans, critics and fellow musicians, including Charlie Parker himself.
Marsh, described by Bill Hardy and Bob Blumenthal in their liner notes to Marsh’s albums for Verve, “is seldom obvious in his approach to the chord; his solos are without cliche.”
Marsh piled “phrase upon permutation upon tangent in a stream of melodic creation ... creates long ribbons of improvisation, in which each phrase simultaneously responds to its predecessor and anticipates a further response. Ideas are taken into different keys, beats are displaced and entire accent patterns are reversed; musical matter is spawned from continually dividing melodic cells.”
Downbeat described him in 1977 as “a titan,” one of the master truly original musicians in jazz, “a rare breed, a player who never coasts but tests and challenges himself.”
Regarding one of his solos, the late, great jazz historian Phil Schaap wrote: “In 16 stunning bars, he shows the energy of jazz and the creativity of a major improviser.”
The biographer’s craft
The author of “Unsung Cat,” Safford Chamberlain received his bachelor of arts degree from Pomona College in 1950 and his masters from Cornell University in 1954. From 1955 to 1989 he taught English, mostly at East Los Angeles College, interspersed with roles as literature and drama program director at KPFK-FM, a Pacifica radio station.
After retiring from teaching in 1989, he devoted himself to music and writing.
Chamberlain’s biography provides the roots of this drama, or this genre, with its own outsized personalities and musical treasures. His musical examples, transcriptions, discography and notes are a model of this genre. As a former student of Marsh, his personal anecdotes and insights into Marsh’s unique personality, complex racial commentary and habits.
‘He had what some, including his wife Geraldyne, called a “cruel streak,” at least some of which Chamberlain attributes to Marsh’s use of pharmaceuticals, marijuana and cocaine.
The telling of Marsh’s tragic death after collapsing at the jazz club Donte’s is harrowing. To me it ranks with the best of jazz bios, ones that get under the skin: Mingus’s “Beneath the Underdog,” Art Pepper’s “Straight Life” and Donald Maggin’s “Stan Getz: A Life in Jazz.” It places a definite inflection point on the axis of jazz history, with a broad semicircle encompassing the area of music, history, culture and personality.
You feel you get to know the man.
As a result of the publication of Chamberlain’s book, another Marsh student, John Klopotowski was inspired to document the details of his studies with Marsh in his own memoir, “A Jazz Life,” published in 2015.
Author Marcus Cornelius was inspired by Marsh and his life to publish his own fictional narrative, “Out of Nowhere: The Musical Life of Warne Marsh.”
And in the same way I had, researching aspects of the Tristano school, journalist Doug Ramsey unshelved Chamberlain’s biography of Marsh for the first time in years. “I was impressed all over again by Chamberlain’s research, the quality of his writing and his balanced treatment of an uncompromising and compelling tenor saxophonist who could be as difficult as he was brilliant,” Ramsey writes on his Rifftides newsletter.
Lewis Porter, professor of music and director of the masters program in jazz history at Rutgers University, edited “An Unsung Cat.”
Porter is recognized, as many editors often are, in the acknowledgments. But he was impressed by the wording.
“I really like the way he thanked me,” Porter said in June. “something like, ‘For unknown reasons, Lewis believed in me from the very beginning.’"
Chamberlain died “maybe eight years ago at the age of 94,” Porter said. “I agree, he did an excellent job and I could just tell that he would—which is why I believed in him.”