Blowing Our Own Saxophone: Fort Worth’s Jazz Legacy

“Fort Worth has produced more avant-garde jazz saxophonists than any city in the world except Chicago. Why that is, I can’t really explain.”

by Michael H. Price

February 6, 2024

10:29 AM

Crystal Wise

It comes invariably as a surprise, the way this burg’s jazz scene springs back to life, time after time and then some, from the brink of extinction. Shut down one wellhead of the music, and two new fonts of practical inspiration burst loose and start pouring.

So it seems, anyhow. And so far, so good. Take nothing for granted.

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Tex Beneke

The element of surprise, after all, is a necessary component, as argued by The New Yorker’s resident jazz critic of the last century, Whitney Balliett. Balliett called jazz “the sound of surprise,” considering its stealth and abrupt pounces. Because jazz is by nature improvisational, its very players are often the most surprised of all.

The persistence and prevalence of Cowtown-style jazz (with its roots in blues and its offshoots into rock) is such that the New York-based rock-and-roll innovators Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller often credited their breakthroughs to a saxophonist from Fort Worth: King Curtis Ousley, the originator of rock’s essential “yackety sax” style.

And Ousley, in turn, would trace his high station to a persistent collaboration with a school-days pal from Fort Worth: guitarist Cornell Dupree. One perennial example of their composite genius has outlived all concerned: That would be Dupree’s rousing guitar introduction to Ousley’s arrangement of Aretha Franklin’s recording of “Respect” — a 1967 hit that transformed the he-man naïvete of Otis Redding’s original lyric into a timeless manifesto of human rights. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T,” indeed.

Jazz is where one finds it. And no sooner has one got it all figured out when jazz sneaks in from another direction to spring another surprise.

“I don’t think we celebrate the richness of Fort Worth’s jazz heritage as thoroughly as we should,” says Tom Martens, director of the Fort Worth Music Office, a companion agency of Visit Fort Worth and the Fort Worth Film Commission. “The scene today is not as robust as it could be, but it persists in such progressive outposts as the Paschal High School jazz-studies program [among others], in the few wholly dedicated public-gathering venues, and in the prevalence of history-conscious, genre-blending performing ensembles.” The range varies from the progressive ensemble 3 if by Sea to the traditionally rooted Bucket List Jazz Band.

“Add to that a vibrant hip-hop [music-making] community that is heavily influenced by jazz,” adds Martens, “and the strengths are obviously here.”

A newer outcropping is Pinky’s Champagne Room & Velvet Jazz Lounge, 615 S. Jennings Ave., whose listening-room playbill includes such recurring popular favorites as the Johnny Case Trio and the Andres Skates Trio. The tenured standby venues, meanwhile, are Gracey Tune’s nonprofit jazz-and-tapdance emporium, Arts Fifth Avenue, Fifth at Allen in the Fairmount district; and downtown’s Scat Jazz Lounge, 111 W. Fourth — both dating from the early years of the 21st century.

Arts Fifth Avenue can boast such perennials as a Django Reinhart Festival, honoring the legacy of a pioneering French guitarist; and percussionist Duane Durrett’s recurring James Clay Tribute, named after the influential North Texas jazzman. Pianist-bandleader Joe Rogers graces both the Scat Jazz Lounge and Arts Fifth Avenue. The Scat’s Ricki Derek emphasizes a pop-jazz identity, with his own Las Vegas-styled presentations and an overall dedication to local artists capable of achieving what he calls “that strange and necessary balance between artistry and commercial appeal.”

Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collect

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Ornette Coleman and the Prime Time ensemble play at Caravan of Dreams, Fort Worth, 10/02/1983 [FWST photographer Jerry Hoefer]

Such are the city’s primary pure-jazz listening rooms. Additional venues deal in jazz to varying extents. British journalist Matt Fripp devotes a page of his international website, Jazz Fuel (jazzfuel.com), to a broader range of such clubs in North Texas.

“Even the Caravan of Dreams identity seems to be resurgent,” says Martens, citing a new Sundance Square gallery bearing that historic name. The original Caravan had held forth from 1983 into 2001. Its Houston Street showplace served originally as a homecoming gesture to Fort Worth-born saxophonist Ornette Coleman and his touring associates in experimental jazz and poetry.

Caravan also nurtured local talents while settling over the longer stretch into a more commercialized groove, less artistically certain. The Caravan’s closing coincided approximately with the opening of Arts Fifth Avenue and, then presently, with the arrival of Scat Jazz Lounge.

Standard-bearers all along have been the jazz-studies programs of Tarrant County College, TCU, Weatherford College, and Texas Wesleyan University — all of which can boast career-bound graduates. All such disciplines owe their inspiration to Fort Worth’s I.M. Terrell High School of the last century. In a once-segregated society, Terrell transformed its so-called “separate but equal” status into an academic jazz program that yielded legions of name-brand performing artists. And more about that in a moment.

Fort Worth Star-Telegram Collect

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Cornell Dupre with guitar and pipe at Caravan of Dreams, Fort Worth, 09/05/1986 [FWST photographer Joe Giron]

Jazz as a Local Phenomenon

“Jazz wouldn’t be jazz as we know it today, if not for Fort Worth and its music-making emissaries.” That sweeping assertion comes from Thomas B. Reynolds, a hometown guitarist of international prominence.

Reynolds adds: “Most musicians in Fort Worth, whether they play primarily blues, rock, jazz, country, or whatever, are very open and liberally borrow from one another. The absence of musical bigotry is comparable with that of New Orleans.”

Yes, and New Orleans may own prior claim on jazz in 19th-century historical terms, but Fort Worth caught up with Louisiana’s Crescent City in short order with a breakthrough ragtime composition of 1915, “Twelfth Street Rag,” by the South Side pianist Euday Bowman — recorded by hundreds of mass-market artists from coast to coast and back again.

Jazz and its root-form, the blues, are music-making idioms of defiant social-protest origins and erotic connotations. These qualities are so symbolic of New Orleans that the visual impact there can be distilled to a single image — such as the face of the trumpeter-vocalist Louis Armstrong — and still convey the meaning. Other jazz-defined locales and eras have their signature artists, such as Kansas City (Count Basie), New York’s Harlem district (Duke Ellington), Paris (Django Reinhardt), and even Germany’s long-gone Weimar Republic (the Weintraub Syncopators, banished in 1935 by the jazz-busting Nazi regime).

Crystal Wise

The historic face of Fort Worth jazz is less readily boiled to an essence: Would that face belong to the free-form saxophone innovator Ornette Coleman? Perhaps the pressure-cooker saxophonist King Curtis Ousley, who set the jazz bar high for both rock ’n’ roll and the soul-music phenomenon of the 1960s? Maybe saxman Gordon “Tex” Beneke, a dominant presence in big-band pop-jazz with the 1940s Glenn Miller Orchestra? Or how about the bandleaders Bob Wills and Milton Brown, whose Depression-era fusions of down-home country music and blues-into-jazz gave rise to the idiom called Western Swing?

“Many musicians from Fort Worth, in all genres and idioms of music, have gone into the world at large and become famous,” as Tom Reynolds writes in our collaborative book, Fort Worth Jazz from the Top. “Since its earliest days, Fort Worth has offered an incredibly varied environment for music — a musical chili composed of almost equal parts blues, country, Tejano, swing, and jazz.”

Fort Worth first put its unique stamp on jazz with the pianist Euday Bowman, who developed a particular interest in the syncopated idiom called Ragtime, itself an invention of East Texas. A separate idiom, Western Swing, started late in the 1920s at a countrified house party in Fort Worth: Fiddler Bob Wills welcomed a garrulous guest, Milton Brown, as a sit-in singer. Brown called for W.C. Handy’s “The Saint Louis Blues” (not usually associated with country music), and the resulting fusion would spread from barn-dance fiddling to the addition of Dixieland-style piano, electrified guitars, and horn ensembles.

The Depression-into-wartime era of Big Band Swing was born as ragtime faded. Saxophonist Gordon “Tex” Beneke, from Fort Worth’s Paschal High School, came to the attention of the popular bandleader Glenn Miller. Beneke walked into an audition and said, “Howdy, boys! I’m sure glad to be here!” Miller, impressed by the drawl, immediately started addressing Beneke as “Tex.”

The Glenn Miller Orchestra became the most famous of Big Band ensembles, in great measure because of Beneke’s affable nature and versatile musicianship. Songs like “Chattanooga Choo–Choo,” featuring Beneke as vocalist, also contributed to the band’s popularity. After Miller’s death during World War II, Beneke headed the Glenn Miller Orchestra until he left to form his own outfit. Another Fort Worth native, drummer Ray McKinley, took charge of the Miller Orchestra. Yet another, Clyde Hurley, a Paschal graduate, played trumpet in the Miller Orchestra.

Crystal Wise

The Terrell High School Connection

Fort Worth’s I.M. Terrell High School holds pride-of-place in progressive music-making programs, more practical than theoretical. Terrell trained many artists who would achieve international prominence. They include such gold-standard figures as saxman King Curtis Ousley, who helped to define rock ’n’ roll with the Coasters during the 1950s, and whose Kingpins ensemble (based in New York) provided accompaniment for Aretha Franklin during the 1960s and beyond; Cornell Dupree, the signature guitarist with King Curtis & the

Kingpins and all-round session man with Atlantic Records; Ornette Coleman, the great free-jazz innovator; and the varied likes of Dewey Redman, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Ray Sharpe, John Carter, Prince Lasha, Julius Hemphill, Billy Robinson, and Thomas Reese.

They emerged from the late 1940s through the 1960s, a small army of African American jazz-blues musicians whose most apparent common trait was that they came out of Terrell High School. A definitive job of research on the Terrell scene was performed during the 1990s by the career journalist Christopher Evans. His findings are excerpted here.

There were dozens, if not more — uniquely trained young musicians, mostly men, all either born or weaned musically here, specifically in a six-block area whose vortex was the intersection of Rosedale Street and Evans Avenue on the city’s Short Southeast side.

Most who realized big-time dreams were saxophonists — King Curtis Ousley, Ornette Coleman, John Carter, Dewey Redman, Jeep Smith, Julius Hemphill, and Prince Lasha. But others, such as jazz patriarch Charles Moffett and percussionist-turned-bandleader Ronald Shannon Jackson, known as “Roundhouse” in his Terrell days, also hit it big.

That they one day might be lumped together as a Fort Worth School of Jazzmen seemed a flight of imagination in the late 1950s. Why Fort Worth produced such a roster of great players, each influenced by others in the group yet developing personalized styles, is a question for perpetual debate.

Why so many from this period headed straightaway into the most intense (but least popular) forms of jazz — the experimental, or avant-garde, edge — is another quandary. Coleman and Redman have pointed to a musical environment that reached outward from the Rosedale-Evans intersection. The influences included church music, all-Black schools, private tutelage, and other performing venues such as the Black-owned Jim Hotel downtown and white-owned clubs where Black music was in demand, but Black customers were not welcome.

The jazz-and-blues styles associated with Fort Worth came from a fecund music environment that suffered from the segregational rules of the time and flourished in spite of segregation. Although it doesn’t make sense in hindsight, Black musicians were allowed, within surreal but confining boundaries, to step inside the white world, play their music, and leave quietly.

Consider blues singer Robert Ealey’s dual-identity crisis of the 1980s — an empire all his own at the Como district’s New Bluebird Nite Club, coupled in contrast with his chronic welcome as a hired-gun entertainer at the Ridglea Country Club. Worlds apart, though within a few minutes’ drive of one another. Ealey, an instinctive integrationist who had welcomed white musicians into his bands as early as 1969, also took pains to make the Bluebird attractive to white customers, defying a prevailing imperative of the day to “keep Como Black,” as Viola Pitts, long the unofficial mayor of Como, often declared. The white-owned establishments across the Camp Bowie divide were not so reciprocally minded.

Ornette Coleman

That Was Then, and This Is Some Other Time

Midway through the last century, adventurous white clubgoers were left to “go slumming,” as the practice was called, and sneak into all-Black venues, such as the Jim Hotel downtown, for wee-hours jam sessions, the better to hear the genuine article. What happened in terms of Black-white crossover music — mainly, in terms of white musicians trying to absorb instrumental techniques from Blacks — was similar to the escalation in bootlegging that had resulted from Prohibition: People on both sides wanted what the rules of segregation forbade.

So rampant were the crossover tendencies that there are reports that jazz immortal Charlie Parker once jammed with Bob Wills’ Texas Playboys — not an illogical possibility, given the convergence of music forms in the midcentury. Fort Worth’s Ornette Coleman once recalled making music around 1948 with white steel guitarist Billy Briggs at Amarillo’s Black-operated La Joya Hotel, which kept later hours than Briggs’s white-folks honky-tonk scene.

King Curtis

If Dallas had its original Deep Ellum district, Fort Worth had its own jazz cauldrons. As Fort Worth-bred guitarist/historian T. Sumter Bruton, III (1944-2022) often stated, “Fort Worth has produced more avant-garde jazz saxophonists than any city in the world except Chicago. Why that is, I can’t really explain, but it must derive from the influence of Terrell High School.”

The 1930s-1950s were a period when music was not so over-classified as it is today. “I think it’s important to remember that people who were around at the time still think of players like Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, and Julius Hemphill as blues players, not jazz,” Fort Worth jazz historian Gregory Harris told Chris Evans in 1993. “Even though Ornette, especially, has become known as avant-garde for his innovations, he’s still considered a Texas blues musician. He still has that Texas blues-sax quality that all these guys had.”

Then, too, whatever the nature of the music they made, a key part of the environment was a cornucopia of small taverns and listening rooms near the Rosedale-Evans junction, among them such fabled rooms as the China Doll, the Aristocrat Inn, the Zebra Lounge, the Paradise Inn, and Billy’s Bar.

“The bars where they played were everywhere down here,” said career educator Marjorie Crenshaw (1927-2019), founding president of the Fort Worth Jazz Society and widow of the trumpeter Willie Newton Crenshaw. “[The East Rosedale site that became] Mrs. Drake’s Cafeteria, now, that was the Zanzibar, which had a roof that would roll back so you could sit under the stars. There was the Chili Bowl at Evans and Humbolt, [and so forth]. And every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday they’d all be full.”

As to the larger venues, such as the cavernous Recreation Building on East Vickery Boulevard, Crenshaw recalled: “Your big Black groups — Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Clark Terry — would play at the Recreation Building. There also were local orchestras such as Sonny Strain & His Sultans of Swing, which employed only the best local players. But it didn’t take a building — or a band — to inspire jazz in Fort Worth.”

“Thing was, you didn’t have to have a [paying] gig to play,” recalled jazzman Dewey Redman (1931-2006), while revisiting the memory-laden Rosedale-at-Evans landmark in 1993. “I remember seeing Julius Hemphill playing ..., right on this corner. Around here, there was always a place to play, even if it was the streetcorner.”

Basil Clemons Photograph Collect

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Madam Rainey's Jazz Hounds, Breckenridge, Texas, 1922

The Crenshaw Connection

Part of the Fort Worth phenomenon, too, is that the musicians who gained international recognition had predecessors locally. The saxophonist Eugene Burnett, for example, was a mentor to children of the 1930s. As Marjorie Crenshaw would explain: “And there were many, many others, including the private music teachers, the church-music people, the parents who put such a great emphasis on music and practice and study. By the time the kids got to Terrell, they knew not only the fundamentals of reading music and some classical music, but also all the [John Philip] Sousa marches. Discipline was the key.”

While some of the great local players made it big in jazz or blues or rhythm-and-blues, some — despite incredible talents — did not. One was a wispy tenor-sax player named Red Connor, whom jazz legend Ornette Coleman likened to jazz innovator Charlie “Bird” Parker. Another was a 500-pound tornado of a saxman named Fronzelle Littlefield, who grew up on East Tucker Street and wowed local audiences with his playing in the 1960s.

Famous or not, all such players mattered in the view of Marjorie Crenshaw, who nurtured homegrown jazz careers to the end of her life. As the matriarch of jazz in Fort Worth, Crenshaw devoted her life to assuring the city of a constancy of purpose in its musical stewardship. Her successor on the board of the American Federation of Musicians, Local No. 72-147, would be a prominent protègé, the saxophonist and composer Rachella Parks-Washington.

Just like we were saying, there, about jazz as a self-renewing phenomenon.

All That (Fort Worth) Jazz Playlist

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