June 24, 1977: Grover Washington Jr.

Catching up with the man who became the Father of Smooth Jazz on a visit home. 

June 24, 1977

Grover Grooves 

          There’s a front porch and a fence around the yard. There’s flowers and there’s kids and there’s a deli right on the corner. All in all, the little house on Glenwood Avenue looks like the coziest spot on Buffalo’s East Side. This is what jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. means when he talks about home.

          But once he gets home, can he relax? Not a chance. There’s friends and relatives who want to see him. There’s even a schedule of interviews. And that long-distance phone rings the same here as it does in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia.

          “My nerves are like this,” he says, holding out a jittery hand a few hours before his first appearance in Kleinhans Music Hall earlier this month. “That’s ‘cause it’s home. I’m going to be playing in front of all the people who know me.”

          He hasn’t forgotten the folks back home. Not by any means. They gave him encouragement in his long struggle before his career took off with “Inner City Blues” seven years ago.

          The gold album award for the record that put him into the big time, “Mister Magic,” hangs on his parents’ living room wall. That was the album that started the ‘70s phenomenon of jazz artists reaching over to the pop audience. Since then, each of his albums in succession has topped the jazz sales charts.

          “I have to constantly put pressure on myself not to be complacent,” he says. “As far as I’m concerned, there is no ‘top.’ Only if you buy a house with two stories can you down on stuff.”

          Washington’s career began at home. His boyhood memories are full of music and his father’s musician friends.

          Grover Washington Sr. was a saxophonist (“I have his C-melody sax in Philadelphia,” he says) and had a collection of 78 rpm records that turned his oldest onto classical music and jazz at an early age.

          Beginning when he was eight, he learned many instruments – piano, organ, bass, drums, saxophone. At the urging of his teachers, he was in choral and instrumental groups at Hutch Tech and East High Schools and played in the All-High Band.

          He’d also sneak in to hear the groups at the Pine Grill (“The guy let me sneak in because I was going to school with his son,” he says.) and he’d go down to C. Q. Price’s big band rehearsals in the Colored Musicians Club on Broadway.

          He recalls his teachers – Norman Vester at Hutch, Carroll Geiger at East, UB’s Elvin Shepherd, who gave him private lessons, and Herman Fisher, who used to play the Expressway Lounge.

          “He was the one horn player in the city who could play his --- off and didn’t leave,” Washington says. “He’s also one of the people who took time to answer questions for me. So it’s not just my success alone. It’s the whole city’s.”

          Washington’s parents gave him their blessings when, at 16, he went on the road with a group called the Four Clefs. Bandmate James Clark, now with the Buffalo Jazz Ensemble, served as his mentor as he got his first taste of the traveling musician’s life.

          The Clefs toured Ohio and Indiana and Washington settled briefly in Mansfield, Ohio, until 1965, when he got drafted. Trained as a radio operator at Fort Dix, N.J., he was on a list to go to Vietnam when his orders were changed at the last minute by an officer who had heard him playing service clubs.

          He spent the rest of his hitch in the 19 th Army Band, zipping off to play dates in Philadelphia and New York City. When he was released, he moved to Philly.

          “Philly’s a nice place,” he says. “It’s the only place I’d live other than here.”

          He began working as a sideman on recording sessions in New Jersey for a variety of Prestige Records jazz artists – Charles Earland, Boogaloo Joe Jones, Melvin Sparks, Leon Spencer and Johnny “Hammond” Smith.

          His break came when he was called to do the horn arrangements for a Hank Crawford album in 1970.

          “Hank wasn’t there,” Washington recalls, “and he didn’t show up all day. Later we found he was arrested on a two-year-old driving charge and couldn’t come back to do the session. So they had me do it. I didn’t even have an alto. I did it on a rented alto.”

          That was “Inner City Blues.” When it came out, Washington was still working a day job at a record wholesaler. It surprised everyone, including him, by becoming a hit.

          “I’d keep getting reports from the record company,” he says. “They’d say things like: ‘L.A. said they sold 10,000 copies today.’ So I said to myself I might as well get a group together. I knew it meant a lot of headaches, but I felt I really ought to try it.”

          His band – Locksmith – has expanded from four to seven over the years. He’s the only horn player. There’s two percussionists, a guitarist and bassist and two keyboardmen, one of whom switches to violin. Washington feels it allows him a full range of expression.

          “I handpicked them first for their attitude for the music,” he says. “You can always get the chops, but if you don’t have the attitude, you can’t fit in.”

          The same deliberate care goes into his albums. He still records with engineer Rudy Van Gelder in Englewood Cliffs, N.J. (“the best engineer in the business, as far as I’m concerned”), and gets together with producer Bob James to choose from among 30 and 40 possible selections a month before he goes into the studio.

          “We figure out what we can do different with them,” he says. “It’s a real partnership between Bob and myself.”

          “Last winter’s “A Secret Place” was his sixth album and he’s just recorded his seventh – a live one which includes his first recorded vocals. It may or may not be a double-record set.

          “It may be too long for one record,” he says, “and I’m opposed to cutting tunes. You don’t ask an artist to cut the middle out of his painting.”

          For now, Washington tours weekends and spends the week in Philadelphia. He headlined the Berkeley, Calif., Jazz Festival and has done numerous benefit shows and high school workshops for the Settlement Music School, which gives free music lessons to Philadelphians who can’t afford them.

          For this, he was commended by the city’s mayor this spring. Last year he received the NAACP’s Image Award as Jazz Artist of the Year.

          Through all this, Washington remains modest and a bit of a worrier. His life centers on his own home now – his attractive wife Christine, his nine-year-old son Grover III and his 20-month-old daughter Shana.

          And his worries center on the future. His recording contract expires next year and already the offers are coming in thick and furious.

          “Making the fast buck isn’t everything to me,” he says. “I want to give something. Would I come back to Buffalo to live now? No, I don’t think so. But as for doing things for the people here, for programs, yeah!”

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IN THE PHOTO: Detail of Grover Washington Jr. mural by Buffalo artist Edreys Wajed.

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FOOTNOTE: That live album was indeed a double-disc record, “Live at the Bijou.” Recorded in Philadelphia less than a month before his Buffalo date, it was Grover’s last album released on Creed Taylor’s Kudu label. Personnel included guitarist Richard Steacker, violinist John Blake, bassist Tyrone Brown, keyboardist James Simmons, flutist Leslie Burns, drummer Millard Vinson and percussionist Leonard Gibbs. Songwriting credits go to several members of his band.

He went on to Motown, Elektra and Columbia Records and had a remarkable string of hit albums that stretched into the 1990s. His collaboration with singer Bill Withers on the hit, “Just the Two of Us,” boosted his “Winelight” album to platinum status and won a pair of Grammy Awards.

          Along the way, he fostered other artists such as Najee and, remarkably, Kenny G. The Buffalo Music Hall of Fame inducted him in 1998 and on Dec. 17, 1999, after taping four songs for “The Early Show” at CBS Studios in New York City, he was in the green room when suffered a massive heart attack. A performing arts middle school in Philadelphia is named after him and his image appears in a mural by Buffalo artist Edreys Wajed on the Kensington branch of M&T Bank at 3037 Bailey Ave.    

          His son Grover III is a sound engineer and a Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer. His daughter Shana runs the website grovernowinc.com, which is dedicated to his legacy.