Aug. 19, 1977 feature: Jazz band leader Emil Palame

 

If the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame is looking for another candidate to induct, this man is available. 

Aug. 19, 1977

Big Band: Young Upstart 

          Big jazz bands have gotten almost as rare as Stanley Steamers. The ones that survived the bop era and the rock ‘n roll deluge are mostly shepherded by senior citizens like Count Baise and Stan Kenton and Lionel Hampton. When a new one shows up – like the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band a couple years back – it’s welcomed like one of those Japanese infantrymen who didn’t know the war was over.

          There’s one place, however, that the big-band spirit still flourishes. That’s in the schools. Any high school or college with a serious music department is more than likely to have rounded up its most adventurous players and put them in an ensemble much like the old big bands. Stage bands, they’re called.

          Normally, stage bands stay safely ensconced in the groves of academe. But this summer one of them has broken loose, giving Buffalonians a taste of a sound that combines old big-band punch with modern rhythmic power.

          The Emil Palame Big Band, which is now branching out from its original forum in the Tralfamadore Café, is essentially this year’s award-winning Fredonia State University College Jazz Ensemble, the group that walked off with composition and arrangement prizes at the 1977 Intercollegiate Jazz Festival at Notre Dame University. Palame himself was judged outstanding pianist.

          “The first tune was my arrangement of ‘Boogie On, Reggae Woman,’” Palame recalls in his parents’ home just north of the city, “and we got a standing ovation for it. There were 4,000 people there. I just went: ‘Oh my God.’”

          Palame’s 23 and he’s led the Fredonia Jazz Ensemble for three years. Graduation in 1976 didn’t stop him. He continued on as part of a project for his master’s degree. There’s too many other things he wants to try with the band.

          The weekend sees the 16-man aggregation finish a series of Fridays and Saturdays at Starvin’ Marvin’s on Grand Island. Sunday they play Clarence Town Park. And Tuesday they begin their most important engagement of the summer – a week at Eduardo’s on Bailey Avenue.

          Beyond that, the band opens for Stanley Turrentine Sept. 10 in the Artpark Jazz Festival. And later in September, Jensen Publishing Co. is releasing a series of arrangements Palame penned for high school bands.

          “Right now,” Palame says, “I don’t even look at these gigs as gigs. What we’re doing right now is promotion. We’re still booking for union scale. I’m hoping to get a name around Buffalo and Rochester and then I’d like to tour. My brother Sam and I are getting up gigs.”

          Palame’s send-off this summer began with the release of an album he’d recorded with the big band last year. It’s called “Make Room” and George Beck, deejay at WADV-FM, has followed up his enthusiastic liner notes by championing Palame at every opportunity.

          “Vince Morette produced the record,” Palame says. “He’s the owner of Mark Recording Studios and he did the 1975 Fredonia Jazz Ensemble record. He was into what I was doing at the time and said he’d be interested in producing.

          “I came back in a year with the arrangements. The band was rehearsed and ready, but we had so many problems getting the guys in. Dick Griffo was on the road with Tommy Dorsey at the time. Two days before the end of school we got them all together and recorded it in one day. Four of the tunes are first takes. That’s why the band is so much better now than the band on the record. I know if I do an album now, it’s really going to make it.”

          Palame says he got into Fredonia State’s music school “by the skin of my teeth.” His background wasn’t exactly extensive. He’d had one year of piano lessons. Before that he’d played rock – he was a singer – and then coffeehouse acoustic and wedding gigs while he was at Bishop Neumann High School.

          “I was heavy into Hendrix and Cream,” he recalls. “Then it was soul music – Sam and Dave, and the Temptations. We were playing high school dances right at the time the Road was big around here. Then I did some different things. I took some classical and that gave me reading. Before that, I played by ear. When I got to college, I didn’t even know who Miles Davis was.”

          Fredonia had two jazz ensembles, the second one being for players who didn’t make the first one. Palame, overawed by the musical talent he saw all around him, got into the second band on a combination of luck and hard work.

          “After two weeks,” he relates, “the guy in the first band quit – he’d misjudged his schedule, you know – so the second band’s pianist moved up. I took all the music and practiced my brains out and I watched myself pull ahead. I’ve always been highly motivated to learn and try things over my head.”

          As a freshman, he also wrote his first arrangements and decided he wanted to lead a band. He ran the second band his sophomore year and took over the first band the following year.

          “I did what I thought would sound good,” he explains. “When I had to put the band together, I always felt I didn’t know what was going on. I was always trying to get my head above water. I always wrote things I couldn’t play. I was constantly challenging myself.”

          Palame wasn’t the only one who felt challenged by the arrangements. His musicians had quite a time with his charts too.

          “For a while,” he says, “the guys would tell me, ‘What are you, crazy? I can’t play that.’ But they got acclimated and people got more involved. The guys have to woodshed their parts like mad because the parts are very, very demanding. You hear it and you know they have to work at what they did to get it to sound like that.”

          Palame’s also altered the traditional big band set-up. Instead of having his men in tiers, he sets them up in blocks extending from either side of his Fender Rhodes piano, bassist Mike Hall and drummer Bob Leatherbarrow. The saxes and the brass play one wall of sound off the other.

          All are Fredonia musicians except trumpeters Howie Shear and Greg Mlacker and saxophonist Bob Sheppard, who attended Eastman School of Music in Rochester. Lead trumpeter Shear, who was a Fredonia undergrad, joins Sheppard, Palame and the rhythm section in a spinoff quintet Mondays and Tuesdays at O’Brien’s Butcher Shop in the Rochester suburb of Henrietta.

          September will see second trumpet Brian Lewis go back to lead a new Fredonia Jazz Ensemble. Palame, with brother Sam handling business, will size up what look like unlimited opportunities. One thing is out, though. He wouldn’t give up the band to take an arranging job.

          “I’m really a player,” he says. “I like to be involved in performing. I’ve been talking with record companies and when they hear ‘big band’ they go: ‘No, man, that’s out.’ The thing is that most of the big bandleaders are like 65, 68 years old. They’ve got their roots in older music. I know that a big band can sound different.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Emil Palame at work with his band.

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FOOTNOTE: These days he’s Emilio Palame, not Emil, and he’s gone far – all the way to Los Angeles and a stellar career as a pianist, composer and arranger. He did 11 years as accompanist and bandleader with singer Peggy Lee, has performed with Etta James, Andy Williams, Paul Williams, Grant Geissman and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and was co-composer for all 110 episodes of “Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide” on Nickelodeon.

          In the past 10 years, he’s turned to the screen as an actor in television and movies, leading up to “Knights of Swing,” a film about student jazz musicians in the 1940s. He co-wrote and directed it, composed and arranged all the music and appears as the high school principal. It’s won awards at film festivals in Europe, is available on Tubi and Vimeo on Demand and coming soon to Amazon Prime and AppleTV.

          The film finds him working again with Bob Leatherbarrow, who went to L.A. in 1978 and whose name is more familiar than Emilio’s. A Buffalo native and Berklee College of Music alum, he too had a stint with Peggy Lee as a vibes player and is much in demand for studio sessions.

Bob’s recorded with Bette Midler, Dolly Parton, Placido Domingo and Leonard Cohen, among others, and played with Joe Farrell, Horace Silver, Doc Severinsen, Natalie Cole and for more than 25 years with Ernie Watts’ Quartet. He’s been on dozens of TV soundtracks and that’s his snare drum in the fanfare that starts every 20th Century Fox movie. He’s already in the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame. Inducted in 2021.