August Features
Continued: Hawley Ades
According to Hawley, the stand-out in the Henderson band was Coleman Hawkins, who "just seemed overpowering." Hawley was less impressed with trumpeter Rex Stewart, "who mostly spit out a lot of fairly meaningless high notes." One night at Roseland, Hawley got a chance to sit in for a set with the Fletcher Henderson band, when Henderson took a break to do something else. There could not have been too many white pianists sitting in with a black band in those days.
Other bands Hawley heard at Roseland were Don Redmond, with McKinney's Cotton Pickers, and a rather obscure but impressive group, Milt Shaw's Detroiters. In June 1927 Shaw had taken over leadership of the band known as Frank Winegar's Pennsylvanians. He took the band to Michigan and brought it back as the Detroiters, featuring Wilbur Schwictenberg on trombone and drummer Ray McKinley. Ten years later these two formed a leading swing band (Schwictenberg was Bradley by then). Hawley substituted with the Milt Shaw band at Roseland for a week in March 1931 and later did a week-long tour with it in Pennsylvania.
During summers while in college, Hawley had music jobs. In 1926 he played at the Lake Washington Casino near Port Jervis, N.Y. In 1927 he was at the West End Hotel in Asbury Park, N.J. During the summer of 1928 he played in a band led by Gene Fosdick at Ross Fenton Farms, a famed nightclub on Deal Lake near Asbury Park. Hawley played twin piano numbers that summer with Bert Stevens, for whom he had subbed with the Fosdick band the prior New Year's Eve. Stevens later played with a number of bands, among them Henry Busse, the Dorsey Brothers and Jolly Coburn. Stevens died in 2001 at the age of 96. How many piano duos lived a combined 195 years?
Gene Fosdick, the brother of mellophonist Dudley Fosdick and a friend of Biederbecke and Hoagy Carmichael, played with Paul Whiteman and made some records in 1922-23 under the name Gene Fosdick's Hoosiers. He was from Liberty, Ind., and after his musical career ended in the 1940s, he went home to run the family's furniture business in Liberty, Fosdick Interiors, which is still in business today.
Bert Lown
Hawley graduated from Rutgers in 1929. That summer he had a job playing at the Mamaroneck Yacht Club. After that, no regular job appeared, so Hawley began to freelance on club dates. These were booked through two offices. One, available to Hawley through an introduction from Scrappy Lambert, was the Ben Bernie office run by his brother, Herman, also employing another brother, Jeff. (Ben had 10 siblings, including bandleader Dave.) The second office was the Rudy Vallee office run by Bert Lown. Lown had been instrumental in launching Rudy Vallee's career as a bandleader, and was a "silent partner" of Vallee's. Through Lown, Hawley played a number of club dates as a member of a "Rudy Vallee Band," sans Rudy.
One evening in 1929 Lown took Hawley over to the Biltmore Hotel to hear a band led by Don Bigelow. Hawley liked the band, but Lown said it was "nothing" and told Hawley he was about to organize his own band to play at the Biltmore.
Hawley recalled, "Since he had the reputation of being the biggest b---------r in the business, I laughed it off, figuring it was just some more BS, but to my amazement he actually had organized a band and did open at the Biltmore. Strictly a booking agent, knew next to nothing about music but talked up a storm!"
Though based on personal observation, this judgment of Lown seems a little harsh. Lown did play the violin, kept the Biltmore gig from December 1929 to June 1932, recorded about 80 sides, and co-wrote, among other songs, "Bye Bye Blues" (in 1925).
August 2008 issue | © 2008 The Mississippi Rag
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