Honoring a mentor
Jeannie Cheatham has impacted music far from her adopted hometown of San Diego
It was while attending San Diego State in the early 1980s that I ended up taking my mom’s advice — and three free tickets — and going to see Count Basie at the San Diego Zoo.
If seeing Basie’s swinging orchestra hooked me on jazz and blues, that hook was firmly set when I wandered into the Mercedes Room at the Bahia Resort on Mission Bay a year or so later.
I was taking a jazz appreciation class at SDSU, and my instructor — a stand-up bass player — reminded me as the semester was coming to a close that I still hadn’t gone to a live performance and written up a review, and that this was going to be a significant part of my grade.
As class was letting out one Thursday, she pulled me aside and suggested — well, “suggested” seems a rather mild term, as I recall — that I plan to be at the Mercedes Room that coming Sunday evening for the weekly jam session. She would be playing, and I could write up that show.
Not wanting to argue with my instructor — who was also VERY pregnant (and I don’t recall quite how she sidled up to that big bass with a significant baby bump) — I immediately agreed.
Three days later, I arrived early, got a seat near the front where I knew my instructor would be able to see me, and took out a notebook.
I do not believe that I took a single note that night. I was too busy absorbing what I was hearing and seeing, too overloaded to possibly try to make sense of it on the spot.
It was the Basie band on steroids — or maybe the Basie band in a time machine, as if we were back in Kansas City in the late ’30s when tenor saxophonist Lester Young would take on all comers in all-night cutting sessions, the audience’s applause determining who stayed on stage after an exchange of solos, and who sat.
Jeannie Cheatham was the master of ceremonies from her seat at the piano. Her husband, Jimmy, was ringleader — organizing all the horn players who would take turns soloing after the opening chorus.
The band?
I don’t even remember who all was there that night.
But I came back the next Sunday, and the Sunday after that, and dozens of other Sundays over the coming years.
You never knew who would show up on any given night: Snooky Young from the Tonight Show Band on might be on trumpet. Basie alum Curtis Peagler might be on alto sax. Former Ray Charles sideman Daniel Jackson would often swing by with his sax. Onetime Ray Charles arranger Calvin Jackson would bring his harmonica, but also play some solo piano between sets. Sarah Vaughn’s bassist, Gunnar Biggs, was a regular. Alto sax star Charles McPherson might be up on stage.
And then Jimmy’s students from UCSD, where he ran the jazz program, might sit in - all nervous at being on the same stage with such established names. Bill Yeager would encourage his jazz students from San Diego State to sit in, too.
Young up and comers like James Zollar — now an in-demand first-call trumpeter in New York City — cut their chops at those jam sessions.
For a young, newly minted jazz fan, it was both heaven and school.
After I’d been coming for awhile — always arriving early and sitting up front — Jeannie noticed me or I worked up the nerve to introduce myself; I don’t honestly remember. I was writing reviews by then for the student newspaper at SDSU, and after the introduction to jazz class I took Professor Eddie Meadows’ History of African American Music class to dive even deeper.
For whatever reason, Jeannie and Jimmy took a shine to me. Introduced me to Stanley and Helen Dance, widely respected jazz journalists who had retired to Vista. Made sure I met Paul Marshall, producer of the “Club Date” show at KPBS-TV. Suggested I write to Nat Hentoff and introduce myself.
The Cheathams eventually parlayed their Sunday night jam sessions into a record deal with Concord Records — and before long, San Diego had to share them with the rest of the world as they were touring Europe, headlining jazz festivals around the world, and sailing off to perform on jazz cruises.
Interestingly, the Cheathams weren’t from San Diego originally. Jeannie Evans hails from Akron; she met Jimmy while gigging in Buffalo, where he was raised. She spent much of the 1950s playing piano behind singer Dakota Staton, as well as Jimmy Rushing — Count Basie’s former lead singer.
Jeannie and Jimmy married, and located to New York City for awhile — where Jimmy was arranger for Chico Hamilton’s band in the early 1960s. Then Jimmy got a job teaching at the University of Wisconsin, and they ended up in Madison in the 1960s. Jimmy also briefly filled in with Duke Ellington’s band when trombonist Chuck Connors was ill.
When the UW job ended, they moved to L.A. and were gigging around there — when the UCSD teaching position opened in the mid-’70s, Jimmy took that and they ended up in San Diego.
Before too long, they were hosting a weekly Sunday night jam at the airport Sheraton. After a few years, they moved it to the Bahia.
When they got the record deal with Concord, they didn’t leave town, didn’t move to Los Angeles. Which was a big deal. Before the early 1980s, if a band from San Diego wanted to get a record deal, you had to move to L.A. or New York. Jazz pianist Paul Smith had made the move in the 1940s, jazz saxophonist Harold Land had done so in the ’50s, pianist Mike Wofford, trumpeter Don Sleet and rock band Iron Butterfly had all done so in the ’60s, folkster Stephen Bishop in the ’70s.
It’s just the way it was.
And then the Cheathams got signed to Concord about the same time roots rockers the Beat Farmers signed with Rhino Records, (Earlier, jazz guitarist Peter Sprague had been signed to Xanadu Records, but it never had quite the reach or marketing budget of Concord, and he’d ended up moving to New York City to try to make some bigger waves before coming back home.)
Before the decade was out, Rhino would also sign folk singer Cindy Lee Berryhill, Mojo Nixon & Skid Roper would sign with Restless Records, blues trio The Paladins with Wrestler Records, before moving to Alligator Records.
Suddenly, bands from San Diego could stay in San Diego and still be nationally touring acts.
That opened the door for subsequent bands like Rocket From the Crypt, blink-182, P.O.D., Switchfoot, Nickel Creek, Delta Spirit, and more.
But it started in the 1980s, and Jeannie Cheatham was a big part of it.
This coming Friday — Veterans Day, Nov. 11 — Jeannie will be inducted into the San Diego Music Hall of Fame.
She’s asked me to introduce her at the induction.
Speaking in front of a roomful of strangers no longer intimidates me.
Having Jeannie listening to what I say about her?
I better get that right.
I hope I am able to convey to this room of mostly younger musicians and music fans — many if not most of whom were not yet born when the Cheathams were holding court at the Bahia — the importance and scale of what Jeannie did for music in San Diego. Of what it meant to have musicians (and noted jazz critic Leonard Feather) drive down from Los Angeles every week to play in San Diego.
Of how keeping a home base in San Diego while touring the globe proved to record company executives and talent scouts that there was world-class talent in San Diego, and a community of fans able to nurture and support them.
Jeannie and her above-mentioned contemporaries created the music scene that today’s musicians and fans get to enjoy.
They helped elevate San Diego to a regional hub for music — an equal to Seattle and Minneapolis and Austin, a town where famed fiddler Mark O’Connor and singer-songwriter J.J. Cale could relocate to, not from.
Jeannie Cheatham helped put San Diego on the map musically.
The passing last week of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis overshadowed the loss of Anita Kerr earlier in the month.
While obituaries noted that Lewis was the last of the original Sun Records stars to pass - following Elvis, Roy Orbison and Johnny Cash (the so-called “Million Dollar Quartet”) — Kerr was likewise the last of the easy listening vocalese leaders to pass.
A contemporary of both Johnny Mann and Ray Conniff, Kerr had to work harder to get opportunities — simply because she was a woman.
But like Mann and Conniff, her ability to create seemingly simple, effortless “easy listening” masked how extraordinarily difficult it was to create such arrangements. There is an underlying sophistication hidden behind the orchestration and choral harmonies that belies the immediate accessibility of the music.
“Easy listening” even became a kind of dismissive term of derision by rock fans — few of whom knew anything about the level of musicality that went into creating said music.
As Jeannie Cheatham once heatedly told me after I made some dismissive comment about Conniff, “Not everything has to be high art. Sometimes it’s enough to just make something beautiful for people to listen to at the end of a hard day.”
And Anita Kerry surely did that.
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That's Amazing Jim! Congratulations and you will actually FEEL the introduction!