Bill Perkins, tenor saxophonist w/Herman & Kenton
Hyfler/Rosner
Bill Perkins
Tenor saxophonist with Woody Herman and Stan Kenton
12 August 2003
William Reese Perkins, saxophone and woodwind player: born San
Francisco 22 July 1924 ; twice married (one son, one daughter); died Sherman
Oaks, California 9 August 2003.
"I'm a born follower," said Bill Perkins, when I asked him why he didn't
lead a regular band of his own. By that time, in the mid-Eighties, he had
rightly come to eminence as one of the great jazz tenor saxophone soloists.
He was also a master musician and the picture of him, with three pairs of
glasses hanging round his neck, switching dextrously between his various
instruments as he sight-read complex parts and played creative solos, stays
vividly in the memory.
Perkins was always a shy man, never happy with his own playing and
restlessly exploring the music of Sonny Rollins and the East Coast
progressives. Born on the West Coast, he lived most of his life there, but
turned his back on the local product:
The guys on the East Coast played a harder kind of Bebop. There was a sort
of palm-tree gentleness about the music we played out here. I think there's
something about Los Angeles that's not conducive to intense high-level
playing. There's an intensity about New York, perhaps the proximity of human
bodies. Everyone's struggling. In Los Angeles there are more neuroses.
The style that so rightly made him famous was, like that of Stan Getz, Bob
Cooper, Zoot Sims and others, based on the playing of Lester Young in the
Thirties. During the Sixties "Perk" moved abruptly from his Young base and
presented the world with an angular, jagged style drawn from his listenings
to Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane. But his audience clung on to his earlier
style, and he took few of them with him as he moved forward. None the less,
he was still in continuous demand for jazz festivals and tours. He was so
universally popular as a person that his audience ruefully accepted what
they regarded as his aberrations.
Although chronically unsuited to the limelight, Perkins was articulate, a
great speaker on conference panels, and firm in his beliefs and
recollections.
Unusually for a musician, his background was in technical engineering. He
was a brilliant sound engineer who qualified at CalTech - almost certainly
the only professional jazz musician who came from that source. A handsome,
well-built boy with blue eyes and blond hair, Perkins had started playing
the clarinet, switching to the tenor saxophone when he was 15.
"Benny Goodman was the first musician I was hooked on," he told me:
When I persuaded my mother to buy me an old Buescher tenor, that was the end
of the clarinet for me. But it came back to haunt me and later, when I had
to play clarinet and all the other instruments required of a studio player,
I wished I'd kept it up as a kid. Clarinet technique is much more difficult
than saxophone.
Later he became adept on the clarinet, flute and soprano and baritone
saxophones as well as the tenor.
His father was a mining engineer who travelled where his work took him. As a
boy he was raised first in Chile, then, after his father died in the early
Thirties, in Santa Barbara. Perkins looked, wrote Alun Morgan,
the archetype of a Southern California boy destined for the beach. He was
determined to become an electrical engineer, and engineering would be a
parallel career even as he gained fame as a jazz artist.
After his service in the US Navy during the Second World War Perkins took
advantage of the GI Bill to qualify in electrical engineering in 1945. He
also studied at the Westlake College of Music in Los Angeles, where he
gained his degree in 1949. The following year he decided to become a
professional jazz musician. His rise was rapid.
He worked first with Jerry Wald's band. He was at home one Saturday night
when the phone rang. The caller claimed to be Woody Herman's manager. The
Herman band, he said, was playing at the Hollywood Palladium and, in the
middle of the performance, which was being broadcast live, Herman had fired
his main tenor sax soloist. Could Perkins get down there at once and
complete the gig? Perkins thought the call was a hoax, but went anyway and
hastily joined the band on stage with his tenor. Almost immediately a
scowling Herman pointed at him to take the solo on "Perdido" and his career
as a jazz star was under way.
Perkins shared the tenor solos in the band with Richie Kamuca. "I wanted
nothing more than to be able to swing like Richie did," he told me, "and he
said he wanted nothing more than to play ballads like I did." Whilst with
Herman, whom he joined in May 1951, Perkins made several classic records
including most notably "Ill Wind". He followed Kamuca into the Stan Kenton
orchestra in November 1953, returning to Herman the following spring and
then a year later going back to Kenton.
Whilst with Kenton many beautiful settings were written for his tenor
saxophone solos by Bill Holman and Bill Russo. "Yesterdays" probably became
his best-known recording and was demanded at all Kenton's concerts. Kenton
brought the band to Britain for the first time in 1956, and Perkins remained
particularly popular there for the rest of his career.
It was at this point that Perkins began making innumerable albums of West
Coast jazz that became classics. Whilst with Kenton and Herman he also
recorded regularly as a member of Shorty Rogers's Giants, with his solo
making the trumpeter's "Blues for Brando" a substantial hit for both of
them. Some of Perkins's finest playing of the period was on a 1956 quintet
album with John Lewis, pianist in the Modern Jazz Quartet, entitled Two
Degrees East, Three Degrees West.
Perkins kept his career as an engineer going until 1969 when he gave up
touring to become a studio musician, joining the band for the Tonight
television show under Doc Severinsen. He stayed in this job until 1992,
fitting his jazz jobs around it.
But studio work was not without problems. "My studio work has diminished a
great deal," he said in 1987:
The inroads of the synthesisers and the computer music machines are such
that anyone who is economics-minded can do an entire television score with
only the synthesisers. That's even got into the movies.
Perkins went with the tide and invented and patented an interface between
saxophone and synthesiser in which the Yamaha Company expressed interest.
He worked in the film studios as well, where his most notable experience was
working under Duke Ellington for the soundtrack of Assault on a Queen
(1966). In the middle Seventies he played baritone sax with the Toshiko
Akiyoshi/Lew Tabackin Big Band and returned to Herman for occasional guest
solo spots. During the middle Eighties he toured the world with a Shorty
Rogers group and in 1986, on one of his visits to Britain, toured with a
quintet he co-led with the British tenorist Tommy Whittle. In 1991 Perkins
recorded under his own name with a big band designed to recall the spirit
of, rather than to copy, the Woody Herman band.
By this time his health began to collapse, and he spent the rest of his life
still playing, but battling four separate cancers. In 1992 he was operated
on for lung cancer. One of his hips collapsed, but he was still regularly to
be seen carrying his four or five instruments around in their cases. I asked
to help take them into our hotel when he played at Egham in 1998 at one of
the many Kenton reunion events in which he starred, but he cheerfully
refused.
Last year Perkins led a recreation of the Shorty Rogers Giants at a Burbank
festival and in May this year appeared at a similar festival.
Despite nine operations on his throat he was, as recently as two or three
weeks ago, when he bought a new clarinet, determined to start playing again.
Steve Voce