Musical Bio

A Musical Biography: Part One

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I was born in Haverhill, Massacnusetts on June 26, 1948. My father, Fred Basile, was the Superintendent of Parks and the Tree Warden in Haverhill; after the age of five I lived on a park next to Kenoza Lake and the Winnekenni Castle.

My mother's father, Salvatore Raiti, had been a shepherd in Sicily before emigrating to America in 1920. He was very musical; he made his own bamboo flutes, and a rhythm instrument made from a walnut shell which he showed me how to play when I was a child. He played with friends at weddings on the Hill, the Italian section of Haverhill. He was the first of his friends to have a radio in the home, and he had Caruso 78s I heard in his living room when I was about five - "Vesti la Giubba" andf "Vieni Sul Mar" were favorites of mine as I remember. My mother's mother, Concetta, used to sing around the house; she reputedly made a recording of "Ramona", one of her favorites songs, in an amateur booth, though I've never been able to find it.

Radio brought me songs early on; I remember Patti Page singing "Tennessee Waltz" and Les Paul and Mary Ford's "Mockingbird Hill". So melody and tone were important from the beginning. My parents, who didn't play instruments but nevertheless valued music as a discipline, encouraged me to pick one when I was eight - they would provide lessons for me. I listened to their 78s and narrowed my choices down to trumpet and tenor saxophone. Ultimately, Harry James' trumpet appealed to me the most (Ihadn't heard Armstrong yet). It's ironic that the 78 of "All Or Nothing At All" was my favorite, since I eventually learned to sing by copying Frank Sinatra.

I had private trumpet lessons with Edolo Lupi for five years. He gave me a great basic training in reading all types of music, but his method after the first couple of years was to give me one melody a week to learn. Looking over those hand-written sheets of his, I find many great standards, including "Stardust", "Moonglow", and "Tangerine" - all tunes I play today. I don't know how he managed to guess what I would eventually play - I didn't know myself until many years later - but I'm grateful for the early start, and for the emphasis on phrasing a melody, which is becoming a lost art among modern players.

My folks took me to see Louis Armstrong at the Salisbury Beach Casino in the summer of 1958. I remember that he sounded great, but that he used about thirty handkerchiefs to mop his brow during the course of the show. I read now that he suffered a heart attack in Italy around then, which was kept quiet as he continued touring; I wonder if there was a connection. Becoming a jazz player didn't really occur to me at that time, even after seeing Pops.

My initiation into the classical world was effected through the generosity of the Jones sisters, two elderly women who lived near the park, and who had season seats at the Boston Symphony. They would give up their seats from time to time, and I had the chance to see Leinsdorf and the BSO in that great acoustical setting. Early favorites were Stravinsky and Debussy.

The first time I heard Elvis, I was sitting in Hector Grazio's basement bar with his kids, while my parents visited with Hector and his wife upstairs. There was a pool table in the basement, and we kids used to play down there. We were on a break, and I heard "Heartbreak Hotel" on the radio. I noticed the difference immediately - this wasn't much like "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?"

When I was fourteen I went off to boarding school at Andover. I was involved with the band and the orchestra, and played in the Pep Bands and Brass Choir. I was a capable section player in this mostly classical fare - over the years I worked my way up to the first trumpets - but there were always several guys better than me, and after a few aborted attempts I gave up on the idea of being a soloist. I did begin to write poetry and fiction, and I acted in a staged reading of Under Milk Wood.

I entered Brown in 1966 as a Physics major. When the conductor of the Brown Orchestra asked me to switch to playing French Horn, I stopped playing trumpet altogether and concentrated on my writing interests. During my undergraduate years I wrote fiction, plays, poetry, librettos to musicals, lyrics, and prepared a performing translation of a Kurt Weill-Bert Brecht show.

Among my most vivid memories of concerts attended in those years include seeing Segovia in 1967 at Symphony Hall (although I was in the last row on the floor, his unamplified tone was clear and potent, as though he were playing right next to me); Artur Rubinstein at the Jewish Community Center in Providence (in a small room! He lifted off the stool to strike fortissimos); Sviatoslav Richter in 1970 (in what proved to be one of his last American performances - he didn't like it here); Jimi Hendrix at Providence College in 1968; Duke Ellington at Providence College in 1969 (Johnny Hodges was still alive, and played with coruscating grace and passion - Cootie Williams was stark); Miles Davis' first fusion band at Lennie's on the Turnpike around 1969 (I thought this would be a more dramatic musical development than it subsequently proved to be - at the time, it had all the excitement of birth); Charles Mingus at the Jazz Workshop in Boston (the Charles MacPherson/Bobby Jones version of the band was particularly inspiring).
A Musical Bio -- Part Two
This short essay served as the liner note to my first solo CD, Down On Providence Plantation, released in 1998. It can also serve as the next installment of my musical biography - the next section will pick up my career after joining Roomful of Blues in more detail, so please stay tuned...

The small group of people who follow songwriting closely might know me from my longstanding relationship with Duke Robillard; for a decade now I've written with and for him, and my work has been available on his titles on Rounder and Pointblank. Band historians would know that our relationship goes back much farther than that, back to the original Roomful of Blues, which Duke started in the late sixties. I was the first trumpet player in the Roomful horn section, and I was in the band from 1973-1975. Our mutual friends know that we met in 1969, when I was a fan of the Tombstone Blues band. I remember seeing Duke play "Sweet Little Angel" with that band in a now-locally famous gig in the basement of the Congregational Church in Providence. They were sharing the bill with the Hamilton-Bates Blue Flames, and I was a friend of Scott Hamilton, who was playing harp at the time. There was a loose fraternity of musicians around Providence who based themselves at Scott's house on Creighton St. on the East Side. This was a haven for like-minded characters who got daily music lessons in jazz, R&b, and blues history by hanging out and listening to Scott play his records and hold forth about what was, and wasn't, good music. A bit later, after Scott had switched to the tenor sax which has brought him his world reputation, there were jam sessions at that house, and though I hadn't played for years, I was inspired to pick up the trumpet again and try to learn how to play some of this great music. The fact that Scott and Duke were friends already and were encouraging made it easy, and it gave me a place to struggle and be bad without unnecessary discomfort. Eventually they both let me sit in with their respective bands, the Blue Flames and Roomful; this was about 1972. The next year Duke hired me to learn parts to six Red Prysock tunes - Roomful had booked a gig with him at the Knickerbocker in Westerly, and they wanted to be able to duplicate the arrangements from Red's recordings on Mercury that we loved so much. This one job, along with a vocal recommendation from Red that Duke should hire a trumpet because it "put fire in the arrangement", led to my being hired as a permanent member of Roomful.

While Roomful was the best possible first band for me - it allowed me to develop as a soloist at my own pace while playing parts night after night - not everyone, even among my musician friends, knew that I had been involved in songwriting since my college days at Brown. While I never played the trumpet throughout my college career, I was involved with the theater, and I wrote book and lyrics for two musical shows which were produced at Brown in 1968 and 1969 by Brownbrokers, a student organization. At the time I couldn't write music; I had a partner, Bill Griffith, who wrote great music for our shows. Having written plays, poetry, short stories, and a couple of novels between 1967 and 1973, I thought of myself as strictly a words man. While I was certainly being influenced by the rock scene of the time, my show background made me especially aware of the great teams writing for Broadway and Hollywood from the thirties through the fifties: Rodgers & Hart; Cole Porter; the Gershwins; Harold Arlen and his several great collaborators like Yip Harburg, Ted Koehler, Johnny Mercer, and Ira Gershwin; Jerome Kern; Dietz and Schwartz; and of course Irving Berlin, who inspired me by writing all those great songs on his special one-key-fits-all piano and without benefit of chords. I concentrated on the lyrics of these songs, and tried to learn what made them so effective.

Being fired from Roomful in 1975 gave me a chance to spend a lot of time learning a few things, including how to sing, how to play over standard changes, and how to write music to go with my lyrics. I started singing in clubs around Providence in 1977, but I stuck to the jazz standards at first, along with a few blues and novelty numbers like those done by Louis Jordan and Slim and Slam. My vocal style was almost completely indebted to Frank Sinatra; I learned how to sing by copying his phrasing and interpretations. Later influences included Nat Cole and Tony Bennett, but artistically I always found Frank to be the deepest and most believeable singer of standards. He made me believe that he inhabited the dramatic situation of the character in the song.

My first efforts at putting music together with lyrics were patterned after the standards that I loved so much - pretty different from what appears here. I didn't perform my own songs in public; even today on club dates I stay with the familiar standards rather than doing any of the material you will hear on this disc. So in fact, only here can these tunes be heard; with the exception of Bite Your Tongue, a version of which appears on Ruth Brown's recent Handy award-winning R+B=Ruth Brown (Bullseye 9583), they are well-kept secrets.

Writing with and for Duke over the last ten years got me pointed in a different direction. Great songs in the blues and R&B tradition were the jumping off point; sometimes we kept to traditional forms, sometimes not. Influences were more likely to be Willie Dixon, Percy Mayfield, Joe Turner, Muddy, Wolf , T-Bone Walker, or B.B. King. The first song I ever sold to Duke, Stop Knockin', which appears on You Got Me (Rounder 3100), was inspired by a tune on a Jimmy Nelson record, Meet Me With Your Black Dress On.

After a while I found myself writing songs which weren't designed for Duke, and didn't really fit his performing persona. I had to change my singing style just to make the demos; the phrasing came out of Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, and Marvin Gaye, though naturally you have to find a way to sing that works for you, since nobody can really sing like those guys. Eventually I came to see that these songs were actually mine in the sense that they were written in my voice, and from my own point of view. It is a bunch of these songs which you'll hear on this disc.

Since I don't have a working band and don't perform my own songs in public, I have no other way to reach an audience besides recording. Even so, this record came about by accident. We were scheduled to make a Christmas record for a local company in January of '96 - the studio time had been booked, and Duke had blocked out time from his road schedule, which otherwise keeps him busy at a prohibitive pace. About ten days before the date, he called me to say that the financing had fallen through, and we were all left with an unfillable hole in our calendars. It was too late to find another project, and the money for the date, which was sorely needed, wouldn't be forthcoming.

At times like these I'm grateful for my day job as a teacher; I could afford to lose out on the money for the date. The idea occurred to me as I was on the phone, though, that this could be a lucky break for me. I'd always wanted to do a project of my own, but there had never been time to schedule it. Suddenly, the time had fallen my way. I made the quick decision, the necessary proposals, and the result, after the long time imposed on us by Duke's road schedule of the last two years, is this disc.

It's called Down On Providence Plantation because here's where I've stayed all this time since that fateful day in the Congregational Church. My friends have chosen to travel the world; I've done my work in this quiet place and let the world go by. I've grown at my own pace, without being forced to accept praise or blame. I love many kinds of music, and I find great songs in every tradition. I try to write the best songs I can in the light of those traditions and to the limits of my abilities. I'm blessed with friends who are world-class players, and who make me sound as good as I possibly can. Here are some of the songs - I hope they find homes out there.

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