Leroy Hog Cooper on Sax - excerpt from his college years

It was a beautiful school, Huston-Tillotson. The band would play and the choir would sing and the president of the college would beg us to play The Bells of Saint Mary and it would make him cry.

“In the early years, our forefathers got together to bring this institution about to lift the ban of ignorance…” he would say. I still remember that.

People like Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole and Adam Clayton Powell used to come to the school. Every Wednesday night we had a celebrity speaker. They were so happy to see a bunch of kids trying to get educated. I enjoyed it. I played in the school band three years. I was the lead alto player which was a big deal. We had to try out for the school band like a football player. You earned a scholarship. I didn’t have to pay for nothing but books. Everything else was a freebee, food, dormitory.

Every time the Nat King Cole Trio would come through to play, our band would play the opening for them and then the Nat King Cole trio would play. All those bands would come through there and we would see those musicians dressed in those latest styles.

Copyright © 2010 Susan Cross – All rights reserved

Leroy Cooper on Frankie Lee Sims & Sun Ra

Leroy talked about the jazz side and blues side. He describes some of his first experiences with real 'outlaw' jazz as he called it.

This is an excerpt from Leroy Cooper's memoir as told to me back in 2007. The material is copyrighted by Susan Cross and cannot be copied, published or duplicated without permission.


"My first automobile I got when I was playing with Frankie Lee Sims. And I didn’t know that he was a big man. So I got down on him. Then I heard these guitar players talking about Frankie Lee Sims. I said he was just another cat to me. I never did know what the story was and when to stop. He’d say, “Blow.” And I’d go voom, voom, voom. And I said to myself, when do you stop? And finally when you got tired of blowing, he’d get back to singing. No charts, no nothing. Just blow.

*****

That’s the way it was with Sun Ra, too. I used to rehearse with Sun Ra in Chicago. And that’s the way he’d come to me.

He’d say, “Play.” The cats in the band would look at you and say, “Play. Just play your instrument.”

That’s not easy to do. He would call me changes. Sun Ra might get a bell. Creativity. People was sitting there so high they don’t even know what day it is. I didn’t last with that too long. I got friends that loved them. They stayed with Sun Ra for years. I’d see them in New York and they’d say come down to the so-and-so and I’d say, I’ll be there. But I didn’t want to go to that.

This is just a snippet. There's much more about Count Basie, Duke Ellington, etc. who he considered more traditional because they used charts and books.

First gig in Vegas with Ray Charles

Here's a little teaser from the book about the state of the country before Ray Charles was recognized as a musical genius.

Segregation in Vegas

In Vegas, we went to the Flamingo. We were the main feature. On our breaks we were sitting on the apple crates. Billy Eckstein was a big man. He came out and told Ray, who was outside with us and was telling jokes, “You’re the headliner in here. You’re supposed to be in here with the rest of the stars.” So Ray went in and played slot machines. The guys were peeping and saying, he’s playing the slots, in other words, it’s alright for him. Ray was the only one that could stay at the Flamingo. But that first year he stayed there by himself.

The next time the Flamingo invited us up, we couldn’t even live at the hotel. We were living in the black part of town called the Dust Bowl. We were living there in a motel with the kitchen and lunch counter downstairs and we could only get cold sandwiches. Very different.

That time, Ray said, “I’m not coming back unless my band can stay.” They said, “Okay, there’s some cabins in the back.” This was about a year later. There was a big difference. The police gave us a speech. They said, “We’re going to watch you guys. Don’t you be having no drugs.” Duke Ellington had just been through there and they busted about eight guys in Duke’s band. The word was out, so that all the guys that messed around had to keep their noses clean out there. It was January and cold in the desert and we had cabins out behind the club. It was nice, very nice, like a village. We had about two hours between shows. Everyone would go out to their cabins and do whatever they wanted to do.

Every night it was real cold. We’d be bundled up going to our cabins. The police would be watching us. They would watch us like we were criminals. That was because we were black and because we were musicians, both. There were no blacks staying in the hotel; just the employees.