Cecil Payne: Saxophonist with Dizzy Gillespie

Cecil Payne was the first to play bebop on the baritone saxophone during the Forties, and he didn't see the need to change his style much in the next 60 years. His shyness and reluctance to trouble anyone led to him becoming a recluse trying to survive on the cheapest tinned food when he was almost blinded by glaucoma a few years ago.

Payne became famous as a member of the Dizzy Gillespie big band during its glory years from 1946 to 1949 when it included John Lewis, Ray Brown and Milt Jackson in its ranks. He was the featured soloist on two of the band's classic records, "Ow" and "Stay On It", in 1947.

His family was musical and he first learned clarinet and guitar, later studying alto saxophone with Pete Brown, a little remembered giant of jazz. "Count Basie was the reason I started playing saxophone in the first place," said Payne. "After seeing Lester Young play tenor with Basie, that was it for me."

He studied at Brooklyn High School with the drummer Max Roach and the pianist Randy Weston. Payne went into the US Army from 1943 to 1946 and then, like Roach and Weston, went back home to live with his parents in Brooklyn. Roach and Payne used to play in jam sessions at Monroe's Uptown House, a nightclub on 52nd Street where many young musicians, including Charlie Parker, were playing the revolutionary music that was to lead to bebop. Payne was still playing alto when Roach got him his first recording in a quintet led by the trombonist Jay Jay Johnson in 1946.

Knowing that alto saxophonists usually doubled on baritone, Payne's father invested in a bigger horn for him and when the trumpeter Roy Eldridge was looking for a baritone player Payne told him that he had one at home and got the job playing at the Spotlite Club. "On the last night of the gig," Payne remembered, "Dizzy Gillespie came to see Roy. He heard me play and asked me to come down to the Savoy where he was playing. I did, and I've been playing baritone ever since."

Over the next three years, Gillespie created definitive big band bebop both in concert and the RCA Victor recording studio. Some of the concerts were recorded and the fiery turmoil that radiates from them sounds fresh to this day. "It was a band," said Payne, "where if you made a mistake reading your music you felt bad immediately."

Leaving Gillespie in 1949 Payne worked for the bandleader Tadd Dameron in another of the bebop hothouses. He played in the bands of Illinois Jacquet and James Moody up until 1954 but then quit music for a day job. He returned in 1957 to tour in Europe with the drummer Art Taylor and then joined Randy Weston's group staying from 1958 until 1960. In 1961 he joined the cast of The Connection, the remarkable off-Broadway play about drug addiction that had the musicians performing as actors and instrumentalists.

In the Sixties Payne left music again. "That was a rough time for the beboppers," he said. "There was no work. So I got into real estate, but I discovered that I wasn't a good salesman at all." He swiftly returned to music, playing first with Machito's Latin band but then getting a break in 1967 when Joe Temperley recommended him to take Joe's place in the Woody Herman band. Payne appeared at many Newport Jazz Festivals between 1969 and 1985 and at the Monterey Jazz Festival in 1966 with Randy Weston's band.

Count Basie called him in 1970: "I was only supposed to be there for two weeks and they offered me good pay. But what they didn't know was that I would have worked for nothing just to play with Count Basie."

In 1974 Payne joined the New York Jazz Repertory Company and toured Europe in a jazz show called The Musical Life of Charlie Parker. Touring Europe again in 1979 with the trombonist Jimmy Cleveland he recorded an album, Bright Moments, in London for the Spotlite label. Payne joined Dameronia, dedicated to the music of Tadd Dameron, in the early Eighties and then rejoined Illinois Jacquet, featuring in the documentary film Texas Tenor: the Illinois Jacquet story (1991).

When Payne's wife died and he began to lose his sight, he gave up working and dropped from the scene. He was rediscovered after some years by a charity, the Jazz Foundation. At first he refused their help, saying he didn't want to be a nuisance, but eventually accepted their "Meals on Wheels" scheme and someone to clean up his badly neglected apartment. His health improved with the nourishment and he began playing again, working with his own quartet made up of young musicians.

From 2000 onwards he played in local nursing homes to entertain the residents in the part of New York where he lived but finally, a year ago, had to enter one himself.

Steve Voce

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