An Afternoon with Benjamin Francis Webster

© Introduction. Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Look at those two heavyweights!.”

The speaker was Jack Marshall a guitarist who was perhaps best known as a composer-arranger in Hollywood recording circles. He composed TV series themes and wrote the arrangement for Peggy Lee’s big hit Fever which featured drummer Shelly Manne, one of Jack’s closest friends.

The “two heavyweights” in question were drummer Stan Levey and tenor saxophonist Ben Webster.

The venue for this two-brute-sighting was The Manne Hole, Shelly’s Hollywood Jazz club, which also happened to serve great soup for lunch. [“Brute was one of Ben’s nicknames.]

Just about every studio musician in the greater Hollywood area - which extended north into the eastern San Fernando Valley to include both Warner Brothers [Burbank] and Universal Studios [North Hollywood] - tried to stop by Shelly’s for lunch during their breaks from recording.

It was our way of “throwing some business his way” as we all knew the kind of stress and sacrifice Shelly went through to keep his club open for 12 years in order to give local Jazz musicians a place to play, including many studio musicians who relished the opportunity to play Jazz whenever it presented itself.

I recorded with Jack as a drummer and/or percussionist on a few occasions and we had just finished a TV commercial that morning when Jack suggested we “go up to Shelly’s for some soup.”

By way of background, I gather that one of Stan Levey’s first gigs as a drummer was working with Ben Webster’s quartet which “Frog” [another of Ben’s nicknames] had formed shortly after leaving Duke Ellington’s Orchestra in the early 1940s. They instantly took a liking to one another and became lifelong friends [with a few arguments along the way]. Each of them were “big men” and they formed an imposing sight when they stood together.

Now here they were a little over twenty years later talking to Shelly and Rudy Onderwyzer, the manager of The Manne Hole, about Ben’s quartet playing a gig at the club for a long weekend with a local rhythm section to be led by Stan. [If my memory serves me right, not always the case these days, Jimmy Rowles was going to be the pianist.]

Scheduling conflicts at Shelly’s were compounded by the fact that Stan Levey was still traveling often as a member of Peggy Lee’s trio, so the two-big-men-of-Jazz reunion gig never happened and Ben went back to New York and eventually formed the quartet that Stanley Dance described in this essay/interview about Benjamin Francis Webster (March 27, 1909 – September 20, 1973) which appeared in the May 21, 1964 edition of Downbeat magazine.