Two Tenor Conversation with Bill Perkins and Richie Kamuca by John Tynan

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

Bill Perkins, Richie Kamuca, Bob Cooper, Dave Pell, Bill Holman, Bob Hardaway, Gary Lefebvre, Wardell Gray, Warne Marsh, Pete Christlieb - the list goes on and on - are among the disciples of the Lester Young lyrical-legato approach to tenor sax who were resident on the West Coast for all or a part of their career.

This style emphasized a laid back [behind the beat?] time-feeling, with a horizontal style of improvisation that relied on the chords plus the melody and a hollow almost haunting tone which filtered out of the horn to create a mellow, rich, warm sound.

Given how universally revered Lester was in Jazz circles, I always wondered why his Jazz West Coast disciples weren’t given more recognition for the incorporation of Lester’s style into their playing.

The harder, harsher sound of Coleman Hawkins, Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter with its emphasis on vertically running the chords as the basis for improvisation seemed to carry the day as the standard preferred by most Jazz critics and even those tenorists like Hank Mobley and Dexter Gordon who tried to combine elements of both approaches were sometimes dismissed as “middleweights.” 

If the timbre of the tenor sax was the closest to the human voice of all the instruments, then Lester’s style made that instrumental voice sound pretty.

Later in 1958, the year this piece was published, Richie Kamuca would join the Shelly Manne Quintet and form a front line with trumpeter Joe Gordon in the version of Shelly Manne and His Men that would record the iconic Contemporary Records “At The Blackhawk” albums in September 1959. It was the beginning of a five-year association between Richie and Shelly’s Men.

Bill embarked on a career as both a studio musician and recording engineer [he had a BS degree from Caltech] and he and Richie would go on to share the tenor sax chairs in what would become known as the Terry Gibbs Dream Band from 1959 to 1962. Many of the arrangements for that band were written by Bill Holman and he and Perkins would continue as lifelong friends for over half-a-century.

Based in Los Angeles, John Tynan was the closest journalist, in terms of geographic access to the musicians and the music, writing regularly about Jazz on the West Coast for a national press. He served as an associate editor for Downbeat in which the following feature appeared on May 15, 1958.