Do You Know the Way to Yerba Buena?

A rhetorical question to be sure, but the musical coordinates can be found in the catalog of Lu Watters. Not a name that sparks much recognition in the minds of current jazz intelligentsia, Watters played an important niche part in keeping the traditional jazz repertory spirit alive from the Forties forward. Fortunately, the bulk of his catalog is still available via a box set put out by the good folks at Fantasy, The Complete Good Time Jazz Recordings. Watters had a cherubic visage, kind of a Chet Baker with baby fat intact, and a commercial-friendly Caucasian pedigree. The band name* borrowed from that of a Bay Area record shop and musician hangout. But seeing as Watters’ took Satchmo as his most immediate musical sourcebook, I prefer to think of it as an under the table reference the herbaceous ‘tea’ leaves that were Armstrong’s tonic of choice. Curiously, the set makes no mention of the possible corollary even though it seems an obvious one.

Watters deviated from the Armstrong model several important ways, chief among them the addition of a second cornet to his frontline (a la King Oliver). Bob Scobey proved an inspired choice for the slot. Trombonist Turk Murphy and clarinetists Ellis Horne or Bob Helm completed the horn section. One session, recorded during Watters’ wartime absence with trumpeter Bob Strickler pinch-hitting even featured the licorice sticks in tandem. The earliest sides plugged in tuba for string bass and also relied on the dueling banjos of Clancy Hayes and Russ Bennett for extra rhythmic potency. Watters’ experimented little with the instrumentation once established, preferring to concentrate instead on building a working band and reliable repertoire in line with classic Crescent City convention. Spanning the band’s recording debut in December of 1941 through its initial swan song in August 1947, the music is gloriously and unapologetically anachronistic.

Most of the sessions come from live air shots and while the fidelity is frequently far from ideal, the raucous atmosphere of venues like the Avalon and Dawn Club bleed persuasively into the acetates. Set lists tap tunes from the usual suspects: Bunk Johnson (who split an LP w/ Yerba Buena), Jelly Roll Morton, Kid Ory, Oliver, Scott Joplin and original muse Satchmo are all represented in the band songbook of rags, stomps and blues. Individual tracks all tie off in the two to three-minute range, but Watters’ arrangements are tight and terse enough not to require further elaboration. The repertory feel remains resolute and any liberties taken are relatively minor. Why then even give these sides the time of day when superior versions of many of the songs are available from earlier more renowned sources? It’s a good question and one I’d answer by arguing that what Watters’ adds to soup isn’t innovation, but personalized veneration. There’s brio and jubilance in these performances that cuts to the quick of what the band’s more celebrated sources were also aiming for. Preservationist though their efforts might have been, Watters and his crew didn’t treat the music as staid stone tablets secluded behind museum glass. In true populist fashion, they held them heartily aloft and paraded them around the town square.

Echoing that which it explicates, the booklet is very nearly a work of art, comprehensive in its inclusion of annotations and ephemera that encompass original liner notes to all of the Good Time albums as well as color facsimiles of the album art. The latter feature deserves special mention as the San Francisco city shots by photographer Fred Lyon give the records distinctive local flavor. Essays and anecdotes are plentiful, documenting Watters’ various musical triumphs as well as the commensurate hard-drinking and womanizing that often went along with them. A concluding portrait by two non-musician friends delves into his colorful eccentricities and activities post-Yerba Buena as an activist, ornithologist, botanist and fisherman. Watters’ ascendancy was comparatively brief and his name now is little more than a footnote. Exposure to these sounds doesn’t necessarily call foul such a curtailed career arc, but it certainly opens the door for reappraisals. In the meantime, that map to fabled Yerba Buena remains readily within reach.

[*“Yerba buena” also refers to various strains of aromatic medicinal mint]