Charlie Mariano and the Birth of Boston Bop

By Richard Vacca

The tributes to alto saxophonist Charlie Mariano that have appeared since his death on June 16, 2009 have called him an explorer, an innovator, and a musical adventurer. The expatriot Mariano was all of those things—a champion of world music before anyone thought to call it that.

Mariano was known for the years he spent crisscrossing Europe and Asia, but his musical career began in Boston, the city where he was born. In the years between 1945 and 1953, he was already an explorer and innovator, but his most important role was as a leader and catalyst. He helped build the founda-tion of modern jazz in Boston on three fronts: as soloist in the Nat Pierce Orchestra of the late 1940s, as a bandleader cutting the records that introduced Boston’s modern jazz talent to a wider world in the early 1950s, and as the founder of the original Jazz Workshop in 1953.

Born in 1923, Mariano grew up in Boston’s Hyde Park district in a house filled with music. His father loved opera, his sister played piano, and starting in his late teens, Charlie himself played the alto saxo-phone, the instrument for which he was best known throughout his life.

By 1942, Mariano was already making the rounds on Boston’s buckets of blood circuit. The following year he was drafted. It was Mariano’s good fortune to spend his two years in service playing in an Army Air Corps band, and while stationed in California, he heard Charlie Parker for the first time. Mariano, whose strongest influence to that point was Johnny Hodges, was deeply affected by Parker and the musical language of bop, and he brought it all back to Boston.

In the fall of 1945, Mariano enrolled at the Schillinger House, the new music school started by Lawrence Berk. Mariano was an impatient student, but he studied with Joe Viola, whom Charlie always credited for helping him develop his sound. At Schillinger, in jam sessions, and in the clubs Mariano met others drawn to Boston, some to study, some just to play—Jaki Byard, Gigi Gryce, Varty Haroutunian, Quincy Jones, Nat Pierce, Sam Rivers, Dick Wetmore. This was a whole new scene, quite apart from that of the swing players like Sabby Lewis, or the Dixieland revivalists. These musi-cians were young, talented, and passionate about bop.

In 1947, trumpeter Ray Borden fronted a Boston-based big band, and with Nat Pierce as pianist and arranger, its outlook was decidedly modern. Charlie Mariano was the band’s star soloist. These were the days of “Four Brothers” and “Things to Come” and “Disc Jockey Jump,” and Pierce’s work put the

Sonny Truitt, Charlie Mariano and Serge Chaloff, Boston, 1950. A Metronome magazine photo.

Troy Street Publishing LLC 1 © 2018 by Richard Vacca

Borden band squarely in that realm. Pierce assumed leadership of the band in 1948, and he continued to feature Mariano on recordings until the chronically underemployed orchestra broke up in 1951. But the band and its star had caught the eyes and ears of the right people, like George Shearing and Count Basie and Woody Herman.

The recordings of 1948 and 1949 are still gems. Mariano was already playing with great feeling on his Hodges-influenced “What’s New,” with the Borden band, and again on “Autumn in New York” with Pierce. “King Edward the Flatted Fifth,” recorded with a Ralph Burns/Serge Chaloff Septet, and “Sheba,” done with his own sextet, show the Parker influence. On the basis of the recordings alone, Mariano, of all the Bostonians, looked like the one who could break out.

With the demise of the Pierce band, Mariano was free to concentrate on small-group work, which, as an improviser, he preferred to the big band. He had been leading small groups in the clubs around Mass Ave and Columbus since 1948, and when he had the opportunity to record for Prestige in 1951, he did so with a small group. The result was the 10-inch LP, The New Sounds from Boston. On it were Joe Gordon, considered Boston’s finest bop trumpeter, and trombonist Sonny Truitt, a veteran of the Pierce Orchestra.

Mariano recorded his second Prestige LP, The Boston All-Stars, with a quintet in early 1953. Alongside Mariano on that one were trumpeter Herb Pomeroy and pianist Dick Twardzik.

Later that year Mariano was in the studio again, recording enough material for a pair of 10-inch LPs on the Imperial label, Charlie Mariano With His Jazz Group and The Saxaphone (sic) Stylings of Charlie Mariano. His quintet included Pomeroy and pianist Jaki Byard.

These same musicians filled out Mariano’s working bands through the early 1950s at venues like the Hi-Hat and the Melody Lounge in Lynn. Charlie always had the best of the modern players, including Pomeroy, Chaloff, or Truitt on the front line, pianists Byard, Twardzik, and Ray Santisi, bassists Ber-nie Griggs and Jack Carter, drummers Peter Littman and Jimmy Zitano, and the amazing Dick Wet-more, who doubled on cornet and violin.

In June of 1953, Mariano was again a catalyst, the idea man behind the original Jazz Work-shop. Mariano and a core group of Pomeroy, Santisi, and tenor saxophonist Varty Haroutu-nian started a school for young musicians that focused on the practical and hands-on. The emphasis was on playing and performing. It wasn’t anything formal, and it wasn’t affiliated with Schillinger House or any other school. It was just rented space in a Stuart Street office building, with a few upright pianos, but it rep-resented a great deal to the local jazz commu-nity.

The Jazz Workshop was important because it brought all the modern players together, and gave them a place to play away from the clubs, that didn’t owe anything to anyone, and that didn’t entail playing commercial music or Dixieland. It was a clubhouse for beboppers. And it was Mariano’s idea.

Nat Hentoff, writing in Down Beat in August, called it “a striking new concept of jazz instruction... aimed at providing opportunity for musicians—advanced and beginners—to work and experiment

Ray Santisi and Charlie Mariano lead a Jazz Workshop session. Photo Berklee College of Music.

Troy Street Publishing LLC 2 © 2018 by Richard Vacca

with all phases of jazz under actual playing conditions.” Emphasis, said founder Charlie Mariano, was on “simulating on-the-job conditions... Through pragmatic experience the student will be able to orig-inate and exchange ideas ordinarily not a part of formal instruction.”

It seemed like every modern player was teaching or playing at the Workshop: Byard, Carter, Chaloff, Griggs, Wetmore, bassist Jimmy Woode, drummer Jake Hanna. The “drop-in” faculty, coming in from their gigs at Storyville, included Kenny Clarke, Jo Jones, and George Shearing.

Mariano’s time at the Jazz Workshop was brief. In October of 1953, he went west to replace Lee Konitz in Stan Kenton’s band. Mariano stayed in California for almost five years. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1954, Haroutunian, Santisi, and Littman formed the Jazz Workshop Trio to play a few nights a week at the Stable, a Huntington Avenue nightclub just outside Copley Square. Within three years the Stable would feature jazz seven nights a week and most of Mariano’s friends were employed there—Haroutunian, Santisi, Pomeroy, Byard, Gordon, Chaloff, Boots Mussulli, and Nick Capezuto and Dave Chapman from the Pierce band—and the musicians continued to call it the Jazz Workshop. It was the forerunner of the Boylston Street club of the 1960s and 1970s.

Mariano returned to Boston in 1958, to teach at Berklee and play in Herb Pomeroy’s Orchestra at the Stable. At Berklee he met the sensational pianist, Toshiko Akiyoshi. They formed the Toshiko Mari-ano Quartet in 1959, married that November, and moved to New York. Boston was never far away, though. There were gigs at Storyville, and an appearance at the Boston Jazz Festival at Pleasure Island in August 1960. It was at this time that Mariano finally shook off the reputation as another member of the Parker school. The release of the Toshiko Mariano Quartet’s recording on Candid in 1961 showed Mariano playing with authority and inventiveness, well beyond the shadows of Hodges and Parker. As he said in the liner notes, “For good or bad, I’m playing my own way.”

“His own way” in the 1960s included extensive encounters with the musics of Asia, and though Mari-ano came back to Berklee for three more short stints in the 1960s and 1970s, and led the fusion band Osmosis in the late ’60s, his life as a musical wanderer was taking him far from Boston. Mariano would be drawn to the North Shore for decades to come for personal and family reasons (he titled one ’80s recording Plum Island), but his creative sparks were being struck ever further from his home town. Although it was the place where he forged his style and found his voice, Boston could lay no claim to him. Mariano’s musical spirit belonged to the world.

Finding Charlie Mariano’s Boston RecordingsThe recordings Charlie Mariano made with Ray Borden and with the Burns/Chaloff group, as well as many made with the Nat Pierce Orchestra, are on the Nat Pierce CD, The Boston Bust-Out (Hep CD 13). Other Pierce-era recordings, including “Autumn in New York,” are only available on the LP, Nat Pierce Orchestra 1948-1950 (Zim 1005). The two Imperial LPs are available on a Charlie Mariano Quintet CD, Boston Days (Fresh Sound FSR-CD-207). The two Prestige LPs are available on CD as Boston All-Stars (Fantasy OJCCD 1745-2). The CD Toshiko Mariano Quartet is available from Candid on a German release (CCD 79012).

A final note: There is an abundance of information about all things Mariano on the Charlie Mariano Tribute site. Although the site is active, it has not been updated for some time.

* * * *Richard Vacca is the author of The Boston Jazz Chronicles: Faces, Places, and Nightlife 1937–1962 (Troy Street Publishing, 2012). Contact him at rvacca@troystreet.com.

Troy Street Publishing LLC 3 © 2018 by Richard Vacca