Jazz & Jive on State Street
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| I
first went to Tom's place to see a jazz combo named Mainsteam.
My friend Stuart Curtis later joined them as saxophonist. Curtis also
played clarinet with an eclectic group called the Jordan River
Uptown Band. They were led by Hardin Davis, and boasted some of
the best woman singers in town. My long-time friend Kurt Setzer played
acoustic lead guitar for them Before Stuart went to Hamburg, Germany to play for the musical Cats, he did many fabulous performances at "The Hole," especially with Available Jelly -- featuring Mike Vatcher, Gregg Moore, and Michael Moore. Curtis also scored a personal coup when saxophonist Dave Fagiolli of The Atheists, a Punk-Rock band, sat in for one of Mainstream's sets -- Dave was schooled in Jazz and could wail like Archie Shepp. |
Pam
Pfister, first-rate lead singer of Irie Heights, a Reggae band
which had two keyboarists -- one was a friend from High School, and
another from my days on the road in a Theater company.
Irie Heights was about DANCING, and people filled the Hole In The Wall to shed their inhibitions while Pam sang. She was a nurse at a local hospital, where the core of the group worked. |
| While
I was working on finally finishing college, I met a man at one of
my dead-end student jobs named Tom Bolan who opened up a club called
the "Hole In The Wall Saloon." He presented live music EVERY NIGHT
and invited me come by and hear what was playing. The name came from
when he expanded the old "Camelot Lounge" into an adjoining
storefront on the ground floor of a historic (i.e. run-down) hotel
on State Street -- Salt Lake City's "main drag." "The Camelot" had a long history as a left-wing hangout. The great radical writer Charles Bukowski himself had held forth there during the legendary Underwater Poetry Festival at the end of the 1960's. |
State Street was a slow parade of moving lights as thousands of cars cruised the length of it at night. The Plandome Hotel (Left) housed Tom Bolan's Hole In The Wall Saloon, which eventually took over the whole street level of the building. |
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Another remarkable
Jazz ensemble that played at the Hole In The Wall was Air Pocket
-- a brilliant group of Frank Zappa refugees featuring Salt Lake's
own Fowler brothers -- Bruce, Tom, and Walt -- along with Mike Miller,
Ike Willis, Al Wing, and one of the best drummers on Planet Earth
-- Chester Thompson.
Somehow ace trombonist Bruce Fowler became a Zappa regular 'round about 'Overnight Sensation.' I was out of the country after that, and the first time I saw Air Pocket was long after they'd left Zappa's employ. The Hole In The Wall was SRO whenever they played for the first few years -- good songs by Mike Miller, good solos by Al Wing, Miller, Walt and everybody Fowler -- all held together by gentle-spoken Thompson, who kept perfect time, and was wildly inventive -- taking the heads of the band where Jazz was meant to go, and keeping everybody's feet in the FUNK of passion and joy. After a while, I learned that he'd played with P-Funk veterans Dennis Chambers and Rodney Curtis back in his home town of Baltimore. He later toured with Phil Collins. Tony Morales eventually replaced Thompson -- and he was excellent, but Air Pocket's creativity and flair slowly withered over the years, and I never asked why -- but I sure enjoyed some good times at their performances! |
