These elite continue the timeless life of jazz.

Story by Taylor Bruce • Photos by Jason Wallis

PORTICO MAGAZINE | MAY 2006

It's a language, improvised and learned and passed-down.

Dr. Frank Adams' metallic blue pocket square brings a cool accent to his silvery suit and black shirt. He wears four rings and a bronze-colored bracelet. "Doc" still dresses like the reedman in Duke Ellington's Orchestra he once was. His hands are silky soft, his brown eyes peek around a curtain of hazelnut skin, and his laugh makes you love him.
He's mid-story. We are in Chicago, The Blue Note. Adams, then a 23-year old sax player subbing in Ellington's Orchestra, is blowing it out to "The Hawk's Talk." Around the second turn, bass thrumming, trumpets bopping, Adams' sheet music slides off his stand and scatters four spots down. He is stunned. Terrified. Then, Duke slows the song and speaks up. "We'll pause a minute," he says. "And let the Little Professor gets his music together."
Doc laughs an airy chortle. His breathy rasp is pulling up the memory to speak it out again. "I'll never forget that number. Duke was relaxed. He never fired anybody."
Doc's 4th Avenue office is on the first floor of the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame in the Carver Theatre. Not ten feet from where he sits is a life-size diorama of Fess Whatley, the "Maker of Musicians" who started Birmingham's first school band at Industrial High School. A blown-up photograph covers the wall. Dozens of young black men donning tuxedos stare out. It is 1930 and each boy holds trumpet, trombone, clarinet, sax, or drum. If the image were captured in 1942, Adams would be sitting second row.
"You had to wear tuxedos in Professor Whatley's band," he says. "Ellington's orchestra had the same thing. Duke used to say, 'Don't over play, don't underplay. Play right in the pocket. And everything you play needs a story.'" Everything about Doc the jazzman says he's still following the Duke's call.
Dress sharp. Tell a story.


Doc Adams is the godfather of jazz in Birmingham. He's served as musical overseer in city schools for most of his professional life, teaching, directing bands, and advocating for better musical education. Ona Watson, proprietor of Ona's Music Room, was one of Adams' students in grade school. Son of a minister, Ona's also been a jazz watchman for years.
"There is a fraternity of hitters here," Ona says referring to Birmingham's highest jazz elite, the city's vanguard. "Doc, Tommy Stewart, Bo Berry, Cleve Eaton, Ray Reach, Victor Atkins. The guys can play."
Ona would know. His Music Room made USA Today's top ten list of "Places for a Jazzy Night Out." Traditionalist jazz musician Wynton Marsalis, perhaps the face and voice in jazz today, stops by when he's in town. "As soon as his gig is over at the Alabama," Ona says, "Wynton and the band got the limo dropping them off at the door. Then they come in, horns out, marching to the stage."
The club makes sure that the music is number one. Every chair faces the stage, not a lick of food is served, and dress code is on key. Ona's, in that regard, is a throwback, a nod to legendary jazz stops.
Alabama, especially near Birmingham, had joints all through the Chitlin' Circuit during the years of segregation. Black-owned bars and speakeasies like the Blue Gardenia, Tall Paul's Funland, Tuxedo Junction, and the Aqua Lounge hosted bigtime acts from Nat Cole to Ike and Tina Turner.
Victor Atkins, jazz pianist who recently settled back in Birmingham after fifteen years in New Orleans, articulates jazz in Alabama. "You leave a city like Birmingham alone, stuff will grow," he says. "Jazz did that. There is a real place for jazz, not only in American history, but in Alabama history."


Jazz is America's music. It can be a thread to follow our nation's life. The music grew in the fields, where slaves' call-and-response of melodies and worksongs meshed with negro spirituals. Improvisation, the bending of notes, and vocal freedom (now the jazz pillars) became the Blues. Later, conservatory-trained Creoles co-labored with black musicians in New Orleans, and, as common knowledge teaches, jazz was born, or as was first printed in daily newspapers, "Jass."
Doc Adams disagrees slightly with the geography of jazz. "It was more of a spontaneous combustion," he says, where in cities like Kansas City, Chicago, and Indianapolis, jazz came like one big rain.
No matter where or when, the life of jazz is a soundtrack to American ups-and-downs. Ragtime roared from the turn-of-the-century through WWI. Jazz quickened like the Ford-filled streets as Swing carried the country through the Depression. Miles Davis made jazz Cool in the fifties, and through the decades of flower power and disco, jazz became Fusion and Funk. Even today, retro is the style. Hip Hop and Rap musicians like Kanye West and Outkast lace old jazz numbers into new records.
In Alabama, Birmingham players of the past toured and recorded throughout the times with the genre namesakes - Ellington, Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Miles, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Teddy Hill, Louis Armstrong. One of those notable players is Cleveland Eaton.


Cleve's standup bass, over fifty years old, looks like the man-old, road-worn, a relic. If the reddish instrument could speak my language, it would be up for a week telling tales. Cleve bought it for fifty bucks about fifteen years ago. It had been stuck in a garage attic since Truman.
Tonight, the bass does talk. But, like Cleve speaks, it goes lightning fast, like a wartime telegraph. Tommy Stewart is on keys, tapping out "Strike Up the Band" and scatting along just above a whisper. Cleve and the bass go solo for a verse. It's a staccato of deep bum-bu-bum's. Tommy cocks his bald head back in a wild laugh, and Cleve shows his lone front tooth and peeks back at his pianoman. They've spoken a joke in jazz, and most in the room miss the punchline.
In the parking lot on a break, Cleve runs through anecdotes like the jam session is still bebopping. His words roll over one another and bend into the next. He's sweatin' it out with Miles in Central Park. Herbie Hancock scribbles down "Watermelon Man" at George's in St. Louis. Sammy Davis gives his wife a coat. Count Basie passes on.
Cleve lives in the twilight of life, and he's become a jazz tune. Bearded with a thousand tiny white coils, he's a nitty-gritty get-down kind of cat. He moves with a steady bassline, he improvises, he gives the past a shout out. He celebrates.
Young folks pass in and out of the bar in their suit attire. They go get a drink, stand by the fire, smoke a cigarette. In the adjoining room, Count Basie's last bassman jams like it were the Cotton Club aftershow in New York. He and Tommy and Bo Berry let a pretty young woman sing "Take the A Train." Until then, only Tommy's quiet yet soulful da-dah-da's mimicked words I might follow. But, truth be told, the jazzmen have been talking all night.
The younger trumpeter, Jose, stands and follows up Bo's run. He's dressed slick, pin-striped suit, bright red tie. And his horn is sharp when he repeats the verse. It is how the session works, the repetition of the previous player's verse with an individual twist in turn.
This is the nature of jazz: the circle of late night hitters, the bursting limo, the jukejoint, scorching hot fields. It's a language, improvised and learned and passed-down. A cutting session brings it all into one.
"You have to come back to the beginning to end it," Ona explains. "Always. Got to come back. Together."