Cass Corridor Documentation Project Oral History Project...We were playing at the junior high school. My teacher, my drum teacher, was also the band director of a couple of the schools

SPANGLER, INTERVIEW 1

Cass Corridor Documentation Project

Oral History Project

Interviewee: Bud Spangler

Relationship to Cass Corridor: Jazz Musician, Radio Program Host and Director

Interviewer: Robin Darling

Date of the interview: April 7, 2011

Location: Wayne State University, Detroit, Mi (telephone)

Darling: Hello Bud, how are you doing?

Spangler: I’m fine, Robin.

Darling: Wonderful, wonderful. So, if you’d like let’s start with some biographical information. If you

could tell me—

Spangler: You got it.

Darling: [If you could tell me] where you were born and raised.


Spangler: I was born in Norwalk, Ohio, which is in the northern part of the state not far from Sandusky

and Cedar Point and all that. And the high school in our town was about two blocks from our house, but

the football field where they marched and practiced was across the street from our house. So, everyday

they would come marching down the street and go into the football field across the street. So from as

early as I can remember the marching band was across the street and the drum majorette was my

babysitter so, it was ok with her and it was ok with my mom. I would go and march up and down the

sidelines along with the band. And the drums always thrilled me. The drums just thrilled me! So I got to

hear music live in that manner.

And then we moved to Detroit. My dad got a job in Detroit and actually lived in Wyandotte. And we

used to go back to Norwalk to visit relatives. And I was fooling around with my—we didn’t have a

record player at our house, but my uncle Eddy had this great collection of stuff and I didn’t know

anything about Jazz. I started listening to stuff there and I came across this record by Bob Crosby and the

Bob Cats playing “South Ramparts Street Parade.” And unbeknownst to me at that time, marches were a

large part of the repertoire of early New Orleans, ‘cause that’s the music that they— the slaves were

taught to play for various events and so forth. And, then after the Civil War when they were playing in

their own clubs and a lot of stuff was based on march music. And, so, I heard this Bob Crosby thing and

it was essentially a march but it was so wide open and swingin’ and exciting. And, I said “What’s this?

What’s this?” and they said “Oh, that’s jazz.”

And so I felt very fortunate inasmuch as I was introduced to jazz at the beginning of jazz’s history. And

as I grew older I learned, step by step: I learned swing, I learned bebop, I learned avant-garde, every step

of the way. So there’s no area of the music at all that I had any negative feelings about. And, I have

some knowledge of all of it.

Darling: Right. Wonderful. So when did you get your first drum set?


Spangler: Well, I got my—my dad had been a drummer it turned out. And, he had a bass drum in his

attic back in Wisconsin. And, one summer they let me bring it home. And, we had a neighbor who was

the drummer; he gave me a pair of brushes and a pair of sticks and I (laughter) turned the bass drum on its

side and played it like a snare drum. And, my best friend was a trumpet player so the two of us would put

on these little concerts in the back yard and stuff like that for the neighbor kids. And then they realized I

was serious about it and they bought me a snare drum and I started taking lessons. And, I worked my

very first gig when I was in the seventh grade.

Darling: Oh, wow.

Spangler: Yeah.

Darling: What were you doing in that gig?

Spangler: Dance music. We were playing at the junior high school. My teacher, my drum teacher, was

also the band director of a couple of the schools in town. And, so we played all kinds of stuff, including

jazz and some of the pop tunes from the era, which were usually ballads, like “Harbor Lights” and “Blue

Skies” and tunes like that, you know. So I got a chance to play all kinds of music, and met some of my

very first musician friends, some of whom are still friends and still playing. And that was—God that had

to have to be sometime in the early fifties [1950s].

Darling: So did you continue to play gigs all throughout high school as well?

Spangler: Very much so. As a matter of fact, I even had my own band while I was still in grade school.

And when I went to the public high school—I went to Catholic grade school, St. Joseph’s—and I started


in grade school to lead a band; and we’d play for dances at the high school. So by the time I was a

freshman in high school people thought I had been there for years. So, yeah, it was a great opportunity;

we had a lot of fun.

Darling: And then following high school you went to Michigan State [University].

Spangler: Yes, that’s right.

Darling: Tell me a little bit about that.

Spangler: Michigan State was full of talented musicians. Being right in the center of the state, musicians

from Jackson and Ann Arbor and Battle Creek and Flint would come through Lansing. And, I got to play

with a whole lot of wonderful musicians. My main mentor is still playing, a tenor saxophone player

named Benny Poole, who lived in Jackson. I would work with Benny on a regular basis, at least once

every weekend. And then I had this wonderful accident. I was the drummer on a Saturday morning TV

show that we had on public television there. The host of the program graduated, and because I was

always able to fill time by bantering with him, the producer of the program asked me if I would like to be

the new emcee. Of course I was terrified, I was nineteen. (laughter)

Darling: (Laughter)

Spangler: I mean it, I was terrified.

Darling: Sounds like it was a great opportunity then.


Spangler: It was a great opportunity. And I got to do interviews and all kinds of things. We were on

opposite of American Bandstand. And the idea was to present an alternative to the Dick Clark formula.

And we had live music. And sometimes I played drums in that band, and sometimes there were too many

other things to do, so I didn’t. But usually I was the drummer in the band. And my friend Benny Poole

came up from Jackson and we had a very, very good professional jazz group on the show.

Darling: So did this influence what you decided to end up studying at Michigan State?

Spangler: Well, no, I actually went there study radio, television, and film.

Darling: Oh, so it worked out well then.

Spangler: Yeah, it did. And I was hoping—you know they had a dormitory radio station in one of the

dorms; and I did some fill shifts over there, but I couldn’t get my own show. And so instead of starting

out in radio as I planned to do, had hoped to do, I ended up with a television show of my own, which is

pretty cool!

Darling: But as we’ll see, it later turned out to help you with some of the other shows that you helped to

work with.

Spangler: Absolutely so. I should say, Robin, that when I first heard this music and I went running back

to all my friends with jazz records, and I said “Check this out! Check this out!” I realized nobody knew

anything about it, they didn’t care about it. And I suddenly became a missionary for jazz music, and it

became my goal. There was a lot of good jazz on the radio in those days, in the old days of A.M. radio.

You could pull in stations from Chicago and New York and New Orleans, and it was wonderful. So, I’d

sit up late at night listening to these excellent disc jockeys talk about music and play the latest stuff.


Darling: Wonderful. So did you get to go out and see any of the acts that you were interested in back

then in college?

Spangler: When I was in college, yeah. We actually—the band I was describing to you, Benny Poole

and that gang—actually they opened a concert for Ray Charles when Ray had his big band on tour. And

one of trumpet players in that band, I would meet many years later in a different function, and that was

Marcus Belgrave.

Darling: Right. And, he worked with Ray Charles up until the early sixties [1960s], was it?

Spangler: I believe so, yeah.

Darling: So who else has influenced you musically? Or, at least in your earlier years who influenced

you musically, in terms of the drums and Jazz music in general?

Spangler: Well, when I was learning to play Dixieland jazz, I was a fan of people like Ray Baduke and,

um, that’s the only one I can think of right now, but he was the drummer with Bob Crosby. And my

brother went off to Purdue—he was five years older than I was—and he came back and said, “why are

you listening to that stuff, man, you gotta’ listen to Gene Krupa and Benny Goodman and the Carnige

Hall concert and all that.” He turned me onto that music, and I fell in love with that. And I would sit in

my basement and play along with the entire Carnige Hall concert. (laughter)

Darling: (laughter) That’s great.

Spangler: And, I actually got to see Gene once live, which was really wonderful.


Darling: Oh really, whereabouts?

Spangler: Well, there was a club in Dearborn, and I can’t remember the name of it right now—oh yeah,

I can!—the Military Inn, which is a strange name for a club. They had Sunday matinees, and they didn’t

sell any alcohol so that kids could come in. And I got to sit right in front of Gene. He gave me his

autograph and sweated on the piece of paper! (laughter) And I have that stashed away some place.

Darling: Oh, great. So, would you like to talk a little bit about your work with [W]DET, some of the

radio work you did?

Spangler: Sure, I’d love to. I’m very proud of that work. Well, I lived in Florida for a year and a half,

doing public television. And I didn’t like Florida, frankly. It wasn’t [my] kind of scene, although there

were a lot of very fine musicians in Florida. So, I got to play. They thought very highly of Midwestern

style drummers. And so I worked probably two or three nights a week and it was pretty nice. [They

were] some very good players who had been on the road with Woody Herman and Basie and people like

that, and they’d settled in Florida.

Spangler: And so when I came back—I actually went back to Michigan State to finish my Master’s

degree and worked at WKAR, their station there. And I had a day job playing. I was the board operator.

And then I had a Monday night radio show call Jazz Horizons, and a Saturday afternoon show that I just

called Album Jazz—and I would play one full side of the new release, probably about five albums in all

during the course of the show. And I was playing there with some very good people. And when I went

back—when I would come back for summer, I would head to Detroit and hang out and meet people. And

one of the people I met was Kenn Cox. Cox and I liked each other’s playing very much right off the bat

and liked each other’s personalities, and hit it off. And [there was] a wonderful tenor play named Ronnie


Fields. And I was still playing with a lot of people back in Wyandotte that I had played with. So [for] my

summers, I was doing a lot of playing and meeting people in Detroit. And we actually—Kenny and

Ronnie and I’ve forgotten who the rest of the band was at this point—but, we were actually one of the

first bands to play at the Minor Key.

The Minor Key was, later on, the jazz institution. It was an amazing thing. And Detroit was so

happening at the time. I remember there was a club on Tireman—Earl’s Blue Bird lounge. And I went in

there just on a week night, no cover charge. And the band that was playing was Barry Harris on piano, a

wonderful bass player named Will Austin, Roy Brooks on drums, and Joe Henderson, just playing a gig

on a week night, you know. And that’s how strong the scene was, is that the so-called average players

were people of that caliber. When the Minor Key just was getting off the ground, they needed to sort of

get their feet wet, and they were hiring local bands. And so I played there quite a few times before they

went into booking the major national bands.

Darling: What time period was this?

Spangler: This would’ve been about sixty-one [1961].

Darling: So how soon after was it before you move to Detroit?

Spangler: Well, when I finished my Master’s degree in sixty-seven [1967], I moved into the city of

Detroit. And we were living on the northwest side at that time, and during the process—literally during

the process of our moving—the riots or, as my friends preferred to call it, the insurrection happened. As a

matter of fact, it was the week after Coltrane passed that we had this terrible, terrible event with a lot of

people killed. And it was really—it was all based on the fact that, on a Sunday morning in the

summertime, the police raided a blind pig on Twelfth Street. And it was a black club. And while they


were loading people into paddy wagons, and the crowds were outside and the neighbors were outside,

there was a white blind pig a half of a block away and people were leaving; of course, they didn’t touch

them. And people just had enough of that. There were unbeknownst to me, I mean—the police

department had two separate attitudes. And although I personally never experienced racism at all from

the point of view of black people treating me badly, it wasn’t that way for the black people. And there

was this riot, and when that happened a lot of places got burned out and the National Guard was in the

streets, tanks were rumbling down the streets. It was really something. And a lot of people were killed.

Darling: And what was that experience like for you? I mean, were you scared about the environment or

frightened or angry?

Spangler: Well, the weird thing was I was in East Lansing. Our house wasn’t ready yet so I would go

back to East Lansing to see my family on the weekends and then drive back to Detroit to work at the

television station at Wayne, which is where I started. And I was just about to walk out the door and I

looked at the Sunday evening news and there was a picture of Detroit and an animation of flames, and I

said “What’s going on?” I turned on the news, and they weren’t even letting cars into the city. So I was

completely—I was so depressed. It was just amazing ‘cause I loved Detroit, and always had been treated

well wherever I went. And it just was so sad to think of this happening. At the time, I didn’t really

understand what the motivation was and how badly people had been treated until that time. So when I got

to Detroit things were tense. A lot of the clubs closed. There were just dozens of jazz clubs in town.

Klein’s Show Bar, for example, was a place where Yusef Lateef worked, I think, for something like four

years steadily.

[There was] a place called Paige’s. The Minor Key had opened it but I don’t know whether they were an

operation during this thing. One of the key places in town and, I don’t know, they may have been closed

by this time—the Rouge Lounge in River Rouge was the club that booked all of the national acts. And it


was just a bar with a national policy, and Miles and Bird and everybody played there. And they were

very strict about being 21. So I couldn’t get into most of the clubs. But I went to every concert that I

could go to. At that time there were a lot of touring concert series’, usually at the Masonic Temple. And

I got to see Sarah Vaughn and Basie and Ellington and Jerry Mulligan and Stan Getz, Brubeck and all of

those people in these concert settings.

Darling: Wow.

Spangler: And, of course, as soon as I was 21 (laughter). I was ready.

Darling: Sure—so how did race play into the jazz scene? Were there any kinds of divisions amongst

musicians or venues or audiences?

Spangler: You know, almost all of the bands that I knew of or played in were integrated. And usually

with black bandleaders and one or two white players in it as well. And it was fine. I mean, the attitude

always was, for me, “if you make the rehearsals and you learn the music and you’re serious about it, we

want you.” And it was a great learning experience, even after the insurrection and the clubs were closed

down. And what Kenny Cox did—I think he was the first to do it—Kenny had a business background

and he applied for non-profit status, and we opened the Strata Concert Gallery. And the first one was on

Michigan Avenue, down the street from Tiger Stadium. And the deal was—we were underwritten by

matching funds from the Michigan Council for the Arts and the NEA—so what we would do is— we sold

the proposal that we would bring in national acts one week and Detroit acts the next week, to try to get

people just used to the idea of going out to the club. And, it also put our Detroit bands one a high level,

as if you go see McCoy Tyner one week and then you go see the Contemporary Jazz Quintet on the next

week, and you didn’t experience any let down in terms of the quality of music. In fact, Herbie Hancock


was running his sextet at that period of time and the Contemporary Jazz Quintet—that’s when Danny

Spencer was playing drums with them—opened for them.

Darling: Oh, wow!

Spangler: A little side note, one of the ways we were able to afford to pay these guys was we didn’t put

them in hotels; they stayed with each of us. So, I got the luck of the draw and Herbie stayed with me and

my family every time he came to town, which was like four days at a time. And to this day, every time

we see other it’s hugs and “how’s the family” and all that, you know.

Darling: Great, great. So, the Strata Concert Gallery was that a successful project then, a successful

endeavor?

Spangler: It was successful enough for us to continue to do it. And we raised enough money—the great

arranger-composer-pianist Carla Bley had her own recording studio in a truck and we found out it was for

sale, and we bought it. We were able to afford to buy that, and the building we were in had these big back

doors and we could drive the truck right in and we started making our own recordings. And Strata

Records was born. And then, Stanley Cowell, who had been a friend of all of ours when he was at the

University of Michigan, started the Strata-East label in New York—and we were sort of like cousins.

Darling: So, what about the relationship between Strata and Tribe? If you could talk a little bit about

Tribe at least.

Spangler: Yeah, sure! Tribe came along a little later and the only guy I knew well—well I knew Harold

Mckinney and I knew Marcus [Belgrave], but I don’t think I knew Wendell [Harrison] at the time. And

Wendell was interested in having me involved, both as a drummer and as a producer for their label. And


by that time the Contemporary Jazz Quintet had broken up; and I was thrilled to be asked to be a part of

that. And that was another wonderful adventure.

Darling: So did you work as producer then for Tribe?

Spangler: I think I only produced one or two things for them, and one of them was a Phil Ranelin record.

[Ranelin is] a trombone player who’s now down in L.A. And, I’m trying to think of what the other one

was, there was so many things that I was doing. I produced more stuff for Strata actually—Lyman

Woodard, Saturday Night Special, which got to be a pretty popular album. I understand it’s worth a lot of

money in Japan now. I happen to have a copy and somebody offered me a hundred dollars for it. It’s the

only copy I’ve got and they’re not gonna get it! (laughter) But, Larry Nozero and the Contemporary Jazz

Quintet—we put out an album called Location, and it was all stuff that had been recorded when we were

broadcasting on WDET. I should probably tell you about how I ended up there.

Darling: Sure. Yeah.

Spangler: Well, I was doing TV and, as a result of the action sixty-seven [1967], there was this

organization called the New Detroit Committee which was put together by some of the most influential

and wealthy people in Detroit, including J. L. Hudson and Henry Ford II. And people were trying to

breathe new life into Detroit and not give up on it. And a lot of people got grants. And there was a guy,

whose name I wish I could remember, but he got a grant to do the very first black television show, [a]

weekly hour-long show that had everything on it. I mean, we had fashion shows. I think, Harold

[McKinney] led the band on the show. Marcus was in it. And a lot of famous people who came through

town appeared on the show. We had news, and all from the black perspective. The only white faces on

the scene were the crew and me, because there was not a black director in the city of Detroit at the time,

and so I got to do it. And I knew a lot of these people, so it worked out really well. And, that (laughter)


was money from the New Detroit Committee and from the Junior League of Grosse Pointe (laughter). It

was an odd couple! They let us do what we wanted to do. And I did that for thirteen weeks, and it was

really, really a thrill.

Darling: And that was called CPT.

Spangler: CPT, yep—which is an inner-city joke for “colored-people time.”

Darling: And that was on WTVS?

Spangler: Yes, I believe so.

Darling: And then after that you decided to work with the radio program at WDET?

Spangler: Well, here’s a funny thing—I was staying with friends just before I moved into Detroit, and I

was already working at the TV station. I got up one morning and I turned on the local commercial jazz

station and the guy on the air said “Well the Trane has left the station,” and I thought “what is he talking

about,” and he announced John Coltrane’s death. And Coltrane was God to me! I mean he was the most

important musician in my life, and that band, especially with Elvin Jones. And then he [the host] said,

“we don’t have any Coltrane in our library, but here’s somebody who sounds a lot like him” and he

played a Charles Lloyd record. And I went into the office of WDET, which was just upstairs from where

we were in the school center building, and I said, “I want to do a (laughter) jazz radio show on this

station.” And I would tape it and I would be on from something like midnight to two [a.m.]; that was my

slot at first. And then, the general manager said, “No, this is good,” you know, “I want to give you a

better slot.” And he put me on my old slot that I had had in East Lansing [at Michigan State] on Monday

evenings. And, I had a four hour show called Jazz Today. So I was doing that simultaneously with the


TV stuff. After CPT went off the air, then I went back to directing instructional television [and] I

couldn’t get up for it, you know; it just wasn’t what I wanted to do. And I had become good friends with

the program director at WDET and he was a fan of my show. He got promoted to general manager, and

when he did, he asked me if I would come to the station and take over as program director. And I was

thrilled! So I did that in about, ‘70, I think, 1970.

So I left my television career behind and went into radio full-time. And shortly after I started there NPR

was born, in 1970. And in June of 1971 was the first NPR conference, in D.C., and I went to it

representing the station. It was interesting because most radio stations were doing pretty much the same

thing. They were doing classical music or other more esoteric music and lectures, and that was pretty

much what they were doing. And, this guy, the program director from the Buffalo station, got up and he

said “well our station is literally in a store front in the inner-city and what we turned it into is—we

haven’t abandoned all that other stuff but—we’ve opened our doors and we call it community access.”

And, the light went on, and I said, “That’s what we need,” you know. And I went back and I met with my

staff, and they were wonderfully agreeable to it. And so we started inviting minority groups of all kinds

to do programming.

On Saturday afternoons, there was one organization called Black Awareness in Television, Project

B.A.I.T.— (interruption) So, they were already organized and I offered them Saturday afternoons, five

hours, to do black radio, news, entertainment, whatever they wanted to do. And, I kept my hands off of it,

you know. And, uh— (laughter) Monday mornings, of course, I would come in to work and there would

be about five phone calls waiting for me: “That program you have on Saturdays is really

[indistinguishable]” (laughter) —‘cause these people were telling the truth, you know. They were

speaking from a perspective that the average white person had never heard before. So, that was on. We

had a program for Native Americans. We had a program called Adventures in Indian Music, which was a


cultural show. We had a feminist show, and we had a gay and lesbian show as well. And, I think we had

some other things too and I can’t think of what all they were.

Darling: Sound extremely progressive though for that period of time.

Spangler: It was progressive and we caught hell for some of the things we did, but we were really proud

of ourselves for doing it. And one little irony is that one of the women who was in the feminist program

moved out here, to the Bay Area, and went to work at the public radio station at the College of San

Mateo. And, it was really interesting ‘cause we were friends, and she called me one day when I was—

well, by this time I was the program director of KJAZ, which was the oldest commercial jazz station in

the world—and she said, “would you come over and consult, ‘cause I wanna’ turn this station into a jazz

station?” Long story short, she did and unfortunately, against my wishes and my advice, it sounded a lot

like KJAZ and it had a much stronger signal. Then about three years later, KJAZ just couldn’t make it

financially, and so it turned into a good thing because we still have the 24/7 jazz station out of San Mateo,

with a good strong signal.

Darling: Oh, wow. Is she still over there?

Spangler: No, she’s moved onto something else at this point.

Darling: And, what time period was that?

Spangler: Let’s see, KJAZ went off the air in, I think, the mid-‘90s, if I’m not mistaken. And I had a

show on KJAZ which I then took over to KCSM, which is the call letters of the San Mateo station. And I

was very-very fortunate, the president of the See’s Candy company was a big jazz fan and had had me

doing live jazz from clubs for about four years—traditional jazz, Turk Murphy San Francisco Jazz Band,


and I even got emcee a concert at Carnegie Hall, which was quite a thrill. (laughter) And then Turk

passed in nineteen—oh—I forgot, ’72 or something like that—no, no, not ’72, ’78—‘cause I came out

here in ’76—he passed in ’82, pardon me [Turk passed 1987]. And my boss said to me, right after the

funeral—he said, “well, what do we want to do now with your time slot?” I figured it was all over, and I

said, “what I’d like to do is to continue to do what we did with Turk, only I want it to be all kinds of

jazz.” And he said, “that sounds good, write me a budget and a proposal.” And, bang-o, I had a new

radio show! And we recorded everything live. And, we had recordings of some of the greatest musicians

on the planet and some who are no any longer on the planet, like Freddie Hubbard and Bill Evans. It was

amazing. And, so that was a weekly show that I got to do on both of those stations.

Darling: Wow. So, on the [W]DET program, Jazz Today, did you do any live sets with that program as

well?

Spangler: No, that was pretty much—I did interviews, but I didn’t do live music. But the station did a

lot of live music. We were one of the first stations in the country—we belonged to the university and the

university paid our bills, and someone in the upper echelons said, “well, why do we have a radio station,

why are we paying for a radio station,” and they cut our funds. And we were one of the first stations in

the country that they had to start fundraising. And we decided that it should be a fun experience for our

audience. So our fundraisers always included remotes from nightclubs, and we put on our own concerts

and we tried to entertain people during the fundraising. So there was a lot of live jazz.

Darling: Can you talk about the venues where some of this live jazz was happening down in Detroit?

Spangler: Let’s see—can I (laughter)?


Darling: Well, there’s the one in [River] Rouge, I believe, West End Hotel. [located in Delray near River

Rouge]

Spangler: Oh, yeah, the West End Hotel was an after-hours club. They didn’t even start until two in the

morning. And it was high quality. Yusef Lateef ran it and brought the bands in, and he was the house

band. And every time anybody came through town—Miles would go over there and sit in, Coltrane

would sit in, and it was top notch. [Park] “Pepper” Adams was in the regular house band. And people

like yours truly could go in and sit in and maybe catch a set with Pepper and Yusef and it was wonderful.

Darling: Did you ever get the opportunity to pull in the recording truck and get some recording done

over there?

Spangler: No, we didn’t have the recording truck at that point. But the radio station learned—we

assembled our own gear. We bought a mixer and started accumulating microphones and all of the

necessary implements to do live broadcasts, which in those days you did on a phone line. And, boy, I

wish I could remember some of them. I know that we did a couple from the Detroit Institute of Arts

which was, of course, across the street. And we did one from the steps of the D.I.A., that was about a

four hour broadcast. And a couple of things from that ended up on a Contemporary Jazz Quintet album

called Locations, on Strata.

Darling: So what role did the D.I.A. or even Wayne State University play in the jazz scene?

Spangler: Not much, frankly. One of the things about Detroit that I really—it’s so different from here—

but the artist community was a community. I remember Charles Moore and I going over, just the two of

us, drums and trumpet and improvising music for the Modern Dance Ensemble, and that was in the court.

So, we’re down in the court and our sound is resonating, and they’re improvising dance numbers to music


that we were improvising. And there was closeness between theater people and symphony people and

poets. And we were artists in a city that didn’t particularly, you know—like in San Francisco and places

like this are known for, “Oh, yeah, big arts scene,” you know, Chicago and so forth—Detroit wasn’t.

And so we stuck together as a community to support each other ‘cause Detroit was, as people used to say

in those days anyway, a lunch-bucket town, where not much happened during the week and on Fridays

and Saturdays people went out.

Darling: Well, maybe this will give you an opportunity to speak about the Artist’s Workshop or the Jazz

Development Workshop.

Spangler: Well, the Artist’s Workshop was the creation of John Sinclair, poet, writer, and good friend

for many, many years. When I was living and going to school at Michigan State, he was going to Ferris.

And he used to come down to Lansing a lot when we’d be playing, and sit in—I mean, not sit in but sit in

the audience, he might as well have been in the band because he was so enthusiastic. And John had this

place, I believe, on Warren, if I’m not mistaken. This is during the period of time, unfortunately, when I

was Florida. And so I didn’t get to be a part of the workshop to any great extent. But they had poetry

readings and concerts and they put out, I believe, a monthly magazine of commentary and poetry called

Work. And they worked in close collaboration with an alternative newspaper in town, the Fifth Estate. Is

that still around?

Darling: That I’m not aware of it.

Spangler: Yeah, Fifth Estate was one of the longest lasting of the alternative newspapers in the country.

And Fifth Estate would support the jazz scene and, of course, John did. And then when I got into the

radio station we supported it mightily. Besides jazz on the station, by the way, we had several programs


that were fully eclectic. Our afternoon-drive time show was called Bombay Bicycle Club for no particular

reason. (laughter)

Darling: (laughter)

Spangler: And on that show, for two hours you could hear—in a single set you might hear a Bartok

quartet, you might hear Miles, you might hear Funkadelic—you know, in one set. And Gary Barton was

the programmer of that. And he did a wonderful job of doing that. And I did Jazz Today. And the

marvelous Jim Gallert came to me at one point and said, “I’d like to do a show called Jazz Yesterday and

talk about the roots of the music.” And I said, “Let’s try it!” and we did.

Darling: Great.

Spangler: Now, where were we going? Oh, the workshop was really a going concern and got written up

in Downbeat a number of times. And, that was John’s creation.

Darling: Well, maybe you could talk a little bit more about the relationship between the musicians and

some of the younger people in the area who were interested in the music, and the role of teaching in this

sort of jazz community, teaching and learning.

Spangler: Well, on a formal level a lot of the guys who got on the road with people like Ellington and

Basie ended up getting hired to be the music teachers in some of the high schools. So that was a great

start right there. And on an informal level many, many people had workshops. The saxophone player

named Sam Sanders had workshops and invited kids to come in and play. Marcus Belgrave had another

one of those non-profit funding situations on the East Side [of Detroit], and had a storefront and had

probably, I don’t know, 25 or 30 musicians from the suburbs and the inner-city and all over come in and


learn. And when some of the great stars of the music were coming through town, like Sonny Rollins,

[they] stopped in and gave a whole workshop and lesson. And there was a tremendous sense of legacy

that started probably back in the ‘20s [1920s] with Mckinney’s Cotton Pickers, which was the Detroit-

based band that used to perform at the Graystone Ballroom. And there was just this sense of—you hear a

young musician and he or she could play and they were learning to play and they would get invited to

come and sit in or to come to a rehearsal. And at various times Charles Moore was running a couple of

different bands, and he would invite younger people in to play with us. (laughter) At one time, Charles’

last band before I left town was called Shattering Effect, and it was a funk-fusion band with three

drummers playing sets: the late Ronnie Johnson, Martha Reeves’ brother—oh, I can’t think of his first

name—Victor Reeves, and me. And we had electric bass. Ron English was the guitarist—an old friend

who I had met way back in my college years, and we had a couple of bands together by the way. And we

would play these sort of avant-garde funk things. And I mean with three drummers you’re gonna have a

little bit of an avant-garde kind of flavor, right—

Darling: Right, right.

Spangler: And a very fine percussionist named Adam Rudolph, who is now touring with Yusef Lateef.

Darling: Well, if you’d like, you could talk a little bit about your experience since you left Detroit.

Spangler: Yeah. I just thought of one other thing I want to mention.

Darling: Certainly.

Spangler: We did a concert at Oberlin College in Ohio, which is a marvelous school and has a

marvelous arts program. And we found out that they had no jazz instruction at the time. So Kenny made


a proposal and we would go down, I think, two days a week and teach jazz to music students. (laughter)

Talk about unusual settings, it was like anybody who was interested—so we would have violin players

and cello players and flute players and drummers and trumpet players— (laughter) you know, playing a

[Thelonious] Monk tune. So we did that for, I think, two or three years. And now I know they have a

formal program over there.

Darling: Right, yeah. I think Marcus [Belgrave] was working with them.

Spangler: Yes. I met a young trumpet player out here who asked me if I knew Marcus Belgrave, and I

said, “I certainly do!” And he said, “I study with Marcus!” (laughter) He was very, very excited about

that.

Darling: Certainly.

Spangler: The scene out here is what you asked me about, right?

Darling: Yeah. What were things like when you left Detroit? Why did you go out to California?

Spangler: Well, in February of ‘76 [1976] I made my first trip to California and stayed with some pals

from Detroit who had moved here a few years earlier. And not only was the climate pretty wonderful, but

it’s a beautiful area. And we did a lot of scouting around at various clubs, and I heard a couple of

drummers that played way better than I did. What was happening in Detroit, to me, was—because of the

affiliation with the station and also my affiliation with both Tribe and Contemporary Jazz Quintet—is that

I felt like I was becoming a big frog in a small pond. And, you know, there were great drummers around,

Danny [Spencer] was there and Bert Myrick was there and people like that. But, I was probably, you

know, in a similar— (interruption) —I was probably in a similar league. And I wasn’t around people that


could teach me things. I really wanted to be around people that could teach me things. And the other

thing was, I was amazed that there were two full-time commercial jazz stations out here, and I thought

“Oh my God!”

You know (laughter) I found heaven. And, it was also a rough time in Detroit. I was getting tired of

finding bulletproof glass just in a grocery store. I lived in the inner-city and there was some edge that I

was starting to feel, not among my comrades but just from people I would see in a store or meet on the

street. I’d say, “how ya’ doin’” and they’d just give me a dirty look, you know. And, so I said “I think

it’s time to find a different path, a different pasture.” And, my girlfriend at the time was a woman named

Cindy Felong, who was the newscaster at WABX. WABX was the number one alternative rock station in

town—very freeform, they might play some Sun Ra, they might play—anything, you know. [It was]

primarily rock, but they would play everybody. And, so she and I moved out here together, and little-by-

little I got my foot in the door at both of those stations. And, even though there were a lot of good

musicians here, the quality of the traditions that we had in Detroit was so different. And one of the first

terms I’d learned when I was a kid was—I’d be on the band stand with somebody like my comrade Benny

Poole, who was about ten years older than was I, and I’d do something and he’d turn around and he’d say

“don’t do that!” (laughter)

Darling: (laughter)

Spangler: Right on the bandstand, “don’t do that!” I’d say, “Ok,” you know, I’m about to get a lesson,

I’m gonna go to school. So on the break he’d come over and he’d put his arm around me, and he’d say “I

need to pull your coat buddy; now when I’m doin’ this and you try to do that, that doesn’t work

because—” And, it’d be a wonderful informal mentorship kind of lesson. And that term pull your coat

became to mean—came to mean that, what it does mean. And I got out here, and nobody knew that term.


Darling: (laughter)

Spangler: Nobody knew that term! And I would say to somebody—I would say to a bass player at a

rehearsal, “hey, on this part why don’t you just play so-and-so and I’ll do so-and-so,” and I’d get, “who

do you think you are telling me how to play!” (laughter)

Darling: (laughter)

Spangler: So, they’re very, very nice people out here, and some very excellent musicians. But it doesn’t

have the community feel that Detroit had. And, I miss that. I’ve tried to insert as much of that as possible

through my broadcasts and various activities in the bands that I’ve played in out here. And every young

player I meet, I teach him about pull your coat! (laughter)

Darling: (laughter) So, tell me a little bit about what you’re currently doing out there?

Spangler: Well, I actually had been—I guess I’m semi-retired. (laughter) But what I was doing until

last year, and the downturn in the economy, I was doing the radio show, [and] I was producing five or six

CDs a year for people. And doing the radio show entailed going out to the major clubs in town and

setting up all our gear, and, of course, first of all, getting permission from the artists. And we pay the

artists. And I would pay my crew. So I was doing the radio thing, I was producing records, and I was

playing two or three nights a week. I was living my dream. I was doing everything I wanted to do in my

life. I still got to be that missionary, you know.

Darling: Right. And you just produced an album?


Spangler: Yeah, I just finished one, a singer named Ed Reed. This is his third album. I produced his

first one and his third one. And I’m very, very happy with it. It’s probably going to be out in May. His

first album got national attention. The great jazz writer, a political writer, Nat Hentoff, wrote a whole

column about it in The Wall Street Journal, of all things, talking about the quality of the music and all of

that. And Ed’s 82 years old. He made his first album when he was 78. And he sounds great. He’s a

great guy. We’ve had wonderful times working on these projects. And I’ve produced, oh, a whole

variety of things. There’s a band here that is led by a well known piano player named Mark Levine, who

has published a couple of books on jazz education, how to play. And they’re sort of standard textbooks in

most of the jazz programs around the country. And Mark has a band called The Latin Tinge, which is a

phrase that Jelly Roll Morton introduced. And I produced three albums for them, and the second one was

nominated for a Grammy.

Darling: Oh, wow. Wonderful! Well maybe I’ll just take one last detour and this might conclude our

interview—

Spangler: I have one other thing I wanted to mention to you that I had forgotten about.

Darling: Sure. Feel free to mention it.

Spangler: Ok. The Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival, which started out sort of small and then in ’72

[1972] they started doing—well about 15,000 people, how’s that, you know. I mean, they had this whole

farmland and people would sit on the grass and they had a big stage. And they would mix artists like—

well, the great Muddy Waters made his return to performing at that festival. And Sippie Wallace, a

pianist who had been working on an assembly line in Detroit got rediscovered by Bonnie Raitt—and she

and Bonnie did some things on the festival. We had Sun Ra and Miles and Pharoah Sanders. And every

set was one set of blues and one set of jazz. And in, I think it was ‘78 or ‘79—wait a minute, I’m gonna


mess this up. It was in ’72 [1972] that WDET broadcast nationwide, via NPR, the entire festival—three

days.

Darling: Oh, wow.

Spangler: Yeah. Talk about doing live remotes (laughter)

Darling: (laughter)

Spangler: Yeah, we went coast to coast. It was the first live music event that NPR had ever done.

Darling: So did you participate in terms of helping to arrange and produce that or did you perform?

Spangler: I produced it. I produced it. And I performed on it with the Contemporary Jazz Quintet—

that’s when both Danny [Spencer] and I were playing drums.

Darling: Yeah, yeah. The one last question that I had was just pertaining to jazz in Detroit, especially

during the later ‘60s and ‘70s. Would you say that there is any kind of a distinct style or sound that was

coming out of Detroit in terms of the jazz music?

Spangler: Yeah, I knew you were gonna ask me that. And, it’s really interesting ‘cause people around

here will say to me, “where are you from, man?” And I’ll say, “Detroit, originally.” And they’d say, “I

thought you were a Detroit drummer!”

Darling: (laughter)


Spangler: (laughter) Danny’s out here and the same thing—it’s like, man, the Detroit drummers they

bring some kind of a fire that other drummers don’t have out here. And, I like to believe that the way that

the city—actually all of the cities, Lansing and Flint and all of those places, with their assembly lines and

their stamping plants—that energy was in the air and it entered the music. And people played jazz with a

driving groove, it was high energy and it was serious. (And that was the wonderful quality of Detroit.

And in recent years some of the then kids, like Kenny Garrett and people like that and [Robert] Bob

Hearst and—oh, what’s the wonderful bass player’s name? He teaches, I think, at—I don’t know if he

teaches at Wayne or where he teaches. I can’t think of his name—Rodney Whitaker! Yeah, Rodney

Whitaker. And just people that came up with the help of people like Marcus [Belgrave]. And Geri Allen

and people like that, they were a part of Marcus’ scene at one time. So, Detroit jazz has an energy and a

dynamism—that at that time and, I think, still today—that doesn’t come from very many places.

Darling: Yeah. Something unique about it, you just can’t quite put your finger on it. But you can tell.

You can tell.

Spangler: Yeah. Well from the ‘50s [1950s] on, Detroit and Philadelphia were like the theater cities. I

mean, so many great musicians who became very significant in the ‘60s [1960s] and still are. I mean, Joe

Henderson, Ron Carter, the late Paul Chambers, of course—uh, oh God—

Darling: All the Jones brothers—

Spangler: The Jones brothers, thank you! The Jones brothers: Hank, Thad, and Elvin. And what I like

to call the triumvirate—there were three Detroit piano players who really introduced a style of playing,

and who were highly sophisticated harmonically. And they—well, the late Tommy Flanagan and Barry

Harris, to this day, and Hank Jones. And they have something in common in their touch and all of that.

But they were very, very advanced musically. And Barry used to have these informal get-togethers at his


home, I believe, on Sunday afternoons, if I’m not mistaken. And anybody could go by, but primarily

piano players would go by and swap ideas. And it was just that kind of a thing; you didn’t hide your

light, you wanted to share it with people.

Darling: Right. Well, this has been a wonderful interview, Bud!

Spangler: I hope so!

Darling: (laughter) I appreciate you participating in this project.

Spangler: Well, I’m very honored—very honored to be asked to do this because Detroit taught me so

much.

Documents

Cass Corridor Documentation Project Oral History Project...We were playing at the junior high school. My teacher, my drum teacher, was also the band director of a couple of the schools