[Dixielandjazz] Evelyn Deane interviewed

[Robert Ringwald]

Evelyn Deane's Jazz Heritage
by Edward Guthmann
San Francisco Chronicle, June 25, 2011
Evelyn Deane had at least three careers in her lifetime: single mom, legal secretary
and late-blooming attorney. But it's her early history -- playing tenor sax in a
series of all-female jazz bands in the early 1950s -- that still gets the most attention.
At 18, Deane got her first gig touring with a quartet. At 20, she played with Ina
Ray Hutton, a platinum-blond bandleader who wore sexy gowns and had a weekly TV show
on KTLA in Los Angeles.
By the time she was 23, Deane had been stranded in Texas, flat broke in Seattle and
threatened by white racists while touring the South with an otherwise all-black female
jazz band.
"I tended to think of myself as a spunky kid," Deane says. "I loved music, and the
opportunity to be paid for what I loved overcame any thought that I might be taking
risks."
Deane, 80, looks back on that early career as a great adventure. She stopped playing
professionally when her two daughters were born in the mid-1950s, and she supported
them as a legal secretary when her first husband left her. At 41, she went back to
school; at 48, she graduated from University of San Francisco Law School and later
became a certified family law specialist.
"I've never met anyone else who started as a jazz musician and became a lawyer,"
she says. "My husband kids me about it. 'From bar to Bar.'"
Deane lives in San Anselmo with her second husband, retired real estate broker Gil
Deane. A huge, blown-up magazine cover is propped on the mantel, showing a very young
Deane -- Evelyn Nadson at the time -- blowing sax in Hutton's band.
Deane says she learned self-reliance early on. Her dad was a self-made man who emigrated
from Russia at 11 with a teenage brother and no parents. Her mom, widowed when Evelyn
was 12, moved the family from Chicago to California and started a business.
"She was fearless," Deane says. "She taught me that nothing is insurmountable."
Deane started piano at 9, learned clarinet in high school and fell in love with jazz.
Right out of high school, "I had a call from a gal at the musicians' union. She said,
'A band is looking for a saxophonist to go on the road.'
Quick study
"I said, 'I don't play saxophone.' She called back and said, 'C'mon, Evelyn. You
know you can play tenor sax if you play clarinet. Go audition.' And that's what I
did: I learned the saxophone instantly and I got the job. The fingering is basically
the same, the embouchure."
When Deane returned from her tour in the fall of 1948, she enrolled at Westlake College
of Music in Hollywood, where she was the youngest student and the only woman. Hutton
was looking for a tenor sax player around the same time, and Deane scored the job.
"We'd rehearse all day Tuesday and do the show live that night. Weekends we worked
the ballrooms around town."
Vampy and with shellacked hair, Hutton had formed her first all-female orchestra,
Ina Ray Hutton and Her Melodears, in 1934. She was more entertainer than bandleader,
Deane says: "She danced and she sang. And she swung around in gowns and sort of flitted
around the stage. She had an arranger and he would rehearse us."
One night during a telecast, Hutton's dress fell off. "It was strapless. The zipper
in back broke. No bra. She was a real trouper and didn't panic at all. Just turned
around and went off the stage."
Deane also spent two months touring Mississippi with the Sweethearts of Rhythm, an
all-black, all-female band that occasionally hired white players as fill-ins. The
Sweethearts were "the only great female band I know of," she says. But life on the
road was dangerous.
"One day, I was walking down the sidewalk in Biloxi (Mississippi) with Vi Burnside,
one of the sax players. Three big, burly white guys told us to get in the gutter.
They said, 'We don't allow people walking with n- in this town.' We ran."
Encountering racism
Blacks and whites couldn't stay in the same hotels, either, "so usually we slept
on the bus. One night we pulled into Biloxi and the sheriff said, 'These white gals
are not going into the concert hall.' They took us to police headquarters and had
us sit there -- didn't book us or anything -- until the gig was over. That kind of
thing happened a lot."
Deane never told her family about those scrapes. Their only worries, she says, were
the stage-door Johnnies who fancied young musicians. Deane laughs when asked if she
had problems with them: "No, I didn't have a problem with them. But I had a lot of
fun. Saw a lot of flowers."
In Seattle, she was stranded when a booking agency went under. "No gigs, no money
and no prospects," Deane recalls. "Thanksgiving began rolling toward us, and our
belts were already as tight as they could get. So we called the Seattle jail and
bartered three hours of music for a huge dinner. Spent Thanksgiving with prisoners
and guards, doing sing-along numbers.
"Anything is possible on the road. It's why I loved it so much."
It's been 20 years since Deane played. "I had a wonderful saxophone and I sold it.
It was too good of an instrument to sit in the closet." She misses playing, "but
I loved the law. And I'm doing a lot of things I really like to do now: I work at
Marin General Hospital in the gift shop. I'm on the volunteer board and the scholarship
committee."
She and Gil have a sweet house on a cul-de-sac and two adorable old dogs. Her two
daughters live nearby, also her grandson. It's a rich life but, more to the point,
Deane has the gift of remembering the past with fondness but never a sense of overwhelming
loss.
"I loved the camaraderie of being in a band," she says. "And sometimes the traveling
itself was almost magical. There would be nights after a long gig where we would
load into the bus pleased with our performance, glowing with confidence and exhaustion.
"There was the low hum of whispered conversations and under it the rumble of the
bus. I'd watch the stars shine down. I loved every minute of it."
__________
Photos:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2011/06/25/DDSP1K1S8J.DTL


--Bob Ringwald
www.ringwald.com
Fulton Street Jazz Band
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