In three previous essays, I have presented many discoveries about the life of legendary trumpeter Freddie Webster. To start at the beginning, almost all of the books and websites give the wrong birthdate and birthplace. Here is the correct information: Freddie Webster was born in Selma, Alabama, on September 3, 1917 and his birth name was Morris Frederick Webster. These two facts were previously published in a 2002 book by Frederick Spencer, M.D., and by researcher Nikolaus Schweizer in Jan Evensmo’s complete listing of Webster’s recordings, which I discussed in the previous essay. But I have supported these two details with several new documents, and everything else in this series of essays is published here for the first time ever. The long gap between each essay and the next one is due to the great deal of time—about 100 hours so far—that I have spent researching and organizing all of this information. I have now confirmed that this will take up eight essays all together, including many of Webster’s recorded solos in the last two essays.
As we saw last time, Webster moved to Harlem in late 1939 and was soon working with the Lucky Millinder band. It’s fair to say that his longest association was with Millinder’s band. He was with Millinder on and off from late 1939 into 1942, and he returned again in 1944. Luckily for us, Webster was in the band when they appeared in the movie Paradise in Harlem, and we watched the film clips of him last time. During his weeks away from Millinder, he performed under other leaders. I’m not listing everything, because you can see the timeline in the free Webster PDF by Schneeberger, which as we discussed last time is quite good but not perfect. But I do want to show you the photo of Eddie Durham’s band that never recorded, which Freddie played with in the summer of 1940. He is on the right behind a saxophonist:
That fall, he worked with Benny Carter. We previously saw some of his positive press in the local Cleveland Black newspaper, but while with Carter he received his first national notice, by the influential critic George Simon (Metronome, November 1940, p.16). Simon even asks if anyone else has written about Webster, because he’s surprised to be the first to notice him:
“Boots” was swing era slang for “kicks,” and it could also be a verb—a hard swinging number “really boots.” Simon goes on to say that the other outstanding soloist was of course the leader, Benny Carter.
Back with Millinder, Webster got another glowing review in Metronome, in February 1942, this one by critic and historian Barry Ulanov, and with a nice photo. (I believe the trumpeter next to him is Nelson Bryan.) Ulanov, who had received early training from his musician father, gives a very detailed description of Webster’s musical approach:
So Freddie was quickly becoming a national “name” musician. By April 1942, he was touring and recording with Jimmie Lunceford’s band, one of the leading Black groups. Thanks to researcher Nikolaus Schweizer, here are photos of Webster with Lunceford in Seattle just a month or so after he joined, probably at a gig that took place on May 24 and 25, 1942 in the Trianon Ballroom. (Other cities had ballrooms named Trianon as well.) The photos are by the legendary Black photographer Al Smith, who has been championed by Seattle jazz historian Paul De Barros.
Freddie stayed with Lunceford for more than a year, and here is a fun photo of him (on the left) eating with Black soldiers at Fort Bragg in North Carolina:
His last recordings with that band were radio broadcasts from Hollywood in June or July of 1943 (exact dates are unknown). He was still with Lunceford for a concert in Los Angeles on July 28, which was reviewed in Variety magazine. On August 14, the Detroit Tribune reported that he “is leaving Lunceford to join a (sic) L.A. California aggregation.” DownBeat, August 1, 1943, said he was going to join a local “combo,” which doesn’t suggest a big band. Still, this was probably the Benny Carter band. Maybe the deal wasn’t yet confirmed, so Webster couldn’t identify the group in print.
In any case, a report in the Pittsburgh Courier dated September 4, 1943 (p.20) said that Webster joined Benny Carter again “this week,” a few months later than what has been listed in Schneeberger and elsewhere. Webster is usually listed as having been present on an L.A. radio broadcast by Carter’s big band from around May 1943. That is wrong, because as I just showed he was still with Lunceford until around the end of July. In any case, that Carter broadcast has been preserved and there are no solos by Freddie. So early September is correct, and he must have joined at the Terrace Club in Hermosa Beach, California, because Carter was in the midst of a six-week engagement there that ended on September 15, 1943. The next day, September 16, the band left to perform a series of one-nighters on the way to a longer stint at the Rainbow Rendezvous in Salt Lake City.
Following the lead of Benny Goodman in the late 1930s, it was increasingly common for a white band to have at least one Black member, and vice-versa. At this time alto saxophonist Art Pepper was the sole white member of the Benny Carter band. Subscriber Todd Selbert, the editor of The Art Pepper Companion book, reminded me that Pepper wrote about Webster in his memoir Straight Life:
The band went to Salt Lake City. I took [my first wife] Patti with me, and we stayed with Freddie Webster and his wife, with a colored family, on the outskirts of town. Freddie was a nice-looking, kind of a strange-looking, little cat. I had a strong affection for him. He was a little man who could back up the little man complex; his playing was incredibly beautiful. And he always carried an automatic pistol. He felt that because he was black and because of his size, somebody was going to push him into a corner and he’d need an equalizer [something to make him equal to a bigger person]. When we finished the job at night, I’d go stand in the street and flag down a cab. Freddie would hide. Then I’d go to get in the cab and hold the door open, and he’d run and jump in. Because they wouldn’t pick up a black guy. And I was always afraid the cab driver would say something and Freddie would shoot him. I was happy and comfortable with the guys in the band, but my dad hated blacks…and he was angry that I hung out with [them.]
That passage is revealing about Webster and about Pepper himself, and of course about the shameful state of race relations at the time.
From Salt Lake City, the band spent two weeks at Jantzen Beach in Portland, Oregon, then a week at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, followed by as many as 25 one-niters. But at the end of October 1943, when Carter planned to tour Texas and other Southern states, Pepper and Webster both left, in different ways: Pepper wrote in Straight Life that “The band was going down south and Benny told me it would be too dangerous from the blacks and the whites both for me to go along.” That is, both Black and white audiences would be against having a white person in a Black band. Benny helped Art to get hired immediately by Stan Kenton. Meanwhile Webster simply refused to tour the South—remember, he and his family knew the racism of the South well, and one can understand that he didn’t want to go back there. “No likee Tex’s” (He doesn’t like Texas), as one reporter wrote:
So Freddie left Carter. But during his time with Carter there had been troubling signs of psychological instability. We will document that next time. And after we finish his life story in the next few essays, you’ll hear many of his recorded solos.
All the best,
Lewis
FW had an interesting left hand grip of his trumpet.
If the Joseph Marshall in the photo of some of Lunceford’s men is the drummer Joe Marshall then I’m pretty sure I worked with him. The first Broadway show I ever played was “Purlie” ca. ‘69-70. I was Danny Bank’s principal sub. It had an all Black cast starring Cleavon Little of Blazing Saddles”fame and the orchestra included several veteran Black musicians including guitarist Billy Butler, bassist Bob Bushnell, trombonist Dickie Harris, trumpeter Dud Bascomb and drummer Joe Marshall.