From Anderson High to Manhattan: Dorham and Ramey

Austin produced more icons in jazz than any other genre

Gene Ramey was Charlie Parker’s bassist for years.

This town is a country and blues burg, a rock-without-borders haven, a place that embraces songwriters who can make poetry from their past. You don’t hear much about Austin’s legacy as a jazz town, but a pair of Austinites- trumpeter Kenny Dorham and bassist Gene Ramey- not only backed the likes of Charlie Parker and Lester Young, but played on many of the late-’40’s and early-’50s Thelonious Monk sessions one critic called “among the most significant and original in modern jazz.” To go from L.C. Anderson High School in East Austin to 52nd Street in Manhattan is a trek only talent can guide. But Dorham and Ramey are not widely known today. Dorham was in the shadow of the top trumpet players of the bop era: Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. And the steady and unflashy Ramey, who retired to a farm in Williamson County, did not engage in the bebop lifestyle that has inspired books and movies.

Ramey (1913-1984) went to Anderson High before B.L. Joyce started the venerated Yellow Jacket band there in 1933. He got his musical education at the Cotton Club on E. 11^th befriending Eddie and Sugar Lou’s Band. Those transplants from Tyler/Corsicana featured Oran “Hot Lips” Page on trumpet. When Ramey went to Kansas City for college he met Hot Lips’ half-brother Walter Page of the Blue Devils, who gave him advanced bass lessons. He got his big break in 1937, joining the Jay McShann Orchestra, then convincing the bandleader to hire his brilliant, yet irresponsible friend Charlie Parker on sax. McShann approved the hire under one condition- Ramey was in charge of Bird’s sax after gigs so it wouldn’t be pawned.

Ramey didn’t drink or do drugs and was naive to the demon ways of an addict. “We were coming from Port Arthur to Austin for a date,” Ramey told John Bustin in 1964, “and Bird and Walter Brown, the blues singer, got sick. They were sweating and moaning and looking real bad, so I called my mother and told her I was bringing home a couple of sick boys from the band and for her to get a doctor.” After Parker and Brown were treated, the doctor took Ramey aside and scolded him for bringing junkies to his mother’s home. “I was shocked because I hadn’t even realized that was what was wrong with them.” Parker died of a heroin overdose in 1955 at age 35.

Pianist Teddy Wilson and former Anderson High trumpeters Alvin Patterson and Kenny Dorham reunited at the 1966 Longhorn Jazz Festival at Disch Field

Eleven years younger than Ramey, fellow Parker collaborator Dorham came up in the Anderson High Yellow Jackets, who won several statewide marching band contests between Black high schools. “If we came in second it was a big disappointment,” said Ernie Mae Miller, sax player with the band from 1940-43. After college at Prairie View A&M, where she toured with the Co-eds swing band, Miller was a beloved mainstay on the local club circuit, with a six-nights-a-week residency (1951-1967) at the downstairs Creole Room of the New Orleans Club.

Jazz singers like Miller and Samuel Huston College student Damita Jo (DeBlanc) received early training at Dinty Moore’s, a café/bar on West Sixth and Colorado that was so popular you couldn’t get in on weekends if owners Flo and Dave Robbins didn’t recognize you through the peephole of the locked front door. After Dinty’s was torn down in 1950 to make way for the American National Bank building, transplanted New Yorkers Flo and Dave opened the Manhattan deli/bar at 911 Congress Avenue, whose back room saloon became, unofficially, Austin’s first gay bar circa 1957.   

Damita Jo, who had a couple of R&B hits in ’60 and ’61 with answer songs “I’ll Save the Last Dance for You” and “I’ll Be There” (“Stand by Me”),  grew up in East Austin, the cousin of future Supremes musical director Gilbert Askey. But after her father, a Creole chef, enlisted in the Navy during WWII and was stationed in Santa Barbara, Damita Jo attended high school there, and didn’t have the Yellow Jacket experience. Joyce’s band represented not just Anderson, but the entire community.

Ernie Mae Miller recorded two live albums at the New Orleans Club.

For most of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, the predominantly Black neighborhood on the other side of the freeway might as well have been in another state. But when the Yellow Jacket Band marched down Congress Avenue to the State Capitol during inauguration and Aqua Fest parades, East Austin’s presence was full and pronounced. Wow! Other marching bands would almost rather follow horse manure.

A master tailor who worked out of his house on E. 14th St., Benjamin Leo Joyce was also a musician who played tuba in the Army band during World War I. With a desire to give Black students the same kind of musical training available in the white schools, Joyce canvassed East Austin looking for kids who wanted to play. He also solicited neglected instruments.

“Mr. Joyce didn’t put up with an ounce of foolishness,” said Ernie Mae, whose grandfather Laurine Cecil Anderson was the school’s namesake. “You couldn’t play no jazz either.” Horn players would jam improv after school in the backyard of the Patterson brothers, Alvin and Roy, with Dorham, Askey and trombonist Buford Banks regulars. Dorham would have a profound influence on Buford’s trumpet-playing son Martin Banks, who toured with Ray Charles and played in the Apollo Theater house band for a decade before returning to Austin in the ‘80s to mentor the next generation of local jazz cats.

The Sousa-loving Joyce bent his strict “no jazz” rule only one time that trumpet player Alvin Patterson could remember. “We were playing football against our rival, Wheatley in San Antonio, and they were beatin’ us,” he recalled. “But even worse, their band was showing us up, playing all these hot big band swing numbers. So, Mr. Joyce called me over and said, ‘What was that swing thing you guys were playing the other day when you thought I was out of listening range?’ I said that was ‘Tuxedo Junction’ and he said, ‘OK, let’s hear it.’” As Dorham played the Erskine Hawkins part perfectly, even Joyce had a smile on his face. The crowd went nuts, rallying the Anderson football team to victory.

Joyce was forced to resign in 1953 when a new statewide rule required high school band leaders to have music degrees. His replacement was protege Alvin Patterson, who held the job until school desegregation forced Anderson to close in 1971.

In a 2004 interview, Patterson told me Dorham was “very thoughtful and perceptive” and would often defer to the older players, especially Hermie Edwards, “who everyone knew as the baddest horn player on the Eastside.”

After high school, Dorham attended Wiley College in Marshall, where he studied chemistry. But after only a year in college, Dorham was drafted into the Army. He was discharged in 1943.

Just two years later, Dorham replaced Fats Navarro in Billy Eckstine’s orchestra, the first bop big band, from whose ranks flowed the likes of Parker, Davis, Gillespie, Dexter Gordon and Sarah Vaughan.

On Christmas Eve 1948, Miles Davis couldn’t make a gig with the Charlie Parker Quintet, so he recommended Dorham as a replacement. The gig lasted two years, including a sensational stint in 1949 in Paris, at that city’s first international jazz festival.

Kenny Dorham circa 1959.

Although Dorham played with Parker on the sax great’s final public performance in 1955, he spent most of the early ’50s freelancing for Monk, Bud Powell, Sonny Stitt and others. In 1954, he co-founded the highly influential Jazz Messengers with Art Blakey. Ramey was also a Messenger for a time. The L.C. Anderson alums crossed paths often.

Later, Dorham led several of his own groups, recording such highly regarded albums as Jazz Contrasts in ’57, and Una Mas, in ’63.

“In Miles’ autobiography, he writes about what an underrated player Kenny Dorham was,” said Thomas Heflin, whose New Six Jazz Project played a birthday tribute to Dorham at the Elephant Room in 2008. “He wasn’t flashy like Dizzy or quite as stylish as Miles, but there was so much lyricism in the way Dorham articulated notes.”

With such tenderness and vulnerability in his dark tones, Dorham has been called the most poetic of trumpet players.

Dorham and Ramey, along with Nat King Cole’s guitarist Oscar Moore, who grew up on E. Fifth St. and Red River, are the greatest representatives of Austin-raised talent to the jazz world because their playing was in service to the song. Counting Austin-born pianist Teddy Wilson, who moved to Alabama at age six,  there’s not a musical genre in which Austin has produced more icons than jazz.

Dorham died of kidney disease in 1972 at 48. Ramey retired in the late ‘70s, living the last eight years of his life near Austin,and Moore died in 1981 at age 64.