Claude "Fiddler" Williams

[Spontooneous]

Just got word that Fiddler passed away overnight at 96. He was a direct link to the early days of the Andy Kirk and Count Basie bands, playing fiddle (he never called it a violin) and guitar.

Alzheimer's made the last few years tougher, but he stayed in touch with the world through music. He performed publicly in Kansas City as recently as December.

His recording career extends from 1929 (with Andy Kirk) to about 2000. Check "Call for the Fiddler" on Steeplechase and "The Man from Muskogee" with Jay McShann on Sackville to hear him really sailing.

Words fail me. Fiddler was an amazing individual and a deeply dedicated artist. One of a kind.

[paul secor]

Sad, sad news - especially to hear that he had Alzheimer's disease in his last years. I heard him play at a club 6 or 7 years ago, and he was a delightful person to speak with as well as to hear. When he went on stage and began to play, it seemed as if the years just rolled away, and he became a much younger man. By then, he had stopped playing guitar (at least publicly), and was only playing fiddle. Only playing fiddle, indeed - oh how he played!

Rest in peace, Fid.

Incidentally, his manager then was also Benny Waters' manager, so I would imagine that he was representing the two oldest performing jazz musicians at that time.

[mmilovan]

Sad, sad news!

He was the last to know the magic itself! People, don't ever forget he was before Freddie Greene in All American Rhythm Section!!! Greene came around March 1937., and if you listen carefully to earliest Decca sessions maybe you can hear Williams strumming those chords with Big Un, Papa Jo and Holy Man.

(Basie band at first Decca session was:

Buck Clayton, Joe Keyes, Carl Smith, Trumpets:

George Hunt, Dan Minor, trombones; Lester Young, Herschel Evans, clarinets and tenor saxes; Caughey Roberts, alto sax; Jack Washington, alto and baritone saxes; Count Basie, piano; Claude Williams, guitar; Walter Page, bass; Jo Jones, drums. Jimmy Rushing, vocal. January 21, 1937

On second Decca session there were:

Ed Lewis, Bobby Moore, trumpets, replace Keyes, Smith. Freddie Green, guitar, replaces Williams; others the same. March 26, 1937)

Is it Williams in series of famous Chatterbox early 1937. broadcast doing solo role on his violin?

If so, you can hear priceless attempts to play fiddle with Kansas City rhythm.

And quote from Albert Murray's "Good Morning Blues" - The Autobiography of Count Basie (p 176.):

"Jo Jones and I also took a little trip to Chicago in that car. Another personal matter came up, and things got a little complicated for me, and I thought the best thing for me to do was cool out of there for a while. So Jo said, "Hell, let's go to Chicago." And we just got in the car and took a little drive up there for a few days and took in some shows. We went to the Grand Terrace and caught Fletcher Henderson, and when Fletcher asked me if I wanted to sit in for a few numbers, Jo told him we would just wait our turn with our own band. We also took in a few other spots. That's how we found Claude Williams. He was playing guitar and violin in one of those places, and I decided that we could use him in the band if things worked out and we came into the Grand Terrace. I couldn't hire him then because the band was still waiting for the word from MCA."

Of course it was during those Reno KC days.

Edited April 25, 2004 by mmilovan

[Chuck Nessa]

I had a couple of experiences with "Fiddler" and he was a first class guy. He will be missed beyond the "musical evidence".

Farewell.

[Spontooneous]

Yep, that's him on the Basie Chatterbox broadcast.

[John L]

RIP

How many jazz musicans do we have left who recorded in the 1920s? I am having trouble thinking of one. Could he have been the last?

[Free For All]

I'm not sure, John, but what about Jay McShann? Another KCer.

[Guest ariceffron]

that is rerally weird. 2 old old people died today. the other which i heard about in the mainstream media was eustee lauder, she was 97 or something

[EKE BBB]

Very very sad news! We´re running out of old giants!

Claude Williams at the Kansas City Blues and Jazz Festival 1999

[brownie]

From today's edition of the 'Kansas City Star':

Jazz violinist Claude 'Fiddler' Williams dead at 96

Associated Press

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Jazz violinist Claude "Fiddler" Williams, who was part of Kansas City's thriving music scene during the swing era of the 1930s and enjoyed new-found popularity in his later years, is dead at 96.

Williams died early Sunday at Research Medical Center, The Kansas City Star reported. His wife, Blanche, said he'd been hospitalized there since April 5 with double pneumonia.

Mrs. Williams, who married the musician in 1991, said he would love to be remembered "as a passionate, passionate violinist."

"He loved his music," she said. "And he loved making people happy and feeling his music. He wanted them to feel it. He lived for his music."

"He was a good musician," pianist Jay McShann, another pioneering Kansas City jazz performer who like Williams was originally from Muskogee, Okla. "He enjoyed playing."

His wife said Williams had continued as an active musician, and until he was taken ill his schedule had included a masters class in California in August and a music camp in New Jersey in August and September.

"He said that as long as his fingers still worked he would," she said.

To celebrate his latest birthday, Williams went with relatives to a restaurant in Kansas City's Country Club Plaza area, bringing his fiddle along and joining in with the band.

"They gave him a very warm welcome," said his wife. "Claude stood up for most of the songs, and that's an accomplishment in itself."

"I'm doing pretty well," Williams said then. "I can still work with my fingers a little bit."

Williams, who played the guitar, mandolin and bass as well as the violin, first came to Kansas City in 1928, joining the Twelve Clouds of Joy band led first by Terrence Holder and then Andy Kirk. He also played later with a band led by Alphonso Trent, which Williams said was "the first black big band allowed to play at white clubs in Oklahoma."

In the 18th and Vine Street area of Kansas City, there were many night clubs featuring jazz music, after-hours jam sessions and "battles of the bands" that drew many musicians to the area to learn and show what they could do.

"Musicians would come from as far awas as Texas and Chicago to learn how to do it," Williams said. "We showed them the right way to do it and straightened up their playing."

After hearing him play in Chicago, Count Basie hired Williams to play both guitar and violin with his band.

"Count came up looking for me because the guys in Kansas City told him about my playing," Williams said.

But when Basie moved his band to New York, Freddie Green replaced Williams as the guitarist, something which Williams was later to say turned out to be a good thing.

""If I had stayed with Count, I would have been playing that ching-ching rhythm for 40 years," he once said.

Williams once told an interviewer for Down Beat that hearing trumpeter Louis Armstrong play a diminished chord in Tulsa one time inspired him to learn about changes and chords.

"All the cats wanted to jam with me because they knew they would hear changes, something different, not just jazzin' the melody," he said. "That's because I mostly jammed with trumpeters and saxophones."

Williams played with various Kansas City bands until moving in 1940 to Michigan with George Lee, another well-known Kansas City musician.

"We put together a band of the common laborers there," Williams said. "It finally broke up when several of the boys had to go into the service."

Williams worked as a welder by day and musician at night, coming back to Kansas City in 1952.

In 1988 he was featured in the Broadway revue "Black and Blue," focusing new attention on his skills, and in the early 1990s he was inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame. He became a popular attraction at nightclubs and music festivals around the country and overseas, where he always had a strong following.

Williams was among the performers at events during President Clinton's second inauguration in 1997. That same year he performed at the grand opening of Kansas City's American Jazz Museum, a show that was later televised nationally.

He suffered a broken leg in an auto accident in 2000, and shortly after that, his wife said, he was diagnosed with the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, but he still continued to perform regularly.

Musician Bobby Watson remembered that at one performance not long after the accident when he was supposed to play sitting down, "he just kicked that stool back and turned the place out."

"I've just always admired his strength, his longevity and youthful attitude," Watson said Sunday. "He never stopped. He was always pushing it."

A visitation and memorial jazz session has been tentatively scheduled for next Sunday, with the funeral the following day at St. Louis Catholic Church.

Information from: The Kansas City Star

[John L]

I'm not sure, John, but what about Jay McShann? Another KCer.

I'm relatively sure that McShann did not record in the 20s. In fact, I don't even think that he recorded in the 30s.

[Rooster_Ties]

Longer version of the AP version of the article. Also from the KC Star (Spoon's paper)...

KC jazz musician who won global acclaim with violin dies

By LEE HILL KAVANAUGH and ERIC ADLER

The Kansas City Star

Posted on Mon, Apr. 26, 2004

Claude “Fiddler” Williams, a standard-bearer of Kansas City music for more than six decades, died early Sunday at Research Medical Center.  He was 96.

Blanche Williams, 66, Williams' wife for 12 years, was at her husband's bedside when he died at 4 a.m. Her husband, she said, would love to be remembered “as a passionate, passionate violinist.”

“He loved his music,” she said. “And he loved making people happy and feeling his music. He wanted them to feel it. He lived for his music.”

Williams, who even in his advanced age played frequent public gigs (his last performance was at the Plaza III restaurant in December), was one of the last remaining links to Kansas City's jazz era of the 1930s. During his storied career, he played with such renowned musicians as Count Basie, Lester Young, Mary Lou Williams and Andy Kirk.

Williams' music was ageless and filled with an irresistible joy, and he was one of the few jazz musicians to gain fame playing the violin. In 1997, he told The Kansas City Star that he would like to be remembered as “one of the best jazz fiddlers in the world.”

“He was good,” Kansas City jazz great Jay McShann said Sunday afternoon. “He was a good musician. He enjoyed playing.”

Pam Hider Johnson, program director for the Elder Statesmen of Jazz, said: “He is an icon. Just like we love Buck O'Neil, we love Claude ‘Fiddler' Williams.”

Reviewing a 1996 performance by Williams at the JVC Jazz Festival in New York, Jon Pareles of The New York Times wrote that Williams made the violin a “smooth-talking tease, sly and ebullient, with phrases that sounded like classy, witty wolf whistles.”

Williams laughed when he read the review. “I try to make my violin talk. I try to tell stories.”

The word retirement “was not even in his vocabulary,” Blanche Williams said Sunday. Until falling ill with pneumonia and being admitted to the hospital on April 5, Williams' schedule included teaching master violin classes in California in August and at a camp in New Jersey in August and September.

“He said that as long as his fingers still worked, he would,” Blanche Williams said.

Williams' career began in the 1920s. Born in Muskogee, Okla., on Feb. 22, 1908, Williams was the youngest of four brothers and two sisters.

He started out playing guitar, mandolin and bass, and later took up the violin, crediting the great jazz violinist Joe Venuti as a key influence.

He arrived in Kansas City in 1928 and found work with Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy. After five years of traveling and playing one-nighters, Williams left the group to settle in Kansas City, a place for musicians from around the country to hone their skills in jam sessions.

“Musicians would come from as far away as Texas and Chicago to learn how to do it,” he said. “We showed them the right way to do it and straightened up their playing.”

In Kansas City, Williams often saw a young Charlie Parker, who later achieved greatness.

“He was only 13 at the time,” Williams recalled. “Everywhere he went, you'd see that saxophone under his arm. He'd sometimes break up our session because he'd play that real wild stuff.”

Williams played a stint with the big band of Alphonso Trent in the early '30s. Trent's was “the first black big band allowed to play at white clubs in Oklahoma,” Williams said. For nine months each year, Williams also played in Peoria, Ill., at clubs with Nat King Cole's brother, Eddie. He left the Cole band after several contracts fell through.

“Good thing I did, too, or else I wouldn't have been able to play with Basie,” Williams said.

In Chicago, Basie heard Williams and asked him to join his up-and-coming band.

“Count came up looking for me because the guys in Kansas City told him about my playing,” he said.

After Basie left Kansas City in 1936, wooed to New York by record producer John Hammond, Williams was replaced by guitarist Freddie Green. Basie fired five players in one night.

Williams returned to Kansas City and played with various Kansas City bands until 1940, when he moved to Michigan.

“Me and George Lee moved to Flint because he had a girlfriend there and I told him I'd go with him,” Williams said. “We put together a band out of the common laborers there. … It finally broke up when several of the boys had to go into the service.”

A musician at night, Williams worked as a welder during the day. During World War II he served briefly in the Naval Reserve until he was discharged because of a sinus problem.

He found work in bands playing blues and jazz in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. He returned to Kansas City in 1952.

“I started playing at the Orchid,” he said. “It was a really good gig. They would broadcast live every Saturday afternoon.”

In the decades that followed, Williams sometimes found the pickings lean on the local and national scene, but his fame in Europe grew. A big career break came in 1988 — he was 80 years old — when he was selected to play in a Broadway revue called “Black and Blue.” Although the show garnered mixed reviews, it gave Williams' career a welcome boost, spurring national publicity and worldwide tours.

He performed at then President Bill Clinton's second inaugural, toured Australia and released “Live at J's, Volumes 1 & 2,” which the Village Voice named among the best jazz recordings of the year.

By the mid-'90s, Williams was working regularly at nightclubs throughout the nation, appearing with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and touring with the Elder Statesmen of Jazz, a group of musicians that included Al Grey, Harry “Sweets” Edison, Jane Jarvis, Benny Waters, Rick Fay and Louie Bellson.

“But Louie couldn't play much because he's getting up in age, you know,” Williams once said with a wink and a mischievous grin. At the time, Williams was weeks away from his 90th birthday, and Bellson was 73.

In the early 1990s, Williams was the first jazz musician inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame, and he released another CD, “King of Kansas City,” featuring several Kansas City musicians.

Williams married Blanche in 1991. He was happiest when playing in public, she said, whether it was in a jazz club, on stage at Carnegie Hall or at his own church in Kansas City.

“One of his best performances was playing ‘Silent Night' at Christmas Mass,” Blanche Williams said. “It was beautiful, and I'll always remember that one.”

In 2000, Williams' leg was broken in a serious car accident. Soon after, Blanche Williams said, he was diagnosed with early Alzheimer's disease. Still, he performed regularly, especially on weekend nights at Plaza III on the Country Club Plaza, which he considered his home base. On his birthday, after his car accident, he gave a performance at the Blue Room in the 18th and Vine Jazz District that jazz artist Bobby Watson said he would never forget.

“He had an unrelenting urge to always swing,” Watson said Sunday. “Right after his car accident, he was supposed to sit down and play. I think it was his 92nd birthday. Everyone was saying, ‘Hey now, Claude, take it easy.' He heard that he just stood up, he just kicked that stool back and turned the place out.

“I've just always admired his strength, his longevity and youthful attitude. He never stopped. He was always pushing it.”

In April last year, not long after Blanche Williams was diagnosed with colon cancer and found it difficult to care for her husband at home, Williams went to live at Swope Ridge Geriatric Hospital.

On March 11, Williams entered Research Medical Center and was in the hospital for two weeks, including five days in intensive care, with severe pneumonia. Though critically ill, he recovered even when few thought he would, Blanche Williams said.

Then, on April 5, he returned to the hospital with double pneumonia, she said.

“We all knew how sick he was,” Williams said. “He never complained. Never. Not one time did he complain about feeling bad or anything.”

After April 5, Williams never left the hospital. For the last week and a half, Blanche Williams said, her husband had been unresponsive. At his side, she said, she simply sat and talked to him, comforting him.

“I told him that millions of people love him,” she said.

A visitation and memorial jazz session is tentatively scheduled for 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday at Watkins Brothers Memorial Chapel, 4000 Emanuel Cleaver II Blvd. A funeral service will be held next Monday at St. Louis Catholic Church, 5930 Swope Parkway, with burial at Mount Moriah Cemetery, 10507 Holmes Road.

“Claude loved an audience,” Blanche Williams said. “Knowing him as I do, he would want a lot of people there, tapping their feet and celebrating his going home.”

[Rooster_Ties]

From the Feb/Mar 1998 issue of JAM Magazine (a local Kansas City jazz magazine)...

Claude "Fiddler" Williams: Still Swingin' at 90

by Michael J. Renner

It's a hot, August afternoon in Kansas City; and a small crowd has gathered around a large stage at the 15th annual 18th and Vine Heritage Jazz Festival. They have come to hear one of Kansas City's favorite sons, Claude "Fiddler" Williams.

Compact and wiry, the 89-year-old jazz violinist takes the stage dressed in tan slacks and a hip, collarless shirt. Like a cat conserving its energy, he moves slowly, checking sound equipment, chatting with musicians and surveying the scenery on Vine Street. Looking decades younger (he turns 90 on February 22), Claude's appearance belies the fact that he's practically as old as jazz itself.

Before performing, the violinist receives a city-initiated award for his life-long contribution to jazz. As the official reads the proclamation, Williams listens intently, his head bowed, his hands folded in front of his short, trim frame. He unassumingly and politely accepts the award. One gets the feeling that this shy man, within whom others see greatness, is either uncomfortable with public attention or just doesn't understand what all the fuss is about.

Any quizzicality his lack of response to the award has generated is quickly dispelled with the first measure he plays. He pounces, playing with a vigor that matches his youthful looks. Hunching over, Williams squeezes from his fiddle plangent melodies and rollicking riffs, stamping his foot and flashing an occasional smile of satisfaction. When he sings, his voice has a tinge of nasality wrapped around a relaxed, almost droll Southern, delivery.

Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1908, Claude Williams was exposed to the many territory bands that criss-crossed Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri. Joe Venuti was not only the first significant jazz violinist, but also the first violinist Williams heard.

"Before him," says Claude, "I had been playing guitar, banjo and mandolin. My brother-in-law taught me how to play all those instruments. But I heard Joe and told my mother that I wanted to play one of those things. What he was playing was so pretty. I was playing (violin) the next day because I knew how to play a mandolin and all I had to do was learn how to use the bow. I got myself a good violin teacher because I didn't know anything about music. All my other playing had been by ear."

Part of Williams' musical longevity is his style of playing, which he attributes to training.

"It's a little different," he explains, "because I knew more about chords and changes than the other violin players. They only knew how to read the melody and swing it. But with me knowing guitar, I played a lot of augmented and diminished changes, flatted fifths, all that stuff."

After his sparkling performance, Fiddler strolls up Vine street, KC's former haven of lavish nightlife, now newly restored. Walking slowly amid renovated buildings -- some built for Robert Altman's 1996 film, "Kansas City" -- the smell of barbecue fills the air. Donning a straw hat to protect him from the intense afternoon sun, Fiddler begins to chat about the current activity in the area. Many Kansas Citians have been surprised to actually see the progress that's been made, but for Fiddler, who made this nine-block time capsule his stomping grounds from 1928 to 1933, it's a different feeling. He's seen it from both sides.

"I thought it was gone," he recalls in his rural, soft-spoken, Oklahoma dialect. "I never did have any idea they would try to bring it back. 'Course it never will be like it was, with the bars on the corner that never close." He stops, points to what is now a parking lot and says, "There was a hotel there and..." (motioning behind him) "...two clubs on the corner over there. There were two or three clubs on every block on 18th Street; same thing on 12th Street. And we did a lot of jamming."

In those days of battling bands, cutting contests and all-night jam sessions, Fiddler had to keep up with monster saxophonists like Lester Young, Buddy Tate, Hershel Evans and Ben Webster. Despite the soft-sounding violin's inferior role in jazz history, he was the only violinist who could compete as an equal against the overpowering horns.

"When Lester got with the Blue Devils, they'd find me and we'd have to have a good jam session," Fiddler recalls.

Before amplification, violinists were forced into making a statement the moment the bow hit a string. It was in this incubator of Kansas City jamming that Fiddler developed his trademark style of first repeatedly attacking the strings, then gliding his way through a phrase. He was, and still is, relentless.

Despite his fondness for recollections, Fiddler is not one to live life through the prism of nostalgia. At an age when most near-nonagenarians prefer to live off their memories, Fiddler not only shows no signs of slowing down, he continues to look forward.

"Claude has two things that a person his age usually doesn't have: curiosity and competitiveness," says Russ Dantzler, Williams' manager. "The most important statement I can pull out of him about what it is that allows him to be such a happy and healthy person at his age is: 'Don't worry about nothing.' He releases stress like 95 percent of the world only wishes it could."

Says Fiddler about this outlook and his current age, "I feel better now than I did fifty years ago."

Jazz writer Scott Yanow believes Fiddler is one of a handful of jazz musicians alive today who recorded in the 1920s and are still recording. He just released his second CD in two years, King of Kansas City (Progressive Records), featuring all Kansas City musicians. They include: guitarist Rod Fleeman, saxophonist Kim Park, bassist Bob Bowman, drummer Todd Strait and vocalists Karrin Allyson and Lisa Henry. His 1995 recording for the same label, Swing Time In New York, included all New York musicians. Add to the collection the 1993 release of an important 1989 live concert, Live at J's (Arhoolie Records) and you have the full array of the Claude Williams catalog as a leader. In addition to his own recordings, his 1972 recording with Jay McShann, The Man from Muskogee, was reissued in 1994.

For the past few years, Fiddler has toured with the Statesmen of Jazz, a group of noted musicians 65 years and older, launched in 1995 by the American Federation of Jazz Societies. Icons like Harry "Sweets" Edison, Louie Bellson and Al Grey are among this elite group.

"With the Statesmen," says Claude, "all of them are what'cha call seasoned musicians. They can call a song we haven't played for 20 years and then play it."

Last year, the group recorded a tasty disc on Arbors Records, and in September the ensemble traveled to Japan to make its international debut.

"Music is an incredible tonic of life," says Matt Glaser, chair of the Strings Department at Boston's Berklee College of Music. "There is something about swinging that keeps people young. Claude's playing keeps growing. He's always interested in new ideas and learning new tunes and trying out new harmonic ideas. That's an amazing thing because it's very easy to just rest on your laurels and stay still. But his playing is constantly energized and growing."

Williams drinks in the tonic known as "swing," not with a desperate thirst, but with the matter-of-fact understanding of what his body and soul need.

"Music changes a little every year," he says. "It's a different style the longer you hold the note... that kind of stuff. But, it makes me feel good; so if that lengthens my life, that's wonderful."

"Claude comes out of the real Kansas City tradition, having played with Count Basie, Lester Young and all those guys," explains Glaser. "You can hear that in his playing... and that's really the life blood of jazz. No other violin player has had the depth of jazz feeling Claude has."

Wynton Marsalis, when discussing the meaning of swing, once said that Fiddler "was someone who doesn't even try (to swing), he picks up his fiddle and the man can't help but swing."

From his perspective, Williams believes he's developed a style that could be considered more focused and fluent than other jazz violinists.

"I play the melody then play some of the changes along with the melody. (Younger musicians) play a whole lot of jazz stuff, which I say is over a lot of peoples ears -- they don't know what they're listening to! Anytime I play a song, you'll hear some of the melody all the way through. That's my style."

Having grown up in northeast Oklahoma, Fiddler moved to Kansas City in 1927. His first recorded performance -- on violin and banjo -- came as a member of Andy Kirk's famed Twelve Clouds of Joy. While with Kirk, Williams often embellished the horn arrangements written by Kirk's pianist Mary Lou Williams. It's not surprising then, that many jazz critics often describe Fiddler's approach as "horn-like."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Claude has two things that a person his age usually doesn't have: curiosity and competitiveness." -- Russ Dantzler

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Though well-received everywhere he goes today and considered an influential jazz violinist, Claude Williams is far from a household name -- even in his hometown. Though not apparently resentful, a series of "circumstances" that happened more than fifty years ago may have set his fate in motion.

During the height of Kirk's success, Fiddler was forced to leave the band due to illness. He returned to Kansas City, recovered and then began touring with Alphonso Trent's group as well as George E. Lee's Orchestra, a band that Williams says included a young Charlie Parker. Of "Bird," Fiddler says, "I hate to tell people that I used to show Charlie how to play because they look at me kinda funny. But when he used to jam with us, he could read anything but he didn't have it together when he'd go from a major to a minor. He would play some wrong changes and I'd have to take him off and show him the right chords. He appreciated that."

A second misfortune occurred in 1936. Fiddler was tapped to play guitar for Count Basie's first big band, but politics and economics prevailed as he and others received pink slips.

"In those days it was (John) Hammond's band because he gave Basie (the money) to get the band together. Hammond was calling all the shots; and he had promised his New York musicians first chance with the band. I wasn't bitter because I knew it wasn't Basie that was doing that, it was Hammond. They wanted somebody like (guitarist) Freddie Green to sit up there and play just rhythm... ching-ching-ching." Something Williams says he ultimately didn't want to do.

"I said (to myself) there was a lot of good guitar players, and the jazz violin players were kinda scarce, so I'm just gonna play fiddle."

Fiddler then moved back to Kansas City, started and played in bands all around the country, but didn't record again for more than 30 years.

Although Fiddler wasn't part of the late-1960s violin wave that resurrected the late Stephane Grappelli's career and launched the likes of Jean-Luc Ponty and Michael Urbaniak, the 1972 recording with McShann brought him newfound interest. According to Russ Dantzler, that recording "helped put both (Claude and Jay) back on the map, where, outside of Kansas City, the world was beginning to forget them."

Furthermore, Williams' work in the 1980s Paris and Broadway musical "Black and Blue" also helped increase his stock. The long-running black revue created steady work until he came home to Kansas City to care for his ailing wife, who eventually passed away.

A lot of Williams' renewed exposure is due to Dantzler. ("He's the one keeping me jumping and working now," Fiddler says.) And, when he's not playing music, this quiet, laid-back man likes to play pool or attend shows with Blanche, his new and vibrant wife of the past six years. "I feel I'm fulfilling my own dreams through Claude," she says. "He plays what I'm feeling and unable to express musically."

True beauty comes from taking complexity and forging something smooth and lyrical, something where the sweat of creativity is undetectable to the eyes and ears. It's Williams' combination of clarity, melody and swing that brings to mind Art Blakey's famous line that "the average man doesn't want to have to use his brain when he listens to music. Music should wash away the dust of everyday life."

As Claude "Fiddler" Williams approaches 90, it seems his life has come full circle. With new recordings and an active touring schedule, his popularity is again on the upswing.

"Ever seen the Mutual Musicians Foundation?" Williams asks, pointing to the site where many an all-night jam session saw the break of dawn. He enters the old building where he serves on the board of directors. A tight-sounding quartet of high schoolers jams hard. Just a few people are there, happy to take respite from the heat. The walls are laden with old photographs, each with hand-printed titles protected by plastic wrap. Like Williams himself, jazz history is displayed unadorned, readily available for anyone caring to take the time to soak in the richness.

Claude listens attentively to the quartet, takes a sip from his worn plastic coffee mug, and says matter-of-factly, "Sound pretty good, don't they?"

It's clear that Claude "Fiddler" Williams -- someone who has played with the greatest musicians in jazz history -- is still thrilled by the purest sound of all: young kids learning to play jazz.

Michael J. Renner covers jazz for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His articles have appeared in Jazziz, Black Diaspora and the Columbia (MO) Daily Tribune.

Edited April 26, 2004 by Rooster_Ties

[tjluke68]

Maybe he's back playing with Basie up there, who died 20 years ago today!

[Hank]

Goodbye to the great Fiddler. I first saw him performing in the excellent film, "Last of the Blue Devils," and grabbed every opportunity since then to see him perform or find his recordings. A Kansas City marvel!

[mmilovan]

Was he the last survivor from Old Testament Basie band?

[brownie]

Looks like it. Very sad...

[John L]

By chance, is Emmett Berry still alive?

[mmilovan]

Hey John,

and what about Earle Warren?

I think I saw him in Ken Burns film, but I am not sure.

[Spontooneous]

Earle Warren's gone. He died in June '94. (AMG gives the wrong year.)

[LAL]

RIP

How many jazz musicans do we have left who recorded in the 1920s? I am having trouble thinking of one. Could he have been the last?

Artie Shaw.

I have no sources to confirm this but he may be on records made in the late 20s with Irving Aaronson's Commanders.

[EKE BBB]

I think you´re right LAL. According to the available on-line information from Tom Lord´s discography, Artie Shaw took part in 302 sessions, starting in 1928 and ending in 1968.

[EKE BBB]

I'm not sure, John, but what about Jay McShann? Another KCer.

I'm relatively sure that McShann did not record in the 20s. In fact, I don't even think that he recorded in the 30s.

According to Tom Lord´s discography, his first session took place in 1940.

[EKE BBB]

By chance, is Emmett Berry still alive?

After some Google research, I found a site BLUE JUICE mentioning he died on June 22, 1993

[mmilovan]

Goodbye to all of you nice people. You will last forever in our world.