Alto player Terrance Tony, until his untimely death of pneumonia on April 7th, led our fourth Saturday jazz club dates with fire coming from deep experience in the music. He came of age as a musician in Dallas and Houston, spending precious time on the bandstand learning his trade from such legendary Texas tenor players as Illinois Jacquet and Arnett Cobb. Terrance later toured with Art Blakey, an indication of the levels his study of jazz elevated him to.  Read a bit more here at an earlier post on our site.

Alto player Terrance Tony, deceased 4/7/15

Drummer Vinnie Rodriguez, who anchored Terrance’s Saturday night quartets here at Bird & Beckett since last September, has assembled a quintet featuring alto player Jesse Levit to pay tribute to Terrance on what would have been Terrance’s gig, Saturday, April 25th from 8-11 pm. They’ll burn through some of the tunes that Terrance could be relied on to call each month, and they’ll also give a nod to a Texas tenor player, Marchel Ivery of Dallas, who Terrance was set to honor on this date.  Jesse Levit, alto sax; Danny Brown, tenor sax; Larry Chin, piano; Aaron Cohn, bass; Vinnie Rodriguez, drums.

One of Terrance’s most thoroughgoing influences in his youth was Marchel Ivery, a player who was a staple of the Dallas jazz scene for decades and who gained considerable notice as a member of Red Garland’s quartet in the 1970s. Marchel’s influence on the players who came into contact with him can’t be understated, witness the article linked above.

Tonight, the quintet will give a nod — as Terrance had planned — to Ivery’s importance, with the help of tenor player Danny Brown, a young and astonishingly gifted player who has appeared frequently on the Bird & Beckett stage and much much further afield.

The importance of influence, like that exerted on young Terrance by the veteran player Ivery, is attested to by Ivery’s appreciation of Red Garland expressed in this quote:  “”I was always in awe of him,” Ivery says. “Whenever we were on the bandstand, it was an experience I can’t explain. It’s something I will cherish forever. I wish he was here today. I talked to Red every day.He would call me, and we would talk an hour, two hours. Then, when we’d get off the phone, he’d say, ‘You coming over?’ I’d sit over there till one in the morning, and we’d talk, talk, talk. I wish I had a tape recorder. We talked about Dizzy, Max, Charlie Parker. He said that when he played with Charlie, he didn’t want to solo after him, he was so good. I asked him if he recorded with Parker, and he said yeah, but he didn’t know what happened to the recording. The record they did together, Live at Storyville, came out a year after Red passed. He passed without even knowing about it.”

Terrance Tony, a player who has passed away too young, whose talent too few here in San Francisco were lucky enough to experience, had a strong influence on the local players who had a chance to work with him — continuing a chain of influence that reaches back to the deep roots of jazz.