April 13, 1979 Gusto music feature: Don Menza

 

A visit with one of Buffalo’s musical legends

April 13, 1979 

Jazz Star

The bartender is a fan. He beams a big handshake to Don Menza and promises to drop by to catch the weekend’s show. Menza has become something of a jazz star on two fronts here on his home turf. His following includes both the audience who heard him in Buffalo’s jazz clubs two decades ago and the folks who hear his saxophone and flute in countless recordings from Los Angeles.

         “I’m not going to tell you who I’m working with,” he says as the waitress brings the menus. “That would be name-dropping and I don’t want to get into it. Everybody. Everybody. What are you going to measure success by, anyway? If it was a musical situation, it happened before I went to California.”

         Menza came up in the aftermath of Charlie Parker, when bebop was a thinking man’s alternative to the popular culture of the ‘50s. Everybody told him saxophone was all right as a hobby, but not as a way of life. Menza had his own ideas. He left Tech High School after three years because he didn’t want to be an electrical engineer. He divided his senior year between Grover Cleveland and the Pine Grill, where he was playing five nights a week. He kept playing in the Army in Germany, then came back to Fredonia State College.

         “I went there a semester,” he recalls. “Then I left and went on the road with Al Villetto. Then I came back for another semester and six weeks before finals I got a call from Maynard Ferguson. I looked at myself in the mirror and said: ‘What do you want to do?’ I packed my bags.”

         Menza toured with Ferguson until 1962, then returned to Buffalo to lead his own group. For a while it looked like it would work. Sunday sessions at Big Mother’s on Main Street mushroomed into a six-night-a-week sensation in the summer and fall of 1963.

         “There were no compromises, no kind of pop music,” Menza says, “and the people loved it. That was a great time.” But it didn’t last forever. By Christmas, the craze had died. When he and his wife, whom he’d met in Fredonia, tallied up 1963, they’d barely earned $3,000. Furthermore, there was a baby on the way. Maybe those people were right when they told Menza to do saxophone as a hobby. He seriously considered quitting music.

         Instead, he took a chance and went to Munich, where he had played in the jazz cellars when he was in the Army. He stepped off the plane one cold March day with nothing more than a heavy coat, a sax, a flute, a clarinet and a duffel bag. Before too long, things started looking up.

         “When we went to Europe,” he says, “our salary more than tripled. We started to live like, quote, normal human beings. In Europe, a jazz player was considered an artist. You got a great deal of respect, even from the common consumer. That sort of turned my head around. I don’t know where in the book it says artists are supposed to starve and live in a cellar some place. That’s long gone.”

         Within a year, the new band he put together in Munich was invited to play weekly on Bavarian radio. They went on to win the radio jazz ensemble competition at the first Montreux Jazz Festival. By the time he left in 1968, he had the key to the city and “some great tapes.”

         “It got so that everybody who came through town was saying: ‘What are you doin’ here? You should be in California,’” he recalls. “When I got to California, it felt the same way it did in Europe. I was there for a few weeks and then I went on the road with Buddy Rich for a year.

         “I first met Buddy Rich rehearsing for a record date. I was impressed. I’ve never heard anybody play drums like him. He was typical Buddy Rich. I was typical me. We became great friends. Being with Buddy put me into prominence. By the time I got back to L.A., everybody knew who I was.”

         His next gig was in the house band for Della Reese’s five-day-a-week TV show. He was part of an all-star jazz house band that included the likes of Herb Ellis, Ray Brown and Joe Pass. “That was the cream job of all time,” Menza smiles. “You’d show up at 10 and by 2 you’re gone. It was syndicated. When they lost the Chicago market, that was it.”

         Menza’s been an L.A. mainstay during the ‘70s, doing recording and live performances, jazz and popular, reading someone else’s charts and writing his own. He’s a regular with Supersax, the group that recreates Charlie Parker numbers, and leads his aggregations in L.A. jazz spots like Dante’s, the Lighthouse, the Baked Potato and Jerry Van Dyke’s Jazz Club.

         Some weekends may find him playing clubs in San Diego, San Francisco or Las Vegas. He does Toronto at least once a year and his friend Ron Corsaro in Niagara Falls has lured him back twice so far in 1979. Tonight, Saturday and Sunday they hold forth in the Palm Court of the Niagara Hilton, opposite the Niagara Falls Convention Center.

         “I work with anybody so long as their thing is honest,” he says. “I do disco things all the time. I just did an album with Walter Murphy. I was with Donna Summer for that live album at the Universal Amphitheater. I go to the Roxy too and hear the rock bands. You have to. The minute you stop listening, you’re dead. You can’t be close-minded about it.

         “You become a mirror image of what you take in. You have to be influenced by anything you hear. For instance, there’s a part of Boots Randolph that I love. And there’s Freddie Martin, who plays like an old-time melody. The younger players, all they want to know is what’s going on now, but it’s incredible how they evolve after a while and discover things that happened earlier. Most things you hear have been around. I can draw you a straight line from the hit players of today to the sax players of 30 years ago.”

         Menza’s done some teaching on occasion, but he’s not ready to do that full-time yet. He’s trimmed down his instrumental overload – sold his oboe and his English horn – and has decided to concentrate on his tenor sax and his writing. He’s been commissioned to write a piece for a jazz festival in May at the University at California at Santa Barbara. He’s writing charts for Louis Bellson and Buddy Rich. He’ll be writing for Luis Gasca’s upcoming album. And he’ll be doing his first direct-to-disc recording sometime in May.

         “It you keep your attitude right, you can play your life out,” Menza remarks. “John Sedola’s like that. And there’s Al Tinney, who’s an ageless kind of player. And Max Thein, I worked with Max, yeah, years ago. It’s nice to see him still playing. The thing I never want to forget is the feeling I had playing here. There’s an enthusiasm, a great deal of energy. The players from here all seem to have that thrust. You can feel it when you come back.”

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IN THE PHOTO: Don Menza on a visit here from L.A. The other players are not identified. Buffalo News photo by Dennis C. Enser.

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FOOTNOTE: The names Don Menza didn't drop included Paul Anka, Leonard Cohen, the Manhattan Transfer, Bette Midler, Lalo Schifrin and Neil Diamond. He's also released more than a dozen albums as a leader, including "Jack Rabbitt" with local virtuosos John Bacon and Bobby Jones in 2004. He was inducted into the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame in 2005, but by then he had announced his retirement because he didn't like the way jazz had become part of pop culture. "If I feel the urge, I might play again," he said.

        And he has. He’s shown up locally for club dates and the Lewiston Jazz Festival throughout the 2000s and 2010s. He went back to Europe in 2017 and was featured in the Jazz at the Albright-Knox series in 2018 and 2019.