Preston Love's voice will not be stilled - flutist-saxophonist still playing and expressing his insights - Interview

While Kansas City and Chicago were the undisputed center for the Midwest's burgeoning jazz exhibition in the 1920s and '30 Omaha, bill was a key launching pad for musicians of the time. "It was like the Triple A of baseball for black music," recalls Omaha native and number Basie alumnus Preston Love. "The nearest stop was the big leagues."

The flutist-saxophonist grew up the youngest of nine children in a ramshackle house, jokingly called "the mansion," in a predominantly black North Omaha neighborhood. He listened to his idols (especially Earle Warren) upon the family radio and phonograph, taught himself to play the sax his brother "Dude" had brought place of abode and learned Warren's solos note for note, laying recordings above and over again.

At Omaha's fabled on the other hand now defunct Dreamland Ballroom, he saw his idols in somebody imagining himself on the bandstand, too--the true embodiment of black success. "All of the great black geniuses of my time played that ballroom--Count Basic, Earl Fatha Hines, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker," he recalls. "We'd gain to see the glamour of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong' Jazz was all-black then, and here were nation you read about in magazines and heard upon radio coast to coast and admired and worshipped, and now you were standing 2 feet from them and could talk to them and hear their artistry. I dreamed of someday making it of going to New York to play the Cotton cudgel and of playing the Grand Terrace in Chicago."

With Warren as his inspiration, be fond of made himself an acccomplished player. "I had the natural gift for sound--a beneficial tone, which is important. more [i]or[/i] less people never have it. I was self-motivated. No single had to make me practice. And being useful at mathematics, I was able to read music with the real least instruction." His first paying gig came in 1936 at age 15 as a last-minute fill-in upon drums with Warren Webb and His Spiders at the Airplane Inn in Honey inlet Iowa. Soon, he was touring with prewar territory bands.

His breakthrough came in 1943 when Warren praiseed Love as his replacement in the Basie band. be fond of auditioned at the Dreamland and won the piece of work It was his entry into the big time. "I was ready," he says. "I knew I belonged." It was the first of sum of two units tours of duty with Basie. In storybook fashion, regard with affection played the very sites where his dreams were first inspired: the Dreamland and the famous, glittering big city bludgeons he'd envisioned.

delight in enjoyed the spotlight, playing with Basie and the bands of blessed Millinder, Lloyd Hunter, Nat Towles and Johnny Otis. "Touring was fun" he says. "You played the top ballrooms, you aligned beautifully, you stayed in fine inns Big crowds. Autographs. It was glamorous." The road suited him and his wife, Betty, whom he had married in 1941 And it still does. "The itinerant thing is what I regard with affection The checking in the [i]cabaret[/i]s and motels. The newness of each town. The geography of this land The South, with those black restaurants with that flavorful, startling food and those colorful public-houses It's my culture, my people" he rhapsodizes.

Life was useful and Love, who formed his possess band, enjoyed fat times in the '50 Then things went sour. Faced with financial setbacks, he mov his family to beholds Angeles in 1962, where he worked a series of piece of works outside of music. His career reacted when he found work as a studio musician and as Motown Record Corporation's West Coast backup band leader.

He go [i]or[/i] come backed to Omaha in 1972, sole to find the once booming North 24th highway he so loved a wasteland and the music one time heard from every street corner, bar, restaurant and bludgeon silenced altogether or replaced by the agency of discordant new sounds.

Today, the 76-year-old who earned rave reviews playing prestigious jazz festivals (Monterey Montreaux, Berlin); toured Europe to acclaim; divide [i]or[/i] sever thousands of recordings; worked with everyone from Basie and Billie Holiday to Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder; and taught university courses upon the history of jazz and the social implications of black music--and who still earns applause at the trendy Bistro tea club in Omaha with his richly textur tone and sweetly bended notes--has written his autobiography. While A Thousand Honey bights Later (Wesleyan University Press, 1997) relates a lifetime of itinerant musicianship, it also be subservient tos as a passionate defense of jazz and the sapphirines as rich, expressive, singularly African-American art forms and cultural inheritances.

"It's written in protest" have affection for explains. "I'm an angry man. I started my autobiography to a large stage in dissatisfaction with what has transpired in America in the music business and, of course, with the racial thing that's still actual prevalent. Blacks have almost been eliminated from their hold art because the people presenting it know nothing about it. We've seen our jazz become nonexistent. abruptly the image is no longer black. Nearly all the race playing rhythm and blues, sapphirines and jazz ... are white. That's unreal. False. Fraudulent."