San Quentin on the Air: Heroin and Prison Jazz in the '40s

This is Shattuck Avenue, which runs between Berkeley's boutique-laden college scene and Oakland. A varied mix of people weave between each other on the avenue—college boys in skinny jeans, homeless men and women carrying cardboard signs, professors in thick-rimmed glasses clicking and scrolling on Blackberries. Many of them stop and greet Reed.

It's not too surprising that the jazz singer, at 80, has attained a certain level of status in the area. He's experienced quite a bit, from learning chord progressions with the legendary Charles Mingus, to doing four stints in San Quentin State Prison on heroin-related charges, to rebounding back into making music with Berkeley's jazz elite. He points inside the Cheese Board, where a glossy piano lords over the hardwood café floor. "This is where I play on Tuesdays," he says, sweeping his hand with the air of a gracious monarch showing off his kingdom. The only constant throughout the singer's chaotic life has been music, thanks largely to the San Quentin Jazz Band, a group that included musicians such as Dexter Gordon, Frank Butler, Art Pepper, Frank Morgan and Reed, all bounded by heroin incarcerations in the famous West-Coast prison.

In early 2009, a three-judge panel ruled that California had to decrease its inmate head count by roughly 55,000. The panel reasoned that overcrowding in the state's 33 penitentiaries, which were designed to hold 84,000, but now house more than 150,000, is violating the Eighth Amendment. With so many bodies, money for health care both physical and mental, as well as recreation and arts programs, is eroding faster than California’s crumbling sandstone cliffs. In such a dark penal climate, it's important to remember the story of this band, which gave '40s and '50s inmates an invaluable second chance—a chance many don't get 60 years later.

Naturally, with adolescence came anger, and for him, it took an extreme form. “When I was a kid,” he says, “I'd get put down and called names, and there was always that 'nigger' thing hanging in there. For some people, it didn't bother 'em that much, it just rolled off. But others of us took it in, and we were so uncomfortable in our own skin that when the opportunity came to take a drug or something, we'd do it."

When he was 12 and a friend invited him over to get drunk, he complied. The booze touched his lips, and all of the doubts he felt enveloped by disintegrated. "When that stuff hit my stomach," he recalls, "I said 'Hallelujah!' 'cause I was no longer humiliated. That stuff told me if anyone messed with me, they were gonna get humiliated." He drank until he was unconscious. When he ran away to join the Army at age 17, a friend offered him a needle, and he remembered that glorious feeling of floating up, above the obstacles choking him. In 1951, he was incarcerated for the first time. Addiction had sunk its greedy teeth into Reed, and it would be more than 40 years before he could shake it loose.

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This was an unfortunately all-too-common story for jazz musicians in the ‘40s and '50s. The creation of the San Quentin Jazz Band was a dark parody on supply-and-demand principles, in that heroin use was a central part of jazz and bebop culture. Charlie Parker abused it. Billie Holiday begged for it on her death bed. Dexter Gordon was hauled off to jail for possession. On the West Coast, San Quentin was the Regional Intake Center, so most of the greats ended up there. However, it took the leadership of one warden, the reform-minded Clinton T. Duffy, to really kick-start an A-list musical group.

In 1942, a few years before Reed would arrive in San Quentin, Duffy strolled into the penitentiary's plaza and listened to a dreary concert. According to his memoir, San Quentin Story, a handful of inmates in gray-and-black uniforms squalled away on a few saxes "as though the parole board had just turned them down" to an audience of bored visitors and circling gulls. Duffy believed that music was essential to his prisoners' well-being, so he called in Ted Stanich, a guard with jazz training, who threw together a worn-out catalog of dusty instruments he'd dug out from odd corners and storage units on the grounds, consisting of a dilapidated piano and a few old saxes and fiddles. The San Quentin Jazz Band was born.

The first concert in the mess hall was a pandemonium of syncopated glee; men stomped their feet on the floor, banging and smashing spoons and plates to the downbeat. But Duffy was determined to bring his musicians outside the prison's gates. In '41, he went to Bill Pabst at Bay Area radio station KFRC, played him the record and asked for some airtime. Pabst agreed.

"San Quentin on the Air" crackled onto the airwaves from a make-shift stage in the mess hall in January of 1942. The inmates used their own funds to buy instruments, soundproofing material, sheet music and a baton for their conductor. They threw together a bunch of dirty yellow shirts whitened with bleach to wear on the stage. The lights dimmed. The mikes hummed on, and the San Quentin Jazz Band went live. "With the magic of the radio we had penetrated the invisible wall that separates imprisoned men from those who judged them," Duffy wrote in his memoir. Their first number was Vincent Youmans' "Time on My Hands." Every week, the melancholy piano strain and lilting chorus ("Time on my hands, you in my heart") drifted through the airwaves, over the thick walls, and into living rooms and kitchens up and down the West Coast.

[Above: San Quentin Marching Band]

Once he was incarcerated, it didn’t take Reed long to discover the band, and like-minded jazz aficionados along with it. One day, he wandered down to the lower yard athletic field aimlessly, then stopped, hearing a melodic riff from the '40s hit "Embraceable You" float up from the bleachers. Before he knew what was happening, his foot began tapping, he started humming along and a wide grin spread across his face. He drew nearer to the music, only to see guitarist Ralph Bravo, grinning back. Reed started singing a variation on the lyrics, changing a word or a stanza each time the chorus hit. As Reed's song reached Bravo's ears, the man on the bleachers looked down, and his fingers flew off into a complicated progression. With a lilt, Reed followed Bravo's improvisation. The two circled around the old classic for hours, dipping and soaring through variations while the gulls drifted listlessly overhead.

After this, Reed joined the band, and began singing at concerts and Warden's Dinners, Art Pepper often playing on his tunes. Music was all the group thought about. They were only allowed a half hour of jazz radio in the prison every week, so whenever a new song came on, they'd spend weeks and months trying to recreate it. When they heard Bill Henderson performing "A Sleeping Bee," Bravo hastened to mimic it on the guitar, Reed scrambled to write down the lyrics and the sax players strained to hear their parts. It gave them an activity, something to fill their time and look forward to that was a reminder of life outside the prison walls.

According to Reed, it was a powerful anti-depressant, though he admits it was no magic potion that curbed addiction. "It's not as simple as, 'They played music, and so they recovered from their addictions,'" he says. "But being able to do the things we were able to do there, it gave us a glimpse that we could go somewhere, we could make something of ourselves after we got out, whenever that would be."

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The interconnection of recidivism rates and prison arts programs isn't a new concept. California's William James Arts in Corrections society published a study stating that inmates involved in extra-curricular activities had 75% fewer disciplinary actions and 27% lower recidivism rates. But in 2009, San Quentin's rates are spiking up past 50%, and with the "tough on crime" mentality of recent administrations, it's been difficult to get money for Arts in Corrections and programs like it. In 2003, AIC had to terminate most of its artist contracts because of the state's budget crisis, and was only able hire several back thanks to contributions from private sponsors. As NPR recently reported, San Quentin's gymnasium is stacked wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with bunk beds this year, leaving little space for activities and less money to cultivate them.

Mimi Fox teaches jazz in California's prisons for AIC. She echoes Reed’s sentiment and says that she's noticed that extra-curricular activities like music also help fight race-based gang violence, a problem which, according to the Encyclopedia of American Race Riots, caused roughly 7000 injuries in California in 2002, and led to a number of heated riots in 2006. “You walk into the yard and everybody is segregated into the Puerto Rican group and the Mexican group and the African American group," Fox says. "But then you gather them into the music room and tell them to play a Duke Ellington samba or some other number, and guess what? The trumpet players get together, the drummers get together. It makes staying in your own little bubble very difficult.”

Reed says he perceives marked deterioration in inmates’ mental health as programs like these erode. "I do some work with guys who are on parole now," he says, "and they're nothing like we were. They are angry and self-destructive in ways that we never dreamed of. They come home, and then go right back to jail, and they're so mad because they're treated badly."

Of course, when the state spends more on prisons than on schools, the Reaganomics answer—cutting funds for the "non-deserving" poor—starts to sound fairly attractive. "When Reagan came, it was all about punishment," Reed spits. "You know, 'We can’t waste our money on these losers.'" But he also admits that life was almost too cushy in '40s and '50s San Quentin. "When I left the last time, this guy said, 'Why you leaving? You know you too dumb to make it out there.' In those days, it was easier to be there than it was out here, because just being here is complex and demanding. You got a responsibility for your freedom, and when you don’t have no freedom, you don't got any responsibility. In there, your laundry and food is taken care of, you don't have to pay rent, your bedding is clean every week. All you have to do is walk between the white lines and pursue your interests."

Warden Duffy struggled with how much luxury, comparatively, he gave his prisoners as well. According to his memoir, when he hosted visitors who saw the jazz band, they would inevitably say, "Dammit, Warden, this is great, but it is not a prison."

"But it is a prison," Duffy would respond. "Its men are prisoners: controlled, locked up, stripped of their rights as citizens, doing time to pay their debt. Confinement in itself is punishment, whether for a day or forever." 

[Above: Eleanor Roosevelt at San Quentin circa 1942]

Whatever its direct impact on recidivism rates, the Jazz Band buoyed Reed through his dark prison years. It's at least part of the reason that, 50 years later, he sits in Berkely's Cheese Board like a rags-to-riches David Copperfield. These days, he's married, running a program for addicts and their families called "The Art and Practice of Living Well" and nurturing a fledgling music career. His elegant attire and bourgeoning success send a clear message: this man has made it.

But as we sit at the table, a flower vendor walks over to the curb and tosses a bucket of water onto the street, close to Reed's parked Cruiser. “Don’t do that,” Reed stands up and says, visibly alarmed.

“It’s just water,” snaps the vendor.

“Yeah,” he retorts, “but it hits the dirty street and splashes back up on my car.”

He sits down, shaken, and for a brief moment, vulnerable. Like a Dickensian character, he’s risen above his past, but he clings to the signifiers of it—his hat, his career, his car—with the air of a man not quite free, still needing to prove something.

After a few minutes of silence, he reveals that, indeed, he's still haunted by his history. He says, quietly, "All the people I know, who were in the band with me, they’re all dead, mostly by overdose.” He glances toward the cafe. The glass reflects the sun skirting through rain clouds, but Reed sees none of this. He's looking at the ghosts of Dexter Gordon and Ralph Bravo, lost to their addictions. 

Then his face changes as he sees a piano through the glass. "I play here on Tuesday nights," he says once more. "This one night, this guy Akira was with us, and he was doing rhythmic stuff that was driving me around and insistently shaping my phrases. Meanwhile, this guy Rob was shaping the music harmonically, and the pianist was taking me somewhere else. All of a sudden, the saxophone just grabbed me, and I went with it. I look up, dazed, and guess what?" He laughs. "We were all grinning."

He strokes one leather glove against the other and gazes up, beyond the store front at the darkening sky. "As a jazz musician, you live for that. It’s all about that moment when, suddenly, all the chaos gets beautiful.”