Sheila Tracy Talks to Dick Nash

For the best part of half a century Dick Nash has been 'first call' in the Hollywood studios, working with such great composers as Alfred Newman, Henry Mancini and John Williams, to name but a few. His name is legendary and even now at the age of 74 and inevitably sometimes losing out to younger players, he can still deliver the goods.

It all began in 1953 when the young, newly married trombonist set off cross country from his home in Boston on his honeymoon, a honeymoon that would take him to the film capital of the world. To make it in the music business it had to be either New York or Los Angeles and with Dick being into tennis, soft ball and later on golf, he figured it had to be L.A. Another incentive was the fact that his brother, saxophonist Ted Nash, was already established in Los Angeles on the Club 15 Radio Show with Jerry Gray and Dick Haymes and there would be a place for the newly weds to stay.

"I'd put aside a little money with enough for a down payment on a house and someone gave me a list of some 15 to 29 dance band gigs around town. 'Oh wonderful, glad to hear you're in town', was the reply when I called, then not a word. That first year I went through the whole of my savings as I wasn't doing anything apart from a few rehearsal bands. Then somebody, I think it might have been Frank Capp as we were both new in town and both from the New England area, recommended me to Ken Hanna who ran a regular Sunday afternoon rehearsal band. One of the trombone players couldn't make it so I went along and he pulled out a trombone feature which ended with a cadenza and feeling a little frisky, I went up to a double G and nailed it. I saw his eyes light up and he came over to me and said 'I want you to come back next week as I'm going to write something for you'. It turned out to be Nirvana which was the very first thing I recorded in this town and it sort of put me on the map. Funnily enough Ray Klein a trombone player at Fox studios was sitting on the 'john' as we say, listening to the radio in his bathroom when they played Nirvana and he yelled to his wife 'There's my replacement at Fox'!"

But that was in the future and although paid work was in short supply during that first year, Dick was gaining a reputation as a high note player, having been invited to join in the weekly sessions at the famous 'Hoyt's Garage' with the likes of Tommy Pederson, Lloyd Ulyate, Joe Howard, Harry Betts, Milt Bernhart and of course Hoyt Bohannon and it was Pederson who recommended him for the Freddy Martin Band. After 18 months, on the recommendation of his brother Ted, Dick found himself sitting beside Joe Howard on a Tennessee Ernie summer replacement TV show, followed by another TV show with Musical Director Frank DeVol.

"13 weeks at $50 a week and with our daughter on the way, kept me going. At the end of the series we had a party and the bass player George Bruns, who also played trombone on the Tennessee Ernie daily radio show asked me how my career was going and on hearing I had nothing coming up, asked me if I'd like to take over for him on the Ernie show as he was working over at the Disney studios and couldn't handle both. What! Suddenly I was on $275 a week and that really scared me. I had two or three solos a week and much later on Bill Watrous told me how when he was in the service in Hawaii, he would tune in to the show to check me out. And when I went to work at Fox, Vince De Rosa told me he used to listen and wait for my solos which was terribly flattering!"

Stints with the bands of Les Brown and Charlie Barnet followed and an offer to work with Dave Pell which never materialised because Dick was suddenly too busy. Enter Ray Klein, the trombonist at Fox who had heard Dick play Nirvana on the radio and who with several other of the studio musicians at Fox, liked to get together for a blow. He invited Dick to join them for their informal sessions, with the end result he was asked to fill Ray Klein's chair when he stepped down at Fox in 1958.

"It was a wonderful experience because a parade of great composers came through there like Alfred and Lionel Newman, Herb Spencer and Earle Hagen. Alfred Newman was always in total control. Being the eldest of about four or five Newmans who had lost their father, he became the father figure in the family and was that way all his life. He had total control over the orchestra and if someone was chewing gum at the back he would send him home. He would say 'Don't ever turn around and look at the screen, look at me, I'm conducting here'. If we were recording a main title, a very important piece of music, he would take an hour to get all the 'bugs' out so that there would be no more than two 'takes'. More than that and he realised he might start to lose the orchestra. Alfred wanted a good performance so you had to be on your toes for that first take because that might be the one. You gave it your 'all' and tried to get through the thing perfectly."

"Alfred was always thinking about his musicians, insisting we park around the sound stage because we had to carry instruments. Now of course, we have to park miles away. I remember standing next to him in the Men's Room one day when he'd been stretching the rehearsal time in order to get the musicians some extra money and he said to me 'How am I doing?' 'Alfred you're the best' I said and he liked that! He wanted to do the performance quickly but would stretch the rehearsal time and set everything up perfectly for the recording. That was Alfred, that was the way he worked."

"Henry Mancini came up through the ranks of the bands as a piano player so he understood the camaraderie between musicians and was friendlier but he didn't waste time either. He liked to work quickly and get a good product. The way composers work today gets a little tedious at times as you can spend a whole morning on four pages. The other big difference is, Alfred would never allow producers or directors on the stage, saying 'I'm recording my music and that's it'. Now they're in the booth re-composing everything and that has become part of the whole lengthy, drawn out process. I hesitate to say it's boring because it can be nerve racking when you have to keep changing things and then re-doing them over and over again."

"When I think of all those very accomplished composers and orchestrators, Dave Raksin, Henry Mancini, I played a lot of solos for him, Alex North, Frank Waxman, Hugo Friedhafer and Bernard Hermann, who forgot more about orchestration than most of today's guys will ever know! I don't mean to belittle the talent that has come along but some of today's song writers have a 'hot group' thing going and they become film composers, with a lot of help from wonderful arrangers such as Leo Shuken and Jack Hayes who were the brains behind many movies. Today there are so many chefs involved who want to get their fingers into the pie that recording music for a film can now take six or seven days when at one time it would have taken three so that's one good aspect of the change for the musicians!"

The Nash trombone has been heard soloing on so many Hollywood movies over the past four decades, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Days of Wine and Roses, Sanctuary, not to mention innumerable television shows and record dates. So who does he think is today's equivalent of, say, Alfred Newman?

"I would say Jerry Goldsmith is one of my all time heroes, he is always fresh and new. There's John Williams, I've done a lot of work for him but there's been a movement toward youth so I've been put aside a little bit here and there by some of the composers I worked with initially on their first pictures and that's fine because I'm not a totally 'legit' player. I've done the dance bands, I play some jazz, I play some ballads but music has polarised and John (Williams) became very classical so I'm not always what he has in mind. Alan Sylvestri is another composer I've worked with from the beginning and Alex North, although he's gone now. Lloyd Ulyate and I did everything in this town for quite a few years along with Tommy Pederson and Joe Howard. Joe and Tommy have both gone but Lloyd and I are still working."

"The other problem is a Union ruling that when movies are sold to another medium, the musicians get paid a residual. The efficiency experts are not very happy with that so they are looking for other areas to record so composers use the Seattle Symphony or go to London, lucky you, and we are now starting to lose a lot of the original connections we had in the movie business and losing some of the contracts to other people. I'm now 74 and I feel a little guilty about going on a call as there are some wonderful young players here, throwing their hat into the ring and possibly they're thinking I should be retired. Well it may happen, sooner or later, whatever."

Having heard Dick's latest recording on the new Sammy Nestico CD due for release this Spring, he sounds as magnificent as ever and it's hard to believe, that when he recorded it at the end of December he was suffering from nerve damage to his face following treatment on his right eye, which affected his embouchure.

"I tried to play through it and not let it bother me and Sammy had this bossa nova ballad that went up to a high E at one point and it came off, so I felt pretty good about it. He liked what I did, in fact I played quite a bit of the lead in the trombone section for most of those charts and he said it was one of the best trombone sections he'd ever heard. Even at my late stage things can happen. I reckon I'm now back to about 80% but I do have to practise every day and I have to go through a routine to keep things going. Here I am at 74 waiting for my 'chops' to come back!"

Dick lost his parents, who were both classical singers, at an early age and at boarding school he started playing trumpet but always fancied the 'slides' behind him in the band and would often fool around with a trombone. But the school decided to switch him to baritone horn (euphonium in the UK) which pleased Dick because he liked the larger mouthpiece.

"I put the bigger mouthpiece on the same notch as the trumpet mouthpiece and as a result of switching from trumpet to baritone, just like Don Lusher, he did the same, I ended up with very high chops for some reason, so I had this reputation for playing high. I have an upstream embouchure and when people look at me playing they can't figure it out. I remember when I first met Jeff Reynolds of the LA Philharmonic at the Earl Williams trombone manufacturing place in Burbank. Bob Burgess had just had his horn stolen and he wanted a Williams so I went in to try them out. Williams had four horns there and I'm cranking it out and playing high Fs and Jeff looked at me and said 'I don't see how you get a note with that embouchure'. That's been a bane of his ever since because every time we work together he says 'how does he get a note?'!"

"The baritone horn turned out to be good for me because, as you know, in the studios there are a lot of times when they want that double and I used it a lot. Mancini and John Williams wrote solos for it, as did Pat Willams for the TV movie "Butch Cassidy the Early Years. He called me on the 'phone and said 'I'm writing this big solo for the baritone horn as the main title and throughout the picture, in the key of D flat'. That would have been OK but then when I got there and opened up the book, it's a half tone higher which meant a lot of twos and threes and everything was a readjustment. I was in the hot seat for two days but we got it all taken care of, which was a total relief and then he called back and said they'd changed the picture so we had to re-record a lot of it! Those are the things that come up and you'd better be ready".

After leaving school Dick was playing dances on trombone with a local band when somebody told him that if he really wanted to get anywhere he should study with John Coffey, the bass trombone with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, known for taking the solo on Boléro because the other two guys in the section were too old to do it anymore!

"Boy, what a dynamic man and player he was. I made an appointment for a lesson and I guess my reputation playing around Boston had got out because he says 'Hey kid, I hear you can play high, let me hear something'. So I proudly squeak on up to a high F and he looks at me and says 'It sounds terrible, but I'll show you how to work with it', which was exactly what I needed because you know I thought I was some hot shot and sure enough he helped me get through the Rochut, the Blazevich and  of course Arbans which was his bible and got me a sound".

"I was with him for about a year and then I got a chance to go on the road with Sam Donahue. Now I was a ballad player but I wanted to learn to play jazz and it's funny because when I played the trumpet I loved Harry James, his romanticism, how he phrased things. Then when I started playing trombone, I naturally had to key into Tommy Dorsey and always thought that his phrasing was kind of stiff, although you had to admire the sound and the breath control. I admired the romantic quality that Harry James got but I didn't do it on the trombone because Tommy was the way to go, along with Bobby Byrne, Jack Jenney and Bill Harris of course. There were all these influences".

"If I have any claim to fame for a 'sound' at all it would probably be due to Mancini because when he did all the arrangements for the Glenn Miller story, which was his first movie and put him on the map, Murray McEachern had done the trombone work behind James Stewart but when Mancini had the chance to do his first album, Murray had had some teeth problems and was not around and Mancini knew about me from having worked at Universal studios. After Fox I started to do some picture work with Joe Gershenson who was Director of the Universal Orchestra and Mancini, knew who was in the orchestra, so he called me and said 'I want you to do an album with me. I'm going to record the love theme from the Glen Miller Story, Too Little Time'. Wonderful! I got there and I'm rehearsing this and playing it à la Tommy Dorsey or whatever I had going at the time and Mancini, not wanting to embarrass me, put the baton down and came over to me, put his hand on my shoulder and said 'Dick can you warm it up a little bit'. And the light went on and I said 'ah, Murray McEachern'. I knew what Hank meant so I tried to get my musical psyche in that direction and it paid off".

After playing with Sam Donahue for a year Dick decided he wanted to return to Boston and learn to play jazz. The new place to go was Schillinger House, later to become the Berklee School of Music, and the move enabled him to resume his lessons with John Coffey. He also began taking J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding solos down off records and started going to jam sessions around town. Stints with Glen Gray and Tex Beneke followed before Uncle Sam intervened and Dick was drafted into the tank battalion of the California National Guard which included several musicians from the L.A. area such as Andre Previn and jazz pianist John Williams.

"After my draft notice arrived I got an invitation to audition for the TD orchestra and I would have loved to play for the old man but I was leaving for the service. My first day in the California National Guard, the captain of the company asked what I did as a civilian and when I said I was a trombone player he said 'Do you think you could become the company bugler?' Sure, I said and I never had to go to the car pool, never had to drive a tank as he would say to me 'Go practise' and he eventually got me into the band. After six months we were sent to Japan where we formed a service band to entertain the troops. Then we had to go to Korea and that was awful. We were in these open trucks, it was 5 above and we were doing guard duty and going up to the front, playing jazz concerts in the back of a truck for the troops and at one time we were strafed and about 3 guys died. We discovered it was friendly fire, some hot pilots who had just arrived, bombed us by mistake."

Following National Service, Dick was recommended by brother Ted to Billy May, who had a band on the road at that time.

"They bought my plane ticket to Denver so I joined the band sight unseen and that was a wonderful experience with Billy, great musician that he is. He asked me one time 'Do you want to do a feature number with us?' Well in the service I used to play this thing on How High the Moon where I play it slowly, ballad style, for first 8 bars, then go into jazz and end up on a high G, so he wrote this wonderful arrangement for me. Then I'd do Tenderly as an encore and that went up to a high E flat and on up to a double B flat. The band played several big promotional concerts for Capital records and we were doing a tour with Billy and all the Capital recording artists such as Lester Young, Bud Powell, Sarah Vaughan and Nat King Cole and we're playing Carnegie Hall. That night Billy came up to me and said 'Nat's sick so we're going to do your numbers'. Wow! I played a big solo feature at Carnegie Hall which was a big moment in my life."

The Nashes were all talented musicians, each going their separate ways following the death of their parents. Dick's brother Ted, five years older, learnt flute and piccolo in Junior High and at 15 was with Johnny Long and from there joined Les Brown and His Band of Renown, where he was renowned for his high harmonics. His sister, who studied voice, moved to Beaver Dam and the three siblings didn't meet for eleven years.

"We are a musical family, my wife Barbara was a singer, her father, who had perfect pitch, was an arranger and composer and sang with local territory bands in Boston and so our kids were bombarded from both sides. Nicki, our first born, studied piano for about ten years which came in handy because she became a TV Production Assistant, working on the Academy Award Show a few times and now she's Associate Director on different TV shows around town. Our son Ted, named after my brother, because he ended up with three girls, learnt piano and when he was six or seven I thought it was time he learnt another instrument. I had an extra King 2B gold plated, nice horn, so I said how about the trombone? He had a dumb looking embouchure but I thought he's only a kid, maybe we'll work around it. Then we were on a vacation when he was between the 6th and 7th grade and he happened to see a clarinet being put together. He just looked at it and said, that's what I want to play. So we got him a clarinet and the rest is history. He's now with the Lincoln Centre Jazz Band and records with his own group."

In his early days the King 2B was the instrument and Dick used it during his time on the road but then switched to a Bach 12.

"I used the Bach for quite a while on some of my early recordings out here but I didn't think the sound was quite warm enough for me so I traded bells with a guy who had a Williams 6 and I had a Williams bell with a Bach slide on some of my early stuff. As time went on the 16M came into prominence with Bill Watrous, who had it opened up to 509 so I now have a Watrous model 16M. I did use the Earl Williams 6 for quite a while but the Bachs, for me, seemed to speak out a little more. The Williams is a nice sound but is a teeny bit mushy, you have to steer the air a little. I also have a 36G Bach which is a 525 bore horn and I have a Bach 42B which I use if I'm playing third trombone with a lot of Bs and Es because I have a short right arm and I don't play a low B very well! Then I have a Conn 70H bass trombone like George Roberts used."

"When I came out here, George Roberts was of course the guy in town. There weren't too many other good bass trombone players so I started to play bass trombone subbing for George which took some keeping up! But after a while the contractor Bobby Helfer, who was taking care of most of the business here in town, kept calling me and it became about 60% of my work. I figured I really didn't want to be a bass trombone player, I wanted to play lead and solos, so I sold it and said I didn't play bass trombone any more. That went on for fifteen years but now we all have to double and all have to do it."

"Way back I used a 12C mouthpiece but it got to be a little small for some reason. When I went in the service I switched to the 'glass like' trombone mouthpiece designed by Donald Rheinhardt, a great trombone player who taught at the Curtis Institute. I thought it would warm up real fast and it doesn't matter what sound you get in a marching band so I got the biggest tenor mouthpiece he made, the Donald Rheinhardt 6A and that worked really well but it was always kind of weird looking. When I started to freelance, I was trying to use that but it did have a brittle sound compared to a real brass mouthpiece. So I went to George Bukur in New York, who was a great technician and he took that plastic mouthpiece and did an exact copy and that's the one I'm using now for the ballads. I use a 6AL for the 36G and the 42B I have a 1G."

Dick Nash was one of many top trombone players who gathered in Nashville for the ITW last May and said he was amazed to find how many people, young and old, could recall what he had played over the years. Perhaps not as amazing as the fact that while not in top form, he can still 'nail' a super B flat. But ask him for his proudest moment and it's on the cards he will tell you it was the day he scored a Hole in One on the 8th of the Old Course at St Andrews in the Spring of '99.

"The green was unsighted over a hill and I could only see the top of the flagstick. My caddy told me to aim way out to the right to allow for the wind and as the ball curled in to the green I lost sight of it. When we walked up and started looking, there it was in the hole!"

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Slide Factory 2007