Sheila Tracy talks to Bill Reichenbach
Bill Reichenbach is one of Hollywood's busiest session trombonists. He lives with his wife, Fran, plus ten cats, three dogs, four squirrels and two rabbits in the Hollywood Hills where the animals are not allowed to wander because of marauding coyotes. Oh, I forgot to mention his collection of a hundred or so antique instruments including various cornets, ten euphoniums and some twenty trombones, which has spilled over into a storage room down near the freeway.
The evening I met him, he had been working in the studios all day on What Women Want, a film that was moving very slowly indeed. He's not even sure who's starring in it although he thinks it may be Mel Gibson.
"It's a kind of light, romantic comedy, probably worth three days for the musicians. But I've already done three days, and there were two other days I couldn't do, and they're going to add three more next week. The director is slow to get with it. I actually worked for her and her husband many years ago on a TV show called Baby Boom when I wrote the main title. I ended up writing thirteen different main titles and they took the first one!
"I'm working on and off on four different films right now. We're doing a picture called Proof of Life with Danny Elfman, which theoretically we're supposed to finish on Friday. That's an interesting score and the trombone parts are kind of fun because Phil Teele and I play tenor, bass and contrabass trombones and there are two other tenor trombones, Charlie Loper and Steve Holtman. Last week we did a movie with Marc Shaiman called One Night at McCool's, a small budget film done in two days, real quick, and it was nice music."
Bill has been working in the film studios for the past ten to fifteen years, but just how difficult was it to break into what is a highly lucrative business?
"I first came out here in 1975 before the advent of synthesisers and all that kind of stuff when there was a lot of television and jingle work, smaller projects; what I call the lower levels of the business. You could start working in television - and have a steady studio career without ever playing in the motion pictures.
"I was playing in Toshiko Akiyoshi's Big Band and I started meeting people that way. I met Jerry Hey, who's a trumpet player, and quite soon we started doing record dates for Quincy Jones, David Foster and some pretty high profile things, so that sort of elevated us from the new guys in town. I was very lucky as I just happened into it.
"It's word of mouth. You have to impress the players and you have to get or the list of the contractors, and there are only a few that handle most of the business. When I first came out here there must have been ten or fifteen of them and every studio had their 'in-house' contractor. Now there are no more 'in-house' contractors. There's one main film contractor and a couple of others doing predominant work.
"I had been out here twice to do two albums with Chuck Mangione when he got his contract with A&M Records, and when I was here I met Vince De Rosa who was like the Godfather of the French horn for fifty years. He would play first French horn on all the films and all the calls for French horn went through him. He would take everything and then send out guys to do the work. It only happened with the French horn - no other part of the business has ever worked like that out here. Vince was the man. I think he's 82 years old now and he still plays great. He's got a lot of property all over the place which he visits.
"He was the one that invited me to come to sessions and introduced me to contractors. He told me to go to the Union and ask for a list of contractors and then went over them with me, told me who to call, and the one that actually called me first was Sandy De Crescent who was Bobby Helfer's secretary. That's how she got in the business and she's now the big contractor in town. The second biggest contractor was Paddy Zimmitti, who died recently from lung cancer, and those two ladies had all the film business locked up.
"Aside from the fact that composers get who they want as they can over-ride a contractor, Sandy De Crescent is very reputable the way she does her business, and even if she didn't like you I think she would hire you if the composer asked for you. So that's good as they don't have total power. But then again there are a lot of composers who don't ask for specific musicians. When you get down to the trombone section it's kinda like the poor neighbourhood - just get me three!
"I play tenor, bass, contrabass, tuba, euphonium, occasionally bass trumpet, but people don't write for bass trumpet very often. I have played alto trombone on a couple of things. I did a whole Al Jarreau album on alto trombone. When I looked at how the trombone parts were written I thought maybe that will be nice on alto, so I played the whole album on alto and it was sort of neat sounding.
"For the last fifteen years or so the need out here has been for a 'tenor/bass trombone/utility in the section' kind of player. Without any question, they expect all tenor trombone players to be fairly good bass trombone players, and they expect all bass trombone players to be able to play contrabass trombone and probably tuba, and they don't give you any notice. It's like, 'Oh, tomorrow bring your contrabass trombone.' There's no time to find one and get it together. I don't practise the tuba and I sort of consider myself a humorous player. I wouldn't want to be a serious tuba player but I like to play it and as long as people can put up with what I sound like, that's fine. I don't put myself out as a legit tuba player. I haven't really been a lead player out here. I played lead on Toshiko Akiyoshi's band for a while after Charlie Loper left and I thought, I don't really want to do this, it's too hard. I don't want to stand up and play ballad solos; I just don't want to do that. I like playing jazz and I like playing anything on bass trombone. I wish people wrote more like they did for George Roberts. George has pretty much retired from the studio business, but he goes out and does clinics and he plays cabaret with his tapes - the George Roberts Big Band!
"Mike Davis and I made an album called Bonetown a couple of years ago. It's a quintet for tenor and bass trombone and rhythm and Mike wrote all the music. That has made me focus on playing jazz on the bass trombone because we've done about 25 concerts with that group and when he and I went over to ITF 2000 in Utrecht the response from the audience was fantastic. Normally when I play jazz I like to play standards with a rhythm section, but this is all new music and I've grown to really like doing that. I think we're going to do a second album, maybe with an orchestra."
Bill admits he has never been a great one for practice, although in recent years he plays every day and likes to do long notes and some tonguing to get everything working. After playing at the ITF in Utrecht last summer, he took himself off to Paris for six days without touching the trombone and needed just one day to get himself back into shape. But how difficult is it to switch from one instrument to another at short notice?
"I'm really trying to concentrate on bass trombone now and I sort of play tenor trombone at gunpoint. But I still do record dates with my favourite guys, Jerry Hey and Gary Grant, the horn section I've been working with for twenty-five years, so I have to play tenor trombone and I have to play it up to a certain level. If I know we're going to go in and play one tune and I know there are not going to be death-defying parts, then I can just get the tenor trombone out the day before and play it a little bit and make sure I feel okay on it. If I know that we have four or five charts in a row, I'll start playing it a week or so in advance.
"For the last month or so I've been playing Friday nights with Dave Pell's Octet at this little hotel restaurant over in the Valley, which is kind of fun. It really has forced me to get the tenor trombone going seriously as it's just tenor, and it's hard. The line-up is trumpet, trombone, tenor sax, baritone sax, guitar, bass, drums and piano and we play jazz from the late '50s. The arrangements are by Johnny Mandel, Shorty Rogers, John Williams, Marty Paich, all the great writers, and you look at this book and it's like 'Wow!'. It's hard but it's great, and it's fun to play. When I went there on the first night I thought, I'm never going to get through this. We were playing an hour and a half set and I'd been doing a film date all day where I had been playing nothing very much on only bass trombone, and I walk in there and all of a sudden it's page after page of leger lines. I called my wife in the break and I said, 'I think I've gotten myself into something I can't finish!' But it turned out OK as the rest of the gig got a little easier, so I thought maybe I'll try this again.
"There are a lot of trombone players here and a lot of the tenor guys double very well on bass trombone. Phil Teele has been around about ten years longer than I have and he has been specifically a bass trombone player all these years. He really only plays tenor trombone when he has to, but does it very well. He's accurate and consistent, but he doesn't take jobs just on tenor trombone whereas I still do. Bob Sanders and George Thatcher are both bass trombone players primarily, and then there are a couple of other guys who are good doublers so there's a lot of competition."
Obviously the film studios are where musicians make
the most money, but according to Bill, some film makers are trying to take their business elsewhere.
"The work scene here has been good but I'd say the last couple of years, some work has gone to London, Prague, Seattle. A lot of film companies want to record their music outside of our Union contract. The way the corporate world is going they're trying to make everybody compete with everybody and I don't know whether London and Los Angeles can compete with Prague at $14 a day. I think those guys in Prague are working real cheap. I don't know if that's the amount, but it's very low. Some friends of mine in London have said they're losing work in that direction. If the film companies could record sound tracks in Zimbabwe, they would do it and pay those guys four cents a week, and they'd all be happy.
Here, a session on a Class A film, which means full budget, what they call regular scale, is something like $220 for three hours. If you play a second instrument that adds 50%. Then we have a thing called a Special Payments Fund which pays when the films are taken into another medium like television, or when they go into the European market. For that we get one percent of the distributor's royalty and we get that as long as that film is still out there on the market. It's a permanent thing, which is great because half of my income might be that one cheque. Some of the guys who have been in the film business longer than I have, or guys who are making multiple scale like keyboard players, when they get that cheque the first of July it's like Christmas and it's big money. It's a great aspect of our contract."
Bill grew up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington D.C. and started taking trombone lessons when he was eleven, but had been playing drums from the age of four. His father, Bill Reichenbach Sr., is a jazz drummer and played on the early bossa nova records with Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz.
"My father is 76 now so he's not playing too much, although my brother Kurt, who is actually a writer and comedian but sings very well, is trying to get him to do an album with us. Dad started me off on drums but he didn't really get too involved - he just let me figure it out. Later on when I heard Dixieland records the trombone appealed to my sense of humour. It seemed to be a fun thing. Before my eleventh birthday my father said, 'I'll give you a choice for your birthday, a camera or a trombone,' which kinda surprised me as I'd hardly mentioned it to him. So I picked the trombone, and I'm sorta glad I did!
"With my father being a musician, he knew who to go to and got me started with Gene Brusiloff. I studied with him for a couple of years. What a great guy he was. I'd go to his house, go down to the basement and there was the big recreational room filled with instruments, He had all these antique instruments, cornets, clarinets and he could play them all. Three other guys and myself from my elementary school would go over there and take lessons together, so three of us would be doing something in the boiler room trying to play trios while he was teaching the one other guy and then we would switch. When he decided to move up to New York State I was just crushed. I thought, this is the end of me because I'll never be able to play now my teacher is leaving."
Bill's father came to the rescue and found another teacher who turned out to be even more of a surprise than the first. Lessons were in an upstairs room at a music store with two folding chairs and a wire music stand the only furniture.
"Having come from a musical wonderland with all the instruments and goodies to look at I thought this was depressing, and then in walks this guy, balding, with a moustache, kind of chubby, wearing a white shirt and he's carrying this trombone case with a belt around it to hold it shut. He takes his horn out and he's got an envelope taped on his shoulder pipe so that the horn doesn't make his shirt green. I thought, this is really wild. Then he played a note and I'd never heard anything like that before. It was the greatest sound I'd ever heard come out of a trombone. His name was Bob Isele and he was the soloist with the U.S. Marine Band for some twenty years, playing all the Arthur Pryor solos and was very famous in the '40s and '50s, a real phenomenon. Very soft-spoken, he had retired from the Marine Band and was freelancing around Washington.
"From the first note Bob Isele played he had my attention and I studied with him all the way through high school and eventually he came over to my house for lessons. Some of the great events of our time seemed to occur on the day of my lesson, like when J. F. Kennedy was shot. I liked taking lessons so much I couldn't understand why he didn't want to give me a lesson that day. I guess I was young.
"Isele had studied at Eastman with Emory Remington who had taught there since the '20s and had students in symphony orchestras all over the world. Some people say he was like the father of the American symphonic trombone school. Isele had studied with him for a year before he went into the Marine Band in the late '30s, and they had kept in contact and were very good friends. So I went up to Eastman and met Emory Remington and it was just magic. I studied there for four years and a few extra months until he passed away in his early eighties, having been there for something like fifty-one years."
Having started playing bass trombone in high school, Bill went to Eastman as a bass trombone player and played his recital on that instrument but kept the tenor for jazz and played lead in the Eastman Jazz Ensemble, little realising just how important playing both instruments to a high standard would turn out to be. On leaving Eastman College in 1972, Bill spent seven months with Buddy Rich's band on bass trombone, starting with a month's tour of England including two weeks at Ronnie Scott's in London.
"That was a great thrill for me because my grandmother, who I spent a lot of time with, was born in England. She would show me pictures, of the Cotswold Hills and she had all these old books from England so that when I finally got over there I just didn't want to do anything but sightsee. I never adjusted to the time change and went through a month with hardly any sleep, walked all over London and lost fifty-five pounds!
"I picked the greatest time to be with that band; hardly any one-nighters, a couple of weeks at Disneyland, a couple of weeks in the St Regis Hotel in New York, and we did an album which I solo on. I was playing bass trombone but Buddy let me play a lot of solos because it was such a novelty to have a bass trombone player who could improvise. Jazz playing and bass trombone playing has always been like a separate thing, so I think he got a kick out of that. He had me play drums a couple of times because he liked to do funny stuff like come out and pretend he was playing trumpet. But you know, it's like playing somebody else's horn that's drastically different, and his drums were so different from the way I would want them to be if they were mine. It was like I could hardly touch them with him watching me, but we got along real well."
After the Christmas vacation Bill decided to leave Buddy Rich and return to his native Washington where he remained for a couple of years playing casual dates at the Kennedy Centre, ice shows, the circus, dance gigs and so on, which gradually snowballed.
"The last year I was there I worked 364 days which was real hard and I didn't make a whole lot of money. The first year I came to L.A., I worked part of the time and collected unemployment for the rest, and still made twice as much money because everything was so much better paid.
"One of the first things I did was subbing for a friend of mine called Bruce Paulson. He and I were in Buddy Rich's band together and then he came out to play with Doc Severinsen on the Tonight Show and was also on Toshiko Akiyoshi's band when they got a gig to go to Japan for two weeks in late '75. Bruce couldn't leave the Tonight Show for that length of time so he sent me in to sub for him on 2nd trombone, which was the jazz chair. Britt Woodman was on 3rd, Phil Teele was playing bass trombone and Charlie Loper was on lead. That was an incredible experience for me as it was a great band, the music was very hard but wonderful, and I got a chance to play several solos every concert. The Japanese people treated us like celebrities and I'd never been in that situation before. I stayed on that band four or five years and we did several tours of Japan and five albums.
"Film
work invariably involves a 65-piece orchestra or even larger. Ever
since Star Wars came out everybody wants to have that kind
of a score, so a lot of the work I do is symphonic and you've got
to play up to the section. The bass trombone I'm playing right now
is a prototype Conn which I think they're going to call the 62H because
it's based on the old 62H. I've been working with Conn for about
a year getting this horn together, fighting and arguing over it and
it's come out pretty good. Everybody who has played it has really
liked it, and I love playing it.
"The mouthpiece is a Larry Minick, which is bigger than a 1½G Bach, not huge, but a little bigger than the Bach and that mouthpiece is responsible for getting me to start practising again. I didn't practise for about ten years. I'd just go into work and I'd play. I wouldn't bring the horn into the house - just leave it in the trunk of the car. When I got this Larry Minick mouthpiece it felt so good, I started practising in the house again and it really invigorated my whole approach to playing maybe eight years ago.
"My small tenor that I use for record dates, rock and roll and jazz, is a Conn 32H. They don't make it any more but it's a dual bore .500"/.522" tenor trombone. The mouthpiece is either a Bach 5 or a Doug Elliot version of a Bach 6½A. The Doug Elliot mouthpiece is a little brighter sounding. I have a Conn 88H that I use for most of the tenor trombone playing I do on films. It's bigger and more symphonic and I use a slightly larger mouthpiece, a Joe Alessi Model 3. My contrabass trombone was made in Switzerland by Haag and is a fantastic horn. I found a mouthpiece made by Thein when I was in Utrecht and it makes that horn play great.
"Looking back, I think the most important thing is to find out what you want to do, what satisfies you most as a musician, and you have to try to separate it from the 'job'. Figure out what kind of music you really want to play: whether you want to play your own music and go in that direction; to be able to make a statement as a musician if you want to; to be able to have a voice, not just to be a faceless studio sausage. The ideal thing is not to have to work for anybody else. Now that I've been working for all these people for all these years, I think the ideal thing is not to have to! Until I win the lottery I guess I will continue to work as much as possible and try to keep the 'job' of music separate from the 'hobby' of music."
Apart from his playing Bill also finds time to write, and just before I left he played me a recording of a yet unfinished bass trombone solo which he was in the process of writing for a brass ensemble.
"They wanted me to do a bass trombone solo and played me a Leonard Bernstein composition for clarinet and asked if I had anything like that. I didn't, so I said I would try to come up with something and wrote this piece for a big band brass section, four trumpets and four trombones and solo bass trombone, which I performed in Chicago a couple of years ago. Some other bass trombone players have heard it and they want to play it so I have to write a couple more movements as it's now only three minutes long and it should be maybe a ten-minute piece.
"For a period of time I was doing quite a bit of composing. There were a couple of television shows I was writing for, ghosting for someone - not the greatest situation but it was a great opportunity for me to practise. I wrote the music for Frank's Place which ran for two years. It was a dramatic comedy show and they wanted jazz, so I made it late '20s Duke Ellington style and Count Basie '40s style. I wrote it, arranged it, recorded it with three or four players and we multi-tracked it. I would occasionally play drums as we had such a small budget. I've written for various television shows, cartoons and a series called Peter Pan and The Pirates. I wrote the main title theme for that show which is playing in Europe now.
"I enjoy writing but I'm not a compulsive writer. If I want to do something and I don't have anything to do, the first thing I'll do is get out my horn, but I will write to a deadline. Right now I'm halfway through twelve trombone duets. I've never tried to write two-part music before and I think Mike Davis wants to publish them. They're for tenor and bass trombone, but possibly for two bass trombones if the first one has reasonably high chops.
"I would like to write a bass trombone piece with orchestra, not a concerto but a real good feature piece and I'd like to play it, so that's something I'm probably going to try. But I have to discipline myself to write every day and discipline is hard for me. If I get on the treadmill for half an hour a day I feel proud!"
Meanwhile it's time for him to feed ten cats, three dogs, four squirrels and two rabbits. Good night, Bill!
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