Listen up, yall. Today is the 70th birthday of my good friend, Leslie Kelly Benedict! I first met Les about 1978, when he came to live and work in Nashville for about a year and a half. We did some sessions and other gigs together, and we hit it off pretty well. In the short time he was there, Les cut a pretty wide swath through the Nashville jazz community, playing with a big band called The Nashville Jazz Machine and a smaller funk group called Bad Mistah (if I recall and spell correctly). My most vivid memory from back then was of a recording session Les and I did out east of Nashville at a place called Bradley’s Barn, with two other trombone players who will remain nameless. One of them ambushed the other one in the parking lot after the session, raining on him about his lack of proper maintenance of his chops, saying that if he didn’t care about the horn, he should step aside and let some other guys who do care about it have the work. Ouch! Les and I stood there, with our jaws dropped – which is when I first realized the value of good embouchure training. (Inside joke for brass players.) Just about the time Les and I had a pretty good friendship going, he up and decided to move his family out to Los Angeles to do jazz and studio work there. I didn’t hear too much from Les for about 6 years after that, until an opening came up in the Disneyland Band trombone section. He told me about it, and I flew out and auditioned, and as a result, we became Disney buddies for about 6 years. During our transition to California life, Les and Haidee and the girls made me and my family feel very welcome. Good old Tennessee hospitality where you’d least expect it: in southern California. During his 10-year stint at Disneyland, Les was always cheerful and dapper looking in the band uniform. But my favorite was the Indian – I mean, Native American – costume Les volunteered to wear, when we played together during the afternoons in the Frontierland Brass. Unlike the rest of us palefaces, he got to wear white socks. Im not sure what tribe would have approved them as standard issue for its braves. There is also a legendary story that involves Les as the…Native American…and a gong which kept disappearing and reappearing at unexpected times and places. I hadn’t yet joined the DL Band, but I heard the tale of how at a plot was concocted, whereby Les was given permission to take off the Mark Twain set, dress up in the Indian outfit, and take the gong to the Indian Village and play it loudly when the riverboat went by. Perhaps Les can add more of the context to this story to explain why it’s even funnier than these few details might suggest. In the band room, Les was just as much of a cut-up as the other guys, but he also had a serious side, playing backgammon, usually with trumpeter Gary Halopoff. They both had highly perfected the art of interminably rattling the dice inside the little can, before rolling them out on the playing surface – and to this, Les added the well-honed practice of crunching ice as he read or otherwise recreated. The bottom-line of that was that the company-issued ear plugs were valuable not only when sitting in front of the trumpet section during sets in the Park, but also when sitting within 20 feet of the dice-ice gang. Les was giving in other ways, too, and very generous with his time and skills. He is a fine photographer, putting together a folio of pix for me to send to my fiancée, back in the days when I was more hunky, less chunky. (Insert rueful-faced emoticon here.) Les also did some excellent desktop publishing of a genealogy newsletter for me. (That’s one other thing Les and I have in common, besides having wonderful wives, kids, and grandkids: our love for genealogy and family history. We found that we each have a Kelly in our family trees, and Les even got Kelly given to him for a middle name. We haven’t yet found out how we’re related, but there’s definitely more than a little Irish in both of us!) Back in those days, such programs were very clunky and time-consuming and hit-or-miss in their results – which may explain some of the hair loss, I don’t know. The other enormous benefit I got from Les’s skill set and knowledge base was to be able to pick his brain about embouchure issues. Anyone brass player who has worked for very long at a theme park knows how much damage outdoor playing can do to your chops, and how difficult it is to stay in decent shape and not lose all your range and flexibility. On more than one occasion, when I felt that I had worked myself into a cul de sac (or crawled too far out on the limb, pick your favorite metaphor), Les had some valuable ideas to help me get back in the zone, ideas I still use to this day. It’s not for nothing that his student Conrad Herwig and others call him “The Chops Doctor. But all good things (?) must come to an end, and Les eventually left the Park (about 1992, I think) and went completely free-lance. Abandoned again! More recently, though, Les and I also worked together for about 6 years in Doug MacDonald’s 13-piece jazz group, The Jazz Coalition. Les played a mean tuba, while I played a rather more subdued trombone. We did two CD’s with that group, the second one supplemented by a raft of strings. Luckily, the raft did not sink, and the group sailed into jazz history. Les and I also played together on a fun Benny Goodman tribute concert in 2008 at the Cerritos Performing Arts Center, under the baton and clarinet of my friend of 50+ years (and fellow Iowan) Terry Myers, with the legendary arranger Dave Wolpe on piano. Joining Les and me in the bone section on that gig was the then-and-still-today-amazing Joey Sellars. Then it was my turn to leave the nest, and I retired from Disney four years ago, moving back to Nashville with my wife and daughter, to be near my older children and grandchildren, and to pick up a modest amount of jazz and studio work with friends old and new. Many of them are also friends and colleagues – even college buddies – of Les, including Jim Williamson, who made both me and Les feel welcome to sub with his group, the Nashville Jazz Orchestra. And so the circle, while somewhat creakier, is unbroken.
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 06:18:37 +0000