By Doug Bright
When one thinks of award-winning instrumentalists in
the rhythm-and-blues realm, the trombone is
definitely not the first instrument that comes to mind.
Most of the trophies in this game, at least on the
national level, seem to go to electric guitarists,
with the occasional harmonica player, keyboardist, or
saxophonist picking up an award or two along the way.
That makes Randy Oxford the proverbial "big frog" in
the very small pond of blues-based trombonists,
having chalked up more than twenty awards from the
Washington Blues Society and similar Northwest
organizations over the course of his career. This year
finds the restlessly creative trombonist sporting a
new band and a brand-new CD with a title that
reflects his current musical orientation: MEMPHIS TO
MOTOWN. Born in 1960 in Seattle's Ballard district,
Oxford heard a wide range of music from his parents'
record collection during his formative years, and when
he moved with his family to Chicago at age eleven, the
listening opportunities only increased. "My parents
played classical, jazz, pop, and even some Sousa," he
recalls. "George Shearing was a big favorite on the record
player as was Peggy Lee, Boots Randolph, Henry
Mancini, Sinatra, Stan Kenton, Buddy Rich, Woody
Herman, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Crosby, and of
course, Tommy Dorsey. My parents would go out to the
London House in Chicago and see many of these groups
perform live, and then they would come home with their
albums and play them all day long. They would take me
to see the Chicago Symphony one week and then Stan
Kenton the next week. I learned early on that there was
a whole wide world full of all kinds of music out
there, and I felt very lucky to be around it at such
an early age." As a result of one cultural outing in
particular, the young Randy Oxford discovered his
lifelong instrument and took it up during his sixth-grade
school year. "My dad always had a fascination with
brass," Oxford explains, "and he took me to see "The
Music Man", which had great music in it, including "76
Trombones". That looked like a lot of fun, so I gave it a
go. The school really needed someone to step up and
take on the trombone, as most kids wanted to play
trumpet, sax, and drums." Unfortunately, Oxford's student experience
wasn't all smooth sailing. After enduring a
junior-high band director with a negative personality for
three years, he nearly quit playing altogether.
Nevertheless, his mother convinced him to try the
high-school band for a year. When his father asked
director Steve Hoernamann what it took to get in, the
bandleader simply replied, "You must have
lips." With the good humor and positive attitude that
Hoernamann's answer conveyed, he literally saved
young Randy Oxford's musical life. "I already liked
the guy after that answer and was willing to give it a
shot," Oxford recalls. "I soon found out that Steve
Hoernamann was much more than just a band director on
the podium. He was a life inspiration and took the time
to talk to you outside of the band room and about
subjects not always related to music. He would sit at
the piano and sing to the band some very moving songs,
and he would have the whole room full of kids in tears of
inspiration by the end of the song. He had so many
ways of setting positive examples about life, and
that also kept every band member wanting to practice and
become better musicians for him as well as better
people." Hoernamann's inspiration
paid off with obvious results. In 1977 his 200-piece
marching band won first place in a national competition,
giving Oxford the experience of playing the next
Orange Bowl parade. In addition to the concert band
and marching band, Hoernamann also ran a tight,
jazz-oriented stage band, where Oxford gained his
most relevant experience. "We played a lot of big
band arrangements by Stan Kenton, Woody Herman, Maynard
Ferguson, Count Basie, and Buddy Rich," he remembers.
"We would take field trips to music conferences in
downtown Chicago where many of these big bands were
performing, so we got to see the real deal. That
really inspired us to go back to the woodshed. This
was part of the advantage of going to school in the
Chicago area because so many of these big names were
coming through town anyway. We even were able to hire
Buddy Rich's big band to come play at our high school
gymnasium, and we opened for him. That was very inspiring
to a bunch of teenagers. It was the band that kept me
coming back to school day after day." After graduation, Oxford
was encouraged by his father to try out for the Army
band. "The audition consisted of traveling to the Great
Lakes naval Base in Chicago and going into a room
full of military musicians who sat there and judged
your ability to sight read sheet music that you have never
seen before that day," he recalls. "The sheet music
covered many different styles, tempos, and dynamics.
Luckily for me, I had four solid years in my high school
band, where we did lots of sight reading of all kinds
of music, so I was well prepared. After the audition,
they said that they had an open spot for a trombone
player in Europe. Once I was guaranteed a spot in Europe, I
was ready to sign the papers." After a chilly winter's
boot camp in Missouri, Oxford was sent to the Armed
Forces School of Music in Norfolk, Virginia. The course,
which lasted nearly a year, combined musicians from
all four branches of the Service for a curriculum
that encompassed everything from symphonic music to swing
and involved plenty of music theory and sight
reading. "One amazing thing to me at the time, coming
right out of high school, was that I was getting paid to
attend this School of Music instead of paying to go to a
dreaded college!" Oxford marvels. Assigned to Berlin, Oxford
gained invaluable experience in many countries and
settings, playing to military and civilian audiences alike.
"We had an Army group called The Ambassadors of Jazz
that played American big-band swing all over Europe,"
he explains, "and the Europeans just went crazy for it!
I found out that many of the old-school Big Band
musicians were living in Berlin. I met Al Porcino,
the legendary trumpet player from the Woody Herman, Stan
Kenton, and Buddy Rich bands, and he asked me to join his
big band. This was the ultimate school of music for
me." In 1981 Oxford returned
home to the States, transferring to fill a trombone
spot in the band stationed at Fort Ord, California, near
Monterey. Once there, he lost no time in connecting
with the local music scene. He worked with many
groups, including the swing-oriented Monterey Peninsula
Big Band, but his most influential experience came
from a three-year stint with the Broadway Blues Band,
a Santa Cruz ensemble whose instrumentation included a
Hammond B3 organ and a three-piece horn section. "This is
the band that really got me started on the blues," he
explains. "All the old blues classics were played
with this band, and we played at the 25th annual Monterey
Jazz Festival. It was a blast!" After finishing his
military service in 1984, Oxford managed Domino's
Pizza franchises in the Bay area for a couple of years.
Meanwhile, his parents had moved back to western
Washington and opened a printing supply business in
Redmond. After being robbed at gunpoint in the line of
duty once too often, Oxford left the pizza business
to join the family enterprise. "I spent twelve years
doing this while enjoying the complete flexibility of being
able to play music in the evenings," he says. "When I
first moved up here, I listened to "All Blues" on
KPLU with Marlee Walker as the host. I called her and
asked where I could go hang out and meet other blues
musicians. She suggested the Blue Monday jam at the Owl
Caf`e in Ballard." At the Owl's Monday-night
blues jam, Oxford met Seattle keyboard-and-harmonica
legend Dick Powell, who told him that guitarist Mark
Whitman and his band Duo Glide might be looking for a
trombonist. "I sat in with them, and they asked me to
join the band," he recalls. "That led to shows and
recordings with Jr. Cadillac, Little Bill and The Bluenotes,
Fat Cat, Junkyard Jane, Nicole Fournier, and now
finally The Randy Oxford Band." Although he had recorded
with Al Porcino, The Ambassadors of Jazz, and even
his high school bands, Oxford made his first Northwest album
as a result of joining the immensely popular
roots-rock band Jr. Cadillac, participating in a 20th
anniversary cassette album recorded live in 1988 at the
Seattle Sheraton. Early the following year, probably
with Cadillac, Oxford played a 50th birthday
celebration honoring Northwest rock-and-roll legend Little
Bill Engelhart, and Engelhart was so impressed with
Oxford's playing that he invited him to join his
band. Eighteen years later, Oxford still views the eight
years spent with Little Bill and The Bluenotes as his
most important learning experience. "Little Bill is
my main mentor in the blues," he says. "He really
taught me how to play the blues and live the blues. He
taught me how to survive the tough times in the music
biz and how to keep a band working year after year.
He is why I am still going strong in this tough music
business today." Oxford continued to work
with his parents in the print-supply trade by day
while gigging steadily with the Bluenotes by night and
making guest appearances on other people's albums.
When the inevitable burnout finally caught up with
him in 1997, he left the Bluenotes to get some
much-needed rest and prepare for his next musical
move. That move turned out to be an affiliation with Fat
Cat, a horn-driven blues crew with plenty of original
material, and with his help, the group took the
Washington Blues Society's 1998 award for New Band of
The Year. Later that year Oxford,
now living in Puyallup, started jamming with a new,
eclectically styled Tacoma band called Junkyard Jane whose
"swampabilly blues" repertoire relied heavily on
original material. During Oxford's three-year tenure
the band made three CD's, achieved great local
popularity, and placed as one of the top eight
entries in a Memphis-based national Battle of the
Bands competition. After leaving Junkyard
Jane in 2001, Oxford decided to take what he had learned
about the music business and turn it into an enterprise that
would help to build and strengthen the local blues
community. Beginning at the now-defunct Jake's Alehouse in
Federal Way, he started hosting weekly jam sessions at
appropriate venues in the Puget Sound area. "I wanted to
help musicians hook up and find bands and gigs," he
explains, "so I started hosting blues jam sessions and
started my own booking agency, Oxford Entertainment. Now I
can help bands form and find new players from the blues jams
that I host. Then I can help them find gigs through
my booking agency." One of the happiest results of
Oxford's jam sessions was the discovery of the
personnel that comprised the first Randy Oxford Band.
Bassist Jack Kinney, originally from southern
California, had toured with such legendary rockers as
the Ventures, the Coasters, and the Isley Brothers before
settling in the Northwest and joining Oxford.
Singer/guitarist Jerry Lee Davidson had left his
native Seattle as a musically restless teenager in the
early 1970's to try his luck in Chicago's thriving
folk and blues circles, eventually working with a
pantheon of artists ranging from Willie Dixon to Willie
Nelson to Chuck Berry. Singer/songwriter/guitarist
Virginia Klemens had also made her mark on the
Chicago music scene at a young age, fronting her own
bands as well as working with artists like Doc
Watson, Maria Muldaur, and bluesman Homesick
James. With the discovery of
drummer/vocalist Riky Hudson, a Little Rock, Arkansas
native with a diverse musical background, the band was
complete. Its debut CD ALL THE BUZZ, released in late
2004, was a masterful integration of tradition and
creativity, spanning an uncommonly wide range of eras
and sources. It earned Oxford a 2005 award for Best
Blues Recording from the Washington Blues
Society. The following year, however,
Randy Oxford surprised the local blues community with
a decision to break up his highly successful band and
start over, explaining to the Tacoma NEWS TRIBUNE
last November that he felt the band had "hit a
plateau" and needed a more diverse repertoire and more
showmanship to attract a larger audience. Drawing on
the vast resource pool of musicians discovered at his
popular weekly jam sessions, he put together a new Randy
Oxford Band, keeping only guitarist Steve Blood and
drummer Riky Hudson. The title of his recently
released CD, MEMPHIS TO MOTOWN, reflects the change. "To
be a modern day 21st century Blues band," he explains in
his liner notes, "you have to branch out and embrace
a style called "Americana", which includes R&B,
Funk, Motown, Jazz, and all kinds of sounds wrapped
around a Blues core." Although this disc
certainly displays a new sound, it's a far cry from the
banal, commercialistic sellout that this hard-core
traditionalist critic might have feared. Steve Blood
and guest guitarist Dean Reichert contribute
wonderfully complementary solos to such straight-ahead
blues as Keb Mo's "Dirty low Down and Bad", Denise
LaSalle's "Someone Else Is Steppin' In", and Delbert
McClinton's "Go On". "Honey", a slow, minor-key blues
co-written and sung by new bassist Dominique Stone,
gets an expressive guitar solo from Steve Blood that
calls B.B. King to mind. Heather Rayburn, a native Texan who
serves as primary lead vocalist, delivers most of her
songs in a muscular, up-front contralto, but on
Mildred Anderson's Forties-era blues "Cool Kind of
Poppa", she employs what Oxford calls a "Betty Boop"
style that evokes Maria Muldaur'supper range. Since the Randy Oxford
Band had already included the James Brown hit "Think"
on its first release, the Memphis-to-Motown soul-music
connection that defines its latest album constitutes
more of an emphasis shift than a new direction.
Consequently, the material here that doesn't strictly
qualify as blues encompasses Elvin Bishop's
gospelesque "I'll Be Glad", the fun-loving funk of
Johnny "Guitar" Watson's "Bow Wow", and a couple of Motor
City hits from the early Seventies led by Dominique
Stone. The best of these latter tracks is Marvin
Gaye's protest anthem "What's Going On", backed by
tight, refreshing vocal harmony from the band. The
closest thing to contemporary pop on this album is
Joan Osborne's haunting "Safety In Numbers", which
Heather Rayburn delivers in a sensitive,
country-influenced style that further showcases her
versatility. Throughout the program,
Randy Oxford utilizes the trombone's full range of
tonal possibilities, riffing convincingly with the
guitarists and taking solos that reflect the heat and
spice of New Orleans or the cool of the Tommy Dorsey
era as the situation demands. "I think that you will
enjoy the "Americana" style of Blues that my band is
exploring these days," he says in his new CD's liner
notes. Like his previous release, MEMPHIS TO MOTOWN can be
purchased at live shows and on his website,
randyoxford.com.
email
RANDY OXFORD