Jazz's Next Sax Symbol?; His Dad Bought the Music.
Now Ron Holloway Plays the Tunes.

Winston Holloway has been collecting jazz recordings for more than 40 years. Ron Holloway has been dissecting them for nearly as long. While the father listened, the son learned, picking apart themes and solos by ear, fascinated by the music he found in the family archives.

Evidence of the obsession they share clutters the basement of the Holloway home in Takoma Park, where the family moved in 1966 and where Winston still lives with his wife, Marjorie. Cassette tapes are everywhere, out in the open and stashed away in cigar boxes. Among them are advance copies of the younger Holloway's new album "Slanted," his major label debut as a leader and a vivid reminder of the lessons that the tenor saxophonist learned in this room.

But mostly the basement is filled with vinyl LPs, in random stacks and orderly rows, spanning one wall and several decades. Beneath a small gallery of extended family portraits - framed photographs of Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Freddie Hubbard, Dexter Gordon and Dizzy Gillespie - thousands of jazz albums fill a cabinet. Many of them are in mint condition, original pressings from the '50s and '60s. The vast majority of them betray a strong bias: the elder Holloway's lifelong passion for the saxophone. Disc by disc, year after year, he's assembled a massive "horn section" down here.

"He couldn't get enough of the sax," says Ron, hardly immune to the allure himself. Thumbing through the collection while his parents look on, he ticks off some of the names that appear on the jacket spines. The list resembles a roll call of great reedmen: Gene Ammons, Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane, Charlie Rouse, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt, Stanley Turrentine. The Rollins and Coltrane stacks each are a couple of feet thick.

"My father will be 70, but he still listens to a wide spectrum of music," says Holloway, noting the library's inclusion of everyone from swing era greats Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry and Ben Webster to avant avatars Coltrane, Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler. "And even before he started collecting, my mother and father used to go down to the Howard Theater and hear guys like Illinois Jacquet blow the roof off the place. My mother always liked that gut-bucket Texas tenor thing."

Nearby, next to the slew of Washington Area Music Awards (Wammies) Holloway has won over the years, sits another pile of recordings, testimony to his genre-jumping work with the funk band Osiris, rock renegade Root Boy Slim, jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron and trumpet legend Dizzy Gillespie, among others. Holloway's eclectic tastes helped him win all nine of his Wammies, but they have also put him on the defensive at times. "There are people who consider jazz an art form," he says, sorting through the records. "And I'm one of them. But some jazz fans tend to look down on other styles of music. I've always felt that you can also make a strong statement using simpler musical forms. That's why I don't look down on the blues, say. I never wanted to be pigeonholed."

"Slanted," though, is all about jazz, home-grown and honest. Since the Milestone label is releasing the album only on compact disc, it won't fit neatly alongside the vinyl platters that compelled Holloway to pursue the sax in the first place. But in every other respect, it seems worthy of the company.

"I've always felt a lot of gratitude toward the musicians in my father's collection, so I wanted this first album to be kind of a homage to them," explains the 40-year-old Holloway. "At the same time, what was so apparent to me even in the beginning, was that all of the great soloists had their own individual traits. As much as I wanted to copy them, they kept telling me: Develop your own voice, come up with your own sound."

Or your own slant. While Thelonious Monk's skewed wit, jerky cadences and odd harmonies, especially as applied to blues, prompted Holloway to compose the title track for "Slanted," the basement, Holloway says, holds countless examples of the kind of emotion and spirit he was trying to convey.

He gets up from the couch, retrieves an old Sonny Rollins album and places it on the stereo. At first, Rollins doesn't sound like himself; he's not playing his customary Selmer sax and his tone is thinner and flatter than usual. But when he begins to test the potential of the tune and the horn simultaneously, whimsically stretching some notes and tongue-triggering others in rapid-fire bursts, there's no mistaking the sheer delight he's found in forging new sounds and developing new angles. Holloway suddenly seems like a student again, all ears, smiling broadly. "There's definitely something slanted about that," he says.

"I used to fear for his health," confesses Marjorie Holloway, looking back on her son's sequestered teenage years. "He spent so much time practicing down here that I began to wonder if it could be harmful." Although Ron first got his hands on a saxophone in seventh grade more by happenstance than design, he was soon hooked. Practice sessions in the basement became longer and longer. An hour or two at first, they grew into 16-hour marathons, intruding on his homework and his social life. "The only thing I rebelled against as a kid," Holloway says, "was not playing."

From the outset Holloway's affinity for R&B was obvious. He joined a high school band called the Speculations and began covering hits by James Brown, Junior Walker, Wilson Pickett and other soul men. But his interest in more harmonically complex music also became apparent early on. Or at least it became apparent to some people. His father still recalls the puzzled expressions in the audience at Walter Reed Army Medical Center one day, after Ron and a drummer friend played a few Coltrane pieces. "They knew the tunes, but it sounded funny because the average kid wasn't playing that stuff."

Of course, years later, after Ron joined Root Boy Slim (the late Foster Mackenzie III) and his Sex Change Band and began playing "Boogie 'Til You Puke" and other deranged novelties, the Holloways became more accustomed to puzzled expressions, including their own.

"I remember we were standing in the lobby before the show once and everyone was looking at us, wondering if we were really fans of his," says Marjorie, laughing. Her husband recalls another night at the Warner Theatre: Root Boy making a grand entrance, "down the aisle in a shopping cart," and a fan sitting nearby, blowing clouds of marijuana smoke into the air, before politely inquiring, "Is this offending you, sir?"

"I never laughed more with any band I've been with," says Ron, who met Root Boy in 1977. "But working with him was also a creative experience. Right from the start I liked the material. He had this funky R&B thing and I've always been partial to rhythm."

Besides, Holloway says, the hours were flexible. So much so that on some nights he was commuting between shows, playing with Root Boy at one club and with Osiris at another. If Root Boy made for outrageous theater, Osiris made for unrelenting funk. He was "the groovemeister," Holloway says of Osiris Marsh, the band's singer-songwriter and namesake. "Sometimes his music was so funky it would make parts of your body move that you didn't even know existed."

Moreover, by the time Holloway hooked up with Root Boy, he had already befriended and jammed with Freddie Hubbard, Dizzy Gillespie and even Sonny Rollins, who rarely invites anyone to sit in. "Root Boy knew I wanted to take advantage of those jazz opportunities and he never gave me flak about it."

Rollins fondly recalls jamming with Holloway at Howard University and engaging in some "Tenor Madness" with him at Blues Alley, though he doesn't see a strong resemblance in their styles. "Some people say he sounds like me, but I don't hear that. Maybe I didn't hear him during the time when he was really under my influence. From my hearing him, he's always been a very original voice. He's got his own concept, which is very rare."

In 1981, while sitting in with drummer Norman Connors at Blues Alley, Holloway met another musician who would play an important role in his development. What impressed Gil Scott-Heron most that night was the fact that "Norman's music wasn't set up to feature an instrumentalist and Ron added a nice thing, following the words and the melody closely." Not long afterward, Holloway was filling a similar role in Scott-Heron's Amnesia Express Band.

"We did so many different styles of music - reggae, blues, jazz," Scott-Heron recalls. "I think Ron appreciated all of the things he was going to be able to do with us ... . By the time he was with us for about a year, he was taking a leadership role as far as the horns were concerned."

More than that, Holloway says, he appreciated Scott-Heron's vision and determination. "I think rather than trying to express his political viewpoint, he was trying to express the truth as he saw it. Some undeniable truths. He was also trying to bring attention to people who really deserved it - Fannie Lou Hamer, for example."

When Holloway joined Gillespie's band in 1989, Scott-Heron gave him his blessing. "You want people to move in a positive direction," Scott-Heron says, "and there was nothing out there more positive than Dizzy."

With Gillespie, Holloway traveled the world, developing a musical rapport and friendship that had begun in 1977, when the two briefly shared the stage at Silver Spring's Showboat Lounge. "The thing that gave me the greatest satisfaction," Holloway says, "was knowing that we had become so close musically, that he trusted me. He knew that if he stopped unpredictably, I'd be there to cover for him. There was a kind of telepathy going on."

Holloway also marveled at the trumpeter's stamina in his final years. "Not just his ability to play the trumpet in his seventies, but sometimes after a long string of engagements, when I was exhausted and heading home, it dawned on me that Dizzy was on his way to play with a big band somewhere or an all-star gig. I think he felt like he was fulfilling a calling. Not in a grandiose way. But he had found something that he was destined to do and it gave him great pleasure."

It's a Thursday night and Holloway is leading a quartet at the Evening Star Jazz Bar, a weekly engagement downtown. (Holloway can also be heard this Friday at the Columbia Arts Festival and next Sunday at the Frederick Arts Festival.) An after-hours office party fills the place with chatter, enough to nearly drown out the rhythm section. Near the end of the first set, though, the crowd and din have diminished. Holloway uncorks a raspy, shouting, swaggering cadenza, a brash invitation to "Take the `A' Train."

When the theme emerges so does the drumming of Aaron Walker, who jauntily rides the cymbals. Pianist Lawrence Wheatley sprinkles Ellingtonia throughout his solo, and bassist Steve Novosel manages somehow to both anchor and animate the music. The performance brings to mind Holloway's version of "Caravan," which opens "Slanted" - partly because of the Ellington connection, but mostly because it underscores Holloway's connections to the Washington jazz scene.

"My mind plays tricks on me sometimes," Holloway says later. "If you were to ask me about some club I played in Boston or somewhere, I probably couldn't tell you much. I tend to remember the stairwells more than stages, because that's where I practice a lot of the time. ... But every time I got back to Washington I'd spend a lot of time checking out what was going on at One Step Down or Blues Alley and other places. And I'd make these observations about certain musicians and what kind of material I wanted to utilize their talents on. I just filed all of that away in my mind. I didn't know when I'd get a chance to record, but I knew it would come in handy one day."

When the chance to record a demo came last year, Holloway called in a lot of area talent, notably bassist Keter Betts, best known for his work with Ella Fitzgerald, and pianists Reuben Brown and Bob Butta, both One Step Down regulars.

"I knew just what I wanted from each musician," says Holloway, "but, of course, in the studio things change. You don't want to ignore the vibe that's dictated just by the moment itself. You want to be able to go with that."

The give-and-take proved beneficial, he says, just as he expected. "There's a lot of great talent here so I knew I couldn't go wrong with these musicians. I just hope the album brings them some of the recognition they deserve."

Dedicated to Gillespie, "Slanted" contains 11 tunes that emphasize Holloway's strengths as both a saxophonist with a commanding tone and a casting director with a keen ear. He uses Brown and Butta, for example, to marvelous but sharply contrasting effect. While Brown's seductive lyricism instantly infuses the ballads "My Shining Hour" and "I Thought About You" with a warm glow, Butta plays a more percussive and swinging role, first on the Monk-inspired title track and then on "Shades of Tyner," Holloway's evocative tribute to pianist McCoy Tyner.

Pop and jazz standards dominate the album, but felicitous touches by Betts, trumpeter Tom Williams, guitarist Paul Bollenback, drummer Steve Williams and other members of the handpicked ensemble freshen them. "I think the most lasting contributions to music are the ones that come out of the tradition and are logical extensions of the ideas that have already been conceived," Holloway explains.

Milestone Records, home to Rollins and part of the family of jazz labels the Holloways have been subsidizing over the years, signed Holloway within days of getting the tape.

"I just sat there feeling a lot of different things," Holloway says, recalling his initial reaction. "I felt elated, of course, but I also felt something I experienced when Dizzy asked me to join his band. It was like a dream come true, but it was also an opportunity that I should take seriously."

Would the opportunity have come sooner had he moved to New York a decade ago? Holloway scoffs at the notion. "I've been to New York enough to know that I was better off here, away from that rat race. And I've always been with bands that traveled internationally - with Gil and Dizzy.

"You know," he adds, "there are a lot of saxophonists who've spent 15 years playing in New York, and they never got a chance to be part of Dizzy's band. So I never thought that living there was going to help me out. It just ain't necessarily so."

Copyright 1994 The Washington Post