Interview: Frank Perowsky - Edinburgh Jazz Festival star

Published on Tuesday 27 July 2010 18:59

FRANK Perowsky has toured with Liza Minnelli and played with some of jazz's biggest names. But the New York tenor sax, clarinet and flute player feels like he's coming home when he performs in Edinburgh.

• Frank Perowsky arrives at the Jazz Bar in Edinburgh. Picture: Jane Barlow

Perowsky's love affair with the capital goes back to a chance meeting six years ago, when he was playing at Smith's Bar on 8th Avenue in Manhattan. During a break, a Scottish man introduced himself and said that he was a jazz singer.

"I said, 'Great, come up on the next set'," recalls Perowsky over lunch at Cornelia Street Cafe in Greenwich Village. "He sang blues and he knocked me out. The audience loved him. He was outrageous, swinging, just a great scat sound. Then I asked him to sing a ballad. He did Over the Rainbow in this amazing, rich voice. We hit it off and kept in touch when he went back to Scotland."

The singer in that New York bar was Freddie King. Perowsky recalls: "The next year he invited me to come over. I did and we worked nearly the whole time. I've been back to Edinburgh another four times since. We recorded an album together, Digging Deep, in 2005. I was struck by the fact there are so many good jazz players in and around Edinburgh. And I love the Jazz Bar (on Chambers Street], it's a great venue."

This is rich praise indeed, coming from a musician, composer and arranger who has lived in New York for nearly 60 years and whose resume reads like a Who's Who of the Jazz World. After graduating from New York's prestigious Juilliard music school, where he studied clarinet, Perowsky began his career in the big bands of Jimmy Dorsey, Woody Herman, and Les and Larry Elgart. He went on to play in the pit for numerous Broadway shows, including Promises, Promises and 42nd Street, and performed in backing bands for such greats as Peggy Lee, Tony Martin, Phyllis Diller, Billy Eckstine, Mel Torme and Michel Legrand.

He has been recording and touring with Liza Minnelli since 1981. He was working on Barnum on Broadway in 1981 when he got the call asking him if he'd be willing to take off on the road for ten weeks to work with Minnelli. Initially reluctant to be away from home for so long, Perowsky was persuaded to go by a friend, and so began a 30-year working relationship. "Liza's terrific," says Perowsky. "I love working with her. She's a genius on stage, she knows how to work an audience like no-one else. I've had many great experiences but working with Liza is one of the greatest."

Back to his collaborations with Freddie King, whose jazz singer daughter Niki King recently performed with Perowsky in New York. Freddie King and Perowsky are performing together at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival (EJBF), where Niki is also doing a gig.

The New York musician is currently busy working on the arrangements for the show with Freddie King and a ten-piece band, which will take in Nat King Cole, Johnny Hartman and Billy Eckstine.

The multi-talented musician is also looking forward to doing some gigs at the Jazz Bar while he's in Edinburgh and will no doubt manage some other impromptu performances. "When I get to Scotland I like to play as much as possible. I'm coming for three weeks. I've made so many friends in Scotland, it's like a second home. I met some jazz musicians from Glasgow, too, so I'm going to play a couple of gigs there." Perowsky is playing another gig at the EJBF with his quartet, and will play clarinet, tenor sax and flute in a mixed programme of jazz standards and classics, along with some of Perowsky's original compositions.

"I love the pub culture in Scotland. We don't have pubs here, just bars where it's all about the drinking, and saloons, but they are kind of seedy. But pubs have this great atmosphere, good food, lively conversation and you can bring your mother, grandmother and the kids along," says Perowsky, whose favourites include Bennets Bar in Tollcross. In between performing he's also hoping to find the time to see some theatre at the Fringe.

The son of a professional dancer, Perowsky's childhood in Des Moines, Iowa, was steeped in culture. His father died the year Perowsky was born. "My mother was really into showbusiness so I grew up with that," he says. As a boy Perowsky spent much of his time hanging out at his mother's dance studio, where he learned to tap dance and where his aunt would play piano to accompany the dancers.

"I still have my aunt's grand piano," he says. "I couldn't part with it. We spent ages looking for an apartment in New York because we couldn't find one with a living room big enough to accommodate it,. "My mother taught all the dance styles, including ballroom, so she had all these big band 78s. I've still got a lot of them. I was nuts about Benny Goodman so I'd slow down the record and I'd copy Benny Goodman's clarinet solos."

Having learned to dance by taking herself off as a youngster to Chicago, New York and Los Angeles to study under some of the masters, Perowsky's mother took the same approach when her son showed an interest in music. She bought him his first clarinet at nine and took him to see all the jazz artists who came to Des Moines – Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey and Buddy Rich. And she drove him to Los Angeles, Chicago and New York so that he could study with the best teachers around.

"I had a wonderful mother. There are so many talented kids out there who don't get that encouragement," he says. When he began to take an interest in learning saxophone as a teenager, his mother bought him a sax and helped him find a teacher. His teacher tipped him off about all the jamming sessions in town, and that's where Perowsky honed his early craft. Around the same time he began arranging and composing.

A passion for the arts is clearly in the Perowsky blood. Frank's son, Ben, is also a jazz musician, playing drums with the Millennial Territory Orchestra. Father and son play together in New York whenever they get a chance and have recorded an album, Bop on Pop, some tracks from which Perowsky is planning to play in Edinburgh.

After finishing his glass of beer, Perowsky calls for the bill. With it comes a programme of events at the Cornelia Street Cafe, a New York cultural and culinary institution. Perowsky looks down the list, pointing out musicians who are worth checking out.

"He's brilliant. And they are worth seeing," he enthuses, generously.

Before he leaves, he reaches into his packed-to-bursting black leather bumbag. In amongst the Moleskine notebooks, keys and his wallet, he fishes out his iPhone. "This thing has changed my life. I lost so many tunes before. They come to you while you're walking down the street.

"Now I just take the phone out and record it. It's a wonderful thing," he says, scrolling through dozens of audio clips – little ditties and melodies which have come to him as he's walking around the city or sitting on the bus.

With that he's off to catch the subway home, where he will spend the rest of the day working on arrangements for his upcoming appearance with Freddie King. With a smile Perowsky promises: "There's a lot of work to do but it's going to be a fine gig."

• Freddie King: Milestones with special guest Frank Perowsky is at The Hub, 30 July, as part of the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival. www.edinburghjazzfestival.com