Claude "Fiddler" Williams:
Still Swingin' at 90

© 1998 Michael J. Renner

Claude "Fiddler" Williams

It's a hot, August afternoon in Kansas City; and a small crowd has gathered around a large stage at the 15th annual 18th and Vine Heritage Jazz Festival. They have come to hear one of Kansas City's favorite sons, Claude "Fiddler" Williams.

Compact and wiry, the 89-year-old jazz violinist takes the stage dressed in tan slacks and a hip, collarless shirt. Like a cat conserving its energy, he moves slowly, checking sound equipment, chatting with musicians and surveying the scenery on Vine Street. Looking decades younger (he turns 90 on February 22), Claude's appearance belies the fact that he's practically as old as jazz itself.

Before performing, the violinist receives a city-initiated award for his life-long contribution to jazz. As the official reads the proclamation, Williams listens intently, his head bowed, his hands folded in front of his short, trim frame. He unassumingly and politely accepts the award. One gets the feeling that this shy man, within whom others see greatness, is either uncomfortable with public attention or just doesn't understand what all the fuss is about.

Any quizzicality his lack of response to the award has generated is quickly dispelled with the first measure he plays. He pounces, playing with a vigor that matches his youthful looks. Hunching over, Williams squeezes from his fiddle plangent melodies and rollicking riffs, stamping his foot and flashing an occasional smile of satisfaction. When he sings, his voice has a tinge of nasality wrapped around a relaxed, almost droll Southern, delivery.

Born in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1908, Claude Williams was exposed to the many territory bands that criss-crossed Texas, Oklahoma and Missouri. Joe Venuti was not only the first significant jazz violinist, but also the first violinist Williams heard.

"Before him," says Claude, "I had been playing guitar, banjo and mandolin. My brother-in-law taught me how to play all those instruments. But I heard Joe and told my mother that I wanted to play one of those things. What he was playing was so pretty. I was playing (violin) the next day because I knew how to play a mandolin and all I had to do was learn how to use the bow. I got myself a good violin teacher because I didn't know anything about music. All my other playing had been by ear."

Part of Williams' musical longevity is his style of playing, which he attributes to training.

"It's a little different," he explains, "because I knew more about chords and changes than the other violin players. They only knew how to read the melody and swing it. But with me knowing guitar, I played a lot of augmented and diminished changes, flatted fifths, all that stuff."

After his sparkling performance, Fiddler strolls up Vine street, KC's former haven of lavish nightlife, now newly restored. Walking slowly amid renovated buildings -- some built for Robert Altman's 1996 film, "Kansas City" -- the smell of barbecue fills the air. Donning a straw hat to protect him from the intense afternoon sun, Fiddler begins to chat about the current activity in the area. Many Kansas Citians have been surprised to actually see the progress that's been made, but for Fiddler, who made this nine-block time capsule his stomping grounds from 1928 to 1933, it's a different feeling. He's seen it from both sides.

"I thought it was gone," he recalls in his rural, soft-spoken, Oklahoma dialect. "I never did have any idea they would try to bring it back. 'Course it never will be like it was, with the bars on the corner that never close." He stops, points to what is now a parking lot and says, "There was a hotel there and..." (motioning behind him) "...two clubs on the corner over there. There were two or three clubs on every block on 18th Street; same thing on 12th Street. And we did a lot of jamming."

In those days of battling bands, cutting contests and all-night jam sessions, Fiddler had to keep up with monster saxophonists like Lester Young, Buddy Tate, Hershel Evans and Ben Webster. Despite the soft-sounding violin's inferior role in jazz history, he was the only violinist who could compete as an equal against the overpowering horns.

"When Lester got with the Blue Devils, they'd find me and we'd have to have a good jam session," Fiddler recalls.

Before amplification, violinists were forced into making a statement the moment the bow hit a string. It was in this incubator of Kansas City jamming that Fiddler developed his trademark style of first repeatedly attacking the strings, then gliding his way through a phrase. He was, and still is, relentless.

Despite his fondness for recollections, Fiddler is not one to live life through the prism of nostalgia. At an age when most near-nonagenarians prefer to live off their memories, Fiddler not only shows no signs of slowing down, he continues to look forward.

"Claude has two things that a person his age usually doesn't have: curiosity and competitiveness," says Russ Dantzler, Williams' manager. "The most important statement I can pull out of him about what it is that allows him to be such a happy and healthy person at his age is: 'Don't worry about nothing.' He releases stress like 95 percent of the world only wishes it could."

Says Fiddler about this outlook and his current age, "I feel better now than I did fifty years ago."

Jazz writer Scott Yanow believes Fiddler is one of a handful of jazz musicians alive today who recorded in the 1920s and are still recording. He just released his second CD in two years, King of Kansas City (Progressive Records), featuring all Kansas City musicians. They include: guitarist Rod Fleeman, saxophonist Kim Park, bassist Bob Bowman, drummer Todd Strait and vocalists Karrin Allyson and Lisa Henry. His 1995 recording for the same label, Swing Time In New York, included all New York musicians. Add to the collection the 1993 release of an important 1989 live concert, Live at J's (Arhoolie Records) and you have the full array of the Claude Williams catalog as a leader. In addition to his own recordings, his 1972 recording with Jay McShann, The Man from Muskogee, was reissued in 1994.

For the past few years, Fiddler has toured with the Statesmen of Jazz, a group of noted musicians 65 years and older, launched in 1995 by the American Federation of Jazz Societies. Icons like Harry "Sweets" Edison, Louie Bellson and Al Grey are among this elite group.

"With the Statesmen," says Claude, "all of them are what'cha call seasoned musicians. They can call a song we haven't played for 20 years and then play it."

Last year, the group recorded a tasty disc on Arbors Records, and in September the ensemble traveled to Japan to make its international debut.

"Music is an incredible tonic of life," says Matt Glaser, chair of the Strings Department at Boston's Berklee College of Music. "There is something about swinging that keeps people young. Claude's playing keeps growing. He's always interested in new ideas and learning new tunes and trying out new harmonic ideas. That's an amazing thing because it's very easy to just rest on your laurels and stay still. But his playing is constantly energized and growing."

Williams drinks in the tonic known as "swing," not with a desperate thirst, but with the matter-of-fact understanding of what his body and soul need.

"Music changes a little every year," he says. "It's a different style the longer you hold the note... that kind of stuff. But, it makes me feel good; so if that lengthens my life, that's wonderful."

"Claude comes out of the real Kansas City tradition, having played with Count Basie, Lester Young and all those guys," explains Glaser. "You can hear that in his playing... and that's really the life blood of jazz. No other violin player has had the depth of jazz feeling Claude has."

Wynton Marsalis, when discussing the meaning of swing, once said that Fiddler "was someone who doesn't even try (to swing), he picks up his fiddle and the man can't help but swing."

From his perspective, Williams believes he's developed a style that could be considered more focused and fluent than other jazz violinists.

"I play the melody then play some of the changes along with the melody. (Younger musicians) play a whole lot of jazz stuff, which I say is over a lot of peoples ears -- they don't know what they're listening to! Anytime I play a song, you'll hear some of the melody all the way through. That's my style."

Having grown up in northeast Oklahoma, Fiddler moved to Kansas City in 1927. His first recorded performance -- on violin and banjo -- came as a member of Andy Kirk's famed Twelve Clouds of Joy. While with Kirk, Williams often embellished the horn arrangements written by Kirk's pianist Mary Lou Williams. It's not surprising then, that many jazz critics often describe Fiddler's approach as "horn-like."

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"Claude has two things that a person his age usually doesn't have: curiosity and competitiveness." -- Russ Dantzler

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Though well-received everywhere he goes today and considered an influential jazz violinist, Claude Williams is far from a household name -- even in his hometown. Though not apparently resentful, a series of "circumstances" that happened more than fifty years ago may have set his fate in motion.

During the height of Kirk's success, Fiddler was forced to leave the band due to illness. He returned to Kansas City, recovered and then began touring with Alphonso Trent's group as well as George E. Lee's Orchestra, a band that Williams says included a young Charlie Parker. Of "Bird," Fiddler says, "I hate to tell people that I used to show Charlie how to play because they look at me kinda funny. But when he used to jam with us, he could read anything but he didn't have it together when he'd go from a major to a minor. He would play some wrong changes and I'd have to take him off and show him the right chords. He appreciated that."

A second misfortune occurred in 1936. Fiddler was tapped to play guitar for Count Basie's first big band, but politics and economics prevailed as he and others received pink slips.

"In those days it was (John) Hammond's band because he gave Basie (the money) to get the band together. Hammond was calling all the shots; and he had promised his New York musicians first chance with the band. I wasn't bitter because I knew it wasn't Basie that was doing that, it was Hammond. They wanted somebody like (guitarist) Freddie Green to sit up there and play just rhythm... ching-ching-ching." Something Williams says he ultimately didn't want to do.

"I said (to myself) there was a lot of good guitar players, and the jazz violin players were kinda scarce, so I'm just gonna play fiddle."

Fiddler then moved back to Kansas City, started and played in bands all around the country, but didn't record again for more than 30 years.

Although Fiddler wasn't part of the late-1960s violin wave that resurrected the late Stephane Grappelli's career and launched the likes of Jean-Luc Ponty and Michael Urbaniak, the 1972 recording with McShann brought him newfound interest. According to Russ Dantzler, that recording "helped put both (Claude and Jay) back on the map, where, outside of Kansas City, the world was beginning to forget them."

Furthermore, Williams' work in the 1980s Paris and Broadway musical "Black and Blue" also helped increase his stock. The long-running black revue created steady work until he came home to Kansas City to care for his ailing wife, who eventually passed away.

A lot of Williams' renewed exposure is due to Dantzler. ("He's the one keeping me jumping and working now," Fiddler says.) And, when he's not playing music, this quiet, laid-back man likes to play pool or attend shows with Blanche, his new and vibrant wife of the past six years. "I feel I'm fulfilling my own dreams through Claude," she says. "He plays what I'm feeling and unable to express musically."

True beauty comes from taking complexity and forging something smooth and lyrical, something where the sweat of creativity is undetectable to the eyes and ears. It's Williams' combination of clarity, melody and swing that brings to mind Art Blakey's famous line that "the average man doesn't want to have to use his brain when he listens to music. Music should wash away the dust of everyday life."

As Claude "Fiddler" Williams approaches 90, it seems his life has come full circle. With new recordings and an active touring schedule, his popularity is again on the upswing.

"Ever seen the Mutual Musicians Foundation?" Williams asks, pointing to the site where many an all-night jam session saw the break of dawn. He enters the old building where he serves on the board of directors. A tight-sounding quartet of high schoolers jams hard. Just a few people are there, happy to take respite from the heat. The walls are laden with old photographs, each with hand-printed titles protected by plastic wrap. Like Williams himself, jazz history is displayed unadorned, readily available for anyone caring to take the time to soak in the richness.

Claude listens attentively to the quartet, takes a sip from his worn plastic coffee mug, and says matter-of-factly, "Sound pretty good, don't they?"

It's clear that Claude "Fiddler" Williams -- someone who has played with the greatest musicians in jazz history -- is still thrilled by the purest sound of all: young kids learning to play jazz.


Michael J. Renner covers jazz for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His articles have appeared in Jazziz, Black Diaspora and the Columbia (MO) Daily Tribune.


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