Keith Balla ’21
They’re The Picture, I’m The Frame
Saunders Street looks decidedly pastoral after crossing Queens Boulevard underneath the Long Island Expressway. East of an overpass at the intersection of Woodhaven Boulevard is a sprawling expanse of dreary Robert Moses era apartment towers, shopping malls, and nondescript small businesses of Rego Park, Queens. Jazz drummer Jimmy Wormworth has lived in the same one bedroom apartment in this neighborhood for forty-nine years. The door of #2H bears a decal, demarcating the territory of the fictitious “Federal Jazz Commission.”
“Hold on, let me unhook the bar on the police lock…you want something cold to drink?” inquires Wormworth with a grin.
He is wiry, and his features are angular and chiseled. Almost every available inch of wall space is covered with framed flyers and posters advertising concerts from various decades and locales— à la batterie, a la batteria, am schlagzeug, en la baterìa—all of which feature Jimmy Wormworth on drums.
Since leaving his hometown of Utica, New York in 1957 to move to New York City, this master musician’s innate talent, generous spirit and nonpareil personality have found a welcoming home in the global jazz community and brought him a feeling of fellowship that was perhaps unavailable to him while growing up the son of an interracial married couple during the 1940s and 1950s.
“I didn’t want to have a sense of belonging in just my family, I wanted to have a sense of belonging anywhere. Not just belonging but accepted.” says Wormworth.
By way of the vast network of friends and colleagues that he has collected over a sixty-two year career, and the legions of fellow musicians that he has mentored and inspired, it seems that the progressive world of jazz—which spearheaded integration long before many major American institutions did—provided Wormworth, who was between two cultures while coming of age, both an emotional refuge and an outlet for an immense creative gift.
*
Utica, New York today looks like any number of economically depressed manufacturing towns still reeling from the gradual departure of industry. In the 1930s, Utica was Central New York’s powerhouse of textile manufacturing, and such a stronghold of organized crime that it was known as “Sin City of the East.” As in Capone’s Chicago or Pendergast’s Kansas City, Utica’s “handshake deal” Mafia influence on businesses, combined with lax local government oversight on gambling and prostitution, led to a proliferation of nightlife to entertain the throngs of factory workers. In turn, a vibrant music scene thrived.
“My father was a pretty well-known musician, he came from a black society family. He played with Billie Holiday and Helen Humes. My mother’s brother was a saxophonist who was just as talented as my father. My mother went to gigs with my uncle and that’s how she met my father.” says Wormworth, rapidly gesticulating with his arms and hands, like a whirlwind or a dynamo.
James Wormworth and Wormworth’s Italian-American mother, Anne Mariani, met in the mid-1930s. They married soon after meeting, and had two sons. His father performed as a drummer and pianist all around Central New York, and the peripatetic life of an itinerant musician wasn’t conducive to being much of a family man—in fact, the union only lasted two years.
“After my father had two kids, he just totally went ‘left’, so I was left to grow up with my white Italian side of the family. They would occasionally take me to visit my black grandmother, or her sister and my black cousins, but I didn’t relate to them at all.”
Wormworth’s saxophonist uncle left a console turntable and a handful of expertly selected jazz 78s with Wormworth’s mother after returning home from World War II in January 1946, inadvertently laying the groundwork for his nephew to become enraptured.
“It wasn’t until I was nine years old and I heard Art Tatum, Nat King Cole, and Nellie Lutcher, that I went in another direction—the direction of black people’s music.”
The young Wormworth sat spellbound for hours by the family stereo, transported by the sounds of the Nat King Cole Trio, piano virtuoso Art Tatum, and vocalist/pianist Nellie Lutcher. After practically wearing the 78s out (and learning to sing the solos therein note for note), his family was convinced that he was a precocious talent, and his aunt arranged for him to begin drum lessons. After two and a half years of study he was a working musician before he was even in high school.
“I worked my first New Year’s Eve gig when I was thirteen. That was the latest I had ever stayed out, until two in the morning!” he recalls with a chuckle. After gaining more experience with youth dance bands, his mother instructed him, “If you want to play this (jazz) music, you might as well go see your father.”
The elder Wormworth had been a spectral presence in his son’s life up to that point, but music served to connect the two, even if a filial bond was never formed.
“I never got a birthday card, Christmas card, anything from him. When I played with him he never even used to talk to me, but he was quiet and didn’t seem to talk to hardly anybody. Which is fine with me, except that I was supposed to be his son.”
The chasm left by his father’s emotional distance created a yearning for surrogate parental figures, the first of which was a brilliant African-American drummer named Gordon Smith, who became a friend and mentor to the teenage Jimmy Wormworth and recommended him for gigs in Utica with older musicians.
“Oh I felt like I finally found a home! I was finally around people who I could not only relate to but who I could rely on to teach me stuff,” he explains.
Though he wouldn’t stay in Utica much longer, leaving at the age of nineteen in 1957 to go on a European tour, (settling in New York City afterwards) the tendency to seek surrogate family figures persisted for years.
“I’m real curious, so I was always looking for stuff. Sometimes I looked in the wrong places and got hooked up with the wrong people, but a lot of times I was lucky to fall into the right places and get hooked up with people who taught me a lot; from Gordon Smith and some of those other guys in Utica, Lou Donaldson, Doug Watkins, Wilbur Ware, Al Haig, Peck Morrison…” he says, rattling off a laundry list of seminal figures from the golden age of jazz.
Wormworth’s talent and effervescent personality served him well in ingratiating himself with fellow musicians on the New York City jazz scene in 1957, moving there after leaving Utica at the age of 19 when he organized a band for an extended tour of Europe.
“Jimmy was so likeable and outgoing and just a fun guy to be with,”recalls saxophonist Frank Perowsky, who was his roommate during that time.
While working with the hugely popular vocal trio Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross from 1959 until 1962, he often played on package tours opposite legends like Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Miles Davis, and Dizzy Gillespie.
“We called him ‘The Kid’ ‘cause he looked about 19, but he was one of the greatest drummers.” said jazz legend and Wormworth’s employer in this group, Jon Hendricks. “He was such a curious guy and everybody loved him.”
While on tour, he made a hobby of snapping candid photos of the musical giants he would encounter on his Polaroid Brownie camera.
*
For the last decade, a monthly ritual for Wormworth has been to play an afternoon gig organized by the Jazz Foundation of America at the Lost Batallion Hall Community Center, just across Queens Boulevard from his apartment. A retinue of young musicians in thrall of Wormworth’s deeply authentic sound is often invited back to his apartment on Saunders Street as he holds court for hours, showing off this priceless collection of photos and recounting stories describing the action depicted. Any one of these informal Wednesday salons in apartment #2H could be comprised of musicians from a wide-ranging swath of ethnicities and nationalities, such as Korea, Italy, Japan, Spain, Germany, and Israel, huddling around their elder in a small living room as he dispenses wisdom. The progression from eager protégé to fulfilling the same mentoring role is complete.
“He’s always helpful to anybody, a lot of musicians ask him about the music, and just talking with him is a great lesson,”says Japanese drummer Ai Murakami, who is a frequent Wednesday guest at Wormworth’s Federal Jazz Commission.
*
“Pakistani looking Italian who fell in love with black American music” is how Wormworth mirthfully describes himself today as he sits nestled in Queens County, the most ethnically diverse county in the United States. This kind of diversity was scarce in the tight knit Italian American community of Utica in the 1930s and 1940s.
“I would say that ninety percent of that community was pretty racist…Some contributed to Mussolini,” he recalls with considerably less mirth then when he recalls his history as a musician. It is perhaps no coincidence that navigating in that particular setting as a person of color, and as the child of an interracial marriage, would cultivate in Wormworth a desire to be accepted, and to avoid confrontation.
“I don’t like conflict, I don’t even like observing conflict. I find it disturbing and frightening. (When I was growing up) people assumed I was something that I wasn’t by what they saw visually,” he says before bounding up from his living room sofa with a speed that betrays his eighty-two years. He offers his guest some refreshments and then remarks, “My family, they were liberal Italians, not a high formal education, but highly intelligent and very honest. They were the exception in the Italian-American community (of that time)—they weren’t racist. I want to belong, that’s what it boils down to…I never felt like I belonged except within my own family, and they thought I was a little weird too!”
He remembers this with a beaming smile and a hearty laugh—both frequently punctuate his sentences in our conversation.
*
In addition to impromptu master classes in Queens, in recent years Wormworth has also conducted formal workshops on jazz drumming in Spain, Germany and Austria, discovering that he possesses the rare gift to inspire students with his joyful and empathetic personality. His humor, immense skill, and positivity serve to act as a binding force between students of disparate backgrounds and skill. Beyond his vast practical knowledge and endless supply of anecdotes (born out of a near photographic memory) and a lifetime of interactions with jazz giants, his greatest asset as an educator and mentor is his commitment to inclusion. Whether generously offering his couch to host students visiting New York from out of town, insisting on introducing his students to respected musicians and arranging for them to sit-in or substitute for him, or offering advice, encouragement and inspiration in one of his signature extended phone conversations, Jimmy Wormworth provides his friends the exact same thing that he has sought throughout his life: a sense of belonging.
“The most rewarding thing is seeing so many talented people from so many different backgrounds wanting to learn the same stuff that I love. They have admiration for me and that makes me feel really good. I’ve made some of what I would consider lifelong friends,” he shares, illustrating the deeply symbiotic relationship between student and teacher.
Jimmy Wormworth’s children bear the trace of his influence, through the forces of both nature and nurture. Married and the father of five children by the age of twenty three, he spent much of the 1960s and 1970s working odd jobs and playing in clubs across the tri-state area, supporting his large family. Though his marriage eventually dissolved and he battled alcoholism until achieving sobriety in 2007, he can look with pride at the success of his children—all of whom are musically inclined, two being professional musicians. His son James Wormworth appears nightly as the drummer on the TBS television talk show Conan, and his daughter Tracy has toured the world as the bassist with Sting, Wayne Shorter, and the B-52s.
“They’ve been more successful than I have been, I’m happy to say. They’ve met and worked with some very influential people, travelled the world, and they did it on their own. A parent couldn’t ask for anything more than to have kids like I have. I like to say—my kids are great despite of me, not because of me!”
Jimmy Wormworth, for a long time, longed to feel connected to others—longed for a kind of connection that felt elusive. Jazz presented itself as a refuge during a childhood where he often felt ill at ease, one foot in the Italian-American family which embraced him, and another in the African-American culture he was estranged from. The very act of creating improvised music extemporaneously with fellow musicians offered Wormworth an opportunity to experience the kind of egalitarian expression of fellowship that occurs so fleetingly in organized society.
“It’s a communal thing, it’s a democracy. Everybody has to carry their own weight. If you impinge on somebody, you try to knock somebody else down, you try to carry their weight for them…all of sudden things aren’t quite on the rails (anymore),” he says, explaining a philosophy central to his way of life. Jazz music, a medium where the practitioner must fit their personal statement within the collective needs of the ensemble, is a form where one is rewarded for both individuality and empathy towards those around them.
“They’re the picture, I’m the frame,” is how he now characterizes his approach to musical accompaniment as a drummer. His generosity of spirit, curiosity, and originality have an outlet in music. In turn, this master artist, caught between two cultures for many years, finds the acceptance, kinship, and sense of belonging that he always yearned for.
Works Cited
- Miner, Neal. “Through the Eyes of a Drummer–The Life & Photos of Jimmy Wormworth.” YouTube, YouTube, 12 Dec. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuRdwt4KeXw.