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I'm sitting here with an espresso in my daughter's dabbing unicorn mug, thinking about last night. We were in Hot Springs at the Vapors for a memorial for my dear friend Clyde Pound. For over 20 years, Brandon Dorris and I have shared rides to Hot Springs for jazz gigs. It never made sense to use two cars for a hundred-mile round trip. Clyde understood that too. If he hired one of us as the featured artist, the other would come along to support and usually end up playing during the set anyway. That was just how things went. Things look different for us now. We aren't the 20-year-olds who could toss a horn in the backseat and take off with no planning. Now there are schedules to work around and kids to take care of before we can even clear a spot big enough for two cases. Lucky for me, Brandon drives an electric car these days. Gas isn't even part of the conversation anymore. The drive still takes about an hour. It never feels like it. We talk the whole way in and always end up cutting the conversation short once we get there, sitting in the parking lot another ten or fifteen minutes before we can pull ourselves inside. Walking into the Vapors feels like stepping into 1960. Back then it was the place to be. Tony Bennett, Phyllis Diller, Liberace, Frank Sinatra all played there. People called it the poshest nightclub between New York City and Los Angeles. I can't think of a more fitting room in Arkansas to send off Clyde Pound. There wasn't an empty chair. Brandon and I were greeted the second we walked in by dozens of musicians who had played with Clyde over the years, many of them players we looked up to as young guys just starting. Taking in that much talent in one room stopped me for a second. Everyone loved Clyde. He was a true pillar in this jazz community. What most of the people in that room didn't say out loud, though everybody there understood it, was how much bigger Clyde's story actually was than what any of us in Little Rock ever really talked about. He was so much more than just a piano player. Clyde started in San Francisco, sharing stages with Dizzy Gillespie and Maynard Ferguson before most of us were born. He moved on to Vegas, leading bands at the Dunes and later the Hungry i, working rooms that had Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby on the same bill. He spent over thirty years in Hawaii as musical director for a long list of island artists, arranging and performing on more than thirty recordings. He ran his own company for years, booking bands behind Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., The Temptations, Andy Williams, Smokey Robinson. Names most of us only ever saw on a record sleeve, Clyde called them coworkers. He could have stayed in any of those places. Vegas would have kept him. Hawaii would have kept him. But he ended up in Hot Springs Village, and instead of coasting on everything he'd already done, he went to work building something small. He sat on the Board of the Hot Springs Jazz Society. He chaired the Hot Springs Jazz Festival for ten years running. He built events seemingly from nothing. Vocalrama, Guitarama, Pianorama, Sax in the Streets. He gave local musicians a stage, always putting them first. That part really gets me. A man who worked with some of the biggest names in the business chose to spend his last chapter on a jazz scene most people outside of Arkansas have never heard of, and he truly wanted to. We found our way backstage to the green room, where musicians were putting horns together, tuning up, and talking through how the sets would be divided. That was usually Clyde's job. Logistics. He always had a way of pacing a night just right. Brandon and I figured we'd land somewhere in the second or third set and went out to find seats off to the side. The first set was made up of the musicians Brandon and I used to watch play the Afterthought or headline the Jazz Festivals back when we were coming up. Brian Brown on drums. David Higginbotham on bass. Les Pack on guitar. Barry McVinney on alto sax and flute. Ron McHone on tenor sax and flute. Guido Ritchie on trumpet. Sharon Turrentine and Dona Pettey came out to sing a couple of songs. No rehearsals. Just musicians building arrangements on the spot, mic feedback and dead wireless batteries and all. Nobody let it stop them. We all just smiled, and it became part of the show. We thought we'd land in the second set, but the order shuffled around the way it does. Tabitha Graves called us up to join her for one of her songs anyway. We played Alone Together. We filtered in and out for the rest of the night, sitting in on a tune here and there. With that much talent in the room, none of us wanted to take more than our fair share of the stage. By the end, it wasn't really a set anymore. It turned into more of a jam session for a few songs until the night just wound down. There wasn't really a big finish. No last song announced. Just musicians playing until there was nothing left to play. Felt like the most honest kind of tribute we could've given him.  Clyde B. Pound Dec 3, 1934 - May 23, 2026
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Chris needed more than a month to recover before he could play again.
We hadn’t played together since before I went to Hawaii. You don’t notice how much you rely on a partnership like that until it’s missing. When we did finally play together again, it felt right to stand next to Chris at Moody Brews after a month away. The chemistry was still there, waiting for us. He was on fire from the first note. We opened with Paul’s Pal, a Sonny Rollins tune you don’t hear called often. Rollins wrote it as a nod to his bassist and friend, Paul Chambers. The song’s upbeat swing vibe really captures their friendship. We didn’t even make it through the end of the first tune. Raindrops started falling out of nowhere. We wrapped up fast and got the electronics under the nearby awnings before anything got wet. A minor setback. A few minutes, nothing more. We checked the radar, and there was nothing on it. Not a thing. So we plugged back in and settled back into it, Slavek joining us on drums this time. Chris started the intro to Saucer Eyes, a tune by Randy Weston. As he leaned into those opening chords, the sun broke through the clouds behind him, spilling between the buildings from where I stood, and I was reminded of a story I heard T.K. Blue tell about the song. Randy was one of Chris’s mentors from his years in New York. Chris played in trombonist Frank Lacy’s band there, and Frank was also in Randy’s group, which is how the two of them connected. Frank was the same connection that led Chris to bassist Rufus Reid, who later arranged the symphonic version of No Tears Suite for Chris. T.K. and Frank both came to Little Rock with the African Rhythms Alumni Quintet, in tribute to NEA Jazz Master Dr. Randy Weston, at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Theater. That’s where I heard the story about Saucer Eyes. T.K. played in Randy Weston’s band for years, and Saucer Eyes was one of his favorites. Randy would only play it at soundcheck, and never on the actual gig. T.K. asked him about it for decades. Every tour, every soundcheck, same request. Put it on the set list. Finally, one late afternoon at the Nice Jazz Festival, in the south of France, Randy got on the mic before the set started. He told the crowd, “My musical director, T.K. Blue, has been bugging me for thirty years to finally play Saucer Eyes on a gig, so that’s what we’re going to open with.” T.K. said what happened next played out like a scene from a movie. The moment Randy set into those chords, clouds rolled in out of nowhere, and it started raining. But nobody left. The whole crowd started dancing in the rain instead. That ended up being the last performance Randy Weston ever played before he passed. Watching Chris finally back in the courtyard play the same tune, feeling the sun cut through the clouds right on cue, I felt it. He was back where he belonged. Some nights line up like that, and you don’t ask why. I ended up telling that story about Saucer Eyes to the crowd. Trey made it to the square a little later, straight from chamber orchestra camp. I’d dropped him off earlier that day. He sounded incredible from the moment he plugged in. I asked what he wanted to play. He gave me that goofy, shy smile and said, “I don’t know.” Chris added, “It better be something you throw down on.” This was also the first time in over a month that Trey had gotten to play with him. Trey started in on the vamp for Lucky Southern, the tune he called the very first time he ever sat in with us. He indeed threw down on it. There’s still something about the mic that catches me for a second, right before I start speaking, but if I’m passionate enough, good luck getting me to stay quiet. The saxophone didn’t come easy. Years of long tones. Working on articulations, breath support, my embouchure, all those minute details of sound before I could even get to constructing a phrase that meant something to me. I’ve spent years chasing someone else’s already mature sound. Sonny Rollins. Sonny Stitt. Harold Land. I’d listen for every detail that made up what I loved about them, trying to build it into my own playing. It took slowing down, really listening to what I actually wanted to say, before I found my own voice on the horn. It had been in there the whole time. I just had to do the work to use it. Something I’ve come to realize is, they all did the same thing. Harold didn’t start off sounding like the version of him that I heard on those albums with Wes Montgomery. Stitt and Rollins were constantly working on and refining their sound. My speaking voice is stuck somewhere earlier in that same process. You know that phenomenon where you hear a recording of yourself speaking and don’t recognize it’s you because the voice in your head resonates differently. I hear myself over the PA and some part of my brain steps outside the moment to listen to the sound of it, instead of staying inside whatever I’m trying to say. I lose a word. I lose the thread. I have to find my way back in. One-on-one, none of that happens. It’s just a conversation. Something about a crowd changes it, the silence where a response would be, waiting to land instead of bouncing back and forth. I remember fighting my own southern accent as a kid, trying to figure out what made it sound the way it did so I could get rid of it. Funny, looking back. I was already doing the same thing to my speaking voice that I’d eventually run into with my horn. We all carry multitudes of instruments. Some of mine are the saxophone, my speaking voice, my body language, my writing. All of them capable of moving somebody. I trust the horn completely at this point. I’m still learning to trust the rest the same way. That night I kept talking anyway, putting myself in uncomfortable places. I introduced every musician. Told the story about Randy Weston and the rain in the south of France after we played it. Set up the next tune instead of just calling it. I was practicing the same thing I ask of any student working on tone or time. Stay present. Keep your ears open. Don’t let the sound of yourself pull you out of what you’re actually saying. I’ve spent my whole life learning to say something on the horn. Turns out I’m still learning to say something with my own voice too. 6:15 a.m., my alarm goes off. I check my phone for notifications. Check the weather. Clear out messages and a couple of Facebook reels somebody sent me to laugh at. Then, Facebook hands me a memory from today, two years ago.
July 23, 2024. A photo from DeLorenzo's Tomato Pies in New Jersey. Both kids at the table eating pizza. The camera pulled focus on Trey. Parker's next to him, looking over at her brother with a soft, loving expression and the slightest smirk. Trey was 12 in that photo. Short haircut. His hair was so blonde back then. Yesterday, he was standing in the doorway between our kitchen and living room, showing me a new shirt from Tiger Camp. He starts at Central High School this fall. He stood in that doorframe with his arms out to the sides, resting against the frame, barely reaching. I had to take a photo to send to my parents. Two years. Youth large to adult medium. Short hair to hair that swoops and curls past his ears now. A kid I used to measure in inches I now measure in shirt sizes. He told me he remembered a time when he couldn't touch the sides at all. Ironically, a few nights before that, Parker stood in the same spot while Trey was downstairs playing music with his friends. Nobody asked her to. She just walked up and stretched her arms out as far as they'd go, trying to touch both sides herself. She still has a few months left before she turns 12. I'm not sure how I feel about that yet. At her age, my friends and I would come back from summer break every year and immediately clock who got taller. It went back and forth between me and my buddy Ryan for years. Neither of us controlled it. It just happened, or it didn't. By senior year of high school, he had a couple inches on me for good. I remember the months before starting high school. My voice dropped that summer. None of my clothes fit right anymore. I remember thinking it was my one shot. If I wanted to become somebody different, this was the summer to do it. I didn't. Not really. Except for one thing. I told the woman cutting my hair that I used to be almost white blonde as a little kid. She asked if I'd ever thought about highlights. I hadn't. I'd never done anything to my hair besides get it cut short. She pulled a cap over my head, the kind with little holes, and pulled strands through with something that looked like a crochet hook. Bleached them. Styled it after. I walked out with something that looked like leopard print on the back of my head. That was the extent of my reinvention. Frosted tips. Mid-to-late 90s at their worst. We've got a Google Home in the kitchen. It cycles through a shared photo folder while we cook. A couple nights ago Christy and I were making dinner and it landed on a photo from ten years back. Christy's parents sitting on our old red couch, reading a bedtime story to Trey. He was 4. Laid back between them in footsie pajamas, twirling a piece of his hair between two fingers, the way he always did right before he fell asleep. His hair was so light back then it was almost white. Christy and I both stopped what we were doing and looked at it for a minute. Her parents looked so young. Her mom used to dye her hair back then. She doesn't anymore. Her dad has been through heart surgery since that photo was taken. Both of their hair is considerably lighter now. Standing in the kitchen looking at it, we were back in a moment before any of that had happened yet. None of these are the same kind of growing up. A kid stretching across a doorframe. A friend pulling ahead by a few inches. Frosted tips as a half-hearted attempt to become somebody else for a summer. Grandparents getting older in ways you can’t measure on a growth chart or by T-shirt size. Somehow my phone and a screen in my kitchen keep handing me proof of it without me asking. I don't have a neat way to close this out. Trey's starting high school. Parker's got a few months left at 11. Christy's parents are older than that photo remembers them. I'm the same guy who let a stranger bleach his hair back in the 90s and called it reinventing himself. Maybe if I just wait long enough, my hair will lighten back up, and I won’t need a stylist to give me highlights. You don't notice a kid getting taller day to day. You only notice it when something like a photo, a piece of furniture, or a strip of trim between two rooms holds still long enough for you to measure the difference. Christy and the kids left for New Jersey this week to get in one last visit before her sister heads back to Australia. I stayed home with the dogs and a full slate of gigs and lessons. Friday put me back at Moody Brews. It was hot, even after the sun went down.
As I headed to the square, I felt something different from what my son, Trey, felt last week. I wasn't worried, but it was the second week without Chris playing keys, and now Trey was gone too. Driving over, I realized I was missing them. I've come to look forward to the energy and excitement they bring to the bandstand each week, and I knew the night wouldn't feel the same. That's different from not knowing whether the night will work. I've done this long enough to trust that part. I can make almost any situation work because that's part of what I do as an artist and a musician. I improvise and adapt. That was never really in question. Missing Chris is different. I miss the specific thing the two of us built together over years of playing, especially the nonverbal communication and the way he leans into a tune, already knowing where I'm headed before I get there. This Friday gig is something we've built together, too. None of that slowed me down or made me hesitate. If anything, it made me want to be on that bandstand even more. Missing them didn't mean I dreaded the gig. It just meant I carried that absence with me while still being excited to play. Those aren't opposites for me. Never really have been. You never know who's going to show up to sit in. Some nights it's a guitarist, or a couple of saxophonists. Other nights, it's more than a dozen musicians with wildly differing levels of experience, all trying to find their way into the same tune. That's part of the beauty of it to me, finding a commonality that works across different players and different instruments. It turned out so good. Several past students showed up, some I've watched grow from nervous kids just starting out to adults who can hang with anybody now. Two of the students were Tyus and Preston. They started coming down to Dave's Place back when they were in high school, both taking saxophone lessons from my brother-in-law, Brandon. I remember how nervous they were that first year. I'd ask what tunes they wanted to play, and their eyes would go wide, like I was speaking another language. I remember when Tyus started bringing other woodwinds he was working on. I remember when Preston transcribed his first solo, and that same language started showing up in his own playing. They both graduated from high school and ended up at UCA, the same college where Brandon and I met. Tyus brought his flute, his B♭ clarinet, and his alto sax. Preston brought his tenor sax. Both of them are finishing up their time at UCA, and this was the last week Tyus would be in town before heading to Arizona for a master's degree. When I walked over to their table to ask if they wanted to sit in, I didn't get the chance to ask what they wanted to play. They asked me instead. Both of them came with a handful of tunes already picked out, no fake books, no charts, ready to trade off the melody and take a solo without blinking. They brought their friends too. Some to play and others just to listen. Looking across the courtyard, I saw couples on dates and friends sharing a few beers. One young couple wandered in during our first set. They couldn't have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two, out for a walk when they heard the music and followed it in. They found an open picnic table at the edge of the square and sat there listening for a while, pulling out their phones to take pictures of the band and the whole scene around them. At some point, they went inside, probably to get a drink and look the place over, and an older couple swooped in on their spot. Prime real estate in a courtyard that full. A few people nearby, who'd brought folding chairs with them, set up right alongside the older couple at the same table. When the young couple came back out with their drinks, their spot was gone. They just stood at the edge of the square for a minute, watching. The folding chair people noticed them standing there and waved them over to the open bench on the other side of the table. A few minutes later, they were all talking like they'd shown up together. The commonality was that all of them seemed locked in once we started playing, genuinely happy to be sitting outside in 97-degree, humid Arkansas heat listening to us. I noticed the Moody Brews staff buzzing from table to table, checking on people and running food out as fast as it came up. The whole space felt congested in the best possible way. A line at the bar. Food tickets stacked up along the prep table. It reminded me of working the lunch rush at my dad's restaurant years ago. Same kind of flow, everybody moving fast without running into each other. There are more parallels between that and the bandstand than I usually give credit for. Both depend on trusting the people next to you enough not to step on each other. Nobody who sits in on a Friday has to be there. They show up because they want to play. None of the Moody Brews staff looked like they were just going through the motions either. They all wanted to be there. They cared about the people they worked with and the people they were serving, and it showed in how easy the whole night felt. After the last set ended and the crowd thinned out, I stuck around at the bar while the crew ran through their usual closing duties. Chairs were shuffled around, and equipment was being wiped down. The owner poured himself something and leaned against the bar next to me. We got to talking about how far Friday nights have come. The staff told me about the buzz building around it, new faces every week, and people hearing about it through word of mouth from folks who'd never even heard the music themselves. It felt like a perfect storm with the music, the community, the setting, the food, the beer, and the crew all landing in the same place at the same time. I'd been thinking the same thing for a while and just hadn't said it out loud yet. None of them have to care the way they do. Plenty of places get by fine on people who show up for a paycheck and leave the second their shift ends. This isn't that. I don't think you can hire your way into it. Somebody just decides to show up, then keeps showing up, and eventually that decision becomes more than the sum of its parts. When you surround yourself with good people, good things happen, and everyone starts to notice. I notice patterns. I find this true in my writing and in my playing. I don't go looking for them. They just show up, usually after the fact, once I've had a chance to sit with something for a day and reflect, and this past Friday night gave me one I can't stop thinking about.
It was my first Friday back in Pettaway Square in three weeks. We'd just gotten home from Kaua'i. It was good to watch my kids stand in the ocean instead of thinking about the next thing I need to write or teach, or plan. It was good for all of us. Necessary, even. But there's a specific feeling that comes from walking back into routine after time away. The square still smells the same. The sound of conversations all blending together triggers a familiar feeling of normalcy. The owner of Moody Brews had also just come back from a two-week family vacation, which overlapped with mine for about a week. The Friday before I left for Kaua'i, he was already in Europe with his family, trying new foods and exploring Belgium. He trusted his staff to run the place as usual, and they did. Everything went smoothly. His team did exactly what he hoped they would, even with him a whole ocean away. It's basically the same story that happened with the jam. When you build something the right way, it learns how to breathe on its own. While we were gone, Chris held things down with our buddy Steve Hudelson filling in on guitar. That's part of what makes what we've built work. It doesn't need any one of us to survive a few weeks off. That's the kind of absence you can plan around, the kind that doesn't test anything because everybody already knows the shape of it. Last night was a different kind of absence. Chris wasn't able to play. He's been dealing with some health issues lately, and I won't pretend that it isn't sitting heavily on the people who love him. Hopefully, he’ll be back on the stand with us soon, but for this one, it was Steve, Trey, and me carrying the night. Steve is one of the first people I remember from jam sessions at the Afterthought, a club that's since closed. Looking back, I think I paid closer attention to him and Chris in those days than I did to the older musicians on the bandstand, since they fit right into that generational gap between us. Steve stood out to me because he never seemed to approach a song the same way twice. He was always finding something new to say, or some new texture to add that hadn't been there the time before. Chris and Steve were bandmates back in high school, and they've been playing together ever since, which probably explains why they complement each other so well. I remember one Afterthought jam in particular where Steve took a solo over a standard I'd heard hundreds of times, and he had this look on his face like he was watching his own fingers in disbelief. Almost like he was just trusting them to find the right thing and getting surprised by what came out, in the best possible way. Every new line inspired the next. When I noted that to the drummer, he told me to “always try to play something that surprises you every time you perform.” On the drive to the square, Trey got quiet for a second and said something I wasn't expecting. He told me he'd never actually played the jam without Chris there. Not once, in all the times he's sat in on bass or piano. I understood exactly what he meant the second it left his mouth. It's true. Chris has been there for nearly every hinge point in my son's jazz life so far. He was there at the summer jazz camp when Trey, barely more than a kid tagging along with his dad to a clinic he was teaching, sat down at the piano next to Chris and worked out Bill Evans' voicings on "So What" for the first time. Chris let him sit in on the jam more than once just to play that tune, long before Trey ever had the nerve to bring the bass out in front of a courtyard full of people. And Chris was there the night Trey finally brought the bass out for the first time. You never know who or what is going to tip a kid over the edge into trying something, but Chris had been building the runway underneath him for months. So when Trey told me he'd never done this without him, I heard what he was really saying. Can I actually do this if the foundation isn't there next to me? He found out he could, and he did more than hold his own. Steve stepped in again and did what good musicians do. He listened first, made room, and let the tunes breathe instead of steering them. It's the same thing I used to notice at the Afterthought, that willingness to trust what shows up instead of forcing it. Watching him lend that same trust to Trey, instead of taking over, said a lot. Trey played like someone who's been absorbing more than any of us realized. He wasn't just walking quarter notes on the swing tunes, which would have been plenty fine for a musician holding down bass duties, let alone a fourteen-year-old. He was inserting idiomatic phrasing and rhythms into his lines, the kind of thing you don't teach directly so much as it seeps in after enough listening. At one point, he rushed a chord change by a bar. I felt it happen. Instead of flinching or losing time, he just noticed it, adjusted, and kept the form moving. The motor never stopped. That's the difference between someone who's memorized a song and someone who actually understands where he is inside of it. I was a proud father watching that happen in real time. It's summertime here in Arkansas, which means it's brutally hot and humid most days, and it also means isolated thunderstorms that show up without much warning. Moody Brews builds out what they lovingly call Tent City. Several event tents strung up in the square with fans running underneath to keep the air moving and cut back on the heat of the direct sun. Every single table and chair under those tents was full last night, despite the heat. People came anyway. That still gets me every time. I saw friends and family out there, and a few of my mentors too, all of them showing up in support without me having to ask anybody. After we wrapped the last set, I went inside to grab a drink, and when I came back out, I saw Joe Vick standing there talking with Trey. Nobody had prompted it. Joe just walked over on his own. Joe is a special individual to me and many others in this community. He was one of Chris's mentors back when Chris first started teaching. He played on the very first gig where I was the bandleader. He was in the house band at the Afterthought back when I cut my teeth as a young player trying to figure out who I was. His son and I started the Jam at Dave's Place together, years before any of this existed in its current form. Watching one of the best bassists, educators, and musicians I've ever shared a stage with strike up a conversation with my son, after a night when Trey wasn't even sure he could get through, is the kind of moment you don't plan for. I kept glancing over at the two of them by the edge of Tent City. Joe gesturing with his hands, and my fourteen-year-old kid nodding along, Trey's bass case leaning against the brick wall behind them. I had every intention of going to say hi, but kept getting pulled into conversations, and I never did make it over before Joe headed out. I still don't know what he said to Trey. Some of what gets passed down between musicians doesn't need a witness. It just needs to happen. I'll take that trade every time. Someday, he’ll think back to that night when he had to hold his own and remember something that was said, like when the drummer from the jam told me to always try to play something that surprises me every time I perform. |
AuthorDave Williams II Archives
September 2026
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