Music

Swing With Rudy Salvini

Trot on Over to the Elks Lodge for Big Band Sounds

    Couples kick up their heels while fox-trotting in the third-floor ballroom of the Alameda Elks Lodge to the 4/4 bounce of “Moten Swing.” Alameda-based bandleader Rudy Salvini was all of 7 when Bennie Moten first recorded the number in 1932, but Salvini’s 17-piece orchestra renders it in a sleeker, more modern arrangement, penned by Ernie Wilkins for Count Basie decades later.
    Pianist John Price takes the opening choruses, improvising lean lines in a manner not unlike Basie’s. Dean Reilly, the Salvini band’s bassist since its inception 53 years ago, maintains a steadily swinging underpinning in tandem with Mark Fuglia, who’s subbing this particular Sunday for the regular drummer, former Ray Charles sideman David Rokeach. Four trumpets, four trombones and five saxophones enter, playing the melody in a gentle purr. Then Salvini, who’d been directing the band much of the time, lifts his trumpet to his lips and blows a robust solo in a big, buttery tone that reflects the influence of Harry James, his childhood hero. The brass and sax sections build to a roar, then soften, only to scream once more, with Fuglia kicking accents in all the right places. The precision of the ensemble work and the juxtaposition of dynamic extremes suggest an aggregation that performs every night—not one that, like Salvini’s, does it just once a month at this regular Elks Lodge gig.
    The Rudy Salvini Big Band is a well-disciplined organization. Its members dress uniformly in black dinner jackets, gray slacks, white shirts and red ties, with red-and-white music stands to match. They’ve been playing every third Sunday of the month from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. at the Elks Lodge for the past 2½ years, ever since a 15-year once-a-month stint at the Boathouse on San Francisco’s Lake Merced ended when that venue closed. The orchestra rehearses once prior to each of its Elks gigs, although many of the men probably know the band’s book of some 1,500 arrangements by heart after having played them so many years. Tenor saxophonist Tom Hart, like Reilly, has been on board since the beginning.
    The orchestra has two books—a jazz book for concerts and a dance book for engagements such as the one at Elks Lodge—that include charts by such nationally known arrangers as Wilkins, Sammy Nestico and Bill Holman, as well as many written by such past and present band members as Hart, Art Dougherty, Allen Smith and the late John Marabuto. The band’s treatments of standards like Sy Oliver’s “Opus No. 1,” Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’ ” and Benny Carter’s “When Lights Are Low” have a pronounced Basie flavor, along with that of the Basie-style band Harry James led in the ’60s and ’70s. But when alto saxophonist Dougherty plays the melody of Billy Strayhorn’s “Day Dream” in a lush, vibrato-dripping Johnny Hodges manner, the Duke Ellington orchestra also comes to mind. Dougherty, a 25-year veteran of the band, is a retired schoolteacher, as are Salvini and several other members.
    The license plate on the burgundy 2007 Infinity parked in the driveway of Salvini’s Alameda home, two blocks from the beach, reads “RUDY 2T.” Salvini has been tooting a trumpet since he was 10. He was born in Oakland in 1925 and raised on 32nd Street, just off San Pablo Avenue. He and his parents lived with his maternal grandparents, who emigrated from Italy in 1906. He was bilingual as a child but has long since forgotten Italian. “If you don’t use it, you lose it,” he says.
    An early gig playing in a band at Danceland, a taxi dancehall in downtown Oakland where men paid female employees a dime per dance, was interrupted by a stint in the U.S. Army. Fortunately for Salvini, World War II had ended in Europe, and he served much of the time during the occupation of Germany in a large dance band that rehearsed five days a week in preparation for Sunday broadcasts on Armed Forces Radio. The band had four vocalists, among them, Tony Benedetto, who would later achieve stardom with an abbreviated last name.
    Back in Oakland, Salvini updated his trumpet style after hearing Miles Davis’ recordings with Charlie Parker and began freelancing around the Bay Area. “When you’re young and you’re broke, you play with anybody,” he recalls. He played strip clubs and dime-a-dance joints, in society bands and, for three months, with the Dave Brubeck Octet.
    Salvini settled in San Francisco during his college days. He and his wife, Erna, moved to Alameda in 2002 because she was tired of the daily Bay Bridge commute to All the More to Love, an Alameda consignment shop for women’s clothing and accessories that she runs with her daughter.
    The Rudy Salvini Big Band had its genesis at San Francisco State College, where Salvini played in the school’s dance band while earning a teaching credential. “It was a workshop for arrangers and players,” he explains. “A lot of the guys, once they graduated, wanted to continue, so they asked me if I would form a band to play their charts.”
    Maintaining the orchestra has been Salvini’s passion ever since, and he has no intention of calling it quits. “There’s nothing that I could conceive of that has the excitement of a big band,” he says. “Having all those guys play together with one intent is wonderful, and when everything is right, it’s exciting. It’s really exciting.”