Mr. 'bone

Porky Cohen takes his horn out front

by Ted Drozdowski

"I think there are better musicians today than when I was coming up, just like the 1996 cars are better than the 1940 cars," opines Porky Cohen, who made his first album as a leader this year -- at age 72. "The younger musicians know about composing, arranging, chord construction . . .

But anybody who misses body chrome and tailfins knows there's a hitch, right?

"It's hard to explain," Cohen continues, "but there's some soul lost. Maybe sometimes too much studying is too much? I don't know."

What Cohen does know is the art of soulful trombone playing. And his Rhythm & Bones (Bullseye Blues) is a surprise not simply because of the age of its star, but because of its rare-bird status. Although it skinny-dips in the waters of jazz, ostensibly it's a blues CD whose eloquent lead voice is a trombone. Even on a reading of Texas guitar great Albert Collins's "Don't Lose Your Cool."

There have been damn few trombone showcases written since the heyday of the big bands, which is when Cohen got his start -- playing with Tony Pastor, Charlie Barnet, Glen Gray, Lucky Millinder, and other road-warrior outfits in the 1940s. ("In those days I wanted to play with every band. I went away on the road with the big bands in 1942, and I pretty much stayed away until 1950, when the big bands started to slow down," he explains.) But Rhythm & Bones, on which Cohen shares billing with his old comrades in Roomful of Blues, is full of 'em. Cohen's own "Porky's Blues" is the most soulful, the rest of Roomful's horns providing a melancholy backdrop for his hearty, arching gusts. "I used to do that and `Caravan' as my feature songs with Roomful," says Cohen, who officially retired from the redoubtable Rhode Island little big band -- and the road -- in 1987, after eight years, six albums and three European tours with the group.

Elsewhere on the buoyant CD, Porky plays cut-up with belter Michelle Willson on "Trombone Porky," their variation on Bessie Smith's "Trombone Charley," which was the blues queen's homage to her own 'bonist, Charlie "Big Green" Green. Willson sings Porky's praises in saucy camp while Cohen talks back in the burred lower range of his big brass bell. On the hard side, there's "Slidin' Horns," a Slide Hampton vehicle that Cohen and his horny Roomful cohort -- trumpeter Bob Enos, tenor-saxist Gordon Beadle, baritone-saxist Doug James, alto and tenor man Rich Lataille, and fellow 'boner Carl Querfurth -- turn into an elegantly swinging big-band romp, with R&B/early rock underpinnings provided by Matt McCabe's piano chords.

In short, the CD's as much of a trip 'round the trombone world as Cohen's career has been. Zolman Martin Cohen -- the name his mama gave him when he was born, in Springfield, Massachusetts -- began working as a professional musician at age 18; went part-time in the '50s after he married his wife, Esther (a record-store buyer who, by the way, turned the Jack-Teagarden-and-Miff-Mole-reared Cohen on to the recordings of gutbucket blues artists like Muddy Waters and Blind Willie McTell); and, between jobs in record stores and the like, has never put down his trombone. Over the decades, he's played with Charlie Parker ("Gene Rowland was putting together a big band around him -- eight saxes, six trombones, five trumpets, and two rhythm sections -- but sometimes he didn't show up for rehearsal. Once we had to wait for him while he got his horn back from the pawn shop. It didn't work out.") and Doc Severinsen and Artie Shaw and W.C Handy and Stevie Ray Vaughan ("the Roomful horn section did a week with him at Carnegie Hall").

With Millinder, Porky was on the ground floor of integration in the big bands. "I never thought much about racial stuff," the unassuming Cohen says. "I figured, if a guy could play, a guy could play. What else mattered? Well, we walked up to Lucky's bus on the first trip and the white driver says to us, `You guys aren't gonna play with these "n"s, are ya?' I couldn't believe it; this guy drives this band around and he talks like that? They had us sit in the back of the bus where we wouldn't be seen; we had to use separate bathrooms. It was weird, you know?"

These days Porky and Esther, who've been married 44 years, are settled comfortably in North Providence, Rhode Island, where Porky can usually be seen with the local outfit Swingtime, and occasionally with Roomful -- where he'll still play "Caravan" if anyone requests it. "I must have played that song 2000 times and I've never once practiced that solo. I always did it like I did -- right from the first time I played it with Charlie Barnet."

Porky Cohen will be the featured guest with Roomful of Blues at the House of Blues in Harvard Square next Thursday, December 12. Call 491-BLUE.