Saxophonist Butch Evans finds solace in jazz

By John Barry, Times Staff Writer
In print: Thursday, April 10, 2008

Jazz musician Butch Evans has experienced and surmounted bad times, including the deaths of two wives and lung cancer.
	[DOUGLAS R. CLIFFORD | Times]

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C learwater — The mistress of this trailer home is music. The blue and white trailer has no living room or dining room, really. It has music studios. Shelves of music scores and framed images of men in tuxedos, hands full of brass, overtake what could have been a living room. What might have been a dining room belongs to a keyboard and more shelves of scores. • One man lives here with three saxophones. He represents a half-century of jazz virtuosity and also what talent and single-minded passion often lead to — to a life broke and alone. • "Out on a cliff," he says. • He spreads out on the couch each evening, by himself, with a pencil, music charts and a cigarette and a beer. He tunes in Cops, and begins to write jazz arrangements — long, beautiful scores on folds and folds of paper. • It's the first music he has written since a series of life earthquakes spread silence for five years.

Now, at 67, beneath the sirens and squealing tires of Cops, Butch Evans is writing again. Go figure that.

•••

The music began to fade in 2003, just a year after the recording of one of his best tunes, Closing Time at the Engine Room Bar, praised back then in the St. Petersburg Times as "a raucous stomper."

It was dedicated to his late second wife. It was the kind of song that could have been written only by a man in love.

The tune evolved out of more than 50 years of baritone saxophone. His father was Bill Evans, saxophonist and band leader for the Red Coats, the jazz band for the St. Petersburg Coliseum for 10 years. Butch joined the Red Coats when he was 16. His father already had two alto and two tenor saxophonists, so Butch automatically became a baritone.

At 16, he was already writing jazz arrangements. He was able to write music one day and try it out on the Red Coats the next. It was an advantage that helped win a scholarship at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

It all led to a life of music — first in the Army, later marching behind Mickey at Disney World, still later with big, small, famous and anonymous bands all over the United States and Europe, while supporting a family.

He was married 27 years to Elaine, who died of cancer in 1995. They had a son, Sean, who now teaches middle school science in St. Petersburg.

Butch's life of music included trade-offs: the abandonment of a master's degree in anthropology in mid thesis, a long, curious resume of day jobs, including one as a "venereal disease investigator" for the state of Florida.

Finally, it led to the blue and white trailer in Clearwater.

Butch's second wife, Janet, had a heart attack in 2003. He was then earning a master's in jazz composition at the University of South Florida. He was 62.

He finished his master's in June 2005. Two months later, he was diagnosed with cancer in his right lung.

Then his father, Bill, died in 2006.

Then Janet died in 2007.

He lost his lung. His teeth fell out.

Without teeth, a saxophonist can't play. Without love, a man can't feel like playing. It went on like that for a long time in the blue and white trailer: cigarettes, beer and Cops.

But Butch got store-bought teeth, and found out he could blow that horn again. He wanted to play. He wanted to write. All he had left was that.

•••

"You'd have to be insane," says the leader of Tampa's Dan McMillion Jazz Orchestra, "to try to make a living playing any type of horn."

McMillion, who formerly played trumpet for the great Woody Herman, has kept his own band together almost 14 years. Butch played for him for three years. "We're nuts to do this," McMillion says. "There are no benefits to speak of, no insurance. Working with a 14-piece band is like working with 14 schoolchildren."

The jazz world is a small one. Most musicians in Tampa Bay know about Butch Evans, how he's getting by on a couple of small pensions and Social Security, how he got sick, how he lost his wife, how badly he still wants to play. Everybody knows that story by heart.

"All you want to do is play jazz," McMillion says. "You do weddings. You do bar mitzvahs. It's nothing but grief."

McMillion doesn't do weddings. He had to draw the line somewhere.

He repairs Volvos.

•••

Everyone also is mindful of the cancer death of Dennis Irwin, the New York bassist who passed away March 10, the same day that Wynton Marsalis and Tony Bennett and other jazz greats held a benefit concert in New York for him.

Dennis' brother, clarinetist David Irwin, teaches music at Eckerd College and St. Petersburg College. David remembers his brother complaining of pain for a year as he carried his bass around. He was 56. He had no insurance.

"There are a lot of young cats, especially in New York, living that lifestyle," David says. A memorial fund was set up by the Jazz Foundation of America in Dennis Irwin's name. It will provide free cancer screenings for uninsured jazz and blues musicians. Says David, "They get hundreds of requests a week."

Butch Evans had medical insurance when he got lung cancer. He wasn't insured as a musician. He kept up the Blue Cross Blue Shield insurance he got while he was a state venereal disease investigator.

What Butch wants most is a gig. Bassist Mark Neuenschwander, who teaches at St. Petersburg College, has been reminding bandleaders that his former bandmate Butch "was at the top of everyone's call list." He's trying to hook Butch up with the Glenn Miller Orchestra, which happens to be looking for a baritone saxophonist.

•••

The luckiest gig Butch ever got was on a Mississippi riverboat, the American Queen, in 1998. Butch had played in the ballroom for a week. He was due to go home the next day. Home was his parents' couch in St. Petersburg.

He followed other musicians into the Engine Room Bar, located right over the paddle wheels. It was midnight, almost closing time.

He met Janet, a pretty tourist from Oregon, separated from her husband. He had just enough time to learn all that.

Butch went home the next day, lost her phone number, but found it again. He called, "How would you like a Florida vacation?" She said she'd have to think about it. He called back the next day.

She said, "I already have my tickets."

Butch and Janet eventually became Mr. and Mrs. Evans. Their riverboat rendezvous inspired Butch's Closing Time at the Engine Room Bar. The Dan McMillion Jazz Orchestra included Closing Time on its 2002 album Got the Spirit. The album earned a Grammy nomination.

Butch and Janet were married nine years before she died.

On the coffee table in the music studio/living room is an arrangement he started shortly before his wife's passing. Now that he feels better, now that he's ready to hit that road again, he's polishing it up.

Atop the lines of notes, the title is scrawled in pencil:

A Song for Janet.

It has lots of baritone saxophone.

John Barry can be reached at jbarry@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2258.