Remembering local jazz legend Fred Purser
It’s taken 25 years, but at long last, the band is all back together.
There’s Delbert on the bongos, singing like Nat King Cole. There’s Reg, the showman and clown of the group, playing piano like Erroll Garner. There’s Dick on the drums pushing the band as close to Basie as you could get. There’s beautiful Rose singing “Teach Me Tonight” as only she could. And there’s stocky Hughie Wayner, with only 10 per cent vision in one eye, but still shaking the floor with his bass.
As longtime jazz fans in Hamilton and the Golden Horseshoe well know, these were local legends the Washingtons. And early on the evening of June 8, they were joined on that bandstand in heaven by Fred Purser, 97, the hometown hero who’d led them on his saxophone since 1950.
“Some groups are talented, others are gifted. We were gifted,” reminisced Purser to The Hamilton Spectator in 2005 about his band, Fred Purser and the Washingtons. “We heard a song on the radio in the afternoon, and played it, just like that, at night. We tried to imitate the style of The Jazz Messengers. We weren’t exactly like them, of course, but we did the best we could. We did tunes by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Zoot Sims, Stan Getz.”
Over the years, they played just about every club and lounge from Hamilton to Chatham to Barrie to Bobcaygeon: The Innsville, The Beacon, The Burgundy Room, to name a few. Weekend gigs turned into five or six nights a week when Purser retired at 65 from his day job as production manager at a tool and die shop.
Those gigs also came with their surprises. Like the one time when Purser, who always soloed with closed eyes, heard the audience
laughing. When he opened his eyes after his solo, standing beside him was a woman who’d just finished a striptease down to her underpants. And the time when water from a hotel’s plugged toilets began seeping from the ceiling onto the bandstand below just as the band had started into “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”
By 1993, all of the Washingtons in the band had passed away. (Larry Brown, who took over when Wayner went blind, is the lone surviving member.) Purser soldiered on, playing under the same name, taking on Dick’s nephew, the late guitarist, Brian Griffith.
“He was a hard-nosed one because you played it his way or no way,” said Purser’s youngest son, Scott, told The Spec. “Him and Brian used to get into arguments all the time. Brian was into Jimi Hendrix and (the) wah-wah (pedal) when he first came in and dad said, ‘That’s not the way we play it.’ But they always came to an agreement and respected each other.”
In 2000, Fred Purser and the Washingtons called it a night.
One of Fred’s last gigs was for Scott’s 50th birthday some 18 years ago, playing alongside Matt Kennedy and Griffith. The band’s memorabilia, including their lone LP, a 1975 release recorded in Olivet United with an augmented roster and entitled, “50 Years Together,” which celebrated the band’s silver anniversary and the United Church of Canada’s golden anniversary, is all at the home of Scott and his wife, Shawn Washington-Purser, who is Dick’s daughter.
“Dad was really well known and loved around Hamilton, but dad knew nobody because he played all the time,” said Scott. “He didn’t get out and listen to other people (musicians). But the kids coming up always respected him.”
Purser was a Hamilton man through and through. Born on Jan. 31, 1921, he was raised in a musical household. His mother was an organist in a United church, while his father was a choir director in a Baptist church. He attended Ballard Elementary and Delta Secondary, dropping out from the latter to get a job. He later went to Ryerson
for engineering, and worked for various companies including Otis Elevator before becoming head draftsman for the Hoover Company at Gage and Barton during the 1950s and early 1960s. He formed his first band, Fred Purser and His Orchestra, in 1939, with his brother, Jack, on trumpet. He also played in The Jack Ryan Orchestra and The Len Allen Band.
“Anyone else who really knew him called him the dumbest smart man the world,” said Scott. “He was an extremely intelligent guy, very diversified. You’d almost call him a Renaissance man. He loved history, music, and art. He loved to travel. He took us kids all over the place. He loved to see things and learn the history of them. He was a (race horse) track man, and he loved the Blue Jays. He dabbled in everything. Dad always had a smile. He wasn’t a people person, but he loved his music.”
But as Scott also noted, his dad once drove the family to Florida with no reverse gear in their car’s transmission, and changed the oil at 75,000 miles.
On a personal note from this
scribbler, for the first 15 years of my life, Purser was my next door neighbour. I remember many a summer’s eve when he’d have the Washingtons and all their kids over at the Stoney Creek home he’d built and engineered in 1949, the aroma from the barbecue and recorded jazz music wafting through the air late into the night. Funnily enough, I rarely heard Purser practice his tenor sax at home. He’d usually come home from work, grab a bite and race off to a gig or the horse track.
“I had a great life. If I were to go now, I wouldn’t regret anything. I’ve had the best friends and the best life I could have asked for,” Purser once told Shawn back in the 2000s.
Purser is survived by his three children, Penny, Russell and Scott, as well as his second wife, Kay, plus numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.