The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Survivors Swing Band keeps big-band sound alive
Jules Bashkin may be 96, but that’s not why the group he plays sax with is called the Survivors Swing Band.
“We seem to think of it not so much that we’re the survivors but that the music has survived … some of it 100 years old,” said sax player Bashkin, who lives in West Haven.
“We play varied music,” he said. “We do not play rock, but we do play just about anything else, with an emphasis on the big-band era.”
While Bashkin may have grown up with swing music, which thrived from the 1920s until after World War II, most of the other members of the band fell in love with the jazzy sound because their parents played the songs on the old Victrola.
“I didn’t know the names of them, but I heard them and that’s what I wanted to play,” said Greg Butko, 71, the second sax player, who’s originally from Wallingford but now lives in Richmond, New Hampshire.
Butko’s father, who played accordion, “played in bands all his life. So I know all these tunes,” he said. “When you hear all that stuff, you don’t like the pop stuff.”
Butko took up the sax because “I always like the sound of it, even when I didn’t know the name of the tunes. … I always liked the technical aspects. Even the modern guys — I’m amazed at what they can do. My attitude is, you’re never good enough. You’ve always got to get better.”
The seven-member group, which plays all over Connecticut, is finding plenty of others who think big-band music is still the best America has produced, from Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong to Glenn Miller and Gene Krupa. The Survivors played 83 gigs in 2017.
“We play Greenwich through to, I guess, almost New London,” Bashkin said.
Just last week, they played at the 380th birthday party for the city of New Haven and at a dance at Amarante’s Sea Cliff on the city’s East Shore. “I don’t think they’ve had a dance, just a dance there before,” Bashkin said. For $10, people could return to the days of “date night.”
Many of the band’s gigs are at senior centers, but not all. Among the band’s upcoming dates are at Cromwell High School, the Watermark at East Hill in Southbury, the Covenant Village of Cromwell, the Jewish Home in Bridgeport, Brightview on New Canaan in Norwalk and the Miller Memorial Library in Hamden.
Despite being the group’s elder statesman, Bashkin said, “I’m the novice here, because they’re nice enough to let me play with them.” He called the Survivors “a surprisingly good band. We’re not a formal band the way bands used to be, with 15-18 people and a section of saxes and brass, three trumpets, a couple of trombones. We’re a streamed-down model, let’s say.”
It was Butko who got the group going, by posting a notice in the Wallingford Senior Center about 10 years ago. He had played sax in high school and took it up again when he retired. “I read an article in a magazine several years ago and they said … technically it was the best, it took the most precision to do well,” Butko said.
Swing players have to be precise in order to create a unified sound that gives the players room to improvise. “We play off a lead sheet, which is a melody line, and a chord chart. You try to react to the other musicians,” said Sandra Wittman of Wallingford, who filled in once when the piano player got sick and has been with the band ever since.
Wittman is classically trained and had played at White Oak Baptist Church. Swing is “a completely different style” but Wittman, who says “I’m older than they think I am but I hate to ruin the mystique,” wasn’t unfamiliar with the big band sound.
Dave Mechler, 73, of Woodbury, has played trumpet, cornet and flugelhorn with the Survivors since 2010, when he met members at a jam session in Seymour.
“I have always liked this kind of music since I was a little squirt,” Mechler said. He started playing trumpet at 8 and, working as an electrical engineer on the Apollo space project, always found musicians to play with, even when he was traveling to Switzerland, Poland or Japan.
“You can sit in with other groups. … You can have a ball as if you’ve been in the band for years,” he said.
“I like this older-style jazz because to me the melodies remain clear,” Mechler said. “You know where we are by and large without playing the same thing over and over. There’s a good bit of improvisation.”
Bill Steinhauser of Wallingford, is 82 and has played with some wellknown musicians, including George Shearing, Bert Kaempfert and Montovani. “I was an accompanist for many singers”: Peggy King, Doris Day, Jayne and Audrey Meadows. He’s played guitar since he was 10, taking after his grandmother, who was a concert guitarist in Germany and also played piano for silent movies. He played his first professional gig at 14.
“I love the swing era,” Steinhauser said. “I never got into bop or progressive jazz. I like the rhythm. It gets into you and then when I got married and when I was 29 I went into the recording business,” engineering master recordings for RCA, Dot and Columbia studios.
Jeremy Alston, 63, of Bethel, has played drums with the Survivors for more than five years. He’s played drums for “probably 43 years” because they “just seem to fit with my personality. I’m very rhythmic; I like rhythms and just have a lot of fun on it.”
He was struck when “I saw a young guy named Daniel Brubeck” at school in Wilton. Brubeck, son of legendary jazz musician Dave Brubeck, became a famous drummer and has his own quartet.
Alston pointed out that Ringo Starr is “a reverse drummer” — playing his fills in the opposite direction from most drummers. Gene Krupa is another icon to Alston and he added, “I was fortunate to study with Joe Morello when in was in New Jersey and he gave me enough stuff to work on for the rest of my life.
“The one basic thing I like about music is there’s always something you can learn, to improve yourself,” Alston said. “And this is a fun band to play for. These are all great guys and gals.”
Lauren Humpage, 80, of Meriden plays a 1958 Ampeg baby bass with a plastic body. “This is one of the originals that was conceived pre-production,” he said. “It belonged to the bass player in Montovani’s orchestra at the time.
Humpage likes the improvising. The score “just tells them who plays where, and they’re doing head arrangements all the time. … It’s up to the individual to do their part. Sometimes we have some clinkers but we just keep going.”
“We enjoy each other’s company,” he said. “We grouch like anybody does, but we respect each other. … It’s a family, it really is a family. We came from all different mixes of life and here we are.
“We’re just trying to keep this music alive,” Humpage said. “I consider this a miracle band. We never thought this would happen and we get a standing ovation — when they can stand.”