Still blowing at 77, saxophonist Denny Hardy calls on a lifetime of experience playing with the legends of big band and jazz to perform with the Bill Smallwood Orchestra. Photo by Phil Houseal

Details:
The Bill Smallwood Orchestra plays at the Pacific Showroom USO Style Hangar Dance on Saturday, June 26, 2010. Swing Dance Lessons from 7-8pm, with the band playing from 8-11:30pm. For information: www.hangarhotel.com/events.htm

webmaster: phil@fullhouseproductions.net

Denny Hardy: Still Blowin'

by Phil Houseal
June 16, 2010

Denny Hardy played saxophone in Tex Beneke’s band, jammed with Al Hirt and Pete Fountain, battled head to head with Boots Randolph, and recorded a hit record with David Lee Roth. Not bad for a farm boy from Missouri who honed his licks in an outhouse.

As a youngster, Hardy wanted to play saxophone so bad that he spent hours practicing in the “outdoor” bathroom.

“Now that’s wanting to learn to play!” he laughed as I visited him in his hill country home where he has lived since 1992. Now 77 and dealing with emphysema, Hardy still loves the saxophone and still plays in the Bill Smallwood Orchestra.

In spite of his intoxicating experiences at the pinnacle of the big band and jazz music scene in the 1960s and 70s, for Hardy it was all about the instrument. He decided to pick it up because he “just loved the sound of it.”

Hardy actually started playing tenor banjo at the age of five. It was something you did in a musical family. He had seven brothers and sisters, and both his parents were musicians, playing in roadhouses.

But it was not until after he returned from the army at age 20 that he started learning sax. He had tried clarinet, and later learned enough guitar from Don Barber of the Four Freshman to play with jazz groups such as the Mike Kasberg Trio.

But no instrument matched the feeling the saxophone gave him.

“I liked the sound of it. How can I say it? It was just something beautiful. You can express feeling. Other people could tell how you felt by way that you played.”

But when Hardy first hit the road in 1954 and was finally playing sax in a real band, he wasn’t happy with the way he played.

“I just didn’t know how,” he said. “I could play melodies, and take stupid, full rides. But I was in the back seat.”

That’s when a guy name Bill Widdicomb came in to the band. Hardy recalls him as “the best alto sax player I ever heard in my life.”

“He took a liking to me, and said he would teach me if I bought the beer.”

It took cases of beer and three hours a day five days a week, and that was the easy part.

“Whenever I made a mistake, he’d say you really are good - we might put you in the 8th grade band. It was a real putdown. I was so mad, I was trembling.” But it motivated the son of a sharecropper. “I said, you SOB, I’m going to learn to play as good as you do.”

Hardy smiled. “Well, I didn’t get that good, but I cut it pretty close. In the end, I was thankful he showed me what to do.”

The secret is something Hardy never forgot.

“He told me, ‘When you play, it’s not your horn you are holding, it’s your heart. That’s not just a piece of brass; you must make it a part of you.’”

Hardy hit some heady heights holding his horn. He played top clubs and for a while worked in Nashville, where he was a sought-after studio musician and sat in the stage band of the popular Ralph Emery Show.

Hardy had graduated from the outhouse to the hottest jazz stages in the world. While living in Baton Rouge, he would play his club gig from 10 p.m. to three in the morning, then jump in the car and drive down to New Orleans where he jammed at Louis Prima’s club with Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, and Sam Butera until 7 a.m.

“I was young and I stayed up all night. I loved to play,” he said, adding, “I wish I could do that now.”

Long after his days playing music all night, it seemed the music world wasn’t quite through with Hardy’s talents. In 1985 he got a call from a music producer in Louisiana asking Hardy if he had heard of the song I’m Just a Gigolo.

“I said I played that many, many times with Louis Prima and Sam Butera. He said, ‘You’re the man I’m looking for.’”

It took only three tries in the studio to lay down the horn track that became part of David Lee Roth’s hit song.

“When you called, I got to thinking about what I’d done, what all I didn’t do, and what all I wished I’d done,” he said. “And I couldn’t think of a thing I’d do different. I’m not saying I didn’t have lots of ups and downs, but I wouldn’t change a thing.”

He still does play, and still blows lead in those familiar big band numbers.