Willie Thomas Remembered

— by Joe Murphy —

When I first truly encountered Willie Thomas, he was standing naked in front of the sauna at the Orcas Athletic Center, potbellied, slight white goatee, “Who let Colonel Sanders loose,” I wondered and then there was that drawl:

“How you doing?” poured out in a fluent mid-Floridian twang.

But if Willie had some redneck roots, and he did, life had other plans.

When Chuck Israels brought him over in the mid-nineties and he ripped off several killer solos from the Orcas Center Stage I heard a condensation of the many twists in Willie’s tale but I had no idea.

Willie was the first to acknowledge that he had led a charmed life,

“A little dab will do ya,” he said of late, paraphrasing the Bylcreem commercial of the 60s but as it turned out for Willie Thomas, life had more going for him than hanging out in Florida collecting rents for the KKK Jim Crow relatives.

And so it went, as it so often goes for brothers with excellent timing, and an ear, unlimited artistic mojo  and that very American trait of striking a deal. As amongst the only ones of his generation to monetize the economically capricious world of jazz music and follow a certain fearless devotion to the intricacies of his craft in the process, Willie came out ahead of the game in some crazy Saul Bellow narrative of pluck and passion.

Which, of course, often made him a giant pain in the ass – his two halves clashing against themselves; artist and raconteur, rounder and saint always going at it in a fight for vindication.

“Of what?” I ask him.

He nodes towards the poster over his bed of Charlie Parker.

“Bebop guaranteed.” His reply.

A generation separated us – he came in at Bird and I perked up my ears to John Coltrane but we both had the evangelical thing about the music that cuts through time.

“Look, you got here didn’t you? close to your family, surrounded by extraordinary natural beauty and the best Bird collection in the state, and you have helped educate an entire generation or two on how to play the music and traded sets with the Coltrane quartet at the Five Spot in NYC so just what seems to be the issue?” I ask him one day as he attempts to finagle me into selling pizza to nascent beboppers.

“No off switch.” Was his reply.

When you have been called to the mountain as Willie clearly was and your life becomes one thing because that one thing is love then you go until you drop trying to spread it around.

“This could be the universal language that saves the species,” he avers at the end of one recent visit.

Willie was a supreme teacher, lessons in the sweat box at OAC and his cabin in Olga have only taken on greater significance over time. We must continue to speak the language.

 Pizza, anyone?