Horn player P.T. Stanton was a creative, original and mysterious musician who left his signature on the second wave of the Great San Francisco Jazz Revival. Integral to the second-generation traditionalist/revivalist movement, he was perhaps its most individualistic. A broad self-taught intellect, his friends and associates recalled his eccentricity, bizarre verbal antics, prodigious drinking and vast musical skills.
Between 1955 and 1978 Stanton shaped and created two distinctive West Coast revivalist bands, Bob Mielke and the Bearcats and the Stone Age Jazz Band. In his music one can find influences from every direction of the early jazz compass: New Orleans, Harlem, Chicago, Kansas City and San Francisco. At the end of this article are links to fifteen streaming musical examples.
Iconoclastic Horn Style
P.T. Stanton (1923-87) rejected the clarion majesty of the jazz horn for a personal vocabulary of quavering growls, strangled tones and expressive cries. His characteristic cornet sound was neither straightforward nor conventional, alternating between the roar of a wheezy ragamuffin or feral beast. He nearly always had a mute, plunger or hand in or near the bell of his instrument, modifying and “stressing” no
