Turk Murphy’s Respect for the Past

I first heard Turk Murphy’s band back in my sportswriting days when I was in Cleveland, Ohio, to cover a college football game in 1949. As I wandered about downtown Cleveland the night before the game, I heard a musical sound I have never heard before coming from an open door leading to the lounge of the Hotel Auditorium, which has long-since been demolished. It was the distinctive sound of the Murphy band perched precariously on a small bandstand above the bar. Years later when I related this memory to Turk, he recalled, “The bandstand was so small that we had to lean against each other to prevent falling off the stage.” Melvin Edward Alton “Turk” Murphy is acknowledged by many as the founding father of the West Coast traditional jazz revival, although some people may feel that honor belongs to or should be shared with Lu Watters. I view Turk’s longevity—40 years of sustained performance vs. seven for Watters’ Yerba Buena band (of which Murphy was a member)—as having a greater impact on the music of that period. Turk grew up in the north-central California farming community of Palermo. When he was 19, he joined the Merle Howard Orchestra where he met Bob Helm, who was in the reed section. The next year (1935) saw him with the Val Bender Orchestra in Texas and then Will Osborne’s big band where he recorded for the first time. He had another stint with a bi