Attention must be paid: A kid from Turners Station had a hand (and his Yamaha YBL-613H) in a Grammy last week. Thanks to Dwight Weems, the longtime and still-frisky front man for one of Baltimore's most popular party bands, Gazze, for pointing out the name of Douglas Purviance (Purr-vy-ance) in the music awards - specifically, in Category No. 49, Best Large Jazz Ensemble Album.
The award went to Vanguard Jazz Orchestra; Purviance plays bass trombone (the Yamaha YBL-613H, in fact) with the band, and he's the orchestra's business manager. Purviance and Vanguard took the Category 49 Grammy for Monday Night Live at the Village Vanguard, from Planet Arts Recordings.
"This kind of music typically gets buried in the Grammys on television," says Weems, "but they can't bury the musical art form that [Purviance and Vanguard] strive to keep alive."
Purviance grew up with Weems in Turners Station, a historically black section of southeastern Baltimore County near Sparrows Point. They were founding members of Gazze. The band has been around since 1971, performing at school dances and proms and festivals and lots and lots of weddings, maybe 800 by now. It has always had a brassy, Chicago-style sound. Purviance helped get that started.
"He graduated from Dundalk Senior High School in 1970 and then Towson State University as a music major," Weems tells me. "He is an accomplished musician who plays major Broadway shows [he was senior bass trombonist in the orchestra for Cats through its entire 18-year run] as well as being a member of Vanguard."
Purviance got his start with the Stan Kenton Orchestra in the mid-1970s. He's been a New York guy ever since.
"Every year, kids across America take music lessons," Weems says. "This is a story of one such kid. Every kid and his parent who has lugged an instrument case back and forth to school could easily relate to Doug. As I said to him the other day, 'It's a long way from Turners Station to the Grammys!' "
Helping job-seekers
The late, great Heywood Broun, who wrote a newspaper column during the height of the Great Depression, started a Give-A-Job campaign in the New York Telegram in 1930. "There can be no question that unemployment is acute and that millions are in want," Broun wrote. "Something should be done, and it should be done now. President Hoover's remedy seems to be a set of promises. Thus ... it is up to us of the middle class to stir ourselves."
