Born June 8, 1939, William Russell Watrous changed the trombone landscape forever in the 1970s.
For me, he was a dear friend and a gigantic outsized influence on my concept of how a trombone should be played. There was seemingly nothing Billy could not do on a trombone. In addition to his jaw-dropping technique, he brought ballad playing and multiphonics to the fore among trombonists. He could even make his trombone "talk." I watched him "play" the pledge of allegiance and MacArthur's farewell speech through his trombone night after night, and never figured out how he did it (and didn't ask).
I remember the day I met him in 1978. I was doing a freebie gig for Ted Nash and Billy came up to me during a break to introduce himself and ask me to play in the west coast big band he was forming. I recall days sitting in the parking lot of AFM Local 47, in either Bill's Mercedes or my Corvette, listening to music for hours. I'll never forget the days at his house making deep dives into Bach, Mozart and other musicians, including John Philip Sousa, whom Billy loved. Or the time I got a desperate call from Bill in the middle of the night saying that his wife was in some trouble and asking for my help. Or smoking weed behind Donte's jazz club and then going in for the second set and not being able to play two notes in a row (though Bill seemed completely unaffected). That night he had me solo for chorus after chorus, stoned and crashing and burning through the whole thing, to Bill's amusement. That was the last night I ever tried that! And mostly I remember how supportive Bill was when I was going through a traumatic and dramatic change to my life, and how he supported me when I came out of the closet and introduced him to my girlfriend.
Watrous also helped my career, even while struggling with his own (he was not immediately embraced by the L.A. studio scene, and indeed his acerbic manner put off some of the bigger studio contractors resulting in a significant loss of work for him). Still, Bill managed to get me onto a lot of great gigs, beginning with the New Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which had a live studio band, and then a number of TV, movie and album recording dates. My very last gig before giving up music for 30 years was to play the Tonight Show, where Bill Watrous, Bob McChesney and I backed up the rock band Chicago on trombone. The very next day I quit music and sold all my instruments.
In his prime, Billy was larger than life, with a huge personality to go along with his ubiquitous pageboy haircut and denim jacket. He lived life passionately. As for people he knew, you were either his best friend or his worst enemy; there wasn't a lot of in between with Bill. And he practiced the trombone every day of his life, a silent example for us all.
The last time I saw him was in the summer of 2006 at the Jazz Bakery in L.A., and it made me cry. He could barely play. I'm told that Bill had suffered a recent stroke, but he was still going at it as best he could. But he was an empty shell of his former self. And I don't think he ever fully recovered his abilities, though he continued to play through serious illness until his death in 2018.
To this day I do not believe a better trombone player has ever lived. Bill Watrous was a true trombone genius, and in his prime was an unstoppable force of nature. He had a way of tapping into the flow of the cosmic musical river that eludes us mere mortals. It was truly something to witness. He had a connection to the universe and an intuition that is unavailable to most of us. There was no separation between Bill and the trombone, and together they were a gestalt, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.
Bill shuffled off this mortal coil on July 2, 2018, but he is not truly gone. He remains with us not only through his many performance recordings and videos, but through an entire generation of trombone players that were changed because of him, and specifically because of a cadenza in a 1975 tune called "Fourth Floor Walkup."
Happy Cosmic Birthday, Bill. I hope you're still out there somewhere along the way.
Everyone has a story of the time they saw Bill Watrous, or met him, or played with him. We'd love to hear yours.
