The Cool Square

As the wail of jazz drifts smokily through San Francisco bistros, the lean man with the horn-rimmed glasses and a grey-flecked crew-cut walks up to the bar and acts like the squarest square from Endsville. He orders milk. But from the Red Garter to the Purple Onion, not an eyebrow lifts. Everyone knows that on matters that count--a beat and a lyric--Columnist Ralph Gleason. 42, has a taste so cool that he turns out much of the solid reporting and comment on the convoluted world of jazz.

Busy as a one-man combo, the teetotaling Gleason writes four columns a week on jazz and records for the San Francisco Chronicle (circ. 225,429), edits a magazine he helped found last year named Jazz--A Quarterly of American Music (circ. 5,000), and tosses off such extra projects as organizing jazz TV programs and festivals. His 1958 book, Jam Session, has sold 5,000 copies, is now in a British edition. Last year Gleason became the nation's first syndicated jazz columnist, now sounds off weekly in 15 papers from the Los Angeles Mirror-News to the Boston Globe.

Hooked with the Measles. Calling the tune as he hears it, Columnist Gleason has earned such a reputation among San Francisco jazz addicts that his column of praise made a hit out of Louie Armstrong's earthy recording of Mack the Knife after it had been all but ignored by local stations. On occasion, the amiable Gleason can peel skin. He risked the formidable anger of Pat Boone fans by describing Pat as "nice, clean-cut, antiseptic, spiritless, pallid, pretentious and even a bit of a phony." Last week, in his syndicated column, he took a long look at Benny Goodman and decided that the King of Swing has lost his crown: "Gone is the fine, warm, throbbing tone. Gone is the great driving swing . . . What we have now is a faint echo, and that's all."

Born in New York City, Gleason got hooked on jazz during his junior year in Chappaqua's Horace Greeley High School, when, during a siege of measles, he dialed in Armstrong, Hines and Henderson on his bedside radio. At Columbia University, Gleason was news editor for the Spectator, often nursed a beer all night long in the jazz joints on 52nd Street. With all that jazz, Gleason finally collapsed, quit college in his senior year. Cracks he: "I'm not copping a plea, but I did get a throat infection, and that cooled it."

Banging the Pad. During World War II, Gleason landed in Lisbon with the Office of War Information, used to delight in driving German generals from nightclubs by playing fumble-thumbed jazz on a piano backed up by a Vichy French clarinetist, an English bass man, and a West African drummer. He caught on with the Chronicle in 1950, now lives with his wife and three children in a red-shingled house beset by his 3,000-album record collection, which grows and coils from room to room. As he listens and listens, he hammers out the beat on a pad with drumsticks. Gleason insists that the jazz town of San Francisco is a better listening post than New York: "Here you can relax and listen. You can't in New York."

Whatever the reason, Gleason has become so highly esteemed by jazz musicians that they often come to him for professional advice. More important, many top pros agree that Jazz Columnist Ralph Gleason is also their best--if sharpest--critic, a man with 25 years of listening who does not flip easily.

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