Dad Has Music in His Blood Too

Long before Clint Eastwood played the roles that earned him worldwide recognition--from Rowdy Yates on the TV series “Rawhide” to the Man With No Name in “A Fistful of Dollars” to Harry Callahan in “Dirty Harry”--before he could legally buy a beer in California, he played another role, that of a jazz piano player in bars in Oakland.

“I used to fall into a joint called the Omar Club in downtown Oakland,” Eastwood recalls in that soft, familiar voice. “It’s not there now, nor are half the people who frequented it. I’d go in there when I was 16 years old, play piano and get a beer for a quarter. In those days, the only ID you needed was the dough in your pocket. They’d give me free pizzas and meals, and I’d hang out there and play.”

Eastwood, who turns 65 next month, says he sounded like a mixture of his early idols--Fats Waller, Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck and Oscar Peterson.

Then, after a year or two, he says, he “kind of drifted away” from performing. Strange as it sounds coming from a man who appears to epitomize confidence and drive, he didn’t have much of either when it came to playing jazz piano.

“I was lazy, wasn’t disciplined enough, didn’t think I could do it,” he says. “I didn’t have any mentor to kind of push me toward it. When I was in the Army at Ft. Ord, I met a lot of guys who had played with Kenton’s band including Lennie Niehaus (who has written the soundtracks to many Eastwood pictures, among them “Bird”).”

But when he got out of the Army in 1954 and started attending Los Angeles City College, he says, “I started taking up acting and never got back into it.”

Well, not as a nightclub professional, anyway. Eastwood still plays in a style that draws on his early heroes. He gave a small sample of his talents when he performed in the 1993 film “In the Line of Fire.”

He also has some talent as a composer, “though I don’t do the orchestrations,” he says. He wrote the theme for “Unforgiven,” which he produced and directed and which won an Oscar for best picture of 1992, and he’s also written some of the music for the upcoming “The Bridges of Madison County.”

Jazz remains a major component of Eastwood’s life. Many of his movies have jazz-based scores, and he’s been responsible for two films on the subject: “Bird,” the 1988 bio-pic that looked at the dark side of the genius who was Charlie Parker, which Eastwood produced and directed, and “Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser,” an insightful 1989 documentary on the eccentric pianist for which Eastwood served as executive producer.

(He also is on the board of directors of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which holds the annual Monk International Jazz Competitions in Washington, which have been won by such current notables as saxophonist Joshua Redman and pianist Marcus Roberts.)

Eastwood stays current with what’s happening in jazz, both by listening to radio and by going to clubs with son Kyle and on his own. Sometimes he’ll catch a major rising star, like bassist Christian McBride at Catalina Bar & Grill; sometimes it’ll be a lesser-known like Southern California bandleader George Stone, who appeared not long ago at the Moonlight Tango Cafe in Sherman Oaks with Bay Area singer Madeline Eastman.

“I try to swing by things and see what’s happening in town,” he says.

He grew up a jazz fan, as his mother listened to Dixieland and swing music. Later, he got to hear many of the giants of jazz.

“When I was doing ‘Bird,’ some of the younger musicians were surprised that I had seen Bird, Lester (Young), Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, all those guys who played at that time,” he says. “They either came through (San Francisco) with Jazz at the Philharmonic or with some small group. That whole mid-’40s be-bop scene, that was a terrific era for a young kid who was interested in music.”

The scene today is none too shabby, he says, noting that “there are a lot of good musicians who are probably more disciplined” than the players of the ‘40s and ‘50s. “There seem to be very few musicians that are kind of going the route of Bird and other guys like Bix Beiderbecke, when they were self-destruct type of guys. There seems to be more getting off on the music itself, so they don’t find the necessity to be into the drugs and everything else. At the same token, some great stuff came out of that era that maybe will never come again. So it’s fun to watch Kyle and his contemporaries going back and revisiting that music.”

Of course, Eastwood makes it a point to hear his son, the eldest of his three children.

“Kyle’s band sounds great,” he says. “They have a lot of spirit, lot of energy. Every time I hear them, they seem to take a lot of jumps. I think they’re ready to happen.”