Joe Marillo: Tenor Sax and Tom Azzarello: String Bass
I didn't get to know Joe until a year or two before he passed away in 2016. He was a well respected jazz icon in the San Diego area. Around 1976 we use to go listen to Joe play at Chuck's steakhouse in La Jolla. One of my strongest impressions was that he would take a song that I thought was corny old people's music and turn it into a wonderful statement of jazz. Wow …and Tom Azzarello on string bass would play the first chorus of a swing tune in a halftime feel which was marvelous to me.
I was gradually evolving from being a rock musician (part of the youth revolution and at a age where I thought I knew everything) to becoming interested in jazz. Paul Comstock, the drummer in the rock band I played with a few years earlier, was listening to the CTI records featuring Stanley Turentine, Ron Carter, Billy Cobham, Joe Farrell, George Benson, Herbie Hancock and many others. I had also heard Chick Corea and returned to forever with Stanley Clark, Lenny White and Al Di Meola. That was a big influence but will come back to that later. Anyway, going to see Joe Marillo was a significant component in my early appreciation of jazz.
It was almost 40 years later when I met Joe. By that time I was writing jazz influenced arrangements for my horn band. We had a weekly gig at a place called ArtLab on Adams Avenue in normal Heights. Whitney Shay was singing with us during those early years of her career. When I finally met Joe he was getting older and many of his conversations would veer off into philosophy or reincarnation. Kind of esoteric. But he would say stuff to me like "you're much bigger than me" and I would look at him and facetiously answer “yeah right Joe.” During the years of his career he brought many of the top jazz artists to the Catamaran Hotel and played with many of them. One thing he said when we first met, commenting about my band, “yeah I was walking down Adams Avenue one day and I heard this music, and I thought I was in New York City. I looked in the door and it was a bunch of hillbillies!" I don't think I'll ever forget that. For many who are not in initiated into "jazz speak" the citation of sounding like he was in New York City was a great compliment since much of the hippest music happened there.