PREVIEW

Nash Quintet Jam Session a Musical Bridge Between Two Generations

It wasn’t unusual to find saxophonist Ted Nash celebrating his 25th birthday at Donte’s back in 1985. After all, he’d played at the North Hollywood jazz club every Dec. 29 since his 17th birthday. What was unexpected was the on-stage appearance of a trombonist of the big-band era named Dick Nash, Ted’s father.

“Leonard Feather happened to be in the audience,” the elder Nash said, “and he wrote some nice things, so we decided to make it a regular thing.” (Feather is a Times critic.)

When asked why he’d waited so many years to sit in with his son, Dick Nash, 60, said, “I’d never wanted to get in the way. I’d spent all those years playing for the studios and hadn’t kept my jazz chops up.”

That’s not what Feather wrote of Dick Nash: “. . .Surprising, to many, was the evidence . . . of a facility and imagination for which he has rarely been given credit.”

Since that first show 3 years ago, father and son made Donte’s a Christmastime family tradition. But now that Ted Nash has moved to New York and Donte’s is closed, the tradition has changed its date and location; they’ll show up Tuesday night at Alfonse’s in Toluca Lake.

“Teddy’s not coming back for Christmas this year,” Dick Nash said. “He’s going to stay back East with his family and start his own Christmas tradition.”

As for Ted Nash, well, you could say traditions of the jazz kind are in his blood. Besides having a famous trombonist for a father, his mother, Barbara Nash, spent her early years as a professional singer and his uncle, also named Ted Nash, is famous throughout jazzdom as a master reedman.

Then there were the family friends: “We used to have lots of parties at the house that turned into sessions with Sonny Criss, Jack Sperling, people like that,” Dick Nash said from his Tarzana home.

All that jazz around the house must have paid off, because the younger Ted is now hailed as a “vitalizing force . . . who is reaching the stages of being a young veteran,” according to New York Times critic John Wilson. “Like many second-generation jazzmen,” wrote Feather, Ted Nash “has absorbed the elements of the be-bop generation along with enough contemporary concepts to establish him as an artist of redoubtable maturity.”

And Dick Nash’s opinion? “I just think he’s great.”

The Dick and Ted Nash Quintet plays Tuesday at Alfonse’s, 10057 Riverside Drive, Toluca Lake. Show times: 9:15 p.m.-1:45 p.m. No cover, no minimum. Call (818) 761-3511 for information.