My two cents: Spokane musicians join tribute to jazz pianist Arnie Carruthers

In the new Spokane Falls Community College music auditorium hands shot up for a few seconds with the house lights down.

Many musicians in Spokane and the Northwest played with Arnie Carruthers, and since he began playing in clubs and restaurants around Spokane in the late 1950s, thousands of people listened to him play jazz piano.

Carruthers, who was stricken by bladder cancer, died March 7 at the age of 81. The March 19 concert at SFCC had been announced back in February with the hope he could attend.

The Carruthers tribute concert was the final event of the annual SFCC Jazz Festival. Dave Wakeley, director of the SFCC big band, came close to losing it during the festivities when he noted how proud he was of his student musicians when earlier this year they opted to do the Carruthers tribute instead of booking a national jazz star to appear with their band.

Over the years, Wakeley and the SFCC band have hosted some major names in jazz, but they have also had a jazz star in town for 50-plus years.

The March 19 concert in Spokane was like a who’s who gathering of the Spokane jazz clan.

In addition to the SFCC students’ big band, the program featured the Spokane Jazz Orchestra and members of the Carruthers family. They played Carruthers favorites and some of his arrangements.

Before the concert and during intermission, a video gave the audience a sampling of Carruthers’ life from his early days in Montana to his concert appearances around the Northwest. The photos included some of Carruthers’ hand-written arrangements, markings which charted great music, arrangements cherished by the musicians who could decipher and master them.

Although he was a jazz pianist, Carruthers played for general audiences at clubs, concerts and festivals around Spokane and in Seattle and elsewhere. Many Palouse area residents who traveled to Spokane for a big weekend enjoyed listening the Arnie Carruthers Trio at Spokane venues which have long since vanished.

In fact, one of the three Carruthers LP records was “Swinging at the Stockyards,” a title which doesn’t need further explanation for Spokane visitors from this area.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Carruthers trio rated a first call for some of the jazz headliners to be booked into the top clubs in Spokane. The program for the SFCC concert lists Pete Barbutti, Ethel Ennis, Oleta Adams and Helen Humes among the top performers who were booked into the Spokane hot spots with a Carruthers trio backup. Others were Dizzy Gillespie, Joe Venuti and Barney Kessel.

Carruthers came to Spokane from Montana via Boston. He was born in Lewistown, Mont., and grew up in Kalispel. He started playing the piano at age three and was performing with bands in Kalispell when he was 13.

After high school, he joined the Navy and spent time at the Navy School of Music in Boston. He planned to stay on the East Coast after his Navy discharge, but first returned home to Kalispell to visit family.

He found he was in great demand at the clubs in Montana and met his wife, Bonnie, at one of his regular spots, the Skylark, according to the SFCC program.

The newlyweds decided to move to Spokane during a time when many top jazz musicians, some on tour as soloists after the Big Band era ran out of steam in the 1950s, made stops in Spokane.

Wakeley at the start of the SFCC tribute, noted Carruthers pursued a unique career for Spokane.

“Trying to make a living as a professional jazz musician in Spokane is a bold thing to do,” Wakeley pointed out at the start of the March 19 concert.

Carruthers in 1974 suffered a stroke which immobilized the left side of his body. He went back to the keyboard and returned to a high performance level while playing with just his right hand. He continued to perform in Spokane and around the country.

One of the top testimonies to Carruthers sustained performance level was written by Gary Giddins of the Village Voice. Giddins is the New York jazz writer who researched Bing Crosby’s early Spokane days for his book on the town’s legendary star and Gonzaga benefactor.

During a 2001 book tour stop in Spokane, Giddins was handed a copy of the Carruthers Trio’s 1999 “I’m Still Swingin” reunion CD. Giddins noted during the book tours he gets presented with local CDs that normally become a baggage problem; he often considers leaving them behind to “keep company with the Gideons.”

The Carruthers trio’s CD, however rated a top review from one of the country’s top jazz writers.

“His technique is full-bodied, alternating block chords and steely 16th note passages,” Giddins noted.

After listening to the CD about half a dozen times, Giddins said he checked the liner notes and discovered Carruthers played with one hand.

He then assumed Carruthers overdubbed some of the baselines and chords, but decided to check it out.

Giddons had trouble checking it out from New York because, typical of the Carruthers career, both his trio’s Spokane jazz club venue and the producer of his CD had gone defunct in the three years since the CD was made.

Giddins eventually located a booker for Montana’s Glacier Jazz Stampede and received an “emphatic no” to his dubbing inquiry.

Carruthers, he concluded, developed a tremendous speed with his right hand and timing with the pedals to “keep tones in one register ringing while his hand shoots off to another octave.”

One of the highlights of the SFCC tribute concert was a stage appearance by three of the six Carruthers offspring, Charlotte, Don and Bill. They also brought up Tom Schager, known to the family at Uncle Tom. He was part of the Carruthers trio for more than 40 years.

Charlotte Carruthers, a regular soloist for the Spokane Jazz Orchestra, noted the family and everybody in the house wished their dad had lived long enough to attend his tribute concert.

“But he was happy just knowing this was going to happen,” she reported.