Irving Ashby

In 1943, several jazz musicians from the US Military Special Services were in New Guinea, including saxophonist Jimmy Mundy and guitarists William “Biddy” Fleet and Irving Ashby, the latter of whom was a Somerville, Massachusetts native. The mission of the Special Services was to entertain other servicemen, but because they sometimes performed behind enemy lines they were given infantry training to defend themselves if they had to.

According to Fleet, the musicians were told that if attacked they should throw their instruments away, “find a foxhole, get your carbine and get ready.” Faced with the stark reality that the gig they’d signed up for put their lives and their instruments in near-constant jeopardy, the musicians checked into the field hospital the next day, where Mundy completed an arrangement for Count Basie while lying in bed. While perhaps not the most honorable episode in their military careers, the sick-out ensured that the musicians would live to play another day.

Fleet had already played a role in jazz history as the man who, in 1939, inspired Charlie Parker with novel chord voicings during jam sessions at a chili house in Harlem. Parker said that he “came alive” when he heard Fleet play and his revolutionary style was born. The other guitarist in the line of fire on the island, Irving Conrad Ashby, was born December 29, 1920 and thus was 10 years younger than Fleet. Ashby would go on to a long career forging a style that influenced many others even though he cut only one album as leader, Memoirs (Accent, 1976).

MUSICAL BEGINNINGS, LIONEL HAMPTON, LESTER YOUNG

Ashby began playing guitar at the age of nine and may have studied at New England Conservatory, although sources differ as to whether he attended or turned down a scholarship there. He played with pianist Eddie Watson and bassist Ed Plunkett in a trio at Alpini’s in Boston in 1939/’40, where he was heard by Lionel Hampton, who offered him a job. Ashby played on at least 14 of Hampton’s recordings, including his big hit “Flying Home.”

He left Hampton late in 1942 and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked in a wartime defense plant while remaining active as a studio musician; he is heard on a few numbers in the 1943 film Stormy Weather. In 1944, Ashby was invited to join Norman Granz’s first “Jazz at the Philharmonic” tour, and on that engagement he played with Lester Young, one of his heroes. “I worship Lester Young,” he once told an interviewer, who replied that “’Worship’ is a pretty strong word.” “If there was a stronger word,” Ashby said, “I would use it.” Ashby would record one album with Young on Aladdin, one of Granz’s labels, along with pianist Joe Albany, bassist Red Callender and drummer Chico Hamilton. While primarily a swing stylist, he played on bop pianist Howard McGhee’s “Harlem Bop” in 1945. After the war, he became active on the LA scene, working with trumpeter-bandleader Gerald Wilson and tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray, among others.

NAT “KING” COLE, “ROUTE 66,” OSCAR PETERSON, OTHER COLLABORATIONS

In 1947, Ashby took over from Oscar Moore in The Nat “King” Cole Trio, with whom he performed until March of 1951 while playing at least one date at the El Patio Theatre in Los Angeles with one of Benny Carter’s big bands. He played guitar on the 1946 Cole hit “Route 66,” which reached #3 in Billboard’s Race Records chart and #11 in its  broader singles chart. The success of Cole’s drummer-less trio may have inspired Oscar Peterson to hire Ashby to replace drummer Charlie Smith in his trio in 1952; Ashby played with that group until 1958, while also recording with Ernie Freeman, a rhythm and blues bandleader who played piano and organ.

By that point, approaching age 40 and perhaps tiring of the rigors of the road, Ashby began concentrating on session work in settings ranging from jazz (Norman Granz, Howard Roberts) and rhythm and blues (B.B. King, LaVern Baker and Louis Jordan) to pop (Pat Boone), surf (Sandy Nelson) and novelty (Sheb Wooley, of “Purple People Eater” fame). He appears on LaVern Baker’s 1957 song “Jim Dandy Got Married” and on two 1973 Count Basie titles recorded for Norman Granz’s Pablo label, “Basie Jam” and “The Bosses” (featuring Joe Turner on vocals).

GUITARS, UPRIGHT BASS, SINGLES, DOWNBEAT COLUMN, DEATH

Ashby developed his style long before guitars were amplified, and from his earliest years with Hampton he used one made by Charles A. Stromberg and his son Elmer in their shop at 40 Hanover Street in Boston (off Scollay Square).  “In the days before amplification, guitars had to be built that could project their sound over the band, big archtops, 19 inches across at their widest point,” wrote Richard Vacca in his book Boston Jazz Chronicles. “When strummed, a Stromberg could cut through the sound of the brassiest band.” In the Cole trio, Ashby played an over-sized model known as “the Yellow Cloud” and it was perhaps that axe that Ashby was paying tribute to in the ’50s when a combo under his own name recorded “Big Guitar.” One of Ashby’s Strombergs is now in the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

In addition to guitar, Ashby played the upright bass, and in 1956 he sang on two singles he recorded as leader, “Night Winds” and “Loco-Motion.” On the latter, he is also credited as writer (but the song is different from the later Gerry Coffin-Carole King song of the same name that was a hit for Little Eva). He also wrote a column, “Guitar & Guitarists,” for DownBeat.

Long troubled by a heart ailment, Ashby died of a heart attack on April 22, 1987 in Perris, California, a few miles from San Bernardino, a city he helped make famous by appearing on Nat “King” Cole’s version of “Route 66.”  In 2022, the Somerville City Memorialization Committee voted to name Somerville High School’s band room in Ashby’s honor.

(by Con Chapman)

Con Chapman is the author of Kansas City Jazz: A Little Evil Will Do You Good (2023, Equinox Publishing), Rabbit’s Blues: The Life and Music of Johnny Hodges (2019, Oxford University Press) and the forthcoming Sax Expat: Don Byas (scheduled for publication in April 2025 by University Press of Mississippi).