Grady Allen plays the saxophone in the sanctuary of True Vine Baptist Church. Mr. Allen said he improvises with his students on occasion: ``It gets them to be creative.''KATHY MOORE/STAFF

Musician gives from the heart

Web posted August 11, 1997

By Wendy Grossman
Staff Writer

``Brother Allen, can you teach me how to play like that?'' a little boy asked Grady Allen after his concert at True Vine Baptist Church.

``Me too, me too,'' two other children clamored.

``You want to learn to play, you tell your mama to bring you down here and I'll start to teach you guys,'' he told them.

Six years later, he has 25 children on the roll call for free lessons. Mondays they sit on the metal, milk-chocolate-colored folding chairs in the church annex from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

``We started with just that one saxophone,'' said Mr. Allen, 48. ``I passed it around letting them get the feel of it and hold it, and one by one, little by little, as we ran into people wanting to study music, we grew.''

He doesn't teach the children the way he learned.

``When I went to school we had `every good boy does fine and all cows eat grass.' If there's an A word, we're doing the A word today,'' he said.

B is for baptize; now, where's that on the staff, he asks the children.

C is for Christ. D is for disciple.

``The music just goes from A to G, but somehow or another we manage to work in all the alphabet,'' he said.

He wants the children to understand all the words they hear the preacher saying Sunday mornings. Mr. Allen didn't understand all the words he was hearing in Bible study, so he figured the children probably didn't, either.

``Bible teaching is boring to young people - even as creative as we can be,'' Mr. Allen said. ``They'd rather go on and go straight to playing music.''

He has a metallic-blue electric guitar, six trombones, two alto saxophones, one tenor sax, one trumpet, two flutes, two clarinets, three snare drums and one keyboard.

He'd love to have some more for children like Monique Taylor, 10, a fourth-grader at South Side Elementary school who's been taking clarinet lessons in the yellow-walled room for three years. And Vedrick Burke, 16, has been coming since the first lesson. The Lucy Laney High School sophomore is getting pretty good at trumpet and keyboard. Jermaine Fields, 18, practices his trombone three hours a day, he said. He is first chair in T.W. Josey High School's marching, concert and jazz bands.

He wants to play professionally, he said. Like Brother Allen.

Mr. Allen didn't shag, watusi or do the pony at his ninth-grade formal. He was too into watching the band's saxophone player.

``I was just so fascinated and so at awe by the sound of the saxophone and how he could play so many notes. I was just captured by it, spellbound by it,'' he said. ``Instead of dancing and enjoying the social like most kids, I was at the foot of the stage staring at the saxophone player. He was just a few years older than me.''

So the next year the band director at Lucy Laney High School gave him a school instrument.

``It never worked really well,'' Mr. Allen said. ``We had it full of rubber bands and every glue to hold it together.''

Mr. Allen grew up in Sunset Homes in the projects. His mom ironed shirts and did laundry for folks. His father worked at the milling company making about $35 a week.

He has three brothers and three sisters. He's the baby.

In 12th grade his mother put a down payment on a new sax, and Mr. Allen joined the Leroy Lloyd and the Swinging Dukes band playing soul music.

He tried to scrape together $20 a month for the sax, but he traded it in before he'd paid it off to get a gold- and nickel-plated horn with ivory and pearl keys. It cost $700.

Then he left Augusta, he said.

His mother didn't want him to go. She already had one son in Vietnam and another one raring to join the Air Force. Mr. Allen went to Fort Jackson near Columbia, but he learned he had a hernia when he took his physical and the doctors decided that his unusually short neck might be a problem, he said. So he got a 4-F deferment and joined Wild Man Steve and the Shangrilas. Based in Miami, they drove up the coast to Niagara Falls in the manager's station wagon traveling the ``chitlin circuit, mostly blues clubs and Annie greasy spoons kinda juke joint nightclubs,'' he said.

He met a lot of women. It was his manager's orders.

``He told us, `Look, you don't sit in the dressing room at break time; go out in the audience and meet a girl. Because when we back here again that same girl and her friends are going to come out because you're playing,''' Mr. Allen said. ``We were encouraged to meet a lot of women and not bring one women from one city to another. We belonged to the women in the audience.''

Fifteen years later, he wasn't getting as many gigs.

``It come up to a time when disco was getting real, real, real strong and a lot of the clubs were beginning to phase out live entertainment,'' he said. ``Bookings were beginning to fall off.''

People wanted DJ's instead of nine-piece bands. So in 1982 he came home. He had 20 pairs of shoes and a closet full of loud suits and bell-bottom pants.

He played at local bars, but then decided he didn't want to play his sax anymore. He didn't touch his horn for six years.

``It just sit right beside my bed,'' he said. ``Every day I just stepped right across it and went to Bible study.

``I didn't have the fire to be out there in the nightclub thing. Even locally.''

The deacon at his church gave Mr. Allen a job as his assistant. He nailed up boards and painted fairly well, he said.

``I had all thumbs and all left hands, but he put up with me,'' Mr. Allen said.

Some weeks he took home $40. Other weeks $100.

``That's a lot, lot, lot, lot less than I made in the band,'' he said.

In 1988 the church was looking to buy a new bus. Mr. Allen bought a new box of reeds and gave a fund-raising concert. The event made about $2,000 that night.

His third concert is where he met the children.