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Section: Arts & Letters

Artie and Leo
By Wendell Wild

Two musicians passed away recently, one more famously than the other; both, however, though years removed from their playing days, leaving a legacy that couldn’t feel more valuable.

Artie Shaw was the nonpareil clarinetist and band leader who for two decades kept swing honest, protecting it through his constant musical innovation from what he saw as the pernicious commercializing influence of Glen Miller and the like. Leo Dillabough was a trombone player out of Syracuse who played with the Larry Fontine and Tommy Dorsey bands, among others, but when offered a full-time gig on the road with Woody Herman, chose to stay at home with his wife and young daughter, backing the likes of Tony Bennett and Bobby Darin as a longtime member of the house band at Syracuse’s famed Three Rivers Inn.

I didn’t know Artie Shaw, but I did know Leo, and while they weren’t contemporaries exactly—they were 95 and 75 respectively at the time of their deaths —they were, I suspect, kindred spirits. In the past few weeks I’ve found myself trying to understand one man’s life by thinking about the other.

Both, for example, were intelligent and contentious men who had complicated feelings about being musicians; men who took their art seriously but struggled to fit it into a life they took no less seriously. Shaw, after years of musical and personal introspection, finally bagged music altogether in the early 1950’s to become a writer, and was rarely heard from after that. Leo parlayed his day job in auto parts and a knack for deal making into a successful business career, before retiring to Maine a few years ago.

There were differences too, of course. Shaw, for all his soul searching, did find time to squeeze in eight marriages, including those to Lana Turner and Ava Gardner. Leo was married to his wife Roz for fifty-one years. As a kid he had virtually no relationship to his own father and turned down a music scholarship to help support his mother and siblings. Never quite able to shake the sense of himself as primarily a provider, Leo spent a lifetime trying to do three really hard things—being a husband, a father, and a musician—really well. He did it with grace and without, for the record, leaking an ounce of hipness. He was a hero.

Not that this didn’t come at a price. Like Shaw, Leo was a guy who seemed a little uncomfortable in his own skin. Talking with him was always a treat—he was glib, informed, associative, and had a way of making you feel like a musician too. But you couldn’t spend much time with him without picking up on a certain sadness as well, his own sense, perhaps, that he had lost his way a little in his own life. One of the last times I saw Leo we were listening to music, and he told me about the time as a young man that he sat in with the legendary Charlie Parker in Rochester. Looking not quite at me, he said—with just a trace of regret—that it was probably the major achievement of his lifetime. He couldn’t have been more wrong.


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