The Ashland musician has made an effort to keep his favorite music in front of local audiences
By Jim Coleman for Ashland.news
For a guy who’s retired, Tom Stamper stays busy. The Ashland drummer performs in and around town with a variety of jazz and blues bands, he teaches drumming and he creates pottery and other visual art.
He’ll be performing soon with two different bands at the Bloomsbury Blends coffee shop and wine bar, where he has been a regular weekend player this year with a changing lineup of local jazz and blues musicians.
Since late last year, he has helped to supply a steady flow of jazz, wedging his drums and a combo of three to five musicians into a corner of the little cafe upstairs at Bloomsbury Books, pitching the cafe on the idea that a band can be more interesting than the solo acts that play so many small venues. The shows moved out to the Bloomsbury patio when the weather got warmer.
The band names in those shows reflect the changing lineups of musicians Stamper brought to the cafe: the Sourdough Jazz Band, the Muskadine Blues Band, the Bill Scholer Trio, the Modern Prometheus Jazz Quartet, the Sean Chon Trio, the Funky Buzzards.
Lining up players for all the gigs has been a job in itself, Stamper says. The work has paid off in many a packed evening at the cafe.
The drummer will be at Bloomsbury this Saturday, June 24, with the Adam Harris Trio and Friday, June 30, with the Sean Chon Trio. Shows run from 6 to 8 p.m. And that’s just a beat after playing there Friday, June 23, with the Muskadine Blues Band.
Despite his work schedule, Stamper, 69, insists he is retired. In the past, he had a full-time schedule of teaching drumming.
Now, he says, “I pick select students.” Before retiring, “I would play with anyone. I don’t do that anymore.” Now, he says, “I make some money playing the way that I want to.”
What he loves to play, usually, is jazz. Or blues. Muddy Waters-style, not blues-rock.
“My heroes are Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Elvin Jones,” Stamper says. Posters of drummer Jones, Charlie Parker, Davis and John Coltrane decorate his teaching studio.
Stamper’s love of drumming began early. He remembers longingly looking a drum set in a store window when he was 8 years old.
“I just always wanted to drum,” he said. He started working at it in earnest around the age of 12.
But music was not Stamper’s only interest. He concentrated on art in college, graduating from San Francisco State University with a minor in ceramics and a major in sculpture.
He still uses his art education, throwing pots in the art studio at the Ashland home he shares with his wife, Cindy. The art studio is near his drumming studio, where he has students play on a compact electric drum kit. Between the kitchen and the back yard is a room with two sprawling drum kits where Stamper can teach, practice and jam.
The back yard is home to chickens and a garden. The front yard displays pieces of art Stamper has made over the years.
The whole place looks busy. From the outside it also looks like a barn, which is what it was when Stamper bought the place after moving to Ashland from the Bay Area in 1987.
Before he moved north, Stamper’s music career developed in the San Francisco Bay Area, and ultimately got busier than he wanted.
As he progressed in his drumming, Stamper became a student of Chuck Brown, a renowned Bay Area instructor who studied under jazz great Max Roach. Stamper would get to play all over the Bay area with some excellent jazz musicians.
He landed a job with bandleader and radio personality Richard Hadlock and his Speakeasy Band.
His bandmates “were just crackerjack jazz people,” Stamper says. “We played every week at the Shattuck Hotel in Berkeley for seven years.”
Then a bigger opportunity came up.
“Hadlock said to me, this guy, Lev Liberman, was looking for a drummer for his ‘Yiddish jazz’ band.”
It was a Berkeley-based klezmer band, the Klezmorim. The band played Eastern European Yiddish instrumental tunes and would become a popular act, touring the U.S and the world, and being nominated for a Grammy.
The music was often fast-paced and humorous. “It was kind of like Tex Avery cartoon music,” says Stamper. It was fun.
Also, “It was a grind,” he says. “We went all over the country. I flew about 48,000 miles with them.”
The band played across the nation, but Stamper said he was going in and out of cities like New York, Minneapolis and New Orleans, one after another, without the time to really see the sights.
A European tour was coming up, and Stamper didn’t want to race through the great cities. He quit “about 1984” after 2½ years with the band.
In the mid-1980s, DJs became a trend in the San Francisco area and live gigs became harder to line up. Stamper moved to Ashland and took a job as a bartender at Alex’s, a restaurant in the space now occupied by the Brickroom.
A band had a show coming up and “the drummer couldn’t make it,” Stamper says. “I sat in for him.” After that, “I got to where I could make a living as a drummer” in Ashland.
Teaching has been a big part of making a living. “I’ve literally taught hundreds of kids here,” he says. Some have gone on to music careers.
As a retiree, he is more selective about the students he takes on and the gigs he plays. He has fewer shows coming up at Bloomsbury this summer but he has other dates scheduled.
He has a performance coming up with the Tom Stamper Trio at the Britt Festival’s side stage on Aug. 3, as an opener for the Beatles tribute band Rain. And he recently was part of an ensemble that played “A Tribute to Charlie Parker” at La Baguette. The band will play the Parker show again at 4 p.m. Aug. 13 at Grizzly Peak Winery. Tickets are $20, $10 for students. Then Stamper will bring the Modern Prometheus Jazz group to Grizzly Peak Winery Aug. 27 at 3 p.m. Admission is $25.
Expect more shows after that. Tom Stamper likes to stay busy.
Ashland resident Jim Coleman is a retired journalist with decades of experience, most at the Los Angeles Times following some years at the Las Vegas Sun. He now helps as a volunteer copy editor for Ashland.news.
