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Last month, the Bill Hoffman Jazztet performed at Lylburn Downing Middle School to raise money for the Jacquelin Pleasants Scholarship fund.
For Bill Hoffman, this was a sort of homecoming, for it was at this school that Hoffman’s musical education began. Principal U.B. Broadneaux started a school band in the early 1950s, which served as the jumping off point for Hoffman’s first band, the Rhythm Makers “We used to practice over in the old building, in the chemistry lab, around tables with Bunsen Burners on them. That’s where the Lylburn Downing band started, and the Rhythm Makers grew out of that band. We used to stick around after rehearsal and jam,” Hoffman told those gathered for last month’s concert.
“At the time we had no idea, we weren’t even thinking about playing for money. The first time we played, we did get money — but they paid us to stop. This is true. It was at the social after the football game, and one of the star football players came over and asked us if we’d stop playing, and he’s pay us a dollar. We took it, because they wanted to dance to records.”
Though they started small, the Rhythm Makers kept playing, and were soon booking gigs.
“Then the first paying gig we had was at Lexington High School. I think they paid us $50. There were six of us, seven of us, and 50 bucks — we’d never seen that much money in our lives,” Hoffman recalled. “We were walking down Main Street; everybody wanted to touch the money.”
From there, they began playing for fraternities around Virginia and North Carolina.
This growth brought change, particularly for Hoffman, who realized he would have to learn a new instrument, switching from trumpet to guitar.
“I started playing guitar my sophomore year, and the reason was pragmatic,” he explained in an interview last week with The News-Gazette. “That year our saxophone player was going to Hampton Institute, my trombone player had moved to Illinois, so that left piano, bass, and trumpet, which was not a very good combination for rhythm and blues.
“Before the summer, I asked Mr. Broadneaux how long it would take me to learn guitar. He said a long time, years,” he said. “I told him we didn’t have years, because we wanted to be able to play again for the college session; we made most of our money playing at colleges.
“Because I didn’t know how to tune a guitar, the guy that would sing with us, Lewis Watts, sang a lot of his songs in C sharp — that’s one of the most difficult keys,” Hoffman continued. “I could play a C sharp cord on the piano, so I tuned my guitar to that. Eventually, I learned to play what we call a triad, which is a three-note cord, and I figured out how to finger that, and I just kept adding from there.”
The band began to reach farther after winning a contest in Northern Virginia.
“Just before we graduated, we played in a battle of the bands up in Northern Virginia, and we won,” said Hoffman. “We supposedly won a trip to Mexico — didn’t happen.”
“We went up to meet with the guy who was supposed to be taking us to Mexico, found out that he had spent the money. But he wanted to be our manager. So, instead of going to Mexico, we went up to New York. Somehow he was able to get us on the amateur hour at the Apollo Theater.”
The Rhythm Makers found success here as well.
“So we did that and we won,” Hoffman said. “So you had to win three times to get a contract, so we want back the second time, and we won. But we were on our way back to New York for the third time, and we had a car wreck right outside of Baltimore, and we had to send for Mr. Broadneaux, whose son was playing with us, to come and get us and bring us home, so we didn’t get the third time.”
In spite of this setback, the band was eventually able to land a record contract, and an agency connected them to other musicians and new opportunities.
“We had an agency out of New York called the Universal Attractions; it was a national booking agent. Back then, the big recording artists didn’t have their own bands when they traveled,” he said.
“After that we were backing up a lot of the stars of the era. We played behind the Shirelles several times. We backed up some Motown people, Martha Rees and the Vandellas, Smokey Robison, when he was still with the Miracles, a group called the Coasters.”
“One of my favorite groups, actually my favorite group that we got, was the original Drifters,” Hoffman said. “We backed them up in West Virginia University, and our singer got sick. Normally, those stars, they would come out and sing 20 minutes and go home. But what happened there, with the Drifters, we were having such a good time, that they played the whole gig with us.” -In the ‘50s and ‘60s traveling as Black artists was difficult, and sometimes dangerous, as Hoffman recounted, facing segregation and discrimination.
“I had a pretty good relationship with the cops here,” he said, recalling childhood summers digging worms to sell to Lexington’s police chief. “I had kind of a different view of police in other areas.”
“Even in Philadelphia, we were going down Columbia Avenue to the club we were playing. We were pulled over. The guy came over and told us to get out of the car,” he said.
“They had us put our hands on the car, and searched us. Then they searched the car, took the back seat out, threw it in the street, opened the trunk, took everything out.
“I said, ‘Well what did we do?’ and they said, ‘routine’. We hadn’t done anything wrong.”
The Rhythm Makers came to an end in the early ‘70s.
“The Rhythm makers, under that name, played their last gig New Years Eve of 1971,” said Hoffman. “By that time there were only two of us who were in the original. One was Broadneaux, the son of the principal, and me. The rest of the guys were from Roanoke and they were young and all they wanted to know was how much they were getting paid.
“We were playing a hotel in Roanoke for some event, and the bass player came in when we were setting up, and I asked him, ‘Where’s your bass?’ And he said, ‘Well that’s what I wanted to talk to you about.’ He had pawned his bass.”
“So I had to run down to Market Square, and get his bass out so he could play the gig, and I thought, I’d just had about enough of this,” he said.
Deciding it was time for a change, Hoffman began a second career in consulting.
“And then I got busy because I was working at a community action agency in Roanoke, and I was traveling abroad. Around 1980 I left that and formed my own consulting practice and we were doing international consulting.”
This work took him all over the world.
“I was often amazed. The first time I was in the Middle East I was like, what’s this little guy from this little old town Lexington, Virginia, doing in the Middle East? But there I was,” Hoffman said.
“The consulting part of my life was so very different from the music part of my life, but in a way, they were similar,” he continued. “Because a lot of the consulting that I did early on had to do with personal growth, helping people to grow and enrich their lives. And I think music does the same thing. It’s a different venue, but, hopefully, similar outcomes.”
Hoffman was drawn back into music by an old friend.
“A friend of mine in Roanoke books bands now. Back in the day, he had a band that was kind of a competitor of ours. He was trying to put together something for a reunion of musicians from the ‘50s,” he said.
“So he talked me into coming back, and while I was there, there was a guy who played trumpet with another band. He said they were trying to put together a band, and they needed a guitar player. And I said, ‘I don’t know, but I’ll what I can do,’” he explained.
“I had been invited to play with a big band, a jazz orchestra, which I had never done before. I was part of the rhythm section, and it was the drummer, the bass player and me. So the three of us decided to do some gigs as a trio,” Hoffman said.
“So we started off as the Bill Hoffman Trio, and then we added another guy and we became the Bill Hoffman Quartet, and then we added another guy and became the Bill Hoffman Quintet. I said, ‘Hold up —before we add anybody else, let’s just call ourselves the Jazztet so we won’t have to keep changing,’” he said. “So that’s how we became the Bill Hoffman Jazztet. And the guys who were at the gig Sunday, we’ve been paying together for several years now, as the Jazztet.”
For Hoffman, music continues to be a passion, and a lifelong teacher.
“The other thing about being a musician, it’s a lifelong learning process. I learn something new pretty much every time I pick up my guitar. I learn something different,” he said.
“It’s been an interesting life. And I’m still living it. Today was a good day, because I woke up. Every day I wake up is a good day.” -The fundraiser at which the Bill Hoffman Jazztet performed last month was deemed a success by organizers.
“I thought the event exceeded my expectations,” said Anne McClung, who spearheaded the event. “There were over 100 folks there and we raised $1,867 for the Jacqueline Pleasants Scholarship fund.
The Jacqueline Corbin Pleasants Democratic Scholarship Fund, established in 2008, awards an annual scholarship to a deserving graduate of Rockbridge County High School.
“It seemed to me that the band and the audience had a symbiotic relationship and enjoyed each other thoroughly,” said McClung. “They played some straight-up jazz and then began playing some of the old Motown music that the Rhythm Makers played long ago. The band didn’t want to stop and neither did the audience!”
