LANGLEY PATTERSON : A HOMAGE TO THE KEEPER OF THE JAZZ FLAME

He played be-bop. Swing. A little blues. . . .

What’s known to a shrinking audience of true believers as “straight-ahead” jazz.

He scoured old record stores for vintage Booker Ervin, unscratched Wayne Shorter blowing sax both hot and cool, and original sides from John Coltrane, back in the days before Wes Montgomery began carrying jazz down the inevitable road to commercialism.

Langley Marquez Patterson, murdered at 35, was repeatedly eulogized by friends and fellow deejays Thursday as “the keeper of the flame” in this rock-dominated era. He played the non-electrified, non-commercial jazz of the ‘50s out of sheer love for the idiom at a time when it appeared to be as passe as Doris Day movies and the Charleston.

When Little Esther Phillips, Big Mama Thornton and Shelly Manne died last year, KLON-FM (88.1) deejay Patterson gave them all a nodding tribute and a low-key but heartfelt midnight “s’long.”

“It’s just a tragic loss, man,” Patterson’s longtime friend Lawrence Tanter said Thursday, two days after Patterson’s body was found in an alley behind a doctor’s office in an unincorporated county area in the 7400 block of South Western Avenue, about three miles from his home. “Langley was a guy who wouldn’t hurt anybody. Whoever did it has really taken away a good cat.”

There were no new leads in the case Thursday morning, according to Detective Paul Mize of the Los Angeles Police Department. All homicide investigators had to go on was a still-missing, and believed stolen, burgundy-colored 1983 Datsun Stanza. Patterson had been savagely stabbed several times about the neck and head. Police said that Patterson’s wallet and identification were missing.

The slain disc jockey didn’t take drugs, according to friends and police. The motive is still presumed to be robbery.

“We’re not getting an outpouring of information,” Mize said. “We wish we could get some information from outside.”

Jazz and black/urban contemporary FM stations may be the ones who come through with leads, Mize said. He’s had calls from a dozen, including KACE-FM (103.9) and KJLH-FM (102.3), where “everyone was really upset.”

“They took it personally, almost the way police do when one of our own is down,” Mize said. “You know, it’s like ‘batten down the hatches and let’s go to work.’ He was like a local guru of jazz.

“One of the oddities of this thing was, when we heard who he was--a disc jockey--nobody had ever heard of him. But my commanding officer here is a jazz buff and he knew who he was right away.”

At KLON, where Patterson worked for the last two years in the 6:30 to 10 p.m. weeknight spot, program director Ken Borgers is still casting around to find a suitable replacement. Bubba Jackson, a regular at KACE-FM (103.9) during the week and a Saturday morning/Sunday evening deejay at KLON, is filling the breach temporarily, Borgers said.

“Bubba plugs the hole on an interim basis, but it’s a big hole. It’s really the key to our programming because Langley used to come up after our evening news from National Public Radio. His job was to pull listeners out of that news hour and keep them away from television.”

He did it well.

“Straight-ahead jazz is the real stuff,” Borgers said. “It’s basically music by musicians who are not electricians. It’s John Coltrane and Red Holloway, not Grover Washington and Pat Metheny. It’s not remedial saxophone. It’s not how many notes you can jam into a bar. It’s improvised acoustic music with a melodic base.”

Tanter, who is now program director at KUTE-FM (101.9), worked with Patterson for more than 10 years at KJLH, where he held down the 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift while Patterson played the “real thing” from 2 a.m. until dawn.

“We used to hunt down old records together,” Tanter said. “He was a big Harold Land fan. ‘Ceora’ by Lee Morgan used to be his theme song for a number of years. We’d look for the old labels, man: Blue Note, Prestige, anything from the ‘60s.”

Tanter theorized that Patterson turned to radio out of frustration that he could not be a Coltrane himself.

“I sold him one of my saxophones. We both played. I think he may have been a frustrated musician like me,” Tanter said.

“Langley wasn’t a very high (profile) media broadcaster. He didn’t get a lot of awards,” he continued. “But just think about it: If you do something that you were paid for before and then you do it for free . . . I think that says something about a cat’s character, you know?

“I mean, he did it for free to expose an art form he believed in, like a policeman who’s not on the force anymore but still walks a beat to protect the neighborhood.”

(While Patterson was a paid employee at public radio KLON, his salary was not as high as that which he could have made at a commercial station.)

Patterson’s mother, Ethel C. Patterson, said her son took voice lessons as a youngster.

“He had a lovely baritone,” she said with a steady but emotional voice, adding with regret: “He wanted to go to New York once for an audition, but I wouldn’t let him.”

His mother said that funeral services have been scheduled for Monday at 3 p.m. at Grace Chapel, Inglewood Cemetery, 3801 W. Manchester Blvd., Inglewood. Friends may also visit Saturday afternoon at Angelus Funeral Home, 3875 Crenshaw Blvd., she said

“The one thing I admired about Langley was his belief in the music,” Tanter said. “One of the things I had to do was to be more versatile. I’d like to play straight-ahead be-bop, but life is life, you know, and I got a family to support. You can’t always play your own music. But Langley did. He found a way.”

Patterson was going to dental school part-time to try to supplement his earnings and was a lieutenant in the California National Guard on weekends.

“We all had this fraternal thing about music that transcended just making a living,” Tanter said. “Whoever wiped him out don’t know what they did when they took him off the planet, man,” Tanter said.

“I was really shocked because Langley was not the type of person who would put up any resistance,” said KJLH News Director Carl Nelson. “I mean, if it was a robbery the way they say, he just would have given them what they wanted.”

Nelson said his station would join several others in regularly requesting listeners to call in any information on the case to LAPD investigators.

KLON has set up a fund to benefit Patterson’s family. Donations may be sent to the Patterson Fund, KLON, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach 90840, according to station manager David Creagh.