Vibist in Full Swing at 66 : Terry Gibbs, Who Has Kept Company With a Multitude of Jazz Greats, Brings Bop to Newport Beach

When he gets right down to it, vibist Terry Gibbs is a lot like those girls who just want to have fun.

“I play for me, not for the audience,” said the 66-year-old musician who appears at the Hyatt Newporter hotel tonight with his longtime partner, clarinetist Buddy DeFranco.

“I mean, I hope they like what I play, but if I don’t like it, then I won’t go home happy.”

Most of the time audiences do like Gibb’s offerings. After all, the vibist has been able to sustain himself mostly as a jazz musician since the late ‘40s. His career has included stints with Tommy Dorsey, Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, Benny Goodman and Steve Allen, and he’s led his own quartets, quintets, sextets and big bands--most notably his 1959-62 ensemble known as the Dream Band.

“I can swing, I can make people happy, and when I have fun, people have fun,” he said. “I’ve gotten to play what I want to play without alienating audiences. How much better can you get it as a jazz player?”

What’s the key to his success, you ask?

“I like to start swinging immediately,” said the peppy player whose latest album with DeFranco--the renowned bop-oriented instrumentalist who has worked with Tommy Dorsey, Count Basie and Oscar Peterson in his lengthy career--is “Air Mail Special” on Contemporary Records.

“If we can get the audience after the first eight bars, we’ve got it. I don’t believe in building. I think we should play the third set first.”

Gibbs has a copacetic partner in the 68-year-old DeFranco, whom he’s known since the mid-’40s but with whom he started performing in 1980.

“We’ve never come close to one argument,” he said. “Even our wives get along,” he added, laughing.

“Buddy is not aggressive, but I am, so I run the business, and I run the show on the bandstand.”

There’s a feeling of mutual respect when the vibist and clarinetist perform, and that respect leads to higher levels of creativity.

“You really don’t know how great Buddy DeFranco is until you work with him every night,” said Gibbs. “He’s one of those guys that if he doesn’t feel good, he’ll play even more, because he won’t finish playing until he plays something he likes. When you play with somebody that good, you’re up to the challenge of it.”

Another reason their partnership has proven so fertile--they’ve made numerous records for Contemporary and they work together regularly--could be that the players have similar styles. “We’re both be-boppers, but we’re from the swing school of be-bop,” said Gibbs, who has often been described as playing with vibes master Lionel Hampton’s powerful rhythmic style but in the be-bop mode.

“We both came from the swing era,” he said. “We know that era, too, but we are be-boppers at heart. Some guys can’t swing, but we know that feeling.”

Chance threw DeFranco and Gibbs together. They were booked as separate acts at Ronnie Scott’s famed London jazz club in 1980 and Scott, a top-drawer tenor saxophonist in his own right, asked the two to close each show with a shared number.

“My band followed his, so I asked him up and we played ‘Lester Leaps In’ and got a standing ovation,” Gibbs recalls. “Next set, Ronnie says, ‘Why not two tunes?’ And little by little, we played more and more. Buddy and I said to each other, ‘Hey, we should do this more often.’ ”

When the pair returned a short time later to Southern California, where Gibbs, a native of Camden, N. J., has lived since 1957, they gained wider exposure from a one-hour show they landed on public television station KCET Channel 28.

“We had a great band with (drummer) Jimmie Smith, (bassist) Andy Simpkins and (pianist) Frank Collett. And we took off from there.” Collett, bassist Monty Budwig and Gibbs’ son, drummer Gerry Gibbs back the leaders tonight.

Last year, Gibbs and DeFranco expanded their quintet, adding guitarist Herb Ellis and three others to play a tribute to the Benny Goodman sextet. The band recorded a live album for Contemporary at the Kimball’s East club in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Did it sound like Goodman’s sextet in the early ‘40s, which featured vibist Hampton and guitarist Charlie Christian?

“Yeah, I think so,” said Gibbs. “But you can take any two idiots who play clarinet and vibes and you’ll sound like Benny and Hamp,” he quipped.

“But Buddy and I don’t really sound like them,” he said. “We play his tunes at completely different tempos, mostly a lot faster, so I guess we almost sound like the Benny Goodman’s bands.”

Also on Gibbs’ current schedule are intermittent appearances with his Dream Band, one of his favorite career projects.

“You couldn’t buy with a million bucks the good times I had with that band,” Gibbs said, referring to the steady Monday-Tuesday engagements the band had at such Los Angeles clubs as the Sundown and the Summit--the latter is now home to Club Lingerie.

When it was first active from 1959 to 1962, the acclaimed Los Angeles-based all-star ensemble included drummer Mel Lewis, trumpeter Conte Candoli, trombonist Frank Rosolino and saxophonist Joe Maini playing arrangements by Bill Holman, Marty Paich, Al Cohn, Manny Albam and Med Flory.

The group made a few records and Gibbs also produced live recordings from the period that weren’t released at the time. All previous studio albums have been reissued on Contemporary--the most recent is “Mainstem”--and with the release of “The Big Cat” scheduled for next week, the last of Gibbs’ personal tapes will have been issued.

Most of Gibbs’ Dream Band dates are with pickup ensembles that play the band’s library--earlier this year he did 72 one-nighters under those circumstances as part of a nostalgia package that also featured clarinetist Henry Cuesta leading the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. Occasionally, as he did a few times in November, he’ll appear with the band’s Los Angeles personnel. Many of the members--such as pianist Lou Levy, trumpeter Candoli and altoist Flory--have been with Gibbs for decades.

Gibbs was born into a musical family, won a spot on a Major Bowes Amateur Hour tour at 12 and was a professional while still in high school.

“I knew I wanted to be a jazz musician and even felt that learning about Julius Caesar wasn’t going to help me play the blues,” he said.

Originally a drummer, he turned his attention to vibes when he was introduced to be-bop by his boyhood friend, the noted drummer-arranger Tiny Kahn.

“In 1943, I was on leave from the Army--I was stationed in Louisiana--and Tiny took me to 52nd Street (in Manhattan) where I first heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie,” Gibbs said. “I didn’t understand one thing they were doing, but they were playing so fast, I figured that (be-bop) was for me.”

A few years later, when Gibbs was leading his own band at Georgie Auld’s Tin Pan Alley in New York, alto giant Parker sat in with him. He said it was a terrifying experience.

“If I had to choose between getting in the ring with Mike Tyson and playing with Charlie Parker, I’d choose Tyson,” Gibbs said matter-of-factly. “It was 1946, and he was so far ahead of everyone. Bird came up and we played ‘Out of Nowhere.’ Each time he came to the end of a chorus, I bent down to fix my vibes, or tie my shoe, or something. I didn’t know what I was going to do, but I wasn’t going to follow him. After a while, the piano player looked over at me and said, ‘I see what you’re doing. I’m not going to follow him either!’

“Whatever I tried to play would have just been some of his licks that I still couldn’t play.”

Later came the performances with Woody Herman, Benny Goodman, bassist Chubby Jackson, Dizzy Gillespie and so many others. It’s no wonder that when Gibbs looks back, he sees his as a dream life .

“I’ve gotten to play with everybody I wanted to . . . five or six times with Charlie Parker, 10 days with Dizzy in Watts, with Benny Goodman . . . God has been so good to me,” he said. “Looks like I’ll go out just the way I started, wanting to play and loving it.”

Terry Gibbs and Buddy DeFranco play at 6:30 p.m. at the Hyatt Newporter, 1107 Jamboree Road, Newport Beach. Admission: $6 to $7. Information: (714) 729-1234.