MUSIC Bigger – and Better?

IN SEPTEMBER OF 1983, ED- ward Bass of Fort Worth’s billionaire Bass family did something that music lovers all over the country found a bit hard to believe. Mixing his money with the imagination and artistry of creative visionaries, he opened the Caravan of Dreams in the then-moribund center of downtown Fort Worth.

The announcement of this unlikely venture caused ripples as far away as New York, where Sue Mingus, wife of jazz bassist Charles Mingus, was introducing Bass’s associate Kathelin Hoffman Gray to the owner of the Village Vanguard.

“Kathelin is going to open a jazz club in Fort Worth, Texas, ” she said.

The legendary Max Gordon was so shocked that he actually took the ever-present cigar out of his mouth.

“Oh, you poor thing, ” he said.

Sue asked if Max had any words of wisdom for Gray.

“Don’t do it, ” he replied. Then he paused for a few seconds, as though he knew this piece of advice would have no effect on the hopeful pioneer.

“But if you do, make sure you get a good piano.

“The Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center, circa 1983-1990, got a piano, and like all house pianos it was cursed by many a temperamental keyboardist. But the fact that names such as Herbie Hancock and Cecil Taylor graced the stage of a Fort Worth jazz club for seven years is a minor miracle in itself.

Until the club closed on New Year’s Eve 1990 with Houston saxophonist Kirk Whalum. the Caravan was a world jazz and blues capital. When the Caravan gets rolling again-it’s scheduled to reopen in June-it will share the block with new luxury apartments and an 11-screen cinema complex. The club will have 425 seats instead of the previous 275, two dance floors, a new sound system, and the same name.

In other words, the Caravan will be more than it was. And less.

Like the first baby born in a new year, the Caravan made news from the start. On September 29, 1983, avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman came back to his home town in the robes of a jazz sultan. Fort Worth Symphony music director John Giordano conducted Coleman’s “Skies of America” at the Tarrant County Convention Center, and afterward the club opened its doors to the strains of Dallas jazz saxophonist Jarnes Clay and his band.

Bass, head of Decisions Team Ltd., was showing off his construction of one of the most unorthodox structures planted in Cowtown since Billy Rose’s Casa Manana lured Dallasites in the 1930s with the motto, “Dallas for business/Fort Worth for fun. ” The Caravan, named in tribute to Brion Gysin’s 1001 Nights club in Tangier, Morocco, was conceived by Bass. Gray, and John Allen. Allen contributed the idea for the rooftop “desert dome” cactus garden and, as Johnny Dolphin, was the resident dramaturge of the Caravan of Dreams theater. Gray, an artist and theater director, became managing partner. The architect was Margret Augustine, whose current project is the Space Biosphere II, a self-sustaining independent environment in Oracle, Arizona. The multilevel performing arts center also included a theater, a dance studio, and a rooftop grotto bar.

With unswerving focus and catalyzing energy. Gray helped the Caravan trek across hostile territory. The mind-set of the Eighties, the decade of short-term profits, was completely alien to Edward Bass’s concept of managing his inherited millions. He practiced “top line” financing; his associates would cite the Taj Mahal as an example of a long-term investment with a dramatic payoff over time. Bass wasn’t the only wealthy heir who used his money unconventionally, but he was one of the few who was strongly tied to Texas. And as a result, none of them risked being raked over the coals as much. After a 1985 Dallas Morning News series in which some former Bass associates spoke of a “cult of intellectual elitists” running the Caravan, Kathelin Hoffman Gray began to wonder why she had left a very creative life in London for a town “where you couldn’t wear a red dress on the street without being thought of as ’that’ kind of girl. “

A typical small-town suspicion toward Ed Bass and the Caravan of Dreams was one of the few things Dallas and Fort Worth shared. And another thing stamped the club as a certified and perhaps dangerous oddity: The jazz and rhythm and blues featured in the club was attracting racially mixed audiences. For years black and white crowds had mixed on the edge of town, or in black neighborhoods such as Como or Stop Six, Now, downtown they came.

Who wouldn’t? For whatever else Caravan of Dreams was, it was a jazz outpost nonpareil. There have been choicer be-bop havens-Jeanie Donnelly’s Recovery Room in Oak Lawn during the 1970s, or the Aran-das Club on Oakland off Hatcher Street in South Dallas where the late pianist Red Garland played. Those clubs supported local jazz, as has Strictly Tabu on Lomo Alto, Terilli’s Restaurant on Greenville, and other cozy places. But from the moment Ornette Coleman picked up his alto on the Fort Worth stage, the Caravan stood out not just for its opulence but also for its unparalleled inspiration to performers. It gave them a place to be the best they could be.

Moments that felt more like New York or Paris were plentiful. Tenor saxman Joe Henderson brought a band to town, and I had to rub my eyes and not believe my ears. The legendary Charlie Haden was playing bass, unbilled and almost unnoticed. Richard Elliot, a West Coast saxophonist, turned up with British keyboard legend Brian Auger in his backup band. Betty Lynn Buckley, Broadway star, used the club to showcase her new jazz group between engagements at New York’s Bottom Line. Whether it was Buckley reprising “Memory” or Eric Bur-don revisiting “House of the Rising Sun, ” history was being remade here. At times the Caravan was like a Venetian Room West, other times like a Louisiana roadhouse. Texas saxmen were revered: from Dallas, James Clay, David Newman, and Marchel Ivery; from Port Worth, Johnny Reno; from Houston, Kirk Whalum. There was Dizzy Gillespie, Pat Metheny, Ahmad Jamal, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Michael Brecker, James Blood Ulmer, Bran-ford Marsalis.

From all the world over, the big jazz names and the jazz hopefuls came to play and see what it was all about. Local musicians such as Tom Braxton and Carlos Guedes worked at the Caravan as often as they could draw a crowd. But drawing a crowd eventually became a problem not just for local artists, but for the big names, too. In a broad sense, seeing jazz and other stylish music at the Caravan was like seeing classical music at the Mort-classy, comfy, and with it. But unlike the Mort, the Caravan was set up as a moneymaking proposition.

Caravan managed to stay in the black with the nightclub part of its operation, but it did so by requiring, on average, two shows a night and a three- to four-night engagement from artists to meet the stiff guarantees the club had to pledge in advance. That meant running with a narrow safety margin, one that could be eroded by something as basic as rising transportation costs. Headliners who could get cheap plane fares when the club opened in 1983 found it tough to make it pay to play in Fort Worth as fares soared to dizzying heights.

In the fall of 1989. Bass and Gray decid-ed to take the next step and acquire the portion of the city block that they didn’t already own. This cleared the way for the apartments and cinema complex, and plans to enlarge the street-level nightclub were put into place. The new Caravan of Dreams will be “younger and more beautiful, ” as manager Maria Sulichin puts it. The key, however, may be the larger size. Artists who priced themselves out of the old club, such as Grover Washington Jr., Sonny Rollins, George Benson. Branford Marsalis (who played there several times before he upped his price), and even James Brown, who was initially asking $100, 000 per concert after his release from prison, may be economically feasible in the larger establishment. That’s the hope.

In the 1980s, Caravan of Dreams brought a parade of unforgettable nights. Part of the fun was experiencing the creation of a jazz colony, the gradual settlement of an outpost by a combination of hardy pioneers and young upstarts who didn’t know better. The bigger club may yet be better in many ways, but it won’t be as fresh or unexpected, a place out of time. The new Caravan is a real estate venture, as sure as the day is long. Too often, that’s how Fort Worth remembers its glory days-by boarding them up and paving them over.