Bennie Wallace

Bennie Wallace began playing jazz in 1959 in a school band under the direction of jazz drummer Chet Hedgecoth. Hedgecoth took the students to hear good jazz bands in the area and once even drove them a hundred miles to hear the Count Basie band. Through Chet, Wallace also discovered the Amvets club, a local black after-hours jazz venue. It was there that he had his first opportunity to sit in and play in a real jazz club. In the summer of 1965, the owner of the Amvets, Seth Crenshaw, gave Wallace his first regular job as a band leader. Before he left the South, Wallace had played in most of the after hours clubs in East Tennessee.

During this time, Wallace was studying the recordings of such jazz favorites as John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, Stanley Turrentine, and Lockjaw Davis, as well as rhythm-&- blues saxophonists like Red Prysock. Later, while receiving his formal music education at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, he discovered Charlie Parker and the followers of Lester Young. All along, he was working or sitting in with area bands in many and varied settings.