Pat DeRosa: Still Swingin’
Walk my way, and a thousand violins begin to play, or it might be the sound of your hello, that music I hear, I get misty, the moment you’re near.
One can almost hear the deeply romantic lyrics as the musician Pat DeRosa plays “Misty,” on a Selmer Mark VI saxophone, in his house in Montauk. Airy, breathy like the human voice, the melody of Errol Garner’s standard is awash in vibrato as it races down the wire and into a telephone receiver, to be heard several miles to the west.
“I was born in Brooklyn,” Mr. DeRosa, who will turn 93 on Dec. 6, said. “When I was 12, my mother noticed I had an interest in music and decided to take me to the Bowery, where she bought me an alto saxophone.”
That saxophone, and a tenor sax acquired later, has taken Mr. DeRosa across the country and brought him face to face with many of the 20th century’s legends of entertainment, including Lana Turner, Marlene Dietrich, Barbara Stanwyck, Tyrone Power, and Errol Flynn.
The musician, who has been sitting in with South Fork bands such as Mamalee Rose and Friends and the Nancy Atlas Project, played that alto saxophone through high school as war clouds gathered in Europe and Asia. Working for the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation in Bethpage, where he built aircraft parts, he was granted a few deferments before being drafted into the Army Air Forces. He was sent to Greensboro, N.C., for basic training, “after which I joined the concert band as well as the 20-piece dance band,” he said.
As Mr. DeRosa neared a deployment to the Pacific theater in 1945, the United States dropped two atom bombs on Japan, ending the war. He concluded his service in San Antonio before returning to Long Island.
In the war’s aftermath, Mr. DeRosa was recommended for work at the Latin Quarter, the famed Times Square nightclub opened by Barbara Walters’s father, Lou Walters. While working there, he received a call from the bandleader Tommy Tucker’s manager. “They needed a sax player immediately,” Mr. DeRosa said. The musician set out for Chicago, and from there to gigs across the country as the band made its way to Hollywood, where it would appear in a film biography of the Tommy Tucker Orchestra.
In Hollywood, he met the stars of the era, also finding himself on the set with Abbott and Costello. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, he said, took him to lunch. He performed with the popular bandleaders Boyd Raeburn, Lionel Hampton, Tex Beneke, and Percy Faith. He has also played with the pianist Dick Hyman, and with another Montauk resident, the harmonica player Toots Thielemans. Mr. DeRosa, in fact, performed at Mr. Thielemans’s wedding reception at the Little Park restaurant in Montauk, where Zum Schneider now stands.
“The Big Band era was dying out,” Mr. DeRosa said, “so I went to Manhattan School of Music for my bachelor’s and master’s degrees.” He began teaching in 1954, initially in the Huntington School District and then in South Huntington, while continuing a professional career that took him to Manhattan venues including the Plaza Hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria, and the Paramount Theater.
In Huntington in the 1960s, the owner of a local music store told him that the legendary jazz musician John Coltrane was looking for a duet partner. They played together for a year or two, Mr. DeRosa remembered, until Mr. Coltrane’s untimely death, at Huntington Hospital, at age 40 in 1967. He also performed at President Richard Nixon’s inaugural ball, and in the 1970s served as master of ceremonies for many memorable jazz concerts at Gosman’s Dock in Montauk.
Mr. DeRosa retired from teaching in 1978 but continued to play professionally. Thirty-six years later, he continues to blow that saxophone on stages across Long Island, sitting in with the aforementioned South Fork musicians — “They do a great job,” he said — as well as at the Montauk Yacht Club with his musical family: his daughter Patricia DeRosa Padden, a retired teacher who has been playing the piano since age 7; his son-in-law Michael Padden, a guitarist, and his granddaughter Nicole DeRosa Padden, a voice major and flutist.
“I look forward to my 93rd birthday,” he said. “I’ve had a wonderful life thus far and thank my daughter, her husband, and their daughter for their assistance in keeping me healthy. We are a family of musicians, three generations who continue to perform together.”
One item remains on Mr. DeRosa’s bucket list: “to perform with Long Island’s most popular piano player, Billy Joel. This would be the highlight of my career,” he said. “Are you listening, Billy?”