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whats the deal w/ clifford brown on 'A night at Birdland'


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8 hours ago, Mark Stryker said:

Dan -- what year was that that Eddie was offered the job?

Sorry should have copied and pasted the start of that section of questioning.

Q: What was the reception you got when Lee Morgan, Clifford Jordan, Blakey, and Art Davis joined you in the Vee Jay studio? (1960.) Did they know who you were at that point?

A: Yeah, they did. At that point I'd been at the London House for 3-1/2 years (spring ‘57 to Oct. ‘60) and so my name had gotten around a little bit. So they had an idea as to who I was. And that was a nice record date, too. I think. Probably my reputation in the world of jazz has been more enhanced by those two dates that I did with Lee Morgan and Wayne Shorter, than any other recordings I've made, cause they got quite a lot of play and people knew about them.

Q: And you say that afterwards, Art Blakey offered you the piano chair

A: With the Messengers, yeah he did.

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19 hours ago, Dan Gould said:

When I interviewed Eddie Higgins the biggest "scoop" of that afternoon spent in his company was that Blakey offered him a job and his reason not to take it was ... interesting.

A: Well, I didn't turn him down right on the spot, I just said let me think about it and I'll call you tomorrow. And I went home and told my wife. She said, What do you think? And I said, Well I've been giving it some thought and there is one huge plus and a lot of negatives. I said the huge plus was obvious. Getting the piano job with the Jazz Messengers will immediately put me on the map in the world of jazz and I'll be traveling all over between the States and Japan and Europe and working in the top jazz clubs and making recordings for this band and all that stuff and that's a huge plus, no question about it. Now we come to the negatives (laughs). First of all I've got a great job here in Chicago at the London House and my kids were very little at that point, they were about six and four years old. And the idea of being on the road all the time and not seeing my children grow up is a negative. Number two, this is pretty much an all-junkie band and I'm not only not a junkie, I don't even drink or smoke or (laughs) or smoke pot or anything at all, I'm about as straight as you can get and still be a jazz musician. And I would be out of the loop as far as the social life of the band plus the fact that I'd be the only white guy in the band, and at that particular time in jazz history there was a very strong Crow Jim feeling that if you're white you couldn't play. And obviously they knew I could play or I wouldn't be on these record dates or asked to join the band but still there'd be a, a definite racial bridge to cross there working with the Jazz Messengers and playing in probably mostly black clubs for mostly black audiences and so forth. And third, I heard by the grapevine that when payday came the first guy that got the money was the connection for the heroin and not just Blakey but the rest of the band, too, and if there's any money left over then they pay the hotel bill and, and if there's anything left over from that then maybe the guys will get a few bucks. And, I had a family, and I had overhead, I had rent to pay, and insurance payments, and you know, I had enough to make every month and I was doing OK, I wasn't making a million bucks at the London House but at least I had a steady job and I was getting paid every week. And that would put me in a very kind of a fancy financial situation. If I was living on the road and being away from my family I'd, I'd have no idea how much money I'd be sending home or even if I'd be sending home anything (laughs)!

And so it just seemed to me the negatives outweighed the one big positive. So I called him up the next day and I said, I'm very honored to to join the Messengers and I'll never forget it, and all my friends will probably think I'm crazy but I'm going to say no.' And he said, You're kidding. I said, No, I mean it. And I said, I can go into the reasons if you want but I don't think they'd accomplish anything except to make you upset so, I'll just say no'. And he said, You'll be sorry.

 

 

You could say that Bill Evans' choice to take the gig with Miles Davis was proof that EH probably made the right decision.

Sure, it put him on the map as an important jazz musician, but the racism he encountered from black audiences, and even members of the band, made the gig unbearable.

He could only last about nine months before he had to split the band, but not before acquiring a habit he never really recovered from...

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Joe Masters was another obscure, white pianist who played a few gigs with Art Blakey. He recounted the story of his first gig with AB in one of his taped interviews in The Jazz Loft Project.

JM said he'd take the gig, but he couldn't handle any of the burning tempos that were characteristic of the AB Quintet at that time.

AB said not to worry about that, because he wouldn't call any fast tempos that night.

On the night of the gig, the first tune AB called was off the metronome! Masters turned around to look at AB, and AB had a big smile on his face, and said, "I was lying..."

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On 6/3/2017 at 2:49 PM, Mark Stryker said:

 

Coda: Are we sure Shorter took over as musical director for Golson?

Hank Mobley replaced Golson, followed by Shorter in 1959. Check out the albums "At the Jazz Corner, Vols. 1 &2" (not to be confused with "Meet You at the Jazz Corner")

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2 hours ago, Stereojack said:

Hank Mobley replaced Golson, followed by Shorter in 1959. Check out the albums "At the Jazz Corner, Vols. 1 &2" (not to be confused with "Meet You at the Jazz Corner")

Yes, of course. Thanks for the reminder. I forgot that Hank snuck back in their briefly, before Wayne came aboard.

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17 hours ago, JSngry said:

Certainly remembered that, but have never been sure if Hank was fully on the gig or was there as a "placeholder" (strictly a business way, nothing musical) until Wayne was good to go. 

Have never seen any evidence of this. From Michelle Mercer's bio of Wayne, it appears he wasn't on Blakey's radar until July 1959 in Toronto, when Lee Morgan facilitated him coming into the band.(Wayne's first gig with Blakey was Aug. 1 in French Lick, Ind. Mercer says Hank's unreliability had become a problem and he had not shown up for the gig at the festival in Toronto where the Messengers were part of the bill with Maynard's big band in which Wayne was playing.

Judging from the dates of recordings, Golson was with the band at least until late December 1958 for European gigs, Hank joined sometime before March '59 , because the Messengers recorded a rejected date for BN on 3/18. The live Birdland recordings were made on 4/15 and Hank there's an airshot of the band's July 4 appearance at Newport with Mobley still on board. That's at least a five month stay (perhaps as much as seven) including studio and live recordings -- also arguments against a placeholder status.

 

 

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What about Eddie's assertion it was pretty much a junkie band? Was Wayne a user at this time? Higgins communicated with me after the interview and was wavering on whether he wanted that part used - which put me in the awkward position of being unwilling to give a subject post-facto rights to clear the material. I was going to have to tell him that he had to tell me at the time what was 'off the record'.

Eventually he relented anyway but it left me wondering, was he concerned about Wayne taking exception to the implication that it was a junkie band, if that wasn't true about him personally?

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Wayne has been honest on multiple occasions. He never touched the stuff, made a conscious decision from the beginning to stay away. He reiterates this in the Lee Morgan film. He does admit to heavy drinking, especially during the Miles years. See Michelle Mercer's book, for example.

Bertrand.

 

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Useful AB chronology by a long gone forum member

http://www.jazzdiscography.com/Artists/Blakey/chron.htm

apparently, there was quite some confusion after Mobley's arrest with Barney Wilen and possibly Jerome Richardson in the saxophone chair before Wayne Shorter took over... reads like Mobley was back for good but in deep trouble at the time... (My main take home message from this list is however that musicians really shouldn't be trusted for dating anything... )

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4 hours ago, Niko said:

Useful AB chronology by a long gone forum member

http://www.jazzdiscography.com/Artists/Blakey/chron.htm

Ahhh...

April? 1969: Woody Shaw-t; Tyrone Washington-ts; George Cables-p; Scotty Holt-b 

  • - Wollman Auditorium, Columbia University, NYC (February 24, 1969) [db 3/20/69 p.15] 
  • - Loeb Student Center, New York University, NYC (March 3, 1969) [db 3/20/69 p.15] 
  • - Fillmore East, NYC (March 9, 1969) [db 3/20/69 pp.14, 52] 
  • Black Bottom, Montreal, Canada (April? 1969) [Coda 6/69 p.34] 
  • Café La Boheme (early April-early May 1969) [Voice] [this is questionable considering the below activity]
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Jamil Nasser told me (re: Dan's interview and the junkie question); when the band went on the road, Blakey stocked up with dope ahead of time. So the typical situation was - they are in some town, middle of nowhere; everybody is strung out and desperate. So Blakey says, 'let me go out and see what I can find' - he comes back with the stuff he already had, marks it up about 10 times, says, 'well, this was all I could get but it's pretty expensive." He takes their "share" out of the gig money, they go home with nothing, he takes all the cash. 

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Never run a tab on a gig, that's my philosophy. That's like shopping at the company store.

There's a guy here in Dallas, an entry-level Chitlin' Circuit band gig, who holds mandatory all-day rehearsals, and if you get hungry or run out of smokes, his wife will sell you hot dogs and Kools. I don't know if that's heavier or lighter dues than buying your Messengers gig drugs from Art Blakey himself.

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1 hour ago, JSngry said:

Never run a tab on a gig, that's my philosophy. That's like shopping at the company store.

There's a guy here in Dallas, an entry-level Chitlin' Circuit band gig, who holds mandatory all-day rehearsals, and if you get hungry or run out of smokes, his wife will sell you hot dogs and Kools. I don't know if that's heavier or lighter dues than buying your Messengers gig drugs from Art Blakey himself.

That's cold

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Dude, the ways that people do people wrong knows no limits, nor can any greed not be covered up by a good PR on the front and people with limited options on the back.

Which has very little, if anything, to do with music. Music is like love, you need it and if you don't watch yourself, you'll put up with any damn thing to get it, both from others and from yourself. Which is why it behooves the individual to always orient towards the elevational, and to spot that okie-doke before it's too late.

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