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Jazz on jukeboxes


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I'm working on a Night Lights show called "Jukebox Jazz: Jazz On 45 And 78."  I've tracked down a few decent print resources so far--Michael Cuscuna's notes for the Ike Quebec Blue Note 45s Mosaic set, some articles online, several references in a bibliographic index from Jazzinstitut, but I wanted to ask board members for their input. Are there any good articles or passages in books about this topic that you might recommend?  (Iirc David Rosenthal fleetingly addresses the role that jukeboxes played in mid-20th-century black jazz culture in his book Hard Bop)  Also, for board members who were around when it wasn't necessarily rare to come across jukeboxes that featured some jazz records, which ones do you recall being especially popular?  Right now I'm starting with Johnny Hodges/Ellington's "Jeep Blues" in the late 1930s and going up to around 1970 or so.  (There will almost inevitably be some crossover with a previous Night Lights show, Jazz For Mad Men: Hits From The 1960s)  

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

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I have a cd entitled Jukebox Jazz which is a compilation of records originally released on small Chicago labels for radio and jukebox play.  It includes cuts done by Coleman Hawkins and Jimmy Rushing. I can scan the notes and send them to you if you like. 

 

Just tracked it down at Amazon:  https://smile.amazon.com/Jukebox-Jazz-Southside-VARIOUS-ARTISTS/dp/B0009IW9O8/ref=sr_1_fkmrnull_2?keywords=Jukebox+Jazz%21+from+the+southside+of+Chicago&qid=1554272946&s=music&sr=1-2-fkmrnull

Edited by medjuck
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It wasn't unusual to find jazz tracks on jukeboxes during the jazz boom at the end of the 50's and in the early 60's. I remember playing "Milestones" complete with Coltrane sheets of sound solo in the refectory at Leeds University - a venue, incidentally, which was to become famous a few years later for The Who Live in Leeds.

I suppose that the 45 rpm version of Horace Silver's "Senor Blues" was produced with the jukebox market in mind.

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I would recommend aggressively looking for jazz 45s. The mastering is loud and hot. It sounds great! This is true for non-jazz as well.

As for what was on the jukeboxes, all the usual "jazz hit" suspects, as well as Blue Note 45s, Columbia 45s (edited from album cuts), Atlantic 45s, Bethlehem (Nina Simone, "My Baby...." on jukeboxes aplenty. Organ records aplenty too, Jimmy McGriff on Sue comes to mind.

Basically just check the discographies. If there was a jazz 45 that wasn't already a hit, odds are good that it was for either DJ or jukebox use.

Jazz on 78s in jukeboxes, before my time.

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Thanks much, all. I am assuming that the jukebox hits of the late 1930s and 40s (such as “Jeep’s Blues”) were on 78s, since 45s weren’t introduced until the beginning of the 1950s. Most of my emphasis will be on the 45 era, but definitely wanted to include several songs from the pre-45 era. (There’s also the interesting side-track of the 1940s “soundies” jukebox, which was a forerunner of the music-video format.) 

Absurd winning-the-lottery fantasy: buying a vintage jukebox and stocking it with jazz 45s. Putting it in the basement lounge of my large 1930s/40s era house (lottery fantasy  purchase as well) and inviting a bunch of Organissimos over for shooting pool, watching movies and baseball, having drinks, perusing books, and raising funds for the Mosaic Records Bill Barron Kickstarter project. :g

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In Urbana in the 1980s when I was in school, there was jukebox at this restaurant hang/out called Treno's that included a few jazz singles that we played to death.

One was the radio;jukebox edit of Groove Holme's "Misty." One night was must have played it 10 times in row, and finally the manager came out and yelled: "Enought!" and pulled the plug on the juke box. The other song we played all the time was Horace Silver's "Song for My Father," which was in two parts, and to save quarters we usually just played Part 2 so we could get Joe Henderson's solo. Good times. I second Jim's endorsement of how hot these singles sound. I've bought a few in recent years for giggles -- just a few bucks or less a pop and I've given some away to record junkie friends. Very plentiful in the used stores here. I love how on the some of the Blue Notes, there's RVG or Van Gelder etched into the dead wax -- just like on the big boys. When I was a kid in the '70s, I had a 45 single of Herbie's "Chameleon." I'm sure that was on a zillion jukeboxes in that era. 

 

Coda: I have an Arthur Blythe 45 rpm single on Columbia -- "Miss Nancy/Illusions." Can't recall without looking, but I think they're full tracks as on the album, not edited.

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12 minutes ago, Mark Stryker said:

In Urbana in the 1980s when I was in school, there was jukebox at this restaurant hang/out called Treno's that included a few jazz singles that we played to death.

One was the radio;jukebox edit of Groove Holme's "Misty." One night was must have played it 10 times in row, and finally the manager came out and yelled: "Enought!" and pulled the plug on the juke box. The other song we played all the time was Horace Silver's "Song for My Father," which was in two parts, and to save quarters we usually just played Part 2 so we could get Joe Henderson's solo.

 

I gotta ask Mark did anyone ever say "hey, he stole that from Rikki Don't Lose That Number!" ?

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5 hours ago, JSngry said:

5460369879_b01fe29e05_z.jpg

You can bet they got a Jimmy McGriff and/or Jack McDuff 45 on this jukebox.

You mean to say records by Wilson Pickett and Solomon Burke would not have been the first ones to feature prominently there In the first place? :lol:

(Yes, me gotta this too ... ever since it was published)

Edited by Big Beat Steve
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Nice anecdote I came across online from Tommy LiPuma:

Charlie Parker With Strings was originally released as two albums on Clef and they are among the most beautiful jazz recordings ever made. Before the album came out, Mercury, who released Clef’s recordings, issued a string of shellac 78rpm records including the divine, ‘Just Friends’ coupled with ‘Everything Happens To Me’. Producer, and later the head of Verve Records in the 1990s, Tommy LiPuma remembers the impact of ‘Just Friends’: “In the 1950s the jukebox was the deal. As a saxophone player I was gigging, although still at school. I’d sit in with black musicians; the jukeboxes in ‘the hood’ were outrageous. One day I’m sitting there making myself scarce, because I was under-age, and suddenly out of the jukebox comes this record. It was ‘Just Friends’ by Charlie Parker, that first time I heard it I couldn’t believe it.’

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The Imperial Pub in downtown Toronto, where a gang of Old Jazz Guys meet up for lunch weekly, has long featured a juke box filled with jazz 45s.  It's wired into the whole sound system which plays a satellite jazz station, over-riding that signal whenever a quarter is dropped into the machine.

Anyone recall the old song "I'd Give A Dollar For A Dime"?  The guy wants to play the jukebox!  (Joe Williams did a nice version...)

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