sgcim

Dick Garcia was a friend of my mom's family. I believe he passed long ago. As far as I know Dick Garcia (born in 1931) is still alive. Yes, Dick Garcia is still around, and living in his parents' house in Astoria, NY., according to a relative I contacted on the net. He practices zen buddhism, and is living in seclusion. His phone # is in the White Pages. One guy that played and recorded with Bird and Diz, who I've done many gigs with is Aaron Sachs. He's still playing very well, and lives in the Bronx. He's in his late 80s now. He told me a story once about how he was walking down Broadway back in the 40s or 50s, and he ran into Bird. Bird said something to him like, " Don't go thinking that you're the top cat around" OSLT. Aaron was interviewed by Phil Schaap a number of years ago about his involvement with Tiny Kahn's version of a head based on "Indiana" that was very similar to "Donna Lee". He used to jam with Tiny and Terry Gibbs in the Bronx in the 40s, and they recorded it on a Terry Gibbs Quintet LP. I transcribed it, and while it was not the same melody as Donna Lee, you can see that DL probably evolved from Tiny's tune. They elaborated on lines at sessions back then, and came up with variations that got picked up by various players. http://www.allmusic.com/artist/aaron-sachs-mn0000586928/credits

CT lived on the road from the time he got kicked out of high school and his house for getting a girl pregnant, till 1960, when he became the first black dude to work for the NBC Studio Orchestra. He was the guy who broke up the fight between Mingus and Tizol when he was with Duke. Mingus had a fire axe(!) and Tizol had a huge switchblade, and CT held them apart from each other, till they got the stage call. Oscar Pettiford replaced Mingus the next night, laughing his head off about Mingus(whom he had previously clocked at a club), and CT said no one noticed any difference from the bass chair. The band was so tough, the first thing CT would do each night was take out his switchblade, and throw it into his music stand, to let everyone know not to mess with him! When Mingus later called him for a rehearsal for the LP "PreBird", the manuscript was so bad, CT told him he couldn't read it and he was walking out. Mingus stood in front of him, and tried to intimidate him physically, but CT put his trumpet case down and gave Mingus such a threatening look, Mingus let him leave. I played at the Jimmy Nottingham Memorial concert with CT at the Storytown club in NY, and he was the sweetest cat in the world, giving me vocal praise on the stand, whenever he heard anything he liked.

I just finished CT's autobiography, and thought I'd post something on it, because I haven't seen much written on it. Three co-authors passed away before it was done, so it was written with CT's wife, Gwen, and it largely comes across as CT's speaking voice. It starts out with his life in St. Louis (where he meets a young fellow trpt. player named "Dewey") and then goes into his stints with Barnet, Basie and Duke, with many great stories about life on the road. It skips around chronologically when he wants to make a point. He then goes into his twelve years with NBC, and his teaching and freelance career after that. A few stories I found interesting were: 1) He goes into the drug scene in the 50s, where at the Apollo, several musicians tried to hold him down and inject him with drugs, but he fought them off with his training as a boxer. He never used narcotics. 2) He finds a "bulk lying in the gutter on Broadway". He kicks it over, and finds it was Miles Davis. He takes him back to his hotel room, leaves MD in bed, and comes back to find MD walked off with his trumpet, clothes and radio. A few days later he saw Philly Joe Jones walking down Broadway with CT's brand new maroon Phil Kronfeld shirt! He gets his wife to call MD's father to tell him that Doc Davis "thinks he's going to Julliard, but he's going to Yardbird". Doc Davis refused to believe Miles was on narcotics, and said that if musicians like CT would leave him alone, "he wouldn't be into that kind of traffic." 3) Norman Granz didn't like the subtle sound of the flugelhorn ( or much other subtlety), so he got a guy to try and steal CT's flugelhorn while he was on tour with NG, but CT found out about it, and prevented it. 4) Patti Ausin was seven years old when she was singing with "Free and Easy" Q's musical in France. 5) He was passed over for Doc Severinsen's job on the Tonight Show because CT would ruin the ratings in the Southern market. Then they told him to find another black trpt. player for the band, but he had to be married (when most of the other players in the Tonight Show Band weren't married). Then Aaron Levine told CT, "we're going to have to let your boy go", because Snookie wasn't getting along well with Skitch Henderson. CT said, "He's not my boy, Aaron. He's my FRIEND", and if you want to fire him, you'll have to fire me, too. They wound up keeping both of them. 6) Monk came into a club CT was playing at in 56 and told him to come over the Baronness' house to work on some songs for his new LP. They spend three hours watching Monk throw some stuff into the fire in the fireplace, and Monk doesn't say a word. Then they do the session the next day without a rehearsal...

And what about the Clark Terry/Bob Brookmeyer Quintet? One of the last bands Eddie Costa played with, they released four great LPs featuring magic improvised counterpoint betwixt the Flugelhorn and Valve trombone: "Quintet" "Tonight" "The Power of Positive Swinging" "Gingerbread Men"

The complete(?) JPJ Quartet recordings (studio and live) have been (re)issued on Storyville. I used to catch the JPJ Quartet live a lot in NY back in the 70s. I have fond memories of Budd's ecstatic version of "If I Had You". I've never heard a tenor sound like that, before or since.

Michelob Ultra= 2.6g carbs

The Honegger was always my fave. I've always wondered why he wasn't played that much, then I read an article on his activities in WWII, I guess that explained it.

AFAIK, the Chico Hamilton record is the only really "inside" playing Dolphy did on an entire LP. He plays an "inside" clarinet solo on the Waldron "Quest" LP, but the rest is typical Eric

Well said, Magnificent One- "be careful what you wish for..." I have fond memories of watching Rhassan destroy a chair(!) on the WNET program "Soul" somewhere around 1970(?). I always wondered, 'what up wit dat?'

I did a gig with a tenor player who was a protege of Roland Kirk way back when, and he told me about the time they were in the audience of the Dick Cavett Show, and they refused to let the show go on unless Cavett promised to have jazz musicians featured on the show. Cavett entered into a dialogue with Kirk, and agreed to feature some jazz people in the future. This sax player thinks that Kirk's type of jazz activism is needed today. What sez you?

A manly man indeed; he refused to play "Giant Steps" and left us cursing Wynton. ; ' )

I used to lump Korngold in with the "cornier" sounding film composers of the 20s and 30s, but he wrote some great things. It's such a pleasure to listen to film music back when it was written by real composers who happened to write film music (Herrmann, Raksin), than the current over-produced crap by people who were trained to just write film music. Sure, the new guys do what the director wants them to do, but that's about it...

WKCR is playing a day of CT. Just heard the 1977 MPS LP, "Clark After Dark", great Tony Coe arrangements, and wonderful CT. Happy Birthday CT!

I took his Music and Literature course at Stonybrook. Brilliant pianist.

According to the book on him by J. de valk, he wrote "Freeway" on a Mulligan record, four Italian songs in 1962, "Blues For a Reason" on the record with Warne Marsh in 1984. Other compositions were "improvisations over a chord sequence, to which a title was later appended"

I never knew he wrote a musical called "The Ambassadors" starring Satch. Phil Schaap just played Satch singing "The Duke"- surrealistic. RIP DB

I think they influenced some rockers to appreciate jazz a bit more. BTW, they did cop the groove on "Gaucho" from the Jarrett tune "ALAYLY", but Fagen did compose a great, original piece of music based on that groove. I used to listen to it and I thought the lyrics were some type of tribute to Borges. When i went online to a SD website, I found out what it's really about- not that there's anything wrong with that... IMHO, Fagen hit songwriting bliss on Aja,Gaucho and Nitefly, but was never able to get back there, including his new one, "Sunken Condos".

A friend and I worshipped Phil Woods back when we were in high school. We went to a concert he did at the Jazz Museum back in the 70s. My friend knew Phil spoke French, so he kept going up to Phil on the break and saying French stock phrases to him, and Phil asked him, "You speak French?", and my friend said, "No", and Phil looked at him, disgustedly. After the concert, my friend was under the impression that Phil was now his friend, and he brought me backstage to meet his new "friend". He burst in there dragging me along (reluctantly) saying, "Phil, this is my friend, he's a great jazz player!" Phil was downing a beer, and when he saw me and my friend, he yelled out, "Get the f-ck outta here!" and flung a beer can at me!

We used to play "Diane" a lot; without the introduction. It's just the same changes as "You Are the Sunburn on my Ass- I mean Sunshine of my Life" ; - ). A friend of mine said Mingus ripped off some things from Jack Walrath towards the end of his life. Some of his tunes were so closely associated with Eric Dolphy, it just feels weird playing them without him- "Fables of Faubus, Folk Form #1, etc...

Just picked up a Pioneer PL1150 (or D?) for $85 with a free setup from my local used record store, and been mainlinin' me some rare, cheap vinyl. Manny Albam "West Side Story"- It's hard to believe NYC was once a real jazz city before the current Marsaylis plague, and we got names like Quill, Brookmeyer, Costa, and Cohn swingin' up a storm on this one. Mike Elliot "atrio" - How Johnny Smith might have sounded if he hadn't hung it up in the 60s. Lalo Schifrin- "Brilliance" Rare Raney

Here's another obscure, yet very talented musician I just thought I'd name check here. Born in Cal.,1941, son of Maurice Harris, a trumpet player with the Tonight Show Orchestra. Worked as a jazz pianist in clubs in the LA area, where he soon became a lifelong, legendary junkster. He married the singer/songwriter Judee Sill in the 60s, whom he converted into the junkster faith, and he did the beautiful orchestral arrangements on her first LP (along with Don Bagley), and played piano for The Turtles.. Played as a sideman with Gabor Szabo for a while, then joined Frank Zappa and The Mothers in 1971 for a short time (he played on the 1971, "Live at the Fillmore East LP- you can hear his great Wurlitzer solo on "Billy the Mountain", from the "Playground Psychotics" CD). Later in the 70s, he went on the road with Ray Charles (his idol, who he called "that genius n-word"), and then did arranging for artists such as The Friends of Distinction, Jack Jones, and others. He was part of the lesser known jazz scene back then which featured players like Tommy Peltier, Bill Plummer and Lynn Blessing. Being a Judee Sill fan, I became obsessed with this guy's arrangements on her first LP, and wound up getting a private recording of him playing in a jazz group featuring Jim Crutcher, a trumpet player. Harris was a very good, Bud-Powell-influenced jazz pianist. Ring any bells?

Thanks for the info. Sure sounded like Tal, but HR used to copy Tal a lot back then. This reminds me of the Ralph Burns Quartet LP where Tal was listed, but it turned out to be J. Raney.

I came across this vinyl yesterday, and the liner notes completely screwed up the personnel, but someone (it was at a used record store) had written in the corrected personnel. I was able to listen to it at the store, and the info written in was correct. This was DeFranco's Quintet with Sonny Clark and Tal Farlow. This was at Farlow's zenith (it was all downhill after 1959), and his discography has no sideman credits for the year the liner notes said it was recorded, 1957. The person that wrote on the LP said that it was taken from a Californian TV show, but didn't give the date. This wasn't on the Mosaic DeFranco collection. The sides this group recorded in the studio were done in either '55 or 56. Anyone know anything about this LP? There were only three cuts by DeFranco's group on it: "Fascinatin' Rhythm", "I Loves You, Porgy", and "Concerto for the Machine Age" (actually an uptempo version of "Now's The Time").

I treasure all their acapella recordings, but other than McConnell's LP, never liked them with bands as much. I recently read an interview with Puerling, done towards the end of his life, and he sounded completely fed up with the business. He voiced the opinion that the concept of beauty in music, was extinct.

Yeah, looking back, they must have been yuppies, slumming or something. This was in the Slope in the early 90s. My gf said the owner was a schizophrenic. Another seafood restaurant I played at in another Borough was owned by the scariest looking guy I've ever seen in my life. He had the same LOVE HATE written on his fingers like DeNiro did in that Mitchum remake,Cape Fear, and he sat there, staring at us when we played. My friend, the pianist on the gig, said he was able to buy the place through some pretty nasty deeds. It had fine, Italian marble all over the place, and was quite elegant. When we finished, and were waiting to be paid, there was a lot of screaming, and we saw him chasing a woman (his gf) and then beating the crap out of her. I just got out of there and waited for my friend outside. I never played there again, but my idiot friend kept playing there. One night, a band we played in was booked to play at a party where someone named Gotti was the guest of honor, and my friend had to cancel the restaurant gig. The owner said something to him that kept him in his house for an entire month- out of fear.