Dan Gould

End August - I did say "next month" on the Schaap piece so I am trying to be sure to meet that. Afterwards though I am going to adopt the language "Next time, _____" to give me a little flexibility. Although few may note, Percy France's birth month is August so I want to make it in that month.

Dodgers in the third seed position is a little shocking but obviously a lot of time left. Its impossible not to respect what the Brewers have done ... manager defects? Who cares? Trade your ace? Don't worry he'll suck with the Mets. Red Sox Update: Went to bed trailing 7-5 they came back in the 9th, 10th (two runs down), 11th, 12th and walked off in the 13th. In their streak they have swept the Rays, Yankees, White Sox (twice) and Dodgers. And gained 15 1/2 games on the Yankees in 44 days now.

So I looked at the standings this morning after verifying that the Sox closed out win #30 of their last 35 games, and discovered that the Yankees lost and are just 1 game ahead of the Red Sox. This made me wonder how this compares to the infamous 1978 collapse when the Yankees sat 14 games back and caught the Red Sox in the standings. So - in 1978, it took the Yankees 53 days to cover 14 games in the standings. As of the end of games on June 24, the Sox were 15 1/2 games back of the Yankees. So - they have covered 14 1/2 games in just 43 days. Granted, they have not caught all the way up, and its not only a different post-season design but we aren't even talking about first place with the Rays outperforming their metrics. Can the Sox catch them this weekend? We get the A's at home, Yankees face the Braves. I kinda like their chances. This has been one hell of an insane run.

Thanks all, glad folks are interested.

It's been so long that I have listened to this set or even any Miles ... No doubt I reach for the BNs for prime Hank and this isn't quite it. I agree with Peter about Miles and Wynton Kelly and maybe its because I haven't listened to him in so long but Miles sounds more aggressive than usual(?). Maybe because he felt Hank wasn't the harder edge foil to play off of? (BTW I have never noticed the clinking glass or alleged cash register, can someone point me to where those sounds are?) Glad this motivated me to finally listen again.

Thanks gents. I finished the last book so tonight I need to make a decision.

Thank you Peter, I am excited about this project because there were a lot of fine people whose stories and music were captured by Schaap. It may be tough to stay on a monthly basis but it will keep me busy.

So - Phillip K Dick people: I've never read him. I have had, for some time, the collection Second Variety. Worthwhile? I am finishing up one book and might try that one next. Thanks.

This is the introductory piece in a series to be titled Live From The West End, The Uptown Home For Swing which, as explained at the end of my article, will utilize Schaap interviews of neglected musicians he booked at The West End to tell their stories and include multiple tunes broadcast or recorded by Schaap and donated to Vanderbilt. I know some people don't like AAJ but it has one significant advantage for the non-pro writer: They'll lightly edit your work and put it out there in a couple of weeks. No dough but its not like I do this for dough. Upcoming articles on Percy France, Franc Williams, Eddie Barefield, George Kelly and others. https://www.allaboutjazz.com/phil-schaap-a-life-in-jazz “Phil Schaap: A Life in Jazz” By Daniel Gould Phil Schaap, a jazz historian, radio host, record producer, archivist, six-time Grammy Award winner, and 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, called himself “a Johnny Appleseed through the transmitter.” Of course, the subject of his proselytizing was jazz, and few did it as long, or through so many different media – broadcasting, teaching, audio engineering, and sound preservation – as did Philip Van Noorden Schaap. Schaap was born April 8, 1951, and raised in the Hollis section of Queens, New York. His affinity for jazz began with his mother, Marjorie Wood Schaap, and her collection of Louis Armstrong and Count Basie sides. His father, Walter Schaap, was a jazz scholar himself, contributing to discographies and translating the work of pioneering French jazz researchers Charles Delaunay and Hughes Panassie. Schaap himself said, “As a real youngster, I was attracted to rhythmically energized music. If it was peppy, I dug it. And this is the 1950s when the jump jazz, the rhythm and blues, the early rock and roll, and jazz were all going on at the same time.” The family’s neighborhood was rife with African-American jazz musicians, and young Phil had no compunction about knocking on doors to meet idols like Milt Hinton and Buck Clayton or asking a classmate to introduce him to her father, Roy Eldridge (that request didn’t work, but he asked the girl’s mother, who arranged a visit). He saw saxophonist Budd Johnson regularly at the public bus stop. A trip to the Randall’s Island Jazz Festival in 1956 was a very important event in Schaap’s life. He told an interviewer, “I remember that we got backstage somehow and that the current Basie band were the Belle of the Ball at this festival. So, everybody was talking to those guys, but the older Basie cats were there. too. And somehow, I was outgoing and hopefully cute and I certainly was a whole lot smaller than I am now. I just started peppering them with questions about these records that I'd listened to. And that started this unique and very hard to duplicate training sessions with great musicians, in particular the original Count Basie personnel, (artists like) Eddie Durham, Earle Warren, Jimmy Rushing, and “Papa” Jo Jones.” Schaap went on to joke that he learned about jazz sitting on the lap of Jimmy Rushing, “but Mr. Five by Five didn’t have a lap.” Schaap’s relationship with Jo Jones was especially formative. At the festival, Jo Jones asked a question about McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, a group that had formed 25 years before Schaap was born. When the tyke answered correctly, Jones turned to Schaap’s mother and told her, “Madam, you just got another babysitter.” Their sessions often became listening sessions. Schaap shared a particularly vivid memory of one such session in an interview on WKCR in 2008: “We’re listening to these records and Jo Jones wants me to tell the difference between Lester Young and Herschel Evans. He wants me to know who they are, meaning what is their musical representation of their soul and how do they communicate their emotion as well as can you tell the difference? So, he's very aggressively berating me about Herschel Evans: ‘This is Mr. Herschel Evans, now what does that sound like to you?’ Well, Joe, I said, it sounds friendly. ‘That's right! The first thing to know about Herschel Evans is that he is your friend!’ The communication of the warmth of friendship is the musical message is, I guess, the lesson he wanted me to learn. He certainly was very happy when I said, Joe, sounds friendly. ‘That's right!’” In 1969, as a freshman at Columbia University, Schaap was quizzed via the time-honored “blindfold test” by the resident jazz expert at the student radio station, WKCR-FM. Schaap struggled for a moment to name the pianist on a particular record, until the answer came to him: Dick Katz. The pianist’s son, Jamie Katz, was suitably impressed. Soon Schaap was host of his own program on WKCR, Traditions in Swing. Fifty years later, he was still broadcasting on the station (he also had programs on WBGO (Newark) and WNYC (New York)). In 1981, Schaap told the Columbia Spectator, “There are a lot of things I could do with my life, but I only got one, so I think I’ll hang out with jazz.” His life with jazz was a remarkable one, and when Phil Schaap died in September 2021 after a four-year battle with cancer, he left behind an enormous collection of recordings, official and unofficial, plus hundreds of books and other material. According to the New York Times, the collection filled two 18-wheelers, plus a van, when it was shipped to Vanderbilt University in December 2023. Today, The Phil Schaap Jazz Collection can be streamed thru the university’s Aviary website. It currently totals over 5900 recordings and documents some of the most famous radio shows in the history of jazz: Bird Flight (an 80-minute weekday dive into the music of Charlie Parker, which started in 1981 and continued until Schaap’s final hospitalization), the annual birthday celebrations of countless jazz musicians, as well as the Memorial broadcasts that marked their passings, Schaap-hosted programs like Jazz at One, Traditions in Swing, Out to Lunch and Jazz Alternatives, and nearly 1,500 interviews of jazz musicians. While most of what was bequeathed to Vanderbilt has now been digitized, there is yet another tranche of recordings still to come. A little-known aspect of Schaap’s work in jazz is revealed in the Phil Schaap Jazz Collection: His Jazz Session record label made many more recordings than previously – and barely – known. At one time, Schaap sold on his website complete sets of the 45s he had issued on the label, by Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham, Tiny Grimes, Harold Ashby, the Swing to Bop Quintet, the No-Gap Generation Jazz Band, and George Kelly. While access is limited on the Aviary website, there are multiple studio recordings by each of these groups, showing that Schaap had plans to issue full-length albums, or at least, additional 45s. But the greatest gift left to jazz fans by Phil Schaap is his documentation of what he considered one of his most important accomplishments: The music performed at The West End Café’s Jazz Room, located on Broadway between 113th and 114th Streets near Columbia University. Quite simply, as Music Director at The West End between 1973 and 1992, Phil Schaap created a unique jazz scene, witnessed by countless Columbia University students, New Yorkers, and world travelers, and broadcast over the airwaves of WKCR-FM. Phil Schaap had the foresight to record and preserve much of it, and often to record not just the broadcast sets, but entire nights of music from the West End bandstand. What was important was both the what and the who Schaap booked, broadcasted and documented at the West End. He emphasized swing at a time when it was something of a four-letter word in jazz. Free and Fusion were what was happening, and this was long before Wynton Marsalis and the “Young Lions” started looking beyond (and before) the Second Miles Davis Quintet for inspiration. Schaap told the New York Times in 1981, “'What you get at the West End is the 52nd Street sound, which was primarily swing and bebop and the big band sound scaled down to small group size. But there were always samplings of a few other jazz horizons on 52d Street, just as we have here.'' For the who, Sascha Feinstein, a poet and writer, described them well in his memoir Black Pearls (2008): “[The West End] mainly featured outstanding sidemen who never attained the fame of their leaders but who almost always provided an evening of lasting music.” Those sidemen included countless Basie and Ellington alumni, and big band veterans not associated with either, like Eddie Barefield and George Kelly. Also featured were Charlie Parker sidemen like Howard McGhee and Joe Albany, and young musicians eager to play with their Swing elders, like Michael Hashim and Loren Schoenberg. As Schaap pointed out, “A lot of [the swing veterans] were not even performing anymore.” These included Basie sidemen Earle Warren and Dicky Wells, as well as pianist Sammy Price, whose return to active performing led to a final chapter that included multiple tours of Europe throughout the 1980s. Schaap told the New York Times: “They were my friends. They were my teachers. They were geniuses.” He told The West Side Spirit that gigs at the West End provided these still vital musicians “with a nice last chapter of their lives.” Sascha Feinstein said the music he heard at the West End was “almost always lasting.” Now it is truly lasting music because all can hear the music created on those long-ago nights, usually in excellent sound, and often far more of what was invented on the bandstand than just what was broadcast on the airwaves. Because of Phil Schaap’s gift to jazz lovers, the scene he created at The West End will last as long as the Internet exists. All About Jazz announces a new series of articles which will feature music by artists Phil Schaap booked into the West End, and their own stories as relayed to Schaap in recorded interviews. “Live from the West End, the uptown home for swing” was Phil Schaap’s usual radio sign-on for the broadcasts from the West End, and it gives this series its name. First up: Percy France. The first act of his career took him across the country with organist Bill Doggett, and into the recording studio with legends Jimmy Smith, Sir Charles Thompson, and Freddie Roach. The second act largely started at The West End, and his forceful tenor saxophone, rooted in the Swing era, gained him new fans around NYC jazz clubs as well as clubs and concert halls in Europe, where he toured with Sammy Price and also with the Oliver Jackson Trio starting in 1979 and continuing into the late 1980s. We’ll dive into Percy France’s story and sample the music captured at the West End next month.

A boogie-woogie pianist with a two tenor swing frontline on a bebop standard is always interesting to me:

Is it me or was the board down (with a weird "Organissimo Coming Soon" message on the Chrome Tab) and now its flying fast?

I am currently reading Kevin Phillip's 1775 - A Good Year for Revolution and it is so chockful of information in such depth I find it remarkable that it was issued as a "popular" non-fiction book. It is college-level and could be a single, semester long reference for the 1774-1776 period. (No wonder it was remaindered and I imagine still available for $3 or $4.) I ain't got no time for that. But I am interested so I am banging out a chapter a night before bed, reading/scanning, reading/scanning. @Big Beat Steve ... intending to buy was not meant to imply any sort of near-term action.

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Are you saying that you always had, say, the Left Bank recordings but bought the recent official releases in hopes of improved sound?