Don Brown

I missed Hank Mobley. When Art Blakey brought his Jazz Messengers to Toronto to play at the Canadian National Exhibition. Blakey's group was one of about twenty booked for a three-day Newport Jazz Festival-type show produced by George Wein. When Blakey's group came on stage it was just a quartet with Lee Morgan the only horn. Apparently Mobley had been stopped at the border and was not allowed into the country. A real bummer for Mobley fans.

Happy Birthday, John.

Eddie Costa Lorraine Geller Terry Pollard John Lewis

I found it. It's on Jerry Valburn's Everybody's label - catalogue number EV-3006. There are six selection by Basie's 1940 band, all recorded in March of that year. There are also three pieces by Louis' big band, three by Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy, and two by Jimmie Lunceford.

Cole Porter's Night and Day by Fred Astaire with Leo Reisman's Orchestra.

Dick Katz Kenny Kersey Clyde Hart Jan Lundgren

Wardell Gray Angelo Tompros Teddy Edwards Frank Socolow

And what about Sweets Edison? Lots of personal licks there but always enjoyable.

I no longer have the LP so I'm unable to check but I seem to recall that the title track on Yusef Lateef's Riverside album, The Centaur and the Phoenix, was written by Charles Mills and adapted from his Crazy Horse Symphony.

Thanks, guys. Still hanging in there. So far this morning I've listened to Ben Webster's World Transcriptions with Lips Page and Clyde Hart from 1944 (Progressive PCD-7001) and the Coleman Hawkins Apollo sides with Dizzy, Don Byas, Budd Johnson and Max Roach among others, recorded the same year - the very first bebop recordings (Delmark DD-459). I am now re-invigorated and ready to face the world. I'm just pulling Albert Ayler's Spiritual Unity off the shelf and it's up next. Then perhaps some Gil Evans and Charles Mingus. I feel younger already just thinking about all those magic sounds. Thanks again, for the kind wishes.

Yes, it did have excellent sound and the music was excellent as well. I sure wish I still had my copy which I foolishly sold to a traveling jazz record dealer from California. If I remember correctly he gave me twenty bucks for it. God knows how much he got for it when he sold it.

I have three of the Ellingtons. They're pretty amateurish productions and they're CDRs.

Billy Strayhorn was given the name Swee'Pea by the the guys in the Ellington band who thought he looked like the infant adopted by Popeye in the Thimble Theater comic strip. (Duke called Billy "Strays".) Muggsy Spanier, who was a baseball fanatic, took his name from one of his idols, Muggsy McGraw. There are two stories about how Johnny Hodges came to be called Rabbit. Some say it was because of the altoist's liking for lettuce, others claim it was because in profile he looked a bit rabbit-like. Hodges also had a second nickname - Jeep. This name came from yet another character in the Popeye comic strip. (The Ellingtonians were big comics fans.) Chu Berry got his nickname from his bandmates who marveled at the tenorman's gargantuan appetite. Originally the nickname had been spelled "Chew".

Over the years I met or talked to many jazz musicians who seemed to be really "nice guys". The warmest and friendliest of them all was Clifford Brown. Others who were very open and friendly were Pee Wee Russell, Henry Red Allen, Tommy Flanagan, Ray Bryant, Tommy Potter, Marian McPartland, Lee Konitz, Donald Byrd, Earl Warren, Sir Charles Thompson, Ralph Sutton, Johnny Guarnieri, Harry Sweets Edison, Johnny Griffin, Ralph Sutton, Jaki Byard, Buddy DeFranco, Sammy Price, Terry Gibbs, Scott Hamilton, and Eddie Lockjaw Davis. Oh, and I mustn't forget B.B.King who turned out to be not only a nice guy but a huge jazz fan. I met B.B. in a record store where he was buying everything from Louis Jordan to John Coltrane. I remember helping him find some fairly obscure Ellington albums.

Check page 305 of Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro's Hear Me Talkin' to You, Mark. It was Don Lamond who said Jo Jones played like the wind.

Actually, Lon, I think it was Don Lamond who made that comment back in the 1940s.

King ubu mentions that Jimmy Heath was on parole in 1959 which made traveling a big problem. Yet somehow he made it across the border with Miles to perform in Toronto. Oddly enough, another group that appeared in the same series of concerts that weekend, Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, had to come on stage without their saxophone player. Hank Mobley had been detained at the border for possession of narcotics. So what we heard was the "Art Blakey Quartet" with Lee Morgan. Damned if I can remember who the pianist was. I seem to remember that Jymie Merritt was the bassist.

I heard the music from Kind of Blue performed live a few months before the record was released. In July of 1959 George Wein brought a Newport Festival-type show to Toronto. The concerts ran for three days days - Friday through Sunday - and took place in the grandstand in the Canadian National Exhibition grounds. I can remember looking forward with great anticipation to hearing Davis's classic sextet and was more than a little disappointed to discover that John Coltrane and Bill Evans had both left the band. The personnel consisted of Miles, Cannonball Adderley, Jimmy Heath, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb. Most of the music played during the group's performance was from the forthcoming Kind of Blue album. Cannonball took charge of all the spoken introductions and talked with great enthusiasm about the Kind of Blue material. He made the audience aware of the fact that this music had been quite challenging for the players when they first played it in the recording studio. So I guess those of us who first heard it at this concert realized even before it was played that it was something special.

Thanks, Chuck. That makes sense.

I'd like to know how drummer William Schiopffe's last name should be pronounced.

I was knocked out to read Larry Kart's post this morning and learn that I'm not the only one who can hear the Ben Webster/Pee Wee Russell connection. And if you haven't already heard it Larry you should really check out the Ray Nance CD on the AB Fable label. It's called Ray Nance: The Complete 1940-1949 Non-Ducal Violin Recordings featuring Ben Webster. The catalogue number is ABCD1-014. Ben plays mostly clarinet on this set and damn, does he ever sound like Pee Wee. North Country Distributors has it.

Thanks for the good wishes, guys. Getting older but I've almost convinced myself that it's been worth it. I mean after all I was around to see and hear giants like Armstrong, Ellington, Hawkins, Pres, Bird, Dizzy, Miles, Clifford Brown. Billie Holiday, Ben Webster, Wardell Gray, Tristano, Oscar Pettiford, and Bud Powell live.

As jeffcrom pointed out there are always musicians who can take a tune you really dislike then do things with it that you'd never have thought possible. I'll never forget buying one of Sonny Rollins' Prestige albums (Work Time?) when it first came out back in the fifties. When I got it home I was horrified to discover that Sonny's program included Irving Berlin's There's No Business Like Show Business, a tune I'd always hated. Well, Sonny's interpretation of this hoary standard just blew me away. For days I couldn't stop playing that track over and over. It remains one of my favorite Rollins recordings.

Jim R says he had some LPs pressed by Sparton that "were beautiful". Were they mono or stereo, Jim? My friends and I found that the mono Sparton pressings were usually quite acceptable but the stereo pressings were often terrible. I remember in particular the gorgeous Lucky Thompson/Oscar Pettiford sessions that first appeared on ABC Paramount. The stereo versions were simply unplayable. Quincy Jones's This Is How I Feel About Jazz was the same. It's funny about Emarcy since the pressings on its parent company's label - Mercury - were excellent. I found the early Prestiges OK but by the time people like Eric Dolphy started recording for the company, sometimes on its Status subsidiary, they were really noisy.

Contemporary Records had the best quality of the independents while Capitol and Columbia were the best of the major labels for pressings. Decca was the worst. During the 1950s and '60s a lot of American issues were pressed by other companies here in Canada and usually the pressings were pretty bad. Impulses were manufactured here by a company called Sparton and they were terrible. Atlantics were pressed by London Records and they were equally bad. We were lucky that Riversides, Prestiges, Contemporaries and Blue Notes were imported so we got the U.S. originals - not that they were all that great. Prestige really deteriorated over the years and the Riversides were spotty.