Joe Williams and Ben Webster???!!!

[Dan Gould]

Marty mentioning Alan's Jazzamataz site sent me over there for the first time this year, and I was stunned to see this listed:

Joe Williams with Ben Webster - Havin' A Good Time (Hyena) Feb 22

— live date from 1964 discovered in the Hamilton College Jazz Archive; only known club performance of the two musicians; recorded at Pio's Lodge in Providence, RI, with the rhythm section of Junior Mance, Bob Cranshaw and Mickey Roker.

Needless to say, I jumped all over this one. Anyone else wanting to hear Joe and Ben for the only known date they played together?

[JSngry]

WELL now!

[ghost of miles]

Yeah, I fired that listing off to our fulltime jazz DJ last week when I saw it--Hyena is Joel Dorn's latest outfit, I believe. Hoping we can get a promo for the station.

[Joe]

COmpletely under my radar.

So, we have this release to add to the material on this one:

http://www.jazzrecords.com/enja/2038.htm

So, what's the story with these "Pio's tapes"?

[RDK]

http://www.hyenarecords.com/main.htm

I gotta say, Dorn sounds like a mighty cool cat...

[Man with the Golden Arm]

http://www.hyenarecords.com/main.htm

I gotta say, Dorn sounds like a mighty cool cat...

While there stream up that Roomful of Blues album! Damn that was one fine band in them early years with Duke.

[Tom in RI]

Don't know the deal with this, sure I will want to hear it. I remember that former RI resident Mike Renzi claimed to be the pianist on the Live at Pio's date highlighted in Joe's post.

[makpjazz57]

http://www.hyenarecords.com/main.htm

I gotta say, Dorn sounds like a mighty cool cat...

Dorn is! I had the pleasure of meeting him about 3 weeka ago at the Jazz Standard in NYC - talented guy and a real jazz fan. I have the Joe Williams Cd (posted to the "What are you listening to" thread on 2/24 - date I rec'd the CD). Priceless - despite the bad weather, low turnout at the gig, sounds like Joe and the band are having a ball. The liner notes are a great read, as Dorn speaks of his personal experiences with Williams. This CD is a "must have," as it is yet another important part of jazz history.

There's always something special about live recordings when everything comes together and the musicians are having fun. For those of us not old enough to have the good fortune of walking into Minton's, Birdland, The Royal Roost, etc., we at least get to hear what it was like, if not experience it live and in person!

Marla

[Lazaro Vega]

Playing it right now on the radio.....

[MartyJazz]

Marty mentioning Alan's Jazzamataz site sent me over there for the first time this year, and I was stunned to see this listed:

Joe Williams with Ben Webster - Havin' A Good Time (Hyena) Feb 22

— live date from 1964 discovered in the Hamilton College Jazz Archive; only known club performance of the two musicians; recorded at Pio's Lodge in Providence, RI, with the rhythm section of Junior Mance, Bob Cranshaw and Mickey Roker.

Needless to say, I jumped all over this one. Anyone else wanting to hear Joe and Ben for the only known date they played together?

Definitely sounds interesting. I know that I really like the meeting of Joe with Hawk and Clark Terry at Newport '63 which RCA fortunately captured. Their version of "April in Paris" knocks me out every time. Joe in front of a quartet with Ben as the sole horn should hopefully be as good.

[Tom in RI]

This appeared in today's Providence Journal with a little more info on this date:

Magic moment in Rhode Island jazz history surfaces on CD

01:00 AM EST on Sunday, March 20, 2005

BY KEN FRANCKLING

Special to The Journal

Back in the winter of 1963-'64, jazz singer Joe Williams and his trio were playing a weeklong engagement at a North Providence lounge called Pio's. There was a sparse crowd one particular night because a blizzard had hit town.

Unbeknownst to Williams, tenor saxophone great Ben Webster happened to be in town for a few days. Webster was waiting inside Pio's when Williams and the other musicians arrived at the club that night. Without any sort of rehearsal or planning, Webster sat in with Williams -- and perhaps for a night or two after that.

Williams' trio at the time featured pianist Junior Mance, bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Mickey Roker.

"We just walked in; there he was," Mance, now 76, recalled in a recent phone interview from his home in New York City. "That's when I met Ben, and got to know him well over the next few days and nights. It was a ball. It was evident we were having a great time."

The music they made that first night -- 41 years ago -- has surfaced on one of this year's surprise jazz CD releases. Williams' Havin' a Good Time, on veteran New York jazz producer Joel Dorn's newest label, Hyena, is startling not only for its superb quality, but for the fact that it exists at all.

The Webster-Williams crossing of paths in Rhode Island came three years after Williams had left the swinging Count Basie Orchestra to go out on his own. And it came just a few months before Webster would move to Europe in search of a more comfortable climate in the twilight of his career.

Webster was one of the giants among the first generation of jazz saxophonists, along with Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young. From the 1930s on, he worked in the Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington bands, and after 1943 he fronted his own small groups and worked as a freelance soloist.

By the mid-'60s, many major jazz figures were finding Europe more appealing, as the rock music revolution put jazz on the ropes in the United States.

Webster died in 1973 and Pio's, the club on Woonasquatucket Avenue that in the mid-1960s hosted many nationally known jazz headliners, including saxophonist Cannonball Adderley and singer Chris Connor, closed, like so many Rhode Island jazz venues.

After Williams died in 1999, his widow, Jillean Williams, donated much of his memorabilia to the Jazz Archive at Hamilton College, in Clinton, N.Y. That trove included some 90 tapes that Williams had been given, often of his own performances.

As he reviewed the many tapes, Hamilton's jazz archive director, Monk Rowe, said the Pio's tape stood out.

"I knew this was a specialty item, and people ought to hear this," Rowe said. "You can feel like what it felt like to be in that club that night."

Rowe took several of the tapes to New York City for Dorn to hear. Dorn said he selected this particular recording for release because he was a huge fan of both Webster and Williams.

"When you get world-class musicians together, they are capable of making magic on the spot," Dorn said. "That's what appealed to me about this tape. It's the magic of jazz.

"Ben had performed with Joe at Newport in an all-star group, and took some isolated solos on a few Joe Williams recordings. But they never had toured or appeared together in this sort of setting, before or since. Joe was at the top of his game and had that great band. He was out there making his initial statement."

"I have in storage thousands of types like this," Dorn added. "But there are so many roadblocks to get to this point. Most of them will never see the light of day. It is just uneconomical to do it."

So what was Ben Webster doing in Rhode Island that week in 1964? That part of the puzzle was solved by Thomas V. di Pietro, a Providence native who is a retired sound engineer and producer. He ran a New York rehearsal and recording studio called Upsurge from the early 1960s through about 1974; he said he has now lived abroad for more than 25 years, primarily in Europe.

"Ben was staying at my house in Providence for a few days when I came up to visit my sister," di Pietro, 81, said by telephone. "We went to hear Joe -- and Ben brought his horn. He sat in for a couple of nights. He wasn't paid for it.

"I had a cheap tape recorder and some mikes with me. The tape was a thing for us, for the guys.

"I gave a copy to Ben and to Joe. I must have given my own copy away to a friend. I don't have it anymore."

Joe Williams featuring Ben Webster

Havin' a Good Time (Hyena)

This CD is wonderful for the mere fact that it exists, but it is extraordinary because it captures the warmth and energy only found in the intimacy of a live club performance -- on those rare dates when all of the musicians and the audience are truly in sync.

Webster sat in with the band on 10 of the 12 tunes that night, most of which were popular standards out of Williams' touring repertoire. They include "Just a Sittin' and a Rockin,' " "Alone Together," "I'm Through With Love," "A Hundred Years From Today," Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin' " and "Honeysuckle Rose" (the latter gets a rousing arrangement), and the Williams staple "All Right, OK, You Win."

With a blizzard going on outside, it was a wonder anyone showed up at all, let alone Webster and Williams' band. At one point during the evening, someone asked Williams to sing the classic Bob Haymes-Alan Brandt pop standard "That's All."

Williams was reluctant, saying he couldn't remember one verse, but added: "If anybody comes out on a night like this, and wants to hear something this pretty, we must try it."

He got it right, nailing the problem lyric. Webster added a horn solo that showed why he was considered one of greatest tenor sax balladeers.

As the night ended, Williams thanked the audience and said: "You may go outside and hitch up your dogsleds now."

[mjzee]

This is from today's Wall St Journal:

A Great Night in Providence for Jazz and Snow

By NAT HENTOFF

March 30, 2005; Page D12

Once in a while, a jazz person has told me of an unexpected and exceptional listening experience at a jazz club somewhere. Eagerly I always ask, "Was there a tape recorder?" Almost invariably, the rueful answer is: "No." But a wondrous exception, finally released in February on the Hyena label, is "Joe Williams/Havin' a Good Time! Featuring Ben Webster."

As Junior Mance, the pianist on the 1964 gig at Pio's, a club in Providence, R.I., tells the story: "In the middle of the week we were there, the city got hit with a blizzard. Enough people showed up, so Joe had to perform. When Joe and the guys got there, to their surprise, they found Ben Webster, saxophone in hand, sitting in a corner. They didn't know he was in town. Ben asked if he could sit in."

What jazz leader would refuse? Mr. Webster, a large, imposing, sometimes bristling man, could swing a military band -- as he proved in his years with the nonbelligerent Duke Ellington. But on ballads he could be as tender as the memory of a first love, as he also demonstrated with Duke.

Mr. Webster gave me a lifetime credo when I was quite young. Sitting with me between sets at a jazz club in Boston, he said -- after vainly trying to get a local rhythm section into a swinging groove -- "Remember, if the rhythm section ain't making it, go for yourself!" That advice has kept me going in many situations where I had to listen to my own drum to be myself.

Mr. Williams became internationally acclaimed as a celebrator of the blues with Count Basie's big band; but then, on his own with a small combo, he was even more warmly, intimately compelling in small clubs.

That winter in Providence, with a rhythm section that delighted Ben, both Mr. Webster and Mr. Williams showed, as Junior Mance says, "what jazz is really about. It's what happens when world-class players get together and do what cats have been doing for decades -- make magic on the spot. Thank God somebody was runnin' a tape."

From "Kansas City Blues" and Joe Williams's hit with Mr. Basie, "Alright, OK. You Win," to such luminous, sensuous ballads as "That's All" and "A Hundred Years From Today," Messrs. Williams and Webster indeed gave the hardy souls who braved the blizzard that night a quintessential sense of what jazz is all about as Mr. Mance, bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Mickey Roker kept the time flowing.

What Mr. Mance calls the "magic" here comes from jazz players' ability to listen, instantaneously and deeply, to each other. During an interview with Terry Gross on National Public Radio's "Fresh Air" long ago, Mr. Williams told of how he composed a performance like the one so memorably illuminated in this recording of that night: "As a soloist, you don't get in the way of the music itself. You give everybody a chance to contribute. You mustn't have anybody...back there feeling, 'My part is not important.' All the parts are important....I have to make room so all the parts are heard the way they want it to be heard." As he also noted, "The music will swing if you try not to get in the way."

This time capsule of the recording in Providence that is the essence of jazz was opened by Monk Rowe, director of the Hamilton College Jazz Archive in Clinton, N.Y. (www.hamilton.edu/academics/music/jazzarchive/1), an invaluable collection of more than 250 videotaped interviews of musicians and singers. These conversations are on VHS, DVD and audiocassette, and have been transcribed.

There is an interview, made solely for the collection, with Joe Williams; and among the material donated by his estate is Mr. Williams's private collection of live open-reel recordings. This tape from the winter night in 1964 was among them. Monk Rowe brought the tape to Joel Dorn, a jazz record producer, broadcaster, raconteur, and all-around jazz insider for nearly 40 years. I keep urging him to write his memoirs.

In the notes for the Joe Williams-Ben Webster CD on the Hyena label (hyenarecords.com2), a Dorn record company, Monk Rowe says: "I was sure I had found the right producer when Joel Dorn leapt out of his seat, and exclaimed, 'Do you know what you got here?'"

When Mr. Dorn sent me the recording, I was brought back to a night in Mr. Williams's dressing room at a small club in New York where he had just finished a set. As usual, he had been totally involved with the music -- and the audience. We were talking about musicians we had both known over the years who had permanently left the scene, some of them by burning the candle at both ends. Joe pointed at me, and said, "You and I are survivors!" I felt honored to be included as some kind of jazz peer, though I can't play anything but an electric typewriter.

In 1999, at 81, Joe Williams died in Las Vegas. Many of his recordings survive, but whenever I want to hear Joe again, this is the one I'll put on first.

What Mr. Williams was all about was told the day after he died on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" by its then, and now much missed, host, Bob Edwards. He recalled going to hear Joe in a small Maryland club on the night of a Muhammad Ali fight on television: "Williams performed in front of just three couples, but he sang as if it was a packed house in Vegas." Joe was later asked by Mr. Edwards, "With only three couples in the room, why didn't you come down with laryngitis?"

"No," Joe said, "the only real reward is when you've done the best you could. It isn't money all the time."

[Dan Gould]

I finally got a chance to hear this, and everyone should get this immediately. I think it is sure to make a helluva lot of year end lists.

In fact, between this and my own recent find that rescued some forgotten music, I'd safely say this is much better and more historically significant, too.