This Day in Jazz

On September 9, 1958, Columbia Records threw itself a party in the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel to toast the health of its jazz division, and booked the entertainment off its own roster: Duke Ellington's orchestra, the Buck Clayton Quartet, Jimmy Rushing, Billie Holiday — ten months from her death — and the Miles Davis Sextet, with John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb, six months before they made Kind of Blue. A remote crew taped all of it anyway; producer Irving Townsend's liner note later explained they did so “in case it never happened again.” Most of the musicians had no idea. Columbia then sat on the tapes for fifteen years, issued them in 1973 as Jazz at the Plaza Vols. I and II, and, by Bill Evans's account, paid the surviving players at 1958 scale. Townsend's notes put the party in the wrong room and credited the wrong drummer.

On September 8, 1960, Oscar Pettiford died at Frederiksberg Hospital in Copenhagen, aged 37, of what doctors called a virus closely related to polio — though at least one account instead blames complications from a car crash two years earlier. He had moved to Denmark in 1958 and never came back. Pettiford's stranger bequest to jazz was the cello, and he arrived at it twice by accident. The first time was a gag on Woody Herman in the late 1940s: he walked offstage in the middle of his bass solo and returned to the bandstand carrying the wrong instrument. The second time he meant it. In 1949 he broke his arm, found the bass unplayable, borrowed a friend's cello, tuned it in fourths an octave above the bass, and worked through his convalescence with his arm in a sling. He was recording on it by 1950. His final studio date, cut in Copenhagen two months before he died, was titled My Little Cello.

On September 7, 1965, Hasaan Ibn Ali went back into Atlantic Studios in New York to finish a quartet session begun two weeks earlier — Odean Pope on tenor, Art Davis on bass, Kalil Madi on drums. It should have been the Philadelphia pianist's second record. Instead he was imprisoned on a drug charge not long after, Atlantic shelved the tapes, and in 1978 the masters burned in the label's warehouse fire at Long Branch, New Jersey. Ibn Ali died in 1980 having released exactly one album in his lifetime. That was the end of it until 2017, when a tape copy of the session's reference acetates surfaced. Seven of the eight titles were intact, and Omnivore issued them in 2021 as Metaphysics: The Lost Atlantic Album — fifty-six years late and one track short, by a man Pope credited with teaching nearly every important musician Philadelphia produced in that era, McCoy Tyner included.

On September 6, 1961, Carmen McRae stood in front of the Dave Brubeck Trio at Basin Street East in New York and sang a set of Brubeck tunes fitted with words by Iola Brubeck — Dave's wife, and the household lyricist. Ten of those performances became Columbia's Take Five: Recorded Live at Basin Street East. The title track was not one of them. “Take Five” — the first known vocal recording of Paul Desmond's tune, and the reason most people bought the record — was cut in a New York studio on December 15, with Desmond, who had not been at the club at all; “Easy as You Go” followed on the 19th. Discographies note both were issued with echo and applause dubbed on to match the room. The instrumental, meanwhile, was still on its way up: it reached No. 25 on the Hot 100 about a month after the Basin Street night.

On September 5, 1950, Al Killian — the trumpeter Gunther Schuller called the greatest high-note lead man of the late swing era — was shot dead in his Los Angeles apartment by his landlord, in a dispute over money that had nothing to do with music. Killian was 33. He'd spent fifteen years anchoring brass sections for Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, and Norman Granz's Jazz at the Philharmonic before joining Duke Ellington's orchestra in 1947, where his stratospheric range was distinctive enough that Ellington wrote a piece named directly after him: "Killian's Lick." A journeyman who never led his own record date, he left behind a tune still credited to Ellington's book — and a death stranger and more senseless than almost anything else in the jazz history books.