This Day in Jazz

On October 11, 1956, Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic played the old Civic Auditorium in Seattle on its autumn tour: Ella Fitzgerald with the Oscar Peterson Trio, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Gene Krupa’s quartet, a swing septet with Roy Eldridge, Flip Phillips and Illinois Jacquet, and a closing jam with Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt and Stan Getz. A recording was made. It then vanished for more than half a century, until San Francisco jazz fan Bill Carter heard that a container of reel-to-reel tapes was sitting at a rubbish dump in San Rafael, California, and went to look. He salvaged a number of them, including this one. Acrobat issued it in 2011–12 as a two-CD set, Jazz at the Philharmonic: Seattle 1956; Seattle Times critic Paul de Barros called the find a treasure chest from jazz’s golden age. How the tapes ended up in the container remains unexplained in the published accounts.

On October 10, 1969, Manuel “Fess” Manetta died in New Orleans, a week past his 80th birthday. Born across the river in Algiers to a family of brass players, he handled at least six instruments: violin, guitar, piano, cornet, saxophone and trombone. He played in bands with Buddy Bolden, worked as solo pianist at Willie Piazza’s house on Basin Street in Storyville, went on the road with Kid Ory in 1919 and played the riverboats in the 1920s. His party piece was playing trumpet and trombone at once, which he could still manage very late in life; a 1950 photograph shows him doing it with two trumpets. He spent his last four decades mostly teaching, which earned him “Fess,” short for Professor; his pupils included Henry “Red” Allen, Buddie Petit and Emmett Hardy. His own playing finally got recorded in 1957, and those tracks were first released on an LP called Whorehouse Piano.

On October 8, 1979, David Izenzon died of a heart attack in New York, aged 47. He had started on the bass at 24, after singing in a Pittsburgh synagogue, and within a few years was playing in Ornette Coleman’s trio, from the 1962 Town Hall concert through the mid-1960s European tours. Then he changed careers. By the 1970s he held a doctorate and was practicing psychotherapy, and in June 1978 he founded Pot Smokers Anonymous, a nonprofit Manhattan program whose nine-week course had heavy users taper off while learning “emotional recognition skills,” logged under the acronym FLAP: fear, anger, love, pain. That December he spent nearly an hour on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air taking calls about the drug. He had also written a jazz opera, How Music Can Save the World, premiered in 1975. The program outlived him, run by one of its own graduates.

On October 7, 1949, Down Beat ran Dizzy Gillespie’s reply to his old partner under the headline “Bird Wrong; Bop Must Get a Beat: Diz.” A month earlier Charlie Parker had told the same magazine that bop had no roots in jazz, its distinguishing mark being “no continuity of beat, no steady chug-chug.” Gillespie agreed about the beat and drew the opposite conclusion: “Bop is part of jazz, and jazz music is to dance to.” Dancers, he said, were not particular “about whether you’re playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance.” After more than a year of dragging his big band around the country, he was cutting and splicing his book “like you would a movie” to remove the shifts in beat, and called George Shearing the greatest thing to happen to bop that year. Some of the pressure came from his wife Lorraine, a former dancer, who had spent the year circulating among the crowds at one-nighters and reporting which numbers left the dancers unhappy.

On October 6, 1944, Efim Schachmeister died of heart failure in Buenos Aires, aged 50, a long way from the Berlin dance palaces where Deutsche Grammophon had billed him as the “King of all Dance-Violinists.” Born Chaim Chaissowsky in Kiev, he trained at Berlin’s Stern Conservatory, came up through a gypsy-style salon band, and by the mid-1920s was leading a hot dance orchestra at the Hotel Excelsior and the Palais de Danse, moving from ragtime toward jazz; his 1927 “St. Louis Blues” crossed blues phrasing with something closer to the shtetl. As a Jew and a jazzman he was doubly unwelcome after 1933. He went to Luxembourg, then Argentina, playing nightclubs and stints in La Paz and Lima, often without steady income. Meanwhile the Nazis’ Lexikon der Juden in der Musik, a blacklist, conceded he had been a “defining” jazz bandleader of the Weimar years. After the war his widow pursued West German compensation for years and was repeatedly refused on bureaucratic grounds.

On October 5, 1951, Miles Davis took a sextet into Apex Studio in New York for Prestige, and the date was built for a new medium. With the 10-inch LP in view, nobody had to stop at three minutes: every track ran past five, and “Bluing” stretched to nearly nine. The alto chair went to Jackie McLean, a 20-year-old from Harlem making his first record, alongside the young Sonny Rollins. McLean’s ordeal had an audience. Charlie Parker, one of McLean’s boyhood mentors, spent the session in the engineering booth, and Charles Mingus came along too, reportedly playing uncredited bass on one track. Parker’s presence is said to have rattled the newcomer. Then came the label copy: McLean’s own line on the changes of “Sweet Georgia Brown” came out as “Dig,” composed by Miles Davis. When Davis recorded it again for Blue Note the following May, it was called “Donna” and credited to McLean. McLean later said suing over it simply wasn’t worth the money.

On October 4, 1944, Billie Holiday cut her first record for Decca, and it nearly didn’t start. Milt Gabler had signed her that August, and for the song she wanted, “Lover Man,” she asked him for strings — the treatment reserved for singers like Frank Sinatra, not for jazz vocalists working with six pieces. “I went on my knees to him,” she later said. Gabler gave in. When Holiday walked into the session and saw the string section Toots Camarata had assembled, she turned around and walked straight back out; Camarata said she was simply overwhelmed. She came back. The song itself had waited out the musicians’ union recording ban: Holiday said Jimmy Davis wrote it while in the Army, brought it straight to her, and shipped out to Europe, and she grumbled that co-writer Ram Ramirez got all the credit. Released as Decca 23391, it reached No. 5 R&B and No. 16 pop, one of her biggest hits.

The first Monterey Jazz Festival opened on October 3, 1958, at the Monterey County Fairgrounds, but it had to pass an audition first. Disc jockey Jimmy Lyons, planning the event with the San Francisco Chronicle critic Ralph J. Gleason, brought the Dave Brubeck Quartet to play for the Monterey City Council before it voted on the festival’s permits. It voted yes. Local merchants had their own motive: the sardines that had kept Cannery Row working had collapsed a decade earlier, and the town needed tourists. Lyons raised start-up money by asking for $100 donations. Opening night, a chilly Friday, began with Dizzy Gillespie playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” unaccompanied and ended with Louis Armstrong’s All-Stars in front of about 5,000 people. Gillespie, emceeing, introduced Armstrong as “the king” and, by one account, knelt and kissed his hand. Armstrong, by Ricky Riccardi’s ear, spent the 80-minute set fighting his own chops.

On October 2, 1925, La Revue Nègre opened at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, a house its managers, Rolf de Maré and André Daven, hoped a real African American show might rescue from postwar money troubles. The troupe, assembled in New York by the Chicago-born socialite Caroline Dudley Reagan, came with a band led from the piano by Claude Hopkins, Sidney Bechet on clarinet, and a show built around the blues singer Maud de Forest. In rehearsal the French side decided it was too noisy, too long, inelegant and — their verdict — not black enough. Jacques Charles of the Moulin Rouge was brought in to rearrange it; de Forest’s part was reportedly trimmed days before the premiere, and a chorus dancer named Josephine Baker was moved to the end of the bill for a “Danse sauvage.” Baker soon replaced de Forest as the lead. By February 1926 she had broken her contract to headline at the Folies Bergère.

On October 1, 1964, the trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon opened the “October Revolution in Jazz” at the Cellar Café, 251 West 91st Street — a basement coffee shop run by the filmmaker Peter Sabino that had opened that February and mostly served poetry, films and folk music to Columbia students. Dixon booked the four days himself, reportedly paying for it in unpaid rent and long-distance calls. The bill ran from four in the afternoon to midnight and took in Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley, Jimmy Giuffre, Archie Shepp, Roswell Rudd, John Tchicai, Mike Mantler and Burton Greene, with panel discussions afterward on topics such as “The Economics of Jazz.” By one count some 700 people came, far more than the room held. Within weeks the organizers had formed the Jazz Composers Guild, announcing that their music would “no longer remain a part of the ‘underground’ scene.” The Guild fell apart the following year.

On September 30, 1946, the State of Texas released John “Jack” Purvis from prison for the last time. The Kokomo, Indiana, trumpeter had been one of the earliest players to take up Louis Armstrong’s innovations, recording with Hal Kemp and the Dorsey Brothers and cutting sides under his own name between 1929 and 1935. In 1937, while working as a cook in Texas, he was arrested for his part in an El Paso robbery and sent to Huntsville. There he led the prison band, the Rhythmic Swingsters, from the piano, and in 1938 it broadcast regularly over WBAP. A conditional pardon came in August 1940; he broke parole almost at once and served six more years. (One account puts his final release in May 1947.) Afterward he worked as a chef, a carpenter, a pilot and a radio repairman, and died in San Francisco in 1962, of liver disease or gas depending on whom you believe. The cornetist Jim Goodwin later said he had met and talked with him around 1968.

On September 29, 1950, DuMont aired the last installment of The Hazel Scott Show, fifteen minutes at 7:45 on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings in which the Trinidad-born pianist played and sang more or less whatever she pleased. It had premiered on July 3 as the first network series hosted by a Black American, and Variety found it “a neat little show.” The trouble had started eleven days before the premiere, when her name appeared in Red Channels, the blacklisters’ directory of alleged Communist sympathizers. Against the objections of her husband, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Scott volunteered to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and on September 22 she did, denying she had ever knowingly served the Party or its fronts. It did not help. With no sponsor willing to touch the show, DuMont pulled it a week later. Its replacement lasted seven weeks. No episode of Scott’s is known to survive.

On September 28, 1957, Lyle Ritz, 27, sat down in a Los Angeles studio for the second of his sessions for Verve — playing the ukulele. The contract was an accident. Ritz had once demonstrated instruments at the Southern California Music Company, and on a visit to his old workplace, played a few tunes at his colleagues’ urging without noticing Barney Kessel, then scouting talent for Verve, standing within earshot. That day he taped four standards, including “Moonlight in Vermont” and “How About You,” the tune the LP borrowed its pun from. How About Uke? made no impression on the mainland, so Ritz went back to the bass and spent the 1960s and ’70s as a Wrecking Crew regular, on records from the Righteous Brothers to Pet Sounds. In Hawaii, meanwhile, the album had become scripture for a generation of players. When Roy Sakuma tracked him down in the mid-1980s with a festival invitation, Ritz had no idea.

On September 27, 1955, three young Ohioans — tenor saxophonist Chuz Alfred, trombonist Ola Hanson and pianist Chuck Lee — walked into Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in Hackensack to make their first LP for Savoy. Their own bassist and drummer, Paul Holt and Jim Kirwan, had sat the date out, figuring they needed more experience, so the label filled in with Vinnie Burke and Kenny Clarke. By the band’s later account, the next surprise came at the door: Savoy would not pay ASCAP or BMI royalties, so they would have to invent their material on the spot. Apart from “Chuz Duz,” a friend’s tune they had never played, everything was said to be made up in three hours, one take each. Memory is not airtight: the record also includes Vernon Duke’s “I Can’t Get Started.” Savoy issued it in January 1956 as “Jazz Young Blood.” Alfred went home, sold real estate by day and played by night until his death in 2018.

On September 25, 1917, W.C. Handy — 43 years old, already the best-known composer of published blues, and only now making his first records — closed a five-day Columbia run in New York with his Orchestra of Memphis. The last day’s work included a cover of “Livery Stable Blues,” the Original Dixieland Jass Band’s barnyard novelty, in which the horns neigh, crow and moo, cut for Victor seven months earlier. Handy had reason to care who owned a tune: he had sold the rights to his own “Memphis Blues” for $50 and later complained bitterly that he had been cheated. This one was about to be settled less happily for everyone. Nick LaRocca and his ex-bandmates Alcide Nunez and Ray Lopez were suing each other over its authorship in Chicago federal court, and within three weeks Judge George A. Carpenter threw out both claims, calling the piece “an old negro melody” known for many years. Columbia issued Handy’s version on A2419 regardless.

On September 24, 1931, Don Redman took his newly formed orchestra into a New York studio for its first session under his own name. He had spent the 1920s as jazz’s first great arranger — Fletcher Henderson’s chief writer, then musical director of McKinney’s Cotton Pickers — and had just left to front his own band at Connie’s Inn. The tune he chose was his own: “Chant of the Weed,” an instrumental built on the whole-tone scale, the six-note ladder the impressionists liked and jazz had barely touched. There are no lyrics, so the title carries the whole drug reference, which is presumably the point. Brunswick issued it on 6211 and it reached No. 15 that December. Redman kept it as his theme for the band’s whole life, remaking it in January 1940, the year he broke the orchestra up. Discographies still cannot agree whether it is “Chant of the Weed,” “Chant of the Weeds” or “Song of the Weeds.”

On September 22, 1954, Thelonious Monk turned up in Hackensack, New Jersey, at a studio that was really Rudy Van Gelder’s parents’ living room, and cut four sides for Prestige with Percy Heath and Art Blakey. His New York cabaret card had been revoked in 1951 over a narcotics charge and would not be restored until 1957; through those six years he could barely take a paying job in the city. Two of the tunes were his own — “Work” and “Nutty.” The third he wrote on the spot in the studio, a B-flat blues quoting a phrase from Charlie Shavers’ “Pastel Blue.” He called it “Blue Monk,” and went on to record it more than anything else he composed. Then Heath and Blakey laid out and he played the fourth alone: “Just a Gigolo,” a 1928 Viennese tango about a broke ex-hussar reduced to dancing for hire. He returned to it, alone again, eight years later on his first Columbia album.

On September 17, 1957, eight musicians assembled at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack to record six tunes for a leader who played nothing at all. A.K. Salim — born Albert Atkinson in Chattanooga in 1922, a DuSable High School classmate of Gene Ammons — had been an alto saxophonist until a jaw injury ended his playing in 1943. He arranged instead, for Lucky Millinder, Cab Calloway, Jimmie Lunceford, Lionel Hampton and Count Basie, then quit music altogether for seven years in real estate, returning only in 1956. Savoy promptly handed him a band most leaders would envy: Kenny Dorham, Buster Cooper, Johnny Griffin, Pepper Adams, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Max Roach, and Chino Pozo on congas. Every title cut that afternoon was Salim's own; his credit on the sleeve reads arranger and director. He wrote the whole of Pretty for the People and played not one note of it.

On September 16, 1950, Dizzy Gillespie took a sextet into a New York studio for Prestige — a label not yet two years old, the session logged at matrix numbers 108 through 111 — with Jimmy Heath on alto, Milt Jackson doubling vibes and piano, Percy Heath on bass and Joe Harris on drums. The tenor chair went to Jimmy Oliver, a Philadelphian who spent his career declining the road; by his own account, his family and a clear-eyed fear of the drugs killing his contemporaries kept him home. The standard account has him deputising for an ill John Coltrane, then in Gillespie’s band and mid-way through his own switch from alto to tenor. Four titles were cut. “She’s Gone Again” carries Oliver’s solo — one of the very few recordings he is known to have made, and one some discographers still refuse to credit him with, filing “Jimmy Oliver” as a pseudonym for Seldon Powell.

On September 15, 1953, eight musicians met at the Europa Film studio in Stockholm and cut a record their employer had expressly forbidden. Clifford Brown, 22, and Art Farmer were in town with Lionel Hampton’s orchestra, midway through a European tour under a standing order: no outside recordings. Hampton’s sidemen ignored it repeatedly — Paris followed a fortnight later — and when he found out he threatened to fire Brown and to complain to the musicians’ union. The Stockholm date set the two Americans against a Swedish front line of Arne Domnérus, Lars Gullin, Åke Persson and Bengt Hallberg, and handed the charts to the band’s 20-year-old trumpeter-arranger, Quincy Jones. Four titles were taped. One of them, “Stockholm Sweetnin’,” became a standard and, by Jones’s own account, the turning point of his career. Brown was dead within three years; Prestige gathered the sides onto a posthumous Memorial.

On September 14, 1984, Sid Torin died of heart and lung failure at the Miami Heart Institute — aged 72, said the wire obituary; 74, if his December 1909 birthdate is right. As Symphony Sid he is credited as the first disc jockey to put bebop on American radio, broadcasting live from the Royal Roost and then Birdland over a network one obituary put at thirty-eight states, and selling clothing shops between choruses: “If you got eyes to be the sharpest, take a tip from Old Daddy Sid.” Lester Young wrote him a theme tune, “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid,” and King Pleasure later put words to it. Police raided his apartment for marijuana in 1948; the trial ended in a mistrial. When he turned to Latin and Afro-Cuban music in the late 1950s, some listeners rechristened him the Jazz Traitor. He spent his last twelve years fishing off Islamorada, telling stories about Bird and Prez that nobody thought to record.

On September 13, 1945, a 23-year-old drummer born Ioannis Alexandres Veliotes — the son of Greek immigrants, who had decided as a kid that “if our society dictated that one had to be black or white, I would be black” — led his first record date, for the small Los Angeles label Excelsior. The sixteen-piece band was absurdly well stocked for an unknown: Paul Quinichette on tenor, Bill Doggett at the piano, Henry Coker on trombone, Curtis Counce on bass, Jimmy Rushing singing the blues. Four titles were cut and one was never issued. The one that sold was an instrumental parked on a B-side, “Harlem Nocturne,” carried by the alto of a teenaged René Bloch. Earle Hagen had written it in 1939, aged 20, as a tribute to Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges; he is better remembered for whistling the theme to The Andy Griffith Show. It made Johnny Otis's name.

On September 12, 1926, at 9:15 p.m., Edmund Thornton Jenkins died at the Hôpital Tenon in Paris, aged 32, after two months on the ward — and the record cannot say of what. The French registration left the cause blank. American consular files said peritonitis; a doctor who saw him suspected cancer of the throat; his family heard he had fallen from his bed and lain there until pneumonia took hold; a friend told the Pittsburgh Courier it was an ulcerated stomach. Jenkins was the son of the Charleston minister whose orphanage bands fed Jabbo Smith, Cat Anderson, Gus Aiken and Tommy Benford into jazz. He had sailed to London with one of them in 1914, stayed seven years at the Royal Academy of Music collecting its composition prizes, and in December 1919 brought his own Folk Rhapsody on Black American themes into Wigmore Hall — more than four years before Rhapsody in Blue. America first heard the piece in 1996.

On September 11, 1939, Lionel Hampton spent an afternoon in RCA Victor's New York studio with a band no single label could have assembled on its own. His Victor deal let him call in players signed elsewhere and working for other leaders, and he used it: Benny Carter on alto, and behind him Coleman Hawkins, Chu Berry and Ben Webster — three of the most formidable tenor saxophonists alive — in one section. Charlie Christian, newly hired by Benny Goodman and still weeks away from his first studio date with him, sat in the rhythm section on guitar. The remaining horn belonged to a 21-year-old nobody had much reason to notice yet: Dizzy Gillespie, whose muted solo on “Hot Mallets” — one of four titles cut that day — is routinely described as the first modern-jazz solo on record. Hawkins made “Body and Soul” a month later. Chu Berry was dead in a car within two years.

On September 10, 1957, John Jenkins brought a sextet into Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack — Donald Byrd, Curtis Fuller, Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins, Art Taylor — and cut five titles for Regent, Savoy's budget subsidiary, issued as Jazz Eyes. He was 26, and it was the last session he ever led. The Chicago altoist had reached New York that spring and recorded almost without pause from May to November: four albums under his own name or shared, then two sideman dates with Wilbur Ware. Then nothing, for thirty-three years. Jenkins worked as a messenger, dabbled in jewelry, and sold brass objects at street fairs; after 1983 he practiced again and played on street corners. His one return to a studio was a chair in Clifford Jordan's big band in December 1990, with no solos. Savoy later reissued the record as Star Eyes under Byrd's more saleable name.

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.