The Night Jazz at the Philharmonic Played Seattle, and a Tape of It Waited in a Container at a Dump

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.