Columbia Taped Its Own Office Party, Then Paid the Band Fifteen Years Late

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.