Miles Davis Quintet Live At The 1963 Monterey Jazz Festival (HQ)

A Ferrari for Miles by Jimmy Lyons

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

We continue our celebration of the Monterey Jazz Festival - now entering its 64th year as the longest continuous Jazz Festival -  with this anecdote from the “Jimmy Reminiscing” Dizzy, Duke, The Count and Me: The Story of the Monterey Jazz Festival by Jimmy Lyons and Ira Kamin, a wonderful collection of articles, vignettes and remembrances about one of of the great cultural events in the USA - the annual celebration of American Contemporary Music in one of the country’s most beautiful settings.

Accompanying the writings are a collection of drawings by the renown illustrator David Stone Martin who designed many of the iconic album covers for the Clef Norgan and Verve LPs in the 1950s, as we as, many photographs by Tom Copi, Jim Marshall, Veryl Oakland and a host of others.

A Ferrari in Monterey

“I have known Miles Davis since he was seventeen years old, back in '46 or '45, I guess, when he was playing third trumpet with Benny Carter's band. I bought him his first drink. There was a party for Duke Ellington out in Beverly Hills and Oscar Pettiford and I were the bartenders. Okay. So Oscar and I gave this kid a drink, the first drink he'd ever had, he says.

In the ensuing years I got to know Miles very well. I became very fond of the way he played and very fond of the guy, in spite of his irascibility. Miles was Miles. He came from a well-to-do family in St. Louis, a dentist's son or a doctor's son. He had a very good life. Miles, if you will, was a spoiled kid. But he was a good player and I loved the way he played. When Bird came through St. Louis he heard this kid play and he said, "You better leave town, kid, because you play too good to stick around here."

So the years went by. Pretty soon Miles played the old Blackhawk out here. For five years I said, "Miles, come play for me."

"Oh, who wants to play any dumb old festival? I can play any festival I want."

"Miles, come play mine.  You're my friend."

"No, I'm gonna be in France. Can't do it."

One time I said, "Come on, come down to Monterey. It's a beautiful country. You've never been there, you've never taken time off to relax a little bit. You're a New York kid. Don't sit around and fight with Columbia and have them buy you more apartment buildings in New York City to pay you off. 

You'll enjoy the sunshine."

He looked at me and said, "You need the sunshine more than me."

Next year he came back to Blackhawk. We were standing outside. He said to me in that gravelly voice, "When's that damn festival?"

"September. I've been asking you for five years. You wanna play?"

"I don't know. Maybe I wanna play it. I'll call you."

Miles called. He said, "I'll play it."

So Miles flew down to Monterey. It was in 1962. He called New York and had them fly his Ferrari out. He had the time of his life, hanging out with everybody. He came out and played a marvelous set. Later he came roaring up from the bar. He had been hanging out with Dizzy and Harry James. I said to him, "You want me to give the money to Benny (Benny Shapiro, his manager at the time)?"

"No, give it to me. I need it."

So I gave him $2,500 in cash. My wife was standing there and Miles took the money, folded it up and shoved it down her bosom. "Keep it for me; I'll pick it up later."

He came back at three in the morning, looking for his money. He thought he'd lost it.

That was Friday night. He hung around for the whole Festival. On Sunday night, Dizzy walked out on stage without a trumpet. I didn't know what had happened. Then Harry James and Miles Davis walked out with a pillow and handed Dizzy his trumpet on the pillow: Harry and Miles bringing out the master's trumpet.”

"The Rhythm, Romance, and Joy" of Erroll Garner by John Edward Hasse

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Born 100 years ago, the jazz pianist created an exuberant, one-of-a-kind style that continues to garner followers.

The following appeared in the June 17, 2021, print edition of The Wall Street Journal as 'Erroll Garner at 100.'

“This week marks the centennial of pianist and composer Erroll Garner, one of the most visible and beloved American pianists of the 1950s and 1960s. A joyful, exuberant and inventive artist, he attracted a large international following of listeners smitten with his readily accessible sound.

Born into a musical family in Pittsburgh, by age 10 he was part of a kid group on radio. Entirely self-taught, Garner joined a line of master jazz pianists associated with that city: Earl “Fatha” Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Billy Strayhorn and Ahmad Jamal. By 1944, Garner was in New York, performing in nightclubs.

Though he never learned to read music, he made no apologies: “Hell, man, nobody can hear you read.” Garner boasted matchless musical memory: He could play a piece after a single listen. Though his stature was diminutive—he would sit on phone books to reach keyboard height—his fingers were long and his handspan wide.

Garner shaped a signature style unlike any other. His ambidexterity and stunning sense of time enabled him not only to render and develop different rhythms in each hand, but also to play his two hands out of sync with one another. Garner often lagged his right hand slightly behind the swinging beat.

Concertizing with his preferred format of bass and drums, he would teasingly improvise a rhapsodic, free-form introduction—prompting the audience to wonder “What’s this tune?”—and even confound his sidemen. In a 1964 performance for the BBC, Garner roams through stride piano, boogie-woogie and a dash of dissonance—seemingly stumping bassist Eddie Calhoun —until, after 62 seconds, he finally breaks into “Honeysuckle Rose.” Such introductions were miniature spontaneous compositions.

Then with the drive of an engine, he’d strike a steady pulse in the left hand, often strumming guitar-like chords, while his right alternated between percussive single notes, chords, and octaves rendered with dazzling precision. His flying virtuosity suggested a third hand. While his ballads could be as flowery as a romantic garden, in pieces such as “I’ll Remember April” from his celebrated album “Concert by the Sea,” he seemed to be playing not a piano, but a full band, replete with solo lines, comments from the brass section, and full ensemble. “I love fullness in the piano,” Garner said. “I want to make it sound like a big band if I can.” In performances such as “Where or When,” from 1962, he employed the entire keyboard from low to high.

He dramatically varied his volume with split-second timing. In noisy nightclubs, drummer Kelly Martin recalled, Garner would play “softer and softer until finally his hands were actually just above the keyboard.” That would shush the loudmouths.

If you watch him in concert, you see a musician at one with his instrument—an extension of his musical mind and ultra-nimble fingers. Enabled by his spatial sense and muscle memory, while playing he might be smiling at his audience or looking at his sidemen instead of at the keys. You can instantly see and feel the wholesale, infectious joy he radiated to his listeners. Like classical musician Glen Gould and jazzmen Keith Jarrett and Bud Powell, Garner was wont to vocalize as he played piano: He emitted a low sound somewhere between grunting and humming.

To compose his nearly 300 pieces, he’d record them and then have another musician transcribe them. His “Misty” became a standard beloved especially by vocalists, for example Johnny Mathis and, in this 1964 concert, Sarah Vaughan. It played a pivotal role in Clint Eastwood’s thriller “Play Misty for Me.”

From 1955, the ebullient “Concert by the Sea,” recorded live in Carmel, Calif., was a masterstroke of marketing and packaging, the title and album cover evoking freshness and relaxation. You have to take “by the Sea” poetically, for the concert took place neither outside nor adjacent to the Pacific Ocean, but in a school auditorium a half-mile away. The album became a record-breaking bestseller. You can see why in this remarkable reading of the Ellington-Tizol standard “Caravan.”

In 1960, Garner and his longtime manager Martha Glaser sued music giant Columbia Records, charging that it didn’t fulfill its agreement to issue new albums and then released older material without Garner’s consent. The upshot was that Garner and Glaser started their own record company, Octave Records, liberating him from corporate control and striking a blow for artists’ rights.

A heavy smoker, Garner contracted lung cancer and died in 1977 at age 55.

In September, to mark his centennial year, Mack Avenue Music Group and Octave Music will issue “Liberation in Swing,” an impressive boxed set of 189 Garner tracks. An accompanying coffee-table book samples his surprising visual art and offers insightful essays by singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, drummer Terri Lynne Carrington and Thelonious Monk biographer Robin D.G. Kelley. This lavish package looks to be a contender for jazz gift of the year.

A century after his birth, Garner’s originality, stunning technique, masterly but accessible musicianship, and disarming ebullience continue to offer generous rewards to attentive listeners.

—Mr. Hasse is curator emeritus of American music at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. His books include “Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington ” (Da Capo) and “Discover Jazz” (Pearson).

"Bob Willoughby – Jazz: Body and Soul" -Book Review by Chris Parker

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles has posted extensively about the way in which Jazz and Photography resonate. At times, it’s like one almost completes the other.

Here’s a brief review that calls attention to one of our favorite Jazz photographers and his work in an attractive packaged volume which is still available at reasonable prices almost a decade after its publication.

It will also call to your attention the fine work of the London JazzNews which came into existence around the time that Bob Willoughby’s book was published and is still going strong today.

“Book Review: Bob Willoughby – Jazz: Body and Soul June 1, 2012 London JazzNews

Bob Willoughby – Jazz: Body and Soul

(Evans Mitchell Books . £29.95/$39.95

Book Review by Chris Parker

With William Claxton and Ray Avery, photographer Bob Willoughby helped define that ever-popular (if slightly misleadingly named) subgenre ‘cool’ or ‘West Coast’ jazz. He did this by searching out and photographing, in their natural environment (clubs and recording studios), the musicians whose playing inspired him as he worked in his darkroom. Of course, nowadays, Willoughby is chiefly remembered as a photographer of Hollywood stars such as Audrey Hepburn and Judy Garland (his Guardian obituary says he ‘defined the youthful glamour of the 1950s’), but it is clear, from both the photographs in this beautifully produced book and the personal reminiscences that accompany them, that his first love was jazz and the people who produced it.

As Dave Brubeck states, in an insightful Foreword, Willoughby ‘not only had a good eye, he had a keen ear, and seemed to know when to snap at an inspired moment’. Accordingly, Jazz: Body and Soul is not only sumptuously supplied with intimate, revealing portraits of everyone from Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong to Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie and Gerry Mulligan, but also contains some wonderfully honest and unpretentious listener-reactions to the music they created. Hawkins, for instance, is described thus: ‘[his] breathy syrup of tone took classic songs to another realm’; Billy Eckstine was ‘a singer [who] really sang a song, without all the shouting and yodeling that passes for music today’; Frank Sinatra’s ‘public persona was relaxed, [but] no one really knew the concentrated effort he put in to achieve that image’.

Willoughby is also enough of an unashamed fan to be able to put himself in the shoes of audiences (his sequence of shots captured at a Big Jay McNeely concert in 1951, of both the saxophonist and the reaction to his climactic playing, is deservedly granted an entire section in the book; Willoughby comments: ‘you could taste the energy in that air’), and – characteristically – honest enough to admit the odd failure, either to connect on a personal level with a musician (Ellis Marsalis) or to appreciate their music (the MJQ in 1992 are ‘a big disappointment … painful listening. The only time they ever got off the ground was when Milt Jackson gave the patient the “kiss of life” with his enchanted vibraphone.’)

Packed with superb photographs, both familiar (Chet Baker playing his trumpet straight down at the floor in Los Angeles, 1954; Dave Brubeck caught at The Haig in 1952) and less so (Paul Desmond listening to a playback at a 1954 LA recording session; an audience member onstage with Cal Tjader at the Blackhawk, San Francisco, in 1957), this is both a fascinating and valuable record of a vanished era, and a tribute to the humanity, professionalism and skill of a gifted photographic artist.”

www.jazzbodyandsoul.co.uk.

Roy and Mulgrew - Hargrove and Miller, that is.

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

For many years in the Jazz world, the standard form of duo was usually some combination of piano or guitar or even violin playing with an acoustic bass.

Guitar and violin combinations occasionally surfaced but the focal point of most duos was usually a piano or a guitar due to their ability to work as both a solo and accompanying instrument with the bass providing a quiet, rhythmic propulsion and the occasional solo.

Since guitar and piano can play both chords and rhythm there is a tendency for these instruments to clash unless there’s a fine line that acknowledges that one instrument plays rhythm when the other is soloing and vice versa, but such “rules” are often broken when the music gets heated. The acoustic bass is safer. It only has four strings with which to produce sound and even with amplification, it’s quieter and less likely to clash with a piano or guitar.

But in recent years, the standard instrumentation for duos has changed - dramatically - and we now find just about any combination of instruments pairing up.

Whatever the instrumentation duos are tricky. There’s always the temptation to fill in the additional space left by the use of only two instruments through overplaying or overblowing. 

Duos are also challenging as everyone approaches making Jazz differently and some styles are more compatible than others.

The key lies in not just listening to what you are playing but in paying close attention to what the other instrument - whatever it may be -  is playing and leaving room for it to express itself.

This approach goes well beyond “call and response” and collective improvisation [both instruments playing at the same time essentially disregarding or playing through the other instrument]. 

Leaving space may involve complimenting or complementing what the other instrument is playing; finishing a phrase that the other instrument is playing; rhythmically comping [short for accompaniment] while the other instrument is improvising on the melody and taking over blowing on the bridge; playing “under” the other solo by using bass lines in the left hand; the combinations are endless as long as the prime requirement of leaving space is met. 

Which brings me to Roy Hargrove and Mulgrew Miller, or, if you will, trumpet and flugelhorn and piano; two instruments not usually found in a duo.

Unusual though the pairing may be, it works because Roy and Mulgrew observe the caveats noted above and go out of their way to be inclusive of one another in every facet of their playing together.

It also works because they play well together; their styles fit. You can tell that they are having a great time and that joy helps create some interesting and intriguing Jazz for the listener.

These recordings underscore the adaptability of the piano as both a solo and an orchestral instrument and Mulgrew is a master at shifting from one role to the other.

Roy’s sparkling tone on trumpet and mellow sound on flugelhorn resonate with the listener as only brilliant brass instruments can, but they are enhanced by Mulgrew’s sensitive pianist shading and nuances. At times, you can hear Miller suggesting substitutions in chord sequences to Roy while Roy sometimes returns the favor with key modulations and alterations in the way the melodies are phrased.

The listener is treated to thirteen selections, each averaging anywhere from 6:00 to 9:00 minutes, and all are based on songs and tunes from the Great American Songbook or the Jazz Standards with the exception of only original by Roy.

This melodic familiarity makes it easier for the listener to sit back and enjoy the creative efforts of both artists without having to contend with recognizing too many new or unusual themes.

It’s common to describe the lineage of musicians, but the usual “comes from” is less important ultimately than meeting the musician of his or her own terms. Of course, you can hear elements of the Jazz tradition in both of their styles, but what’s more important is to listen to Roy and Mulgrew “tell their own stories.” And tell them they do, beautifully.

And when it comes to music made in a concert setting, there’s the extra added benefit of the shifting of energy between the players and the audience and this quality is certainly present on these recordings.

Ann Braithwaite, who is handling the media release Resonance Records, did her usual fine job in providing the following background for how this music came to be recorded, as well as, developing an excellent overview of the background of each musician in the following excerpts from the press kit.

RESONANCE RECORDS TO ISSUE IN HARMONY IN JULY 2021 FEATURING TRUMPETER ROY HARGROVE AND PIANIST MULGREW MILLER IN A CAPTIVATING DUO

“Previously unreleased live recordings from 2006 and 2007, available July 17th as a limited-edition 180-gram 2-LP Record Store Day exclusive and July 23rd as a deluxe 2-CD and digital edition issued in coordination with the Hargrove and Miller Estates

Elaborate booklet with rare photos, informative essay by Ted Panken, interviews and statements from Sonny Rollins, Christian McBride, Common, Ron Carter, Jon Batiste, Karriem Riggins, Keyon Harrold, Ambrose Akinmusire, Chris Botti, Robert Glasper and others

 

Los Angeles — Resonance Records, the award-winning label home of acclaimed archival releases by Nat King Cole, Bob James, Charles Lloyd, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Wes Montgomery and more, is thrilled to announce the release In Harmony, a stunning set of live performances by Roy Hargrove on trumpet and Mulgrew Miller on piano, available on July 17, 2021 for Record Store Day. In Harmony provides a rare glimpse of these two now departed and dearly missed greats, united in song and improvisational mastery in front of audiences at Merkin Hall in New York City (January 15, 2006) and Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania (November 9, 2007).

Co-produced by Zev Feldman and Larry Clothier with executive producer, George Klabin, In Harmony is the first posthumous Hargrove release since the trumpeter’s untimely passing on November 2, 2018 at age 49. Aida Brandes-Hargrove, President of Roy Hargrove Legacy, said: “Roy’s daughter Kamala and I are excited to collaborate with Resonance and to get this great new album out to Roy’s many fans.”

Miller passed away on May 29, 2013 at age 57. With In Harmony, we are back in the musical company of these two greats for a short but precious time. And though the settings heard here were ticketed concerts, the vibe unfolds exactly as it might have back in the day at Bradley’s, when Hargrove was first coming up in the late ’80s and Miller loomed large from his associations with Art Blakey, Tony Williams and others. Acclaimed jazz journalist Ted Panken, in his extensive booklet essay for In Harmony, evokes that scene, and its central importance to Hargrove’s development, in vivid detail.

Hargrove told Panken, “Bradley’s was like going to school. It was like your masters. You go in there, and you’re playing, and there’s Freddie Hubbard at the bar! What do you do? Everything I’m playing right now I owe to that whole scene.”

Hargrove hailed from Texas, Miller from Mississippi. Each of them drank deep from the Black music traditions of their respective regions, absorbing lessons from family, the church, and blues and soul artists long before they became immersed in the language of their jazz forebears. In Harmony finds the two alluding to those great jazz legacies in many ways, from song choices to improvisational flourishes to off-the-cuff yet impeccably placed arranging details.

We hear Hargrove calling out to Clifford Brown, Dizzy Gillespie, Blue Mitchell, and more. Yet he plays from the perspective of a prescient bandleader who burst through genre boundaries collaborating with leading lights of hip-hop, neo-soul and Afro-Cuban music, laying the groundwork for such next-generation trumpeters as Keyon Harrold and Theo Croker (both of whom are quoted in the booklet as well).

Miller, as Panken observes, had his own “fluid personal argot,” even as he drew on influences from Bill Evans, McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett to Woody Shaw. “His concept drew on piano-as-orchestra signposts like Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson, Ahmad Jamal and Erroll Garner, the ‘blowing piano’ of Bud Powell, the disjunctive syncopations and voicings of Thelonious Monk, and the melodic ingenuity of gurus like Hank Jones, Tommy Flanagan and Cedar Walton,” Panken adds.

It’s all there, in the bright tempos of “What Is This Thing Called Love” and “Invitation,” the majestic balladry of “I Remember Clifford” and “Never Let Me Go,” or the funk of “Fungi Mama,” where one can practically hear Al Foster’s signature drum groove from the Blue Mitchell original. Which brings us to another key Panken observation: In Harmony is the only recording in Hargrove’s entire discography not to feature a drummer. Miller, for his part, has one solo album and a scant few duos in his catalog, making In Harmony an even more significant addition to the historical record.

“From the very first time I heard these recordings, I was immediately taken by the sheer virtuosity of these two masters’ ability to mesh with each other,” says Resonance Records Co-President and Co-Producer of In Harmony Zev Feldman. “They’re playing their hearts out. I personally find these to be some of the most daring and beautiful interpretations of classic jazz repertoire I’ve heard. It’s an honor for Resonance to be able to collaborate with the families of Roy Hargrove and Mulgrew Miller to bring this music to their many fans, and we thank them for the opportunity.””

Dizzy, Duke, The Count and Me: The Story of the Monterey Jazz Festival by Jimmy Lyons and Ira Kamin

 © Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

Covering the festival from its inception in 1958 to 1977 the date of its publication, Dizzy, Duke, The Count and Me: The Story of the Monterey Jazz Festival by Jimmy Lyons and Ira Kamin is a wonderful collection of articles, vignettes and remembrances about one of of the great cultural events in the USA - the annual celebration of American Contemporary Music in one of the country’s most beautiful settings.

Accompanying the writings are a collection of drawings by the renown illustrator David Stone Martin who designed many of the iconic album covers for the Clef Norgan and Verve LPs in the 1950s, as we as, many photographs by Tom Copi, Jim Marshall, Veryl Oakland and a host of others.

The editorial staff at JazzProfiles will represent both text and images from this fascinating book in a series of posts beginning with the following, Foreword by Dizzy Gillespie, Preface by co-author Ira Kamin and lead-in articles by Ralph J. Gleason, the San Francisco based columnist and critic

Foreword

“One of the great shining examples of the kind of association I have with Jimmy Lyons is the fact that contract-wise, our contracts never seem to catch up. I just assume that I'm playing the Monterey Jazz Festival. It's assumed that I'm going to be at Monterey every year.

Now sometimes that gets a little out of hand, such as last year, when I had the chance to play a theatre with Sarah Vaughan.

Now, I love Jimmy Lyons, but oh my God, Sarah Vaughan!

Monterey has a special meaning for me, because I understand that the people expect to see me there. My face is a part of the Monterey Jazz Festival just like that chair that they have. And at the end of the concert every year I start wondering what they are going to do next year? Because you can't top yourself all the time.

But over the years, the Monterey Jazz Festival has overextended itself—musically, I mean. Each year seems to be getting a little better. Sometimes it drops. Well, it can't be the same thing all the time. But it is the one festival where the musicians really feel a part of the festival itself.

At other festivals, you have a spot, you play the spot, you go wherever your spot is. But the Monterey Jazz Festival is unique in that the musicians feel they're part of what's happening, and that lends itself to a very high degree of creativity.

And the coup de grace was the hiring of John Lewis as musical director.”

John Birks (Dizzy) Gillespie - October, 1977

Preface

“There have been twenty Monterey Jazz Festivals, held every late September, in Monterey, California, since 1958.

It's Jimmy Lyons' Festival. He founded it and every year, with the help of his musical director, John Lewis, he puts the shows together.

I spent a few dozen hours with Jimmy Lyons over a couple of warm summer months, putting together this book about Lyons and the Festival.

He lives on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco in a small apartment with his wife, Laurel. He sits at a table by a window, smokes Camel cigarettes, bites the backs of both thumbnails and talks in the most listenable voice — he used to be a deejay, the first GI voice in Berlin — about the people who've passed his way the sixty years he's been on this earth.

The first part of this book is Jimmy Lyons' account of the Festival and parts of his life that led to the Festival. The second part is a more specific, chronological overview of the Festival's first twenty years.

I would like to express my special thanks to Dizzy Gillespie for doing the Foreword. When I talked to him about the book he was in the middle of a long road trip. He had an abscessed tooth and the insides of his face were hurting from that crazy way he has of playing the trumpet. He was incredibly gracious to all of us who wanted some of his time.

I would also like to thank Hal Silverman, Laurel Lyons, Tim Ware, Elaine Ratner, Ernie Beyl, Jean (Mrs. Ralph) Gleason, The Monterey Jazz Festival staff and Board of Directors, and of course Jimmy Lyons, for their great help and patience in putting this book together.”

Ira Kamin - Mill Valley, May 1978

Why a Jazz Festival?

by Ralph Gleason

“The Monterey Jazz Festival — or any real festival, jazz or otherwise — can't be just a collection of concerts. It must be a thing unto itself, an entity beyond the individual performances, beyond the individual programs and greater than the sum of these.

The point of a festival is to be festive. To give and to receive joy and to present — in a jazz festival, at any rate — a wide diversification of styles and types of this music in as festive and benign a surrounding as possible.

To be successful as a festival, the grounds, the concerts, the musicians, the patrons and the atmosphere all have to jell together to be something more than one can find elsewhere. And this, of course, is what has happened these years at Monterey.

To be a true festival, there must be something for those who are not hard core jazz fans and who make this their sole jazz experience for the year. This, too, Monterey has provided.

The unusual combinations of music, the special events, the virtuoso performances, but above all, the opportunity to see and to hear great artists in a great setting — that is the festival.

Seeing musicians as people has always been an attraction. "People out front don't know of the battle you wage backstage," Jon Hendricks wrote in his lyrics to Count Basie's "Blues Back Stage." At Monterey and at any true festival of music, the concert hall setting is avoided and the musicians make up part of the audience, walking through the grounds, rehearsing in the mornings and early evenings, themselves digging the festival. Charles Mingus was rehearsing well into the evening concert the night before his historic appearance in 1964 and latecomers lingered by the doors to hear him.

Nor all the great music has always been on stage. There have been those delicious moments observed only by the people who came early or who stayed late and wandered around, such as the afternoon pianist Ralph Sutton rehearsed with Jimmy Rushing, the year that Ben Webster sat in on piano until Earl Hines arrived or the time Ben Webster was shooting pictures of the festival orchestra's saxophone section playing an arrangement of Ben's own solo on "Cottontail." These are the bonuses that make the festival worth more than anyone could dream of.

Of course, there's the opportunity to learn by listening to great artists from great eras in their own styles and settings. But that is only part of it. There are the once-in-a-lifetime performances.

Who could ever forget—who saw and heard ir—the "Evolution of the Blues" with Jon Hendricks preaching and Jimmy Witherspoon and Big Miller singing and Miriam Makeba and Odetta and Pony Poindexter and the children gathered onstage in a semi-circle around Jon?

Who could ever forget — who saw and heard it— Lambert-Hendricks-Bavan, dressed in monk's hoods and robes, singing in the cold night air behind Carmen McRae and Louis Armstrong in Dave and Iola Brubeck's "The Real Ambassadors." Or Lawrence Brown stepping forward ro play "Poor Butterfly" or Duke Ellington's "Rockin in Rhythm" or Bunny Briggs dancing "David Danced Before the Lord with All His Might" or Dizzy and Big Mama Willie Mae Thornton or Annie Ross, Jon Hendricks, Dave Lambert and Joe Williams ending the show singing with Count Basie?

Right from the very first night, when the unknown trumpet player sat in with Dizzy, Monterey has been this way and that's what makes a festival and that's why a festival is almost a necessity in this era of restraint and inhibition. For one weekend, anything goes and the results have been some of the greatest moments in jazz history.

The festival is for the musicians and the festival is for the patrons — both. Each one digs the other and they both dig the digging. A festival is to have fun, to be festive, to give and receive love. And love, like jazz, is a four letter word and surrounded these days with Inhibitions and taboos. But at Monterey, for this one weekend, we are all free to love and jazz is free to be our music.

A festival is to have fun. You aren't supposed to like or dislike anything. You don't have to listen and you can come and go as you please. It's nor a posh concert hall where silence must be preserved and it is only a tribute to the quality of the music and the musicians that silence has been granted (not preserved or enforced) during some of the great performances.

Nowhere in this country is there such a homogeneous gathering of people as at these festivals. Pass through those gates and leave behind all the traumas and the psychodramas that inhibit the rest of the year. Glory in the music, in the people, in the place. Jazz is what you call it, everyone's his own expert (as is really true in every art form when you get down to it) and you pick your own likes and dislikes.

A jazz festival should be the best possible combination of enjoyments one can devise. Organization and improvisation, lyricism, strength, euphoria and the blues, individuals and groups, the scream, the cry and the whisper. It should all be there for you.

A festival, like music, is to be experienced. It is interesting, but not essential, to know things about the music and about the musicians. The music is enough by itself; so is the setting; so, too, are the people there. All together they make up one of the best things about living around here, even if it only happens once a year.”

Reprinted from Monterey Jazz Festival Program, 1966

Mother

First Child