Dizzy, Duke, The Count and Me: The Story of the Monterey Jazz Festival [Revised with Video Additions]

  © 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 Foreword is by Dizzy Gillespie, the Preface is by co-author Ira Kamin and the lead-in articles is by Ralph J. Gleason, the San Francisco based columnist and critic and one of the founders of the Festival.

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 to 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