Shelly Manne - Jazz as "Street Music"

 "CB: Once, at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco, a young drummer came up to you and asked how long you had studied. You replied that you had about a year of formal study, and the rest you had learned in the streets. When I asked you about that, you told me that you considered jazz “street music.” Explain what you mean when you use the expression “street music.”

SM: I don’t mean that you play in the street. I just mean the experience of hanging out with fellow musicians, eating together, exchanging ideas and rapping about music—different ways of playing, who you like and don’t like, and the importance of this way of playing as opposed to that way of playing. That’s what I mean by the term “street music.” It’s an exchange of ideas away from the bandstand and away from actually playing.

Also, your environment definitely influences you. I was born in downtown New York. I know this sounds very dramatic, but to me the energy of the City—with the hustle and bustle of the people, going uptown and listening to music, and traveling on the subway—all had to do with playing and with music. Now there are great jazz musicians who come from a cornfield or someplace, but they always come to the City. They bring a different kind of texture and a different approach to playing, but they have to come to the City to be heard. I think the City also rubs off on them. So I also mean that, when I say jazz is “street music.” But in its basic form, jazz is a very primitive music. When you get a primitive music, it becomes similar to folk music, and of course, all of that goes back to the environment. I feel the same way about jazz. Jazz has a way of absorbing all of these basic human feelings from all cultures and expressing it in its own way."

From - Shelly Manne – The Last Interview by Charles M. Bernstein, Modern Drummer, 10th Aug 2018

Grover Sales - "Jazz: America's Classical Music"

© -  Steven A. Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Strongly opinionated and superbly literate, longtime Bay Area resident Grover Sales was the kind of jazz critic who left no doubt about where he stood on issues ranging from the genius of Lenny Bruce to the paucity of gay jazz musicians.

During a career that spanned 50 years Sales wrote about jazz, film and cultural politics and published widely in the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Tiburon Ark and Gene Lees' Jazzletter. He wrote three books: Jazz: America's Classical Music, a biography of John Maher and, with his wife Georgia, The Clay-Pot Cookbook, which sold more than 800,000 copies.

Sales was also publicist for the Monterey Jazz Festival from its birth in 1958 until 1965, and for the hungry i nightclub. He also did freelance publicity work for artists such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland and Dick Gregory, and wrote liner notes for several Fantasy recordings.

Over the years, he taught jazz history courses at Stanford University, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, San Francisco State University and the JazzSchool.

Sales became a jazz fan at 16, after hearing a broadcast of Benny Goodman's band with drummer Gene Krupa, and later became what he called "an inveterate Ellington groupie" after hearing a recording of "Black And Tan Fantasy".

After serving in the Army Air Corps in Southeast Asia during World War II, Sales studied at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and then settled in the Bay Area, where he received a BA in history from the University of California at Berkeley.

In addition to his wife, Sales is survived by a daughter and two stepsons.”

www.jazzhouse.org.

If you were a Jazz fan living in the San Francisco Bay area, sooner or later, you met Grover Sales.

Columnist, author, instructor in Jazz Studies at Stanford University in nearby Palo Alto, CA and for many years, Publicity Director of the Monterey Jazz Festival, Grover seemed to be everywhere in the world of Bay Area Jazz.

I met him on several occasions and he was always welcoming, engaging and directly to the point.

He wrote a book - Jazz: America’s Classical Music [New York: Prentice Hall, 1984; New York: Da Capo Paperback Edition, 1992]  - to which I am constantly referring.

This foreword to Grover’s book was written by his great friend and Jazz author and essayist, Gene Lees.

“It occurred to me some time ago that I have, by accident, known most of the major figures in jazz history, some of them slightly and some of them intimately. Whatever I know of the subject I learned from them, not from books. Countless hours of conversations with them have long since sunk into my subconscious and shaped my thinking not only about jazz but about art in general and life itself.

One consequence of this experience is a skepticism toward histories of jazz, some of which are too technical for the layman, some of which reveal a limited technical grasp by the writer, some of which are at odds with the reminiscences of those who made it, and all too many of which have been political, serving one partisan purpose or another.

It is no surprise to me that Grover Sales has written a sensible, useful, and, to the best of my knowledge, accurate introduction to jazz, because that is a reflection of his character. His approach to the music has always been informed with the humility of the scholar. And in his various capacities as writer, lecturer on jazz history at San Francisco State University and—at one time—publicity director of the Monterey Jazz Festival, he too has had the opportunity to know many of the major figures in jazz.

A few months before he completed work on this book, Grover did a program at San Francisco State on the career of Dizzy Gillespie, using photographic slides and records to trace the life of this remarkable musician. The participants in this presentation included an audience of 300 students and faculty members, and the object of the exercise, Mr. John Birks Gillespie himself. At several points in the proceedings there was a suspicious mist in the eyes of Mr. Gillespie, a man in whom lives not only a brilliant musical mind and a vast sense of the world's humor but also a deep gentleness. Yes, I would say that Grover Sales is well qualified to describe and discuss the music of Dizzy Gillespie.

Jazz is a living music, not only in the sense that it is still evolving in our time, but in the sense that as a music that is substantially improvised, its emphasis is on the performance rather than on the writing. In jazz, the creator and performer are one. It is a music that has evolved through recording, and indeed it seems likely that had the phonograph not been invented, jazz might not have come into being. Certainly it could not have had its phenomenal rapid development from a folk music into an art music requiring enormous knowledge and skill. (During that seminar with Grover, Dizzy said that no question annoyed him more than the one about whether he ever played any "serious" music. "Men have died for this music," Dizzy said, and added with his customary dry wit, "You can't get more serious than that.")

Much of its history is preserved on records, albeit in the early days records with poor sound quality. And so the emphasis in an approach to jazz history must be on listening rather than reading. And it seems to me that if anyone were to follow this book very carefully, acquiring the records Grover recommends and then listening to them as he reads, he (or she) would come out at the other end with a rather considerable familiarity with the art, equipped now to appreciate and enjoy it on his own. I think this is an important point about this book: It is meant to be a linked listening-and-reading experience.

I believe this book does a major service for the art, particularly for the young, whether they intend to be players or appreciators, who will carry it into the future.

[Gene Lees is a former editor of down beat and a long-time contributor to Stereo Review, High Fidelity, and other major publications, as well as a composer and lyricist whose songs have been recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, and most of the major singers in jazz and popular music. He is the publisher and editor of The Jazzletter, whose subscribers include almost all the major jazz musicians.]

Following Grover’s death on February 14, 2004, Gene issued this essay entitled Vanished Friend in The Jazzletter [Vol. 22 No. 3]

Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.                                                    — Albert Einstein

“... Grover Sales lectured on jazz history at Stanford, which he did also at various times at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, San Francisco State University, and other schools. Grover's lectures made effective use of his enormous collection of records and an equally wide-ranging archive of photographs, which he projected as illustrations. His lecture on Duke Ellington was outstanding, but then all his lectures were formidably informative.

The institution of jazz training programs at universities has produced generations of skilled musicians, though many of them have a cookie-cutter similarity to each other. Where are they all going to work when the audience has long been shrinking? The universities should be educating the audience as well. But, I have been told by academics, such "survey courses" are not popular. Really? When I did a lecture at the Santa Fe chamber music festival it was the best-attended they had ever had. Grover was there and participated in the discussion.

Grover used to lecture on jazz at the library in Tiburon, California — always to standing-room audiences that were backed up out the door. And he would go anywhere to preach his gospel of American music. He lectured to the very young and the aging as well: he taught at Elderhostel.

He drew on personal experience, having known just about everybody in jazz history. He once did an extended radio interview with Earl Hines as a pilot broadcast for Chevron. Hines sat at the piano and explained what he was doing to Grover, and talked about his past.

I met Grover in the fall of 1959, not long after I became editor of Down Beat. I came out to California to cover the Monterey Jazz Festival, which, the critic Ralph J. Gleason assured me, was doing it right. Grover was the festival's publicist, a position he held from 1958 to 1964. Gleason, who then wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle, said that this new festival was avoiding *he quicksand of commercialism in which, he said, the slightly older Newport Jazz Festival was sinking. He was right then; but in time, the Monterey Festival, no longer guided by its founder, the late Jimmy Lyons, would become one of the most flagrantly "commercial" jazz festivals in America. But it was superb in those early years, and Grover represented it with justified pride.

Somebody hung the nickname "Groove" on him, and it gave him an almost childlike pleasure. He was a handsome man whose comportment somehow made him seem taller than his six feet. He had a full head of wavy gray hair. He lived in Belvedere with his wife, architect and art collector Georgia Sales. It's a lovely community, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. He was more than a fixture in that area, he was a presence in its culture, a perpetual gadfly.

When Groove died on February 14, 2004, at the age of 84, the San Francisco Chronicle carried an obituary by Jesse Hamlin, that said: "Grover Sales, a veteran Bay Area critic, author and teacher who wrote about jazz, movies and cultural politics with passion, knowledge and biting wit, has died of kidney failure at Marin Convalescent Hospital in Tiburon.

"Mr. Sales was a lucid, literate, and opinionated man whose gift for language and pleasure in expressing his often contrarian views delighted and sometimes infuriated readers of his essays and reviews. His work appeared in a wide range of publication over the last 50 years, including The Chronicle, San Francisco magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Tiburon Ark, and Gene Lees Jazzletter"

He wrote a book called Jazz: America's Classical Music, published by Da Capo Press, in print since 1984. It is a good brief introduction to jazz. He also wrote, in collaboration with his wife Georgia, The Clay-Pot Cookbook, a Book of the Month Club alternate which has thus far sold nearly 900,000 copies. It has been in print since 1974.

Grover wrote a number of pieces for the Jazzletter over the years, including in 1984 a carefully researched essay called Why Is Jazz Not Gay Music? Grover consulted (and so did I) the Gay and Lesbian archives of Los Angeles, whose people said they were well aware of the comparative rarity of homosexuality in jazz, particularly in contrast with the classical music world. A high proportion of "classical" composers in the United States, including Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Virgil Thompson, Giancarlo Menotti, and Samuel Barber, have been homosexual, but you would have trouble counting ten homosexual jazz musicians, a phenomenon on which Ralph Burns, who was homosexual, commented.

There was nothing biased in Grover's piece, he just examined a phenomenon. He was attacked for it by one of the few overtly homosexual jazz musicians, but the piece stands up, even now.

He was born Grover Sales Jr., on October 26, 1919, in Louisville, Kentucky, where his father was a prominent judge. Since it is not Jewish custom to name children after living relatives, and certainly not after yourself, it would seem the father was no more religious or conventional than Grover.

When he was sixteen, Grover heard a radio broadcast by the Benny Goodman band when Gene Krupa was in the drum chair. He told an interviewer years later, "It was a religious experience. I'd never heard anything like it. I went to bed and had a high fever. My mother had to rub my chest with Musterol, and I've never been the same since."

Grover lived in New York City from 1938 through 1940. It was there that he first heard Duke Ellington, specifically Black and Tan Fantasy. He said it was "an eerie and hypnotic minor blues that went far beyond Goodman. Immediately I ran to the local record store screaming, 'What have you got by Ellington? Give me all of it.' I have never lost the fever."

He attended the University of California at Berkeley from 1948 to 1951, graduating Phi Betta Kappa. He won a Highest Honors in history award in 1949. As well as being publicist for the Monterey Jazz Festival during its best years, Grover was a publicist for the hungry i, and, at various times, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, the Royal Ballet, the Bolshoi Ballet, the Budapest String Quarter, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Woody Allen, Johnny Cash, Judy Garland, Andre Previn, Dick Gregory, and Lenny Bruce, surely a disparate lot. But Grover was interested in ail these people, and he wrote a movie script called The Trial of Lenny Bruce that has yet to be produced. It's based on the transcripts of Lenny's San Francisco trial.

For one of his jazz history classes, Grover designed a retrospective on the life and work of Dizzy Gillespie, whom he lavishly admired and loved. It used photo slides and records of course, but what made this class exceptional was that Dizzy was present. At the end of it, he was almost in tears, I think Grover said that he actually was in tears.

He later wrote: "When a clumsy journalist asked Dizzy Gillespie if he ever played any 'serious' music, Dizzy grew serious indeed: 'People have died for this music. You can't get no more serious than that.' Dizzy could have had in mind the plight of jazz fans in the Third Reich, where, if you were caught with records or magazines devoted to what Dr. Goebbels called 'American nigger kike jungle music,' you could be imprisoned — or even shot. This became the subject of the unique 1993 film Swing Kids, written by Jonathan Marc Feldman with obvious love and rare authenticity. Following disastrous reviews that revealed more about the critics than the film, it folded after a week in the theaters, but survives on video cassette and on Cable TV.

"Those of us who came of age in the 1930's to embrace big-band swing with religious intensity have no trouble accepting the premise of Swing Kids. But reviewers unfamiliar with Mike Zwerin's La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis — or the careers of Alfred Lion and Francis Wolff who fled Hitler to found Blue Note Records — found it 'silly' and 'weird.'

"But the film's premise is rooted in fact. At the dawn of Nazi hegemony in the early 1930's, a close-knit band of dissident teenagers, as portrayed in Swing Kids, loomed in open rebellion against the regime, united by their adoration of Basie, Ellington, Ella, Django and frenzied jitterbugging in the soon-to-become verboten dance halls of Berlin."

In the first year of the Jazzletter, I was introduced to the Czech novelist Joseph Skvorecky, who showed me a short story called Eine Kleine Jazzmusik. It is a narrative about a group of young Czech jazz musicians at the time of the German occupation. Contemptuous of the Germans, they stage a jazz concert under their noses, mocking the conquerors. They are taken to a concentration camp and executed, all but their girl singer, who becomes the mistress of a German officer — and stabs him to death in his sleep. The story, Skvorecky told me, was true. That's what Dizzy meant, and those kids weren't the only ones who died for "this music."

Grover was incensed when various movie critics excoriated Swing Kids. He wrote: "The reactions of film reviewers who helped to ruin Swing Kids' chances for wide distribution seem akin to the notorious attacks on Ellington's 1943 Carnegie Hall premiere of Black, Brown & Beige by established music critics languishing in ignorance of the jazz experience. And Benny Goodman's epochal 1938 Carnegie Hall concert goaded the New York Times' first-string music critic Olin Downes to write: 'hard, shrill, noisy, monotonous . . . swing of this kind will quickly be a thing of the past.'

"Of the film, Janet Maslin in the New York Times wrote: 'Swing Heil is the battle cry of the swing kids, long-haired big-band-loving teenage rebels in Nazi Germany. You may want to read that sentence slowly, just to make sure it does not describe some missing chapters of Wayne's World or simply seem too nutty for words.' It escaped Maslin that Swing Kids wore long hair, wide English-style trousers, and gaudy ties to signify a dramatic break with the military.

"New York magazine's David Denby, from whom we might expect better, said: 'What the naive filmmakers don't seem to understand is that totalitarianism made rebellion meaningless. No one even noticed.' This amazing argument flies in the face of history: the Nazis did much more than merely 'notice' this musical threat to their ideology.

"In the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan found the film 'unsatisfactory from just about every point of view. Awkward, hollow and emotionally heavy-handed, it transforms a sea of movie cliches onto those unfamiliar German shores.'

"Similar was the consensus in the standard video guides. Video Hound said: 'There is something disturbingly silly about the entire production.'"

I agree with what Grover wrote about that picture. And the film is corroborated by everything I have ever heard from jazz lovers (including Claus Ogerman) who lived under the Nazis.

Grover didn't suffer fools gladly, and particularly when they were critics. He could be scathing on that subject. He particularly detested the San Francisco Chronicle's music critic John Wasserman, who got drunk and killed himself in a car crash. Grover once called Wasserman "a ganglion of solipsism, the Rex Reed of San Francisco," saying:

"Rex Reed is somebody with no background, absolutely no judgment, and no taste. Rex Reed is a joke and is never taken for anything else. He has a counterpart on every major newspaper who is comparatively young and relates to the young reader — a brash, uninformed, arrogant writer who occasionally has a clever gift for smart-ass journalism and the bitchy aside ....

"It's very easy for somebody to write a vicious attack on a bad pornographic movie or a spaghetti western. That doesn't take any special talent. What does is for somebody like Judy Stone to review Bertolucci's 1900 and have a complete and thorough background about Bertolucci and the history of Fascism in Italy. She does her homework ....

"There's a great deal of difference between writing a serious piece of criticism about a serious work and making a career out of attacking Marilyn Chambers, Jerry Lewis, and Annette Funicello."

Whatever cause he took up, Grover did so with ardor. In common with some of his neighbors, Grover became incensed by the use of these ghastly noisy leaf-blowing machines by gardeners at ungodly early hours, and they raised the issue with the Belvedere city council. The council gave them a pat on the head and promised to make a study of the matter. Grover asked how come the British could throw out a government and replace it within days and Belvedere couldn't decide a simple issue without a "study." That got him nowhere.

So Grover rented a leaf blower, and on a day of a council meeting he went to the building and started the leaf blower and walked up and down by a window, blowing leaves out of the flower beds. The council of course couldn't hear its own hot air. But that wasn't enough. He went right into the council meeting, with the noisy monster going full blast.

Belvedere passed an ordinance restricting the use of these devices. It became a model for the country, adopted by one community after another. So if those infernal machines have fallen silent in the early hours in your town, you may owe it to Grover Sales.

If he sounds cranky on the subject of other writers, he was uncommonly generous to those he respected. If my attempts over these past years to record aspects of jazz history that seem in danger of being lost, then the jazz world owes Grover a debt. None of this would have happened without him.

He was an early subscriber to the Jazzletter and praised it to anyone who would listen. He sent copies of it to a friend named John Fell, who in turn sent them on to James Lincoln Collier in New York. That was about 1986. I couldn't in those days get a book published to save my life, and I was about to fold the Jazzletter. Collier, whom I did not know except by reputation as author of one of best jazz histories, took those Jazzletters to Sheldon Meyer at Oxford University Press, telling him, "You ought to be publishing this guy." Collier (who would become a very close friend) wrote me a letter saying that if I would submit an idea to Sheldon Meyer, he thought he might be receptive. I did, and Sheldon published Singers and the Song, which got rave reviews. There have been something like sixteen books since then, including my biography of Woody Herman. I owe it all to Grover Sales and Jim Collier, and I told Jim so when I called him recently about Graver's death. He said, "Oh, I think you'd have found some other publisher." I said, "I don't. And had I not found Sheldon, the Jazzletter itself would have died."

So you can imagine how I feel about Grover's passing from the scene. …

Georgia sent out an exquisite card when he was gone consisting of three lovely photos of Grover and two quotations, one of them from an unpublished autobiography, titled — typically Grover — Ragtime Cowboy Jew. "Looking back, I've been lucky to survive the approach of my eighties, lucky in my marriage, my travels, my teachers, my friends and my colleagues, and luckiest and most rare of all, to be able to combine my passion with my career." The other quotation: "And now, that little while, is all my life, and all reality, how long or brief it seems to be."

Atque in perpetuum, frater, ave atque vale.

Hail and farewell, brother.

The jazz world has lost its most passionate evangelist. I have lost a very dear friend.”

"Blues for the left hand only"- Phineas Newborn, Jr. - Thinking of the late Phineas Newborn Jr. on the anniversary of his birthday.

Pancho from Latinville by Victor Feldman

The soloists are Frank Rosolino on trombone and Walter Benton on tenor saxophone.

Frank Rosolino- Violets- with the Metropole Orchestra

Something beautiful this way comes.

Jazz in Paris

 © -Volkher Hofmann, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Jazz went to Paris and other places in Europe to live. That might sound funny to many of those who don't spend a lot of time listening to jazz, but it's true. Although its birthplace was elsewhere, many musicians either relocated to Europe or found a more than appreciative audience there whereas in the US they were at times perhaps shunned or at best ignored. I think it was Dizzy Gillespie who once said something to the effect that jazz was too good for the United States. Without wanting to get too much into the racial implications here, it is a fact that at various times in US history, black (jazz) musicians had more than their share of problems, segregation more often than not relegating them to the back entrances of places they were playing at - and that was only a small part of the problem(s).

Paris, which had developed into the jazz center of Europe already in the beginning of the 20th century, offered many of these musicians a safe haven as well as a permanent home (later, Denmark, Sweden and sometimes Germany usurped that role) and jazz thrived because of it. One can even be as bold as to state that without Paris and Europe, jazz might never have been recognized as an art form. It was in Europe that jazz had gained that kind of recognition and, as far as I recall, it was jazz critics such as Leonard Feather (England) and Dan Morgenstern (Austria), who spent their entire lifetimes promoting it as an art form in the United States.

No matter what your take on jazz history is, it remains a fact that we all owe the bigwigs at Universal for releasing this wonderful run of spectacular recordings from mostly the 1950s and 1960s. If you got with the program right from the start, you had the chance to pick up over 100 regular reissues of classic LPs/EPs, a few more that were added "out of series", as well as four absolutely beautiful boxed sets that collected the best from the previous runs on 3 CDs plus a wonderful booklet and perhaps an extra recording or two each. One had the chance to buy these reissues separately or, for a limited time, in two slip-cased editions that either collected 25 or 75 of them and, if you kept your ears close to the ground, you will have the chance starting March 2007 to complete the series with the last 15 CDs coming up. There even was a catalog CD and a DVD (not seen by me) and if you look at the grand picture, this is definitely one of the most consistent and exciting reissue series of the 21st century, bar none. Kudos to Universal France for pulling it off.

Each CD is housed in a digipack cover, carries the "Gitanes Jazz Productions" logo, was carefully re-mastered, sports a wonderful Paris photo from that time period and includes a booklet in French and English with liner notes and complete session information. The spines are quite colorful and for packaging fetishists like me, the entire run brightens up a collection considerably.”

- Volkher Hofmann

2008 - Jack Sheldon - Trying to get Good

Eli “Lucky” Thompson [From the Archives]

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

“Lucky Thompson was a vastly under-acclaimed tenor saxophonist.”

- Doug Ramsey

Eli “Lucky” Thompson was born on June 16, 1924 in Columbia, South Carolina, but grew up in Detroit. From a very young age, Lucky was obsessed by music and long before he owned a horn, he studied instruction books and practiced finger exercises on a broomstick marked with saxophone key patterns. When he acquired his first saxophone at the age of 25, he practiced eight hours a day and within a month he played professionally with neighborhood bands.”

- Joop Visser

“… it seems likely that the cross-pollination of ideas so promi­nent among bebop era saxophonists affected Lucky less than anyone. Stylistically he has always been his own man.”

- Bob Porter

"Like Don Byas, whom he most resembles in tone and in his development of solos, he has a slightly oblique and uneasy stance on bop, cleaving to a kind of accelerated swing idiom with a distinctive 'snap' to his softly enunciated phrases and an advanced harmonic language that occasionally moves into areas of surprising freedom."

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton,  Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed.

“There is the history of the saxophone in Lucky Thompson’s music.”

- David Himmelstein

“Music is the most interesting thing in the world.”

- Lucky Thompson

“You know I lost my interest in music. I had to run from place to place at the mercy of people who manipulated me. I never rejected music; it constitutes a great part of my soul.”

- Lucky Thompson to Mike Hennessey in MusicItalia interview

“Thompson's disappearance from the jazz scene in the 1970's was only the latest (but apparently the last) of a strangely contoured career. A highly philosophical, almost mystical man, he reacted against the values of the music industry and in the end turned his back on it without seeming regret. The beginning was garlanded with promise.”

- Richard Cook and Brian Morton,  Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 6^th Ed.

I lived and worked in Seattle, WA for a while.

Given the city’s notorious commuter traffic, fortunately for me, it was easy to access my office at the downtown corner of Fourth and Pike Streets as it was a clear shot into town on the Aurora Highway [Hwy 99] from my home in the Green Lake area of the city.

It was a point in my work-life that often found me toiling late at the office.

Because of the manner in which one-way streets configured downtown traffic, I often exited the city along Second Street which is also the home of Tula’s, a great Jazz club that primarily features the work of local Jazz artists.

One rainy night - now there’s a surprise in Seattle! - I had worked so late that I decided to catch a set at the club and treat myself to a dinner of its excellent dolmathes and souvlaki before going home.

Jay Thomas, who plays both superb trumpet and tenor saxophone, was Tula’s headliner.

Besides the great music and tasty Greek food, I also met up that night with a couple of Jazz buddies who lived in the nearby Belltown part of the city [a downtown waterfront neighborhood that overlooks a portion of Elliott Bay].

We shared a bottle of red plonk while thoroughly enjoying the music on offer by Jay’s quartet.

All of us still smoked during those days and, as a result of the club’s ban on partaking of lit nicotine within the walls of its premises, we found ourselves merrily chatting and puffing away outside the club’s entrance during the first intermission.

Thankfully the rain had abated, or a least scaled down to a soft drizzle. While the three of us were standing and smoking by the curbside, we were approached by a street person who asked if he could bum a smoke.

After we obliged him and he had continued on his way, one of my friends asked me if I’d recognized the damp denizen of the night?

I thought I was making a wisecrack when I answered that “… he looked vaguely familiar.” “He should,” remarked one of my friends: “That was Lucky Thompson!”

Obviously, my Belltown buddies had met him before, under similar circumstances.

All of us became very subdued after Lucky left.

Each of us quietly puffed our cigarette which gave us time to adjust to the sense of sadness that had come over us following the sight we had just witnessed.

Needless to say, the evening wasn’t the same after that; no more frivolity and jocularity, only a deep and abiding hurt.

When I returned home with that chance meeting still on my mind, it occurred to that while I had heard Lucky’s tenor saxophone sound with Count Basie’s band [my Dad had some V-Discs by the band with Lucky], on Miles Davis’ famous Walkin’ LP and as part of Stan Kenton’s sterling Cuban Fire album [his solo beginning at around the 4:00 minute mark of the opening track – Fuego Cubano - always touches my heart], most of his recorded music had passed-me-by.

For whatever reasons, I had missed much of Lucky’s discography when he was a force on the Jazz scene, primarily from 1945-1965.

The following day, I decided to put that omission right and I began seeking out Lucky’s recordings which, to my surprise were plentiful, and still readily available.

As is often the case with chance meetings, it was the beginning of a love affair as Lucky’s music was engaging, full of marvelous twists and turns, and alive with an almost effortless swing.

Although it is a later recording in the Thompson canon, one of my first purchases of Lucky’s music under his own name was Tricotism [Impulse/GRP GRD-135].

The insert notes to this CD are by Bob Porter and they contained the following overview and commentary of Thompson’s career which was very helpful to me as a guide for further purchases of Lucky’s music.

If you are like me and not a member of the Lucky cognoscenti, perhaps it can serve a similar purpose for you.

“The career of Eli Thompson (6/16/24), musician, is one of the most enigmatic in all jazz. It is an odyssey involving four cities, two instruments, big bands, small bands, popularity, poverty, stylistic changes, associations with major names, (Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Stan Kenton), and long peri­ods of inactivity.

Detroit is his home town. A grad­uate of Cass Tech, Lucky was among a number of remarkably talented saxophonists who were active in the Motor City during the early '40s. Wardell Gray, Teddy Edwards, Yusef Lateef, and Sonny Stitt would lead the list and it seems likely that the cross-pollination of ideas so promi­nent among bebop era saxophonists affected Lucky less than anyone. Stylistically he has always been his own man.

Lucky entered the ranks of pro­fessional musicians when he left Detroit with the Treniers in 1943. An unhappy six months with Lionel Hampton followed, ending in New York. Shortly thereafter Lucky went into the brand new Billy Eckstine Band. The Eckstine association was brief, and Lucky first began to achieve prominence during his year with Count Basic. The war-time Basic band was a fine organization, and Lucky had considerable solo space. The V-Disc of "High Tide" is especially impressive.

Lucky left Basic in late 1945, set­tling in Los Angeles. One of his first gigs in L. A. was as a member of the Dizzy Gillespie Rebop Six. Actually he was the odd man out in a group that featured Milt Jackson, Al Haig, Ray Brown, Stan Levey, and the leader. Lucky was hired because of the erratic habits of the co-star, Charlie Parker. Yet that engagement acted as a springboard for Lucky.

During 1946 and '47 Lucky was the most requested tenorman in the L. A. area. He worked frequently with Boyd Raeburn, but he also made over 100 recordings as a sideman during those years. He had recorded for Excelsior and Down Beat and in 1947 he made four famous sides for RCA, including his masterpiece "Just One More Chance." He won the Esquire New Star award in 1947. In 1948 Lucky migrated across coun­try. New York would be his home for the next eight years.

Lucky worked frequently at the Savoy Ballroom during the early '50s, but the recording slows had set in.

A couple of obscure small label ses­sions were Lucky's only recordings from 1947 to late 1953, when he did a date for Decca. Two dates in 1954 under his own name presaged anoth­er masterpiece: his "Walkin"' solo with Miles Davis.

During the 1950s Lucky was a close associate of light-heavyweight boxing champion, Archie Moore. Moore liked to warm up and work out while Lucky and company pro­vided the music.

Lucky and Milt Jackson have been close associates since their days in Detroit. In 1956, just prior to the recording of the music heard on this CD, Jackson and Thompson record­ed five LPs together, under Milt's name for Savoy and Atlantic.

I suspect that it was no accident that the trio session here included no drummer. If there has been one aspect of Lucky's playing that has been criticized through the years it is his relationship with drummers. The hard swinging sessions of the 1940s and early '50s were giving way to an almost ascetic rhythmic approach. I also suspect that some critics, in writing about the Jimmy Giuffre Three, (which had the iden­tical instrumentation as Lucky's group), may have forgotten these per­formances, which predated Giuffre by 10 months.

Paris in the spring of 1956 was, for Lucky, a period of tremendous activ­ity. He recorded five LPs for various French labels. Also while in France, he sat in with Stan Ken ton. This led to Lucky's participation in one of the most famous Kenton LPs of the' 50s, Cuban Fire. Before returning to France for an extended stay, Lucky worked again with Oscar Pettiford and recorded with him.

Lucky was the first major jazzman since Sidney Bechet to adopt the soprano saxophone. He predated John Coltrane by at least 18 months; but Lucky has never been given any credit for ushering the return to popularity of the straight saxophone. In the mid-'60s Lucky returned to the U.S.A., recording for Prestige and Rivoli. He had been back and forth to Europe several times since and did several interesting LPs for Groove Merchant in the early '70s. He also taught at Dartmouth for a year[1973-74].

When Will Powers interviewed him for Different Drummer, Lucky was completing his academic work and thinking of a new city. This time it might be Toronto or Montreal. Always the drifter, ever the search.

It is not my opinion, but consen­sus, that says the music on these LPs is the finest extended playing that Lucky Thompson has produced on record. As noted earlier, the sessions came at a period where Lucky had been recording frequently. He and Pettiford were a mutual admiration society and the rapport, even inti­macy, they achieve in the trio tracks is nothing short of remarkable.

This is not to take anything away from the quintet sides where Jimmy Cleveland shines so brightly. The presence of Hank Jones reunites a close partnership dating to Detroit days. Yet it is Lucky, with the warmth, the inner feeling, the depth, the mastery that permeates every groove on these LPs.

That this music is able to appear again after years of neglect is cause for celebration. Let's hope that this release is able to shed new light on the talent of Lucky Thompson.”

—Bob Porter, Contributor—Radio Free Jazz1975 (original edited liner notes from Dancing Sunbeam, Imp ASH-9307-2)

A few years after this meeting, I learned that Lucky had passed away in Seattle in 2005.

With everything he had gone through, including apparently suffering from Alzheimer’s disease during the later years of his life, somehow he had luckily [?] managed to live to be 81-years of age.

And if you are looking for a comprehensive discography of Lucky’s recordings, you can’t do better than the one that Noal Cohen has compiled.