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Jive-Colored Glasses
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The 1111 ("eleven-eleven") Club on the far North Side was one of these where old-timers like pianist

Art Hodes
piano1904 - 1993
In 1953, my friend Paul and I gave a notable party at my house in Highland Park and got Brunis and the band to come out from the city and play. The drummer was Hey-Hey Humphrey, a kind of early, boozy version of Keith Richards. You could say the party was a success. People drove their cars across the front lawn when leaving, and Paul drank so much he passed out in my bathtub upstairs with the tap running while trying to sober up. My father, mixing drinks at his bar referred to above, began to notice water dripping through the ceiling. Paul, now dressed, comes down and hands Jerome an umbrella, saying, "I'm sorry, Mr. G." Big Daddy laughed but Dr. Jazz's parties ceased thereafter.
Summer Bands, 1952
My father delighted in golf and his country club, at one time belonging to two of them, both Jewish and flourishing on the upper-crust goy model. In addition to the usual sports (golf, tennis, swimming) there were parties, dances, special events and incredible food. The Sunday buffet was Roman in its splendor. People were known to puke in the parking lot. In my younger days, I fell right into the country club scene, loved the swimming, took up golf. Mostly I played alone and grew to detest the game because it got me so emotionally wrought up. Missing shots was like a personal failure, and the social aspect of it was beyond me. I finally quit during my college years. The male camaraderie of the club housethe gin games and the banter of the fathersnever appealed.
However, as we have seen, Jerome loved parties and turned out to be a proto-

George Wein
piano1925 - 2021
Then a freshman in college, I invited part-time girlfriends to these affairs and came to understand the multiple pleasures of moving to the music and holding your lady close, the saxophones blowing right in your face. I had a serious crush on a girl named Sue, a tall blonde. So did maybe three other guys. She came with me to one of these dances, wore a corsage that I bought and a semi-formal white dress I complimented her on. I wore a dinner jacket and bow tie, standard dress for an event like this. The dancing, I finally discovered, was sexy. Sue was gorgeous.
In high school, dances were held in the very unsexy gym with teachers making sure that no one got out of hand from extramural drinking. You tried to impress the girls, but it had little to do with seduction or sex except in a subliminal way. Sex was something wonderfully mysterious but distinct from music. Guys in high school were incredibly uncool but tried to interest the girls by acting cool. The girls wanted to dance and most of the guys seemed to keep the act of dancing fatally separate from the music. We just couldn't fall into the sensual groove. I was always uneasy about my dancing ability; my feet seemed quite detached from my body. Maybe it was the horrible '50s pop music that caused this uncoupling.
It was just impossible to connect with girls in high school. Testosterone had us all numb fumbling, as

Fats Waller
piano1904 - 1943
Anyhow, the three club parties were extraordinary. The Basie event finished the series in late summer of '52, as I recall, and by then I was dancing my ass off and feeling more comfortable with my feet. This was the Count's new band with a new sound, heavy on ensemble playing, less light on its feet than the Kansas City band that had featured Lester Young. The new group was trying out different, sometimes good, sometimes repetitive arrangements by

Neal Hefti
trumpet1922 - 2008

Frank Foster
saxophone1928 - 2011

Joe Williams
vocals1918 - 1999
Basie's band in the '50s and '60s was all functionality, comfort and easelike some sort of Cadillac Fleetwood with deep maroon plush seats and a soft easy ride. No longer the blues-based, Kansas City swing unit that brought it fame, the Basie bunch evolved into a well-oiled dance band, as you can hear on this typical bluesy performance.
With jazz stars like

Frank Wess
saxophone, tenor1922 - 2013

Marshal Royal
saxophone, alto1912 - 1995

Les Brown
composer / conductor1912 - 2001
Les did a lot of covers, the art being in the arrangements. While sometimes echoing Basie and Woody Herman, the Band of Renown still managed to project its own robust voice.
One of Les's best albums is Live at the Palladium from 1953, the same band I heard. I recently listened to this LP for the first time in maybe twenty years, and my memory brought the solos right back to me. Most all were preplanned, but so they often are in big-band jazz. Mingus once said that to be a competent jazz musician you had to be able to play back, i.e., repeat, your solos from memory. Les's people could do that in spades every night, with slight new variations and without getting bored. The solos then got fixed in a listener's memorywhich is part of the appeal of big-band music. Audiences want to hear the familiar solos and tunes they know from records and earlier performances. Why have recent jazz musicians forgotten that?
In my younger years when I started poking through the stacks of 78s in my parents' library, there seemed to be a lot of Duke Ellington sides, one or two going back to the early Cotton Club days of the late 1920s. But most were from the mid-1940s, that is, relatively contemporaneous music for me then. I grew really attached to those disksa few Bluebirds but mostly black-and-gold RCA Victorsbecause the Ellington sound was like no other.
I couldn't then have put it this way, but what caught my ear was the voicing of the brasses and reeds. None of the swing bands sounded like that, and none offered the kind of rhythmic punctuation that characterized the Duke's music. But it was the timbres his players achieved and their harmonic blendsthe tone colorsthat struck me.
Duke's recycled tunes like "Black Beauty" and new ones like "Esquire Swank" I played over and over. I got hooked on Joya Sherrill's little-girl voice as she and the band made pop tunes like "Kissing Bug" and "Everything But You" into sterling three-minute compositions.
I hadn't yet heard the famous earlier numbers like "Cottontail" and "Ko-Ko." But these later tunes from the mid-'40s contained references to the war and the home front (events that made a big impression on me), to lovers and love affairs, to life, loss and leisure among adults. Then courtesy of Nat King Cole's overwrought version,

Billy Strayhorn
piano1915 - 1967
I used to visit all the very gay places
Those come what may places
Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life
To get the feel of life from jazz and cocktails.
The girls I knew had sad and sullen gray faces
With distingué traces that used to be there
You could see where they'd been washed away
By too many through the day twelve o'clock tales.
Yet music was a way to begin comprehending these adult things. Ellington's musicand that of his alter ego Billy Strayhornwas a guidebook to learning about sophistication.
Players like

Cootie Williams
trumpet1911 - 1985

Ben Webster
saxophone, tenor1909 - 1973

Harry Carney
saxophone, baritone1910 - 1974

Clark Terry
trumpet1920 - 2015
Duke's music in the '50s has been subject to a lot of criticism, sometimes deserved. Yes, the band did get brassy and repetitive. The maestro developed an addiction to certain formulas like the sterile medley of famous old numbers, Cat Anderson's high notes, and constant repetitions of "Satin Doll." His key line "We love you madly!" got tiresome. In time, this schtick became part of the Ellington persona. In print I once called him "the greatest exponent of programmed whimsy in jazz."
But all criticism became moot when the band opened the series at the country club on May 29, 1952. My memories from years earlier of the Ellington sound, its voicings and rhythms, suddenly were fleshed out in real time by real performers in an intimate setting that put them before a fascinated audience, some dancing, some at tables just listening. Now, all the band's household names were right out front blowing, it seemed, for me.

Louie Bellson
drums1924 - 2009
Duke's was originally a show band, a pit band, and his first important gig was to accompany the dreadful jungle dance numbers at Harlem's Cotton Club. To the end, his music testified to this showbiz aspect. Bellson's extended solos were definitely part showbiz. Throughout his career Duke was attracted to the stage, the opera, films and television. Early on, he was influenced by

Paul Whiteman
composer / conductor1890 - 1967
Throughout the '50s and '60s I sometimes had the feeling that Ellington was losing his way, that he was struggling to maintain his claim against the new music, or that the band was failing him. At the same time, I got to hear that band live on many occasions, and it was still a group of very extraordinary musicians playing an undying concept of jazz. At the country club Duke continued to rely on the old, somewhat tired formulas, but there were many grand moments and much of the magic was still working.
Reprinted from Jive-Colored Glasses ? 2015 John F Goodman (jg publications)
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Book Excerpts
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Art Hodes
George Wein
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Neal Hefti
rank Foster
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Marshal Royal
Les Brown
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ben webster
Harry Carney
Clark Terry
Louie Bellson
Paul Whiteman
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