When I first moved to New York in 1950, I was introduced to Dave Lambert, and we became good friends. He got a call from Rudi Blesh, who was doing a recording project with Mary Lou Williams. She had written a couple of tunes with lyrics, and she was having trouble finding a vocal group that could sing what she had written. Rudi thought they might do better if the vocal group was made up of singers who played instruments, thinking that they might be able to follow the parts better. Dave hired me, trumpeter Norma Carson and her husband, tenor man Bob Newman. We got together in a Manhattan recording studio and our four voices managed to record both tunes, “Cloudy,” and “Walkin’.” They were released as a 78 RPM record, and later they were included in a CD collection. Several years later I was a member of the Marian McPartland Trio, and Marian was a good friend of Mary Lou. On our job at the Hickory House, Mary Lou often sat in on piano with me and Joe Morello, and we became good musical friends.

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When I first came to live in New York, Birdland had just opened, and Charlie Parker was playing there with Bud Powell on piano. One night I was sitting in the peanut gallery, and I noticed that the man sitting next to me was Art Tatum, who was listening to Bud. When Parker’s band left the stand for a break, Al Haig, who was in the house band, invited Art to sit in, and Art did. When he slid onto the piano bench, he sat down on his own left hand and left it there for the whole set, playing just with his right hand. I was amazed!

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Jon Sotiropoulos posted this on Facebook:

Nat King Cole was an enormously popular crooner, earning $4,500 a week in Las Vegas in 1956. He headlined at the whites-only Thunderbird Hotel, where he wasn’t allowed to venture beyond the showroom and the cook’s resting area behind the kitchen. Cole’s road manager was given a room in the hotel because he was white, but the high-paid feature attraction had to find other accommodations. He regularly stayed in a rooming house on the West Side.

Frank Sinatra was a great fan of Cole’s. While performing at the Sands, Sinatra noticed that Cole almost always ate his dinner alone in his dressing room. Sinatra asked his valet, a black man named George, to find out why. George explained the facts to Frank. “Coloreds aren’t allowed in the dining room at the Sands.”

Sinatra was enraged. He told the maitre d’ and the waitresses that if it ever happened again, he’d see that everyone was fired.

The next night, Sinatra invited Cole to dinner, making his guest the first black man to sit down and eat in the the Garden Room at the Sands.

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Al Cohn once told me about a bunch of musicians who usually hung out at Jim and Andy’s bar on West 48th Street. One day they all decided to have a ball game. They gathered equipment and headed for one of the ballfields in Central Park. Al said that Zoot Sims was playing right field, and when a fly was hit in his direction, Zoot ran back and caught the fly with his right hand. As he did that, his cap flew off, and he caught the cap with his left hand before it hit the ground.

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Jim and Andy’s Bar was on the ground floor of the building that housed the A & R recording studio on the second floor. A & R had installed a direct phone line to the bar, since so many musicians hung out there. One evening the phone rang, and someone at A & R asked Jim if there was a trombone player there. Jim called the request down the bar, and one guy responded. When he got to the phone, the caller said, “We need a bass trombone player.” The trombone player replied, “I don’t play the bass trombone.” The caller said, “That’s okay, we’ll call Carrol’s and rent you one.” The trombone player answered, “Okay, and you might as well rent me a saxophone too. I don’t play that either.”

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One night at the old Half Note, Zoot was subbing for Clark Terry in the Terry/Brookmeyer quintet. Rashaan Roland Kirk came to sit in, and he unpacked his tenor sax and two other reed instruments that he called a manzello and a stritch. He also hung a police whistle around his neck. He planted his feet firmly on the tiny spot allotted to him on the Half Note’s bandstand, and Bob gave him the first solo. He played a couple of choruses on his tenor, and he then added the manzello and then the stritch on the next choruses, playing all three instruments at once. He sounded like a big band sax section. Kirk finished his choruses with a piercing scream on his police whistle. As Brookmeyer prepared to take the next chorus, he muttered to Zoot, “How the hell am I supposed to follow THAT?”