Down memory lane…some stories from the Band Room from 1983…

When I first came to New York to be a jazz musician, I spent most of my evenings sitting in the bleachers at Birdland, which had just opened. I was listening to Charlie Parker’s wonderful quintet. Birdland was in a basement on Broadway near 52nd Street, and the bleachers were three or four rows of chairs at the side of the bandstand where you could sit all night for the 99 cent admission charge without being hustled to buy drinks.

Besides Bird’s regular band, Red Rodney, Tommy Potter, Bud Powell and Roy Haynes, there would be a second group with musicians like Miles Davis, Sonny Stitt, Al Haig, Curley Russel, Howard McGee and J.J. Johnson.

One night, a buzz of recognition ran through the bleachers as Art Tatum slipped into a chair beside the bandstand. He listened carefully to Bud Powell’s piano playing, and he was complimentary when asked how he liked it. Then Al Haig asked Art if he would like to sit in with the relief band.

As Art slid onto the piano bench, those of us sitting behind him in the bleachers could see that, as if by accident, he sat down on his left hand. It stayed there under his ample derriere for the entire set. He comped, and took several brilliant solos, all with just his right hand.

Art could have been commenting on Bud’s sparse use of his left hand, or he could have been reminding himself that stride was not being mixed with bop that season. Whatever his reason, he let everyone see that he could sit on one hand and still give the rest of the piano players a run for their money.

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Zoot Sims was encouraging Jim Hall and his wife Jane to come down to the Half Note one night to hear his band. Jane expressed reluctance because she had been working all day, and she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stay awake. Zoot offered her a Dexedrine spansule. She said, “Oh, that’s too much for me. I’ll just dump out half of it.” As she started to pull the capsule apart, Zoot grabbed her hand and said, “What are you doing? Don’t you know there are children sleeping in Europe?”

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At one of Bob Reisner’s Sunday jam sessions at the old Open Door in the Village, Brew Moore and Don Joseph were trading tenor and trumpet solos. Several young drummers were waiting their chance to sit in. As a new tune began, a new drummer took over and began pouring on the fire and brimstone. Don gave him a pained look and said, “What happened to that other drummer we had all nice and tired out?”

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One of Merv Gold’s best efforts to get a laugh was a special mouthpiece he carried. He made it by hacksawing the rim of an old mouthpiece into a jagged sawtoothed shape, and then having it re-silvered. Engraved on the outside of the cup was the brand name: “Sure Grip Comfo-Rim.” Merv told me he got a laugh from every trombone player he had showed it to, except Urbie Green, who slipped it on his horn, played a few runs and high notes, and handed it back to Merv, saying, “Not bad.”

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When I got out of the Army in 1949 and went home to Seattle, I met Quincy Jones, who was a teenager still in high school, and he introduced me to his friend, R.C., a blind piano player. R.C. was scuffling around Seattle, trying to get work for his trio, which sounded a lot like the Nat King Cole Trio.

It must have been a month or so after I first heard R.C.’s trio that, in a club where he was playing, someone called out, “Come on, R.C., sing the blues!” He did, and I jumped right out of my chair. I had never heard anyone sing like that.

Later on, I asked R.C. why he didn’t sing like that all the time. He said, “Aw, man, where I come from, everybody sings like that. You can’t make a nickel singing that way.”

A year later, when I had moved east, I heard him singing that way on a record, and found out his real name was Ray Charles. He made quite a few nickels singing that way.

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When George Wein had his modern jazz club, Storyville, in Boston, he also had a club in the basement called Mahogany Hall, where he featured traditionalists like Bud Freeman and Pee Wee Russell. One year during the week after Christmas, I was playing at Storyville with the Gerry Mulligan Quartet, and the older generation was playing downstairs. George Wein thought it would be nice to have both bands welcome the new year with a jam session, and Gerry offered to write an arrangement of “Auld Lang Syne” for the combined group. When the chart was finished, Gerry got everyone together to rehearse. Pee Wee made a lot of suffering noises because he was worried about his reading. He played his part fine, but he continued to worry about it. On the eve, both bands got together on the Storyville stage to jam a few tunes before twelve o’clock, and as the hour approached, Gerry called up his chart. Everyone got out their parts, but Pee Wee couldn’t find his. So, we faked “Auld Lang Syne,” and never got to play Gerry’s arrangement. As we left the stand, I noticed that Pee Wee had been sitting on something. Sure enough, it was the missing part. I never found out whether Pee Wee knew it was there.

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When I was living in Seattle in 1949, I was playing with a tenor player named Paul McCrea. One night Paul told me, “I just asked the girl in the record store across the street if she had a record of Daphnis and Chloe. She thought a minute and said, ‘We got Chloe.’”