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We didn't listen to much jazz at home when I was young, because it wasn't my father's preference and he didn't understand the music, but he certainly didn't dislike it. Whenever I did hear jazz, mainly at Paul Siebenmann's record shop and on the radio, it excited me.
During high school I tuned into jazz through friends. The players who were current then were some of the greatest of all times: Miles Davis, Coltrane, Bill Evans, Art Blakey, Art Farmer, Thelonius Monk, Charles Mingus, Cannonball Adderly, Horace Silver, Mose Allison, and Ramsey Lewis all come to mind.
Classical music station WFMT, still one of the best in the country, played music on the show Live from the Southerland Lounge from downdown Chicago, ten until midnight every weeknight. I heard all these now legendary players live on the radio. I'd play the radio quietly in bed and listen until I was about to fall asleep, or until my mother came in and suggested I ought to turn it off and go to sleep.
One of the greatest concerts I'd ever been to until
that time was an outdoor show on the most perfect early summer
evening imagineable at Old Orchard shopping mall, allegedly the
first mall in the country. The program was shared by the Dave
Brubeck Quartet, and the George Shearing Trio. Brubeck played hits
from his famous Time Out album. Shearing announced:
``I'm going to play a solo arrangement of `Tenderly,' in the style
of Rachmaninoff, arranged by ... me ... right now!'' The whole
experience knocked me out. The company of a girl friend made it
all the more pleasurable.
Playing jazz is altogether different from playing classical music.[6] I had little opportunity to learn how. But I played some jobs with a dance band run by a saxophone player named Spike (Jim) Dashow.
[6] Duhh---a truism of titanic proportions to any reasonably informed musician. Normally I dislike the traditional labeling of music, partly because the labels are imprecise. Rather than the usual ``classical'' and ``jazz'' types, I prefer to distinguish these broad categories as ``European'' and ``American'' on the basis of the music's roots and how it is made, rather than where it actually comes from. American music includes the genres dubbed jazz, blues, folk music, and rock and roll, whereas so-called American musical theater is more European in nature. By that standard, French violinist Stéphane Grappelli played American music, and Leonard Bernstein, in works such as West Side Story, composed essentially European music.c
Naturally, these distinctions exclude many musics that don't fit neatly into such simplistic pigeonholes. Admittedly, I haven't made a point of following through with this perception in this biography, in order not to throw the story off on a tangent.
The first time was a frantic learning experience---getting the whole book of trombone parts to stock arrangements, close to a hundred of them, just two days before the job at a teen dance club in Evanston, and practicing the difficult parts for so long my lip turned to hamburger before I even got to the job. There I was, sight-reading music that was not only way harder than I had ever played in the school band or orchestra, but in a completely different style, with a technique of articulation, phrasing, and interpreting rhythm that was still foreign to me, doing so for the first time ever on the job. It was quite a night, but was both fun and exciting. I made it through, and Spike asked me to play two or three more times. So did another musician named Ron Turner, who ran a competing dance band. Ron was the second trumpet player in our brass quartet at school.
One of those
occasions was a radio performance with a vocalist. The singer was
Ann-Margaret Olson, who became famous later as Ann-Margaret. She
was beautiful even then, when she had jet black hair, not the red
hair that became her trademark. Ann-Margaret graduated from my
high school two years ahead of me. Some of my classmates went gaga
whenever she walked by, but I considered her an older woman, so
didn't pay as much attention until I saw her perform a
show-stopping choreographed rendition of the song ``Tropical Heat
Wave'' dressed in a bathing suit on the 1959 edition of the annual
New Trier student show Lagniappe.
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