It may have been news to many that there was a trace of jazz left anywhere on AM radio, but that doesn’t make a report from Los Angeles easier to take. Here’s the lead paragraph from Kirk Silsbee’s story in today’s L.A. Times.

A silence has descended on Los Angeles’ AM radio band. On April 2, KABC’s longtime morning man, Doug McIntyre (pictured), acquiesced to his management’s request that he no longer program jazz. Although he hosts a current events show 5 to 9 a.m. weekdays, McIntyre represented the last vestige of AM jazz, with his variety of big band bumper music, full songs and on-air interviews of jazz personalities.

The station apparently sees jazz as hindering its bid for a wider audience. In its place, rock music now serves as McIntyre’s bumper music.

To read the whole story of the corporate karate chop to jazz, go here.

Staying with Los Angeles, archivist Jim Harrod has a new blog devoted to the history of Pacific Jazz, the Southern California label that did much to make west coast jazz famous. The two installments so far profile Richard Bock, who founded the label. They cover Bock’s early involvement with Discovery Records, his work at the club called Haig and the advent of Pacific Jazz. There are photographs of Dizzy Gillespie, Art Pepper, Hampton Hawes and others, pages from PJ catalogs and lots of record labels, like the one on the right, that are likely to induce ripples of nostalgia. To see Harrod’s most recent post, click here. Scroll down to part one to get to the early history.

Before Bock moved to Los Angeles, before west coast jazz became a category, there was plenty of substantial jazz activity on the lower left coast. On the periphery of much of it, and sometimes at the center, was the pianist, guitarist, singer and protohipster Slim Gaillard (1916-1991). He had a duo, Slim and Slam, with bassist Slam Stewart. In 1938, the success of their “Flat Foot Floogie” made them famous on radio and jukeboxes. If you can’t bring Gaillard to mind, think “vout” and “oroony,” words that enriched the language. Gaillard moved to L.A. in the early 1940s, appeared in several movies and played in clubs including Billy Berg’s. His musicianship and verve attracted artists beyond the arena of novelty and comedy in which he primarily operated. They included Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker, who appeared as guest soloists on a few of Gaillard’s recordings, including this one.

Here is Slim Gaillard as guest performer on a television program, presumably in L.A. If you have more information about it let us know by way of a comment.

Vout!

Finally in this west coast wig bubble, here’s a link to a piece from Oregon Music News, written by old pal Jack Berry, who was desperate for a column idea.

The next time I visit New York, which can’t be soon enough, I will make it a point to visit the Cornelia Street Café. The restaurant in Greenwich Village has intrigued me with its digital notifications about performances by musicians, singers, poets and uncategorizable others. Eclecticism seems to be the café’s guiding principle. The latest schedule speaks of poetry events—recreated conversations of the German composer Hanns Eisler—a lecture on “The Pathological Sublime and The Anatomical Unconscious”—the travel writer Ralph Potts—a trio made up of two singers and a bassist—a vocalist named Brianna Thomas of whom the Cornelians quote Will Friedwald as saying that she “may be the best young straight-ahead jazz singer of her generation” (who knew?)—and an array of adventurous jazz players of the downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn jazz scenes.

What brought Cornelia Street to mind was a message from the trumpeter John McNeil inviting me to his next engagement there with his band Urban Legend. Alas, I can’t go, but this presents an opportunity to share with you writing of the kind McNeil often disseminates in advance of his gigs.

In the message, McNeil wrote this about Urban Legend:

Steve Cardenas, Bill McHenry and I have had this band for something approaching eight years, with a changing cast of bass and drums. On the bandstand I’m the leader and ostensibly the music is mine, but in eight years band members have contributed major changes to all of it. McHenry and Cardenas have done the most, but I always tell the various bassists and drummers that ideas are welcome, and they come through with a lot. Matt Penman in particular changed a lot of harmony, bass lines etc.

Cardenas and I have collaborated on a tune or two also, and the result of all this is a book that is diverse but maintains a consistent vibe. What that vibe is I can’t really say, but like porn, I know it when I hear it.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I admire McNeil not only for his wit, general musicianship and trumpet virtuosity, but also for his fortitude in the face of vicissitudes that might have persuaded many of us to close up shop. If you follow this link, you’ll see a Rifftides archive piece explaining that. It includes video of a performance with his quartet.

If you follow jazz even tangentially, you have seen photographs by Ted Williams. Most of us have also seen his shots of major figures in news events of the second half of the twentieth century. This picture of Martin Luther King is one of them.

When Williams died in 2009 at the age of 84, he left tens of thousands of his prints and negatives in shoeboxes and notebooks. Most of them have never been published. They are not cataloged. The father and son team of Lou and Max Modica are spearheading an effort to preserve, organize and display Williams’ work. This paragraph is from the website they have created as part of the fundraising needed to see that the photographs survive and become available to the public.

Williams (pictured) was one of the first African-American photographers to attend Chicago’s Institute of Design, where he heard lectures on photography by such luminaries as Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. He began taking pictures of musicians in the late 1940’s and his body of work consists of more than 90,000 images. His first major magazine article was a 21-page spread for Downbeat magazine when he covered the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. He went on to regularly contribute images for many music and national publications and took part in the exhibit “Images of Music: Classical through Rock” at New York’s Soho Triad Fine Arts Gallery.

In his early days, Williams photographed many of the musicians who lived in Chicago or appeared there. Lou Modica has provided Rifftides with a photograph of one of the visiting artists and Ted Williams’ account of what happened the night he took it.

CHARLIE “YARDBIRD” PARKER  Chicago 1953

The town buzzed for weeks in anticipation of Bird’s scheduled six days at The Bee Hive. The Hive was essentially a bar — a narrow room with a bar running the length of one wall. Bird was to be working with a local rhythm section plus, this time, another local musician that doubled on trumpet and tenor — I imagine to cover any absence on Bird’s part. I am not usually a First Nighter. But in Parker’s case I make an exception, the first night might be his only night!

Even with an added cover and minimum, the place was packed…leaning room only. Set time comes — no surprise — no Bird. Ira Sullivan played valiantly but the patrons paid for The Yardbird and they could hear Ira anytime — no cover, no minimum!

Rumors that Bird is in the house relieve some of the tension. Next set — Bird is on the stand, horn in hand. Within minutes he is nodding out, leaning against the piano! Poor Ira is going nuts — soloing on the trumpet — soloing on the tenor — the grumbling gets louder — the club owner is on the phone to the musicians union — Bird sleeps.

Had it been anyone but Charlie Parker, the place would have been vacant — customers clutching their refunds in hand and long gone. But nobody wanted money back — we came to hear Bird and if he played one note we would be there to hear it!

Between sets he begins to show signs of life — the bartender made him something tall and milky and Charlie was sucking it up through two long red straws. On the stand he calls loudly to the piano man “The blues in A!” What followed was the most unexpected but absolutely brilliant exhibition of blowing that I have heard from anyone! The whole set was his!! As Duke might have said ‘beyond category.’

When he finished the set, Bird called out to the union rep — “Do you still want my card, m___f___?”

(©Ted Williams, used with permission)

The campaign headed by the Modicas includes an opportunity for donors to acquire copies of Williams’ photographs in return for contributions. If you are interested in the preservation of a valuable trove of pictorial history, visit this website and see if you think the effort is worthwhile. The site has more of the photos, a video that includes Williams discussing his work and information about the fundraising organizers.

The previous item about the Blackhawk triggered thoughts of Shelly Manne (1920-1984) and the quintet he led in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. As chance would have it, this morning I encountered videos of a superb edition of that band. The pieces are from Manne’s 1961 album Checkmate. The drummer’s group had pianist Russ Freeman, trumpeter Conte Candoli, tenor saxophonist Richie Kamuca and bassist Monty Budwig. For the 2002 CD reissue of the album, I wrote this summary:

Long before he composed the music for Jaws, the Star Wars series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and dozens of other major motion pictures, John Towner Williams was Johnny Williams, jazz pianist. He began writing for films and television in the early 1950s, and in much of his earlier work the jazz influence was still strong. Shelly Manne worked with Williams on Hollywood sound stages and was taken with his music for the TV series Checkmate. Manne adapted seven of Williams’s themes from the show for his band, Shelly Manne & His Men. Because Williams was tuned in to trends in jazz, some of the pieces reflected modal approaches recently taken by forward thinkers like Miles Davis and John Coltrane. “The King Swings,” as an example, is nearly identical in form to Coltrane’s “Impressions.” Accordingly, Manne and his quintet, one of the best small groups of the 1960s, plumb Williams’s unusual television music for all of its considerable improvisational possibilities.

Here is “The King Swings” from a1962 installment of the excellent Jazz Scene USA program hosted by Oscar Brown, Jr.

Budwig and Freeman introduce “The Isolated Pawn,” also from the Checkmate album. The modal bent is again strong. Candoli’s muted trumpet may not be the only thing that reminds you of another quintet of the era.

Concord seems to have dropped Checkmate from the OJC catalog. It has become an expensive collectors item, although used copies of the CD or LP occasionally pop up for less than twenty dollars.

In my notes for the final volume of Shelly Manne & His Men At The Blackhawk, I wrote:

During my years of labor at KGO-TV in San Francisco, I never passed the parking lot a block away at Turk and Hyde without regretting the injustice of a world that puts more value on the storage of automobiles than on preserving historical landmarks. To be accurate, the Landmark Preservation Commission never actually got around to trying to save the Black Hawk or even mounting a brass plaque at space number five, the approximate location of the door where Elynore Caccienti and Susan Weiss collected one-dollar entry fees and dispensed wisdom. All right: the matter never came to a vote, never even came up for discussion.

Nonetheless, officially recognized or not, history was made in the dust and dimness of that temple of gloom. “I’ve worked and slaved to keep this place a sewer,” Guido Caccienti used to say of the joint he ran with his partner, George Weiss. In the 1950s when the club was in its florescence, Count Basie set a new world record for compacting musicians by cramming sixteen men onto the Black Hawk’s little stand, adding Joe Williams, and still finding room to swing. Cal Tjader’s and Dave Brubeck’s groups were more or less headquartered at the Black Hawk and did some of their best live recording there. The first ten-inch LP by the Gerry Mulligan Quartet was made in September, 1952, while Mulligan, Chet Baker, Carson Smith and Chico Hamilton were at the Black Hawk refining their alchemy. The Miles Davis Quintet with Hank Mobley recorded two albums there, commemorating that regrettably short partnership. Although he recorded it in a hall a few blocks away, it was during a Black Hawk engagement that Thelonious Monk made a solo piano album notable for the beauty and serenity of his playing.

That was 11 years ago. Now, thanks to the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District, justice has been done. The corner is again a parking lot, but a bronze plaque embedded in the sidewalk commemorates one of the most important clubs in the history of jazz. In addition to Manne’s five Blackhawk albums, the club was the site of recordings by the Dave Brubeck Quartet, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and others named on the plaque.

The Tenderloin, an area of about 50 square blocks was famous, and infamous, long before Dashiell Hamett made it the locale of his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon. Uptown Tenderloin project manager Sarah Wilson reports that the Blackhawk plaque is one of nine marking historical sites in the district. The ninth will be dedicated tomorrow at 11 a.m. PDT in front of Hyde Street Studios, founded by Wally Heider in 1969. Heider, legendary for the quality of his recordings, captured dozens of live performances, including Cal Tjader’s Saturday Night/ Sunday Night At The Blackhawk, San Francisco (Verve). Maybe Uptown Tenderloin, Inc. can convince United Music, the custodian of that gem in Tjader’s discography, to finally reissue it on CD. Here is Tjader outside the Blackhawk getting ready for a gig with his Afro-Cuban quintet. Inside the van is drummer Johnny Rae. (Photo courtesy of David Murray).

And here is Tjader on vibes recorded at the Blackhawk in 1957 with his quartet—Vince Guaraldi, piano; Eugene Wright, bass; Al Torre, drums.

If you live in San Francisco (lucky you) or plan to visit, you may want to tour the sites commemorated with those bronze plaques.

Wally Heider Recording, 245 Hyde St.
Blackhawk Jazz Club, corner of Turk & Hyde Sts.
California Labor School, 240 Golden Gate Ave.,
Gene Compton’s Cafeteria, 101 Taylor St.
Original Joe’s, 144 Taylor St.
B’nai Brith, 149 Eddy St.
Screening Room, 220 Jones St.
Arcadia/Downtown Bowl, current Boedekker Park, Jones & Eddy Sts.
Blanco’s Café, current Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell St.

Just seeing the name Original Joe’s makes me hungry. The plaques are only a beginning. Uptown Tenderloin, Inc., is planning a museum dedicated to preserving the history of one of the most interesting, quirky and vital parts of an interesting, quirky and vital city. For details, go here.

To spend a few memorable minutes in the Blackhawk, watch the video in this Rifftides archive piece.

The proper spelling of the name—Blackhawk or Black Hawk—has never been satisfactorily resolved. Take your choice.