I’ve only got time for a quick post today so I thought I’d put up a clip of someone I think is one of the most consistently enjoyable but underrated Jazz pianists of all time. He was probably best known as the long-time accompanist of Ella Fitzgerald but he also played on a number of really important Jazz albums with Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane, to name just two. He also loved to play within the classic Jazz trio format of piano, bass and drums as represented here.
Just a quick post in response to a suggestion from a friend:I do requests on here, but only if they’re asked for.
Neville Dickie was born in County Durham in 1937 and did national service in the RAF around the same time as my Dad. He’s still going strong, playing lovely jazz mainly in the Harlem stride piano style of the 1920s with those infectiously bouncing left-hand tenths.
Here is he recorded in 2007 with Danny Coots on drums or, rather, drum. They’re playing a lovely tune by the great Jelly Roll Morton called Wolverine Blues.
The sound balance isn’t great but I think it’s a wonderful version of a classic bit of good time Jazz.
When the great American songwriter Billy Strayhorn saw the beautifully evocative painting (left) by James McNeill Whistler of one of the bridges over the River Thames, it inspired him to write an equally evocative song to be performed by his longstanding musical collaborator and friend Duke Ellington. The song was written in 1941, but it was only years later that he realized that he had named it after the wrong bridge.
The painting was of Battersea Bridge; but he had named the song Chelsea Bridge, a much less romantic location. Nevertheless, the tune quickly became a standard, and a feature for the band’s star saxophonist, Ben Webster who carried on playing it after he left Duke Ellington’s orchestra in 1943.
By all accounts Ben Webster was a drunken brute of a man but when he played ballads like this he produced music of great warmth and delicacy. In fact, his technique on the tenor sax would probably be called “wrong” by a teacher: he didn’t use his tongue properly on the reed so his notes had to be produced by much more lung power than “normal” players use. Instead of a clean attack, each note is wafted in on a sort of phoohing sound. The breathiness of his tone is a consequence of this and, although he produced a huge volume which was good for playing in front of a big band like Ellington’s, it also made him unable to play well at faster tempos. His playing on slow ballads, though, was often exquisitely beautiful. Who says everyone has to be a speed merchant?
Ben Webster moved to Copenhagen in 1964 along with several other great Jazz musicians, to escape the racism and consequent lack of opportunity for black artists in his homeland. He was buried in the part of Copenhagen called Nørrebro when he died in 1973.
I am a fairly frequent visitor to Copenhagen – I’m going there again in June, in fact – and I did visit his grave once. There’s also a restaurant named after him in the city centre.
Anyway, here he is in in 1964 playing Chelsea Bridge with the marvellous Stan Tracey on piano who featured in a previous post of mine.
All of a sudden it seems like Spring. We had a little foretaste a few weeks ago, but this was followed by a return into chilly miserable weather for a while. That even seemed to dampen the spirits of the blackbird that was waking me up and he’s left me alone for a while.
Now, though, it’s sunny and warm and the forecast is set fair until the weekend. My walk through Bute Park takes me past hosts of daffodils, appropriately enough for Wales. The trees are covered once more in green leaves. It’s just a pity there’s another week or so before the Easter holiday so I can’t spend more time outside or make use of the weather to get some necessary house repairs done, such as new window frames and repointing the chimney.
Still, I shouldn’t get too depressed. Spring has come early anyway. The clocks don’t go forward for another couple of weeks.
And if the weather wasn’t enough, my weekly veggie box arrived this morning with further evidence of springtime. After a steady supply of winter vegetables (such as swedes and parsnips), things have suddenly changed. The selection of seasonal vegetables I got today includes lettuce and tomatoes (for the first time in months), as well as Red Russian Kale and Cauliflower.
Oh, and the blackbird was back this morning too.
I haven’t put any music up for a while, so I hope you enjoy the following clip from Youtube which seems to fit the season. Errol Garner was a brilliant musician who invented a very distinctive style of Jazz piano entirely of his own. Many attempted to copy him, but nobody managed to get it quite right. He perfected a style of playing that involved using his left hand to keep a solid rhythm while his right hand usually played behind the beat created by his left. In other hands this lagging effect would probably have made the music drag, but in his it produced a wonderful sense of tension that he always somehow managed to resolve.
On slower numbers, such as most famous hit, Misty,
he tended to be elaborately decorative, something which I don’t like at all. But on the faster ones he could rattle along producing wonderful ad-libbed melodies like no other Jazz pianist, putting in little musical jokes here and there at the same time.
His other trademark was to play lengthy disguised out-of-tempo introductions that kept the audience guessing as to what tune was coming next and what speed it would be played at. I always thought his bass player and drummer were probably in the dark too, until he broke into tempo and played the melody, usually to spontaneous applause and broad grins all round. You can see that happening on this clip, around 2 minutes in, when at last he plays the theme of It Might as Well be Spring, a tune which was a big hit for Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto in the 1960s.
If you’re interested in hearing Errol Garner at his absolute best, you have to get the classic Concert By the Sea, recorded live in Carmel, California in 1955, which is a joy to listen to over and over again. But in the meantime, here is in 1964.
A few weeks ago in my bit about the great jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Monk, I mentioned another great musician, Stan Tracey. He was Ronnie Scott’s house pianist for many years, as well as being a composer and leader of his own band. It’s only the fact that he stayed all his life in England that prevented him from gaining wider recognition. No less a musician than Sonny Rollins asked (of British Jazz fans)
Does anyone here realise how good he is?
Well, I think they do but he remains relatively unknown outside these shores.
Amongst the collection of old LPs that I am gradually making into CDs using the USB turntable I got for Christmas is one of the greatest British jazz albums, Under Milk Wood, which was written by Stan Tracey and recorded by his band in 1965.
Living in Wales, I’m somewhat ashamed that I didn’t do this one before because it is of course inspired by the “play for voices” with the same name by Dylan Thomas. The music is brilliant throughout, vividly evoking the atmosphere of various episodes in the play, but my favourite track is about the very first lines. Stan Tracey’s piano and Bobby Wellins‘ saxophone hauntingly evoke the atmosphere of the opening of Under Milk Wood which, if you’ll forgive me for quoting a rather lengthy extract, shows Dylan Thomas extraordinarily imaginative use of language, superb control of rhythm even in a prose setting. His poems are wonderful to listen to as well as to read, especially when read by the poet himself with his sonorous yet lilting voice; if you want a short example try this example, steeped in a sense of nocturnal melancholy
In My Craft or Sullen Art
In my craft or sullen art Exercised in the still night When only the moon rages And the lovers lie abed With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light Not for ambition or bread Or the strut and trade of charms On the ivory stages But for the common wages Of their most secret heart.
Not for the proud man apart From the raging moon I write On these spindrift pages Nor for the towering dead With their nightingales and psalms But for the lovers, their arms Round the griefs of the ages, Who pay no praise or wages Nor heed my craft or art.
Anyway, the play Under Milk Wood‘s famous opening goes along these lines:
It is Spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courter’s-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows’ weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wet-nosed yard; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing.
Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep.
And you alone can hear the invisible starfall, the darkest-before-dawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.
Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats, sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman’s lofts like a mouse with gloves; in Dai Bread’s bakery flying like black flour. It is tonight in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot, text and trinket, harmonium, holy dresser, watercolours done by hand, china dog and rosy tin teacaddy. It is night neddying among the snuggeries of babies.
Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; going through the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by the Sailors Arms.
Time passes. Listen. Time passes.
Here are Stan Tracey and Bobby Wellins with Stan Tracey’s meditation on that piece, Starless and Bible Black, played in a way that’s as moving and ethereal as the sound of time passing….
I’ve been lecturing and writing bumf all day and decided I could do with a bit of a break, but my fingers are so used to typing today that they insisted I should use this ten-minute hiatus to write a blog entry. And who am I to argue with my digits?
Anyway, I had an idea last night of something to put up so I’ll take it off the mental shelf on which I store silly blog ideas and present it now.
Last weekend I went to see the Opera Doctor Atomic in London, and last night I was tidying up my CDs which I usually leave lying around all over the place. In amongst the ones I found in my study and moved back to their rack was the brilliant album that my version calls The Atomic Mr Basie, but I think was originally issued in 1957 on LP with the name E=MC2. I doubt that there is that much musical fare with the word “Atomic” in the title so it struck me as a bit of a coincidence. Apart from anything else it’s a reminder of how far the language of atomic bombs had entered into popular circulation during the 1950s. I can’t think of any other Jazz albums with an equation as the title either.
I’m not sure why Count Basie became Mr Basie for the purposes of the later title, but there you are.
Jazz historians tend to distinguish quite sharply between two versions of the Count Basie Orchestra. According to the books, the first Basie Band was a rough-and-ready blues outfit that arrived in New York from Kansas City in 1936 and the second was a magnificently slick powerhouse machine that emerged after a short hiatus in 1951. Actually both bands were terrific, able to slip from laid back swing to full-throttle up-tempo rabble-rousing in barely the bat of an eye. Anyway, how “rough-and-ready” could a band be with the great Lester Young in the saxophone section? Another invariant between the two bands was the brilliance of the rhythm section which had a featherlight touch but was able to drive the band along like no other.
The late and very great Ella Fitzgerald described the Count Basie Orchestra as
They’re the swinginest band there ever was. They swing ya into bad health.”
Quite.
The real difference in the two bands wasn’t really the personnel (although that did change substantially over the years), but in the style of playing. The early Count Basie Orchestra didn’t have very sophisticated written arrangements so it relied a lot more on punchy riffs and call-and-answer exchanges between the brass and reeds, which were executed incredibly tightly considering that they were ad-libbed. The second manifestation drew on superb arrangers, particularly Neal Hefti who wrote most of the arrangements on The Atomic Mr Basie. The band still had an almost telepathic gift for synchronized riffing, especially playing behind a star soloist improvising in one of the many gaps left in the arrangements.
I had a quick shufti for hefti on Youtube and found one of the tracks from The Atomic Mr Basie, Whirlybird, performed in 1965 but with the same tenor sax soloist, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis that plays on the album. I remember going to see him play in Newcastle once and was blown away by his enormous sound, the muscular leatheriness of his tone, and his uncanny ability to change up a gear just when you think he’s going flat out. Then in his sixties, he was an exhilirating musician to listen to and he was even better twenty years earlier with this great band punching out riffs behind him. I love this version nearly as much as the original, even if the drum solo (by the overrated Rufus Jones) does go on a bit, because the brass section is just awesome…
Today’s the day we call in England Shrove Tuesday. We’re apparently all supposed to get shriven by doing a pennance before Lent . Another name for the occasion is Pancake Day, although I’m not sure what sort of pennance it is to be forced to eat pancakes.
Further afield the name for this day is a bit more glamorous. Mardi Gras, which I translated for the title using my schoolboy French, doesn’t make me think of pancakes but of carnivals. And being brought up in a house surrounded by Jazz, it makes me think of New Orleans and the wonderful marching bands that played not just during the Mardi Gras parades but at just about every occasion for which they could find an excuse, including funerals.
The Mardi Gras parades gave rise to many of the great tunes of New Orleans Jazz, many of them named after the streets through which the parade would travel, mainly in the famous French Quarter. Basin Street, South Rampart Street, and Bourbon Street are among the names redolent with history for Jazz fans and musicians around the world. I also remember a record by Humphrey Lyttelton‘s 1950s band called Fat Tuesday.
The New Orleans Mardi Gras has on recent occasions sometimes got a bit out of hand, and you probably wouldn’t want to take kids into the French Quarter for fear they would see things they shouldn’t. Personally, though, I’d love the chance to savour the atmosphere and watch the parades.
The clip I’ve chosen is of Bourbon Street Parade. The one and only time I went to New Orleans I felt a real thrill walking along this street, just because I’ve heard the tune so many times on old records. I didn’t go in Mardi Gras time, however, but in the middle of summer. The heat was sweltering and the humidity almost unbearable, but the air was filled with music as well as moisture. It was impossible to sleep in the heat, so I stayed up moving from bar to bar, drinking and listening to music until I was completely exhausted.
The tune was written by the late Paul Barbarin, who died in 1969 during a street parade in New Orleans. What a way to go. He also plays on the clip I included here.
I picked this particular clip because it features a much underrated British musician, Sammy Rimmington (although the notes on Youtube have muddled it up; he plays saxophone on this, not clarinet). My dad once played with Sammy Rimmington and I remember the unqualified admiration with which he (my dad) spoke of his (Sammy’s) playing.
Just to balance the books here’s a wonderful version of the classic bebop tune Anthropology, performed by Bud Powell who I mentioned in my previous post about Thelonious Monk.
This really is authentic bebop, with its complex yet propulsive drum patterns and jagged melodic lines characterized by unusual intervals and little punctuating tags at the end of each phrase in the solo. Also brilliant, but quite different to Monk, Bud Powell was very much a direct translation onto the keyboard of the saxophone and trumpet styles of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.
The tune was written by them too, although it uses essentially the same chords as George Gershwin’s I Got Rhythm. It was a standard bebop procedure to write a new melodic line on top of an existing harmonic structure and give the result a new name. Jazz improvisation is always based on the harmonies (chord changes) rather than the tune, so this is a way to build new compositions quickly with the knowledge that the harmonic foundations would be sound. In the 40s there was a classic Charlie Parker recording session during which the band decided to do such a variation of the standard Cherokee (written by Ray Noble). In the middle of the performance they absent-mindedly played the Cherokee theme and there was a cry of anguish from the control room by the Producer who obviously hoped that if they stayed off the actual tune of Cherokee he wouldn’t have to pay composer’s royalties. So that take was abandoned, and they did another. The final version was called Koko and it’s one of the Charlie Parker classics. Many other classic bop tunes were made in this way, with different standard tunes underneath them. Necessity and budget restrictions are the mothers of invention.
Oh, and just listen to the fantastic double bass by the brilliant (and then very young) Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen who drives it along like the clappers!
When you read about the structure of bebop it seems so complicated and obscure that it’s hard to believe that the result is such a thrill to listen to. I think it is the highest point of twentieth century music-making, both in the creativity and skill of its proponents and in the sheer excitement of its sound which is made all the more remarkable when you realise how difficult it is to play!
Some weeks ago I posted a clip of Billie Holliday and Lester Young that was part of a 1958 TV programme called Sounds of Jazz. I found another clip from that show and decided to put it on here because it’s absolutely fascinating. The star this time is the great Thelonious Monk, whose middle name was Sphere.
Thelonious Monk was a unique musician. His remarkable self-taught style of piano playing was unlike that of anyone who came before him. Look at his hands in this clip and you’ll see that his fingers are straight as he plays: he uses them a bit like mallets in order to get such a percussive sound from the instrument (although the audio is a bit muffled on this track).
Monk was often called “The High Priest of Bop” and regarded as one of the leaders of the post-war bebop revolution in Jazz alongside Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. Actually, I don’t think Monk ever really played bebop: the archetypal bop pianist was undoubtedly Bud Powell whose style was quite different to Monk. But the “High Priest” tag owed at least something to his eccentric personality: he hardly ever spoke and, aside from his music, he communicated mainly through his choice of hat.
Monk’s piano style is hard to describe – his wife Nellie once described it as “Melodious Thunk” – but I’ve always loved his music. To me his solos sound like someone talking directly at you in a strange and wonderful language that you don’t quite understand but which sounds beautiful anyway. His use of syncopation is quite different from the usual bebop musicians and it seems, to me anyway, to echo the rhythms of everyday speech. But, above all, when you hear Monk play the piano, you know immediately who it is. He had many admirers, but nobody could play like him. He was a genius.
In later life his behaviour became disturbingly erratic; he would sometimes stand up in the middle of a performance and go wandering around the stage. His music also deteriorated, I think, from the early sixties onwards. His best records are from the 40s and 50s. I think it was generally assumed that he had a drugs problem, which he may well have had, but it was eventually realised that he was suffering from a serious mental illness. Although attempts were made to treat this, he stopped playing in the 1970s and lived out the rest of his as a recluse.
I remember very well the day he died in February 1982. It was during the Newcastle Jazz Festival and on the day when the great British jazz pianist Stan Tracey was due to give a concert there. As we took our seats in the Newcastle Playhouse for the gig, an announcement was made that Thelonious Monk had died. Stan Tracey, for whom Monk had been a major musical inspiration, responded to the occasion by playing two sets exclusively consisting of tunes by his hero. It was one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to and remains strong in my memory to this day.
That also reminds me to say that as well as being a completely unique and individualistic piano player, Thelonious Monk was also a great Jazz composer who penned some of the great modern standards of the idiom: ‘Round Midnight, Straight No Chaser, Epistrophy, the list is substantial. And then of course there is the tune he plays on this clip which became something of a signature tune.
Off the record, I don’t think it’s completely fair to say that Thelonious actually wrote Blue Monk. The main theme was in fact borrowed from an earlier tune called Pastel Blue written by the trumpeter Charlie Shavers. It’s basically a straightforward 12 bar blues, lacking the twists and turns and stops and starts of his more typical compositions, but Monk recorded more varied versions of this tune than practically any other. This clip is a short rendition, but it’s fascinating to see the other characters in shot. Sitting at Monk’s piano looking straight at him is none other than Count Basie, and we also get a glimpse of blues singer Joe Turner standing at the side. Later on, there’s a shot of the great saxophonist Coleman Hawkins clearly enjoying the music as I hope you will.
I noticed this morning that I’ve passed a bit of a milestone on here. I’ve actually reached my 100th post. That probably means I’ve been spending way too much time blogging but, undaunted, here I go again.
Ages ago (or it seems like ages ago) I posted an item about Humphrey Lyttelton and during the course of it I mentioned that my Dad had played the drums with Humph some years ago. I did mention in that post that I would put up a picture as soon as I found it, which I have now done. Here it is, taken probably somewhere around 1990.
I’m not entirely sure of the venue. I always thought this session took place in the Corner House in Newcastle but on closer inspection it doesn’t really look like it in this photograph so I wouldn’t bet on my memory being right. It’s not a great photograph, but that’s definitely my Dad (Alan Coles) on the drums. I don’t know the other personnel, but you do get a proper impression of how tall Humph was (he’s on trumpet, of course) .
Humph of course had his own band but many jazz venues (including the Corner House) preferred to invite soloists only to come and play with the house band. The main reason I think was that it was cheaper that way. And of course the local musicians loved it because they got to play with their heros. My Dad idolized Humphrey Lyttelton but when he finally got to play with him he was extremely nervous and didn’t particularly enjoy the evening.
Semi-professional bands like the Savoy Band shown here couldn’t afford fancy band uniforms or outfits so for some reason they all seem to settle on cheap red nylon shirts, as shown in the picture. I don’t know why because they’re not at all pleasant to wear if you’re going to be sweaty. But these shirts reminded me of a story that I’ve bored people with over many years. When I was little (in the 70s) there was a similar band in Newcastle called the Phoenix Jazz Band. They also wore horrible red nylon shirts for gigs, except for their young bass player (a guy called Gordon) who refused to do so. This uppity young student teacher turned up for gigs in a black-and-yellow hooped jersey so he looked rather like a bumble-bee or a wasp. The rest of the band called him, rather sarcastically, Sting. He soon went on to other things but the name stuck.
My dad always claimed that Sting had played the double bass in our garage – when I lived in Benwell village. I don’t remember having seen him though, and I might well have been having my leg pulled. Actually it wasn’t a garage anyway, more of a big wooden shed where he kept his drums and lots of other junk.
Anyway, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this but I did for a while have dreams of becoming a Jazz musician myself. I wanted to be a saxophonist but my Dad persuaded me that I should learn to play the clarinet first and it would be easy then to switch to sax. I don’t think it was very good advice because they’re quite different instruments to play, but I rather think he had pushed the clarinet because he wanted me to play traditional Jazz rather than modern stuff.
I found that I had quite a good ear for music and a pretty good sense of rhythm so I mastered the rudiments fairly quickly but never got much further than that. I even got as far as sitting in with some bands, but never became a full-time member of one.
Sitting in with one of these traditional Jazz bands is a very informal business. Usually the repertoire consists of standard tunes that everyone knows and there are no real arrangements as such. The trumpet usually plays the lead for a chorus or two, with impromptu clarinet and trombone alongside, then there’s a sequence of solos (usually a couple of choruses for each player, unless you really get into it and the leader shouts “take another!”), and then you play out to the end. Other than that you make it up as you go along.
But there is one notable exception to this, a number called High Society. This probably began as a Mardi Gras parade tune but later on came to be played as an up-tempo flag-waver. Almost every Jazz band, however, plays it the same way. It starts with a sort-of call to arms with drum rolls and a few phrases on the horns a bit like a fanfare before moving into tempo and it has quite a few scored passages that are played straight (i.e. without improvisation). When it breaks eventually into the solos there is an unwritten rule that the clarinet soloist plays a standard set-piece solo obbligato, at least for one chorus, after which it’s back to the more normal improvised solo.
I don’t know how this became such a strong tradition but you can check it out yourself. There are dozens of versions of High Society played by different Jazz bands and the clarinettist will always play the same basic notes. There’s a classic recording by Jelly Roll Morton on which there are two clarinettists (Albert Nicholas and Sidney Bechet) who both play the original licks, one after the other.
The story I heard was that this solo (as well as possibly the tune itself) was written by a man called Alphonse Picou who was born in 1878 and played with the first real Jazz band in New Orleans, which was led by the legendary figure of Buddy Bolden, the first great jazz trumpeter. Bolden died in 1931 but no recordings by him have ever come to light because he stopped playing before 1910 and spent most of the rest of his life in mental institutions. It is said that Buddy Bolden’s band did make a cylinder recording, but this grail-like object has never been found.
High Society is such a well known tune and is such fun to play that it is very often part of after-hours Jam sessions at clubs like the Corner House where I did once actually play the Alphonse Picou solo from memory (or at least some sort of approximation to it), having heard it so many times on different records.
Last weekend, when I was playing around on Youtube, I chanced upon a bit of film of New Orleans Jam Session from 1958. It was looking back down a very long tunnel into ancient history but you could have knocked me down with a feather when I saw, sitting down next to the piano at the left, the great man himself, Alphonse Picou. I never thought there would be a film of him, thinking that he was, like Buddy Bolden, an almost mythical figure. I later found elsewhere, a clip from the same session of him playing his own famous solo! However, he was 80 years old and very frail at the time and he doesn’t actually play it that well so I’ll spare his posthumous blushes (he died in 1961) by picking a rather better number from the same session.
The tune I’ve picked to put on here is called Mamie’s Blues. They play it with that lovely lazily lilting beat that’s so typical of authentic New Orleans Jazz but is actually so difficult to get right. And if it wasn’t enough to see Alphonse Picou, there are several other legendary names too: Paul Barbarin (drums), George Lewis (clarinet) and Jim Robinson (trombone) amonst others. The session happened 50 years ago at which point these were all very old men and they’re all long gone now.This clip, to me, is every bit as important a piece of history as, say, an original score by Mozart.
They may all look like they’ve seen better days, but they certainly still knew how to play!
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In the Dark 