Sunday Wax Bits

For those who love listening to jazz recordings of the '40s and '50s, it's easy to forget a simple fact: The jazz life back then was hard and physically exhausting. Artists who came up in those decades toured under harsh conditions and then had to perform brilliantly night after night, no matter how tired or how ill they felt. Complex music had to be memorized in some cases and played in top form in hot or drafty rooms choked with second-hand smoke. The pay wasn't great, loneliness and boredom were common, and few saw much daylight, let alone their families. Jazz was manual labor. [Photo of Art Farmer by Enid Farber]

I mention all of this because we never should forget the hard conditions under which the jazz we love was created. Today, we complain when it rains a few days in a row, when customer service doesn't answer on the first ring, when we have to wait for a restaurant table or when traffic slows.

The next time you think you have it rough, consider what the people who recorded the music we love had to endure—and still managed to produce dazzlingly improvised works night after night. Jazz was (and is) as much a physical task as it is a creative challenge. Hands hurt, lips are sore and muscles ache. [Photo: Hot Lips Page]

When I interview jazz legends and hear what they had to endure and the stamina required, I realize why so many of them have a wonderful sense of humor. You had to laugh if you wanted to survive. Misfortune and bad breaks had to be shrugged off. Otherwise you wouldn't have lasted long. There were no weenie jazz musicians in the '40s and '50s.

Arthur Penn. City Island director Raymond De Felitta posted a touching, personal essay on the late film director Arthur Penn last week at his blog Movies 'Til Dawn. Here's one of the great movie intros to Penn's Mickey One (1965), featuring the saxophone of Stan Getz and arrangements by Eddie Sauter:

CD discovery of the week. Trombonist Carl Fontana began his recording career in Woody Herman's Third Herd in 1952. He moved on to Stan Kenton's band in 1955, starting with the leader's Contemporary Concepts album with Bill Holman arrangements. By the late 1950s, Fontana was on record dates led by Kai Winding and Bill Holman.

Since Fontana was often in band settings in the 50's, you rarely had a chance to hear him and his warm sound other than as part of a trombone section. Now you can, on the newly issued single CD entitled Carl Fontana: The Fifties.

There are four sessions on this CD: A live radio recording with Fontana and the Vido Musso Quintet in 1958; a session in Paris in 1956 with a unit from the Stan Kenton band directed by Fontana; a Jimmy Cook big band date in Las Vegas in 1960 (the two tracks are Polka Dots and Moonbeams arranged by Bill Holman, and Soon scored by Bob Enevoldsen); and two tracks featuring Fontana with extended solos in the Kenton band in 1956.

Among my favorites is Intermission Riff with Fontana and Musso going at it, and the Cook and Kenton big band tracks with superb Bill Holman charts.

You can sample and buy Carl Fontana: The Fifties (Uptown) here.

Oddball album cover of the week. Leo Diamond was a harmonica virtuoso who played in novelty combos in the '40s and then signed with RCA in the mid-'50s for a series of LPs. Based on the YouTube clips posted from this album (warning: spare yourself), it seems the LP was a crash dummy for the label's development of stereo. Great to see that the art director found a model who could breathe under water.

Comments

[Brew]

Wow! I have never seen this photo of 'Hot Lips'. What a treat! -- Your article on the pains of jazz performers has reminded me of one recording with Dizzy from a Carnegie Hall Concert (1952) where he is obviously not feeling very well.

Anyway, "what still came out of his horn was impressing" (said Axel Dörner, my trumpeter colleague from Berlin after I'd played this track on the phone), though it's really not the Dizzy Gillespie we know.

It is obvious that he must have been a) sick, or b) tired or c) ... just drunk (it was a late night set).

I will post the tracks ("A Night In Tunisia" & a really rough, and disorganized "52nd Street Theme" with Bird and others) at my blog as soon as I find the time.

The music of your oddball cover would sound very hip for some of today's DJ's. The cover itself is priceless. Wonderful!

[Michael Steinman]

Thank you, Marc, for reminding us of how grateful we should be for what we have from jazz musicians. We know in some emotional way that they give us their whole souls, but we need to be reminded of just how much of jazz is pure athleticism, how their bodies must feel this hard work. We understand this when we see a drummer come off after a solo, the clothing soaked with sweat, but perhaps sometimes we should think of what the bassist's feet feel like at the end of the night, the trombonist's lips, the tenor player's neck and back. These men and women work so hard even now for what gets put in the tip jar! Bless each and every one of them, alive and dead.

[Ed Leimbacher]

All work and no play may make Jack a dull boy, but hard work and no-letup playing made Jazz a dulcet buck or two... and, so the story goes, allowed the lucky winners to just keep gigging till they paid off all their debts.

[Rab Hines]

Thanks, Marc, for reminding us of the adversities faced every day by these folk who are now recognized as artists. Add to the things you mention racism, irregular availability of proper nutrition, ... I can't even imagine some of it.

Great article.

[David]

Great tribute. Musicians who landed a spot in a successful big band considered themselves lucky to have a steady job, but found themselves living on a bus and were lucky to get a chorus or two. Charlie Barnett summed up the big band life eloquently in his memoir: "You stay tired, dirty, and drunk."

[David]

Fortunately, more Fontana small group recordings are surfacing all the time. The recently released "Trombone Heaven" by Carl and Frank Rosolino features an astonishing two bone cadenza on one track. My own favorite is "The Great Fontana" which is a collaboration with Al Cohn and a superb rhythm section.