For The Wall Street Journal this week, I interviewed Tisha Campbell (above) for my "House Call" column in the Mansion section (go here). Tisha (pronounced Tee-sha) is an exceptional actress, singer, dancer and comedian who was on Broadway at age 12. She is a superbly talented woman who is now co-starring in Uncoupled, producer Darren Star's new Netflix comedy series. Here's Tisha (on the left below, in the embed) with Tichina Arnold, co-hosting last year's Soul Train Awards...
Also for the WSJ's Opinion page, my July "Cultural Commentary" is on the importance of Curtis Mayfield's Superfly, an album released 50 years ago this month. The record not only took on the destructive impact that drugs were having on black urban communities but also changed the direction of soul. Instead of focusing squarely on the slow pace of civil rights and racism, soul began to look inward, at how pushers and addiction were destroying the black church, families and neighborhoods from within, with help from corrupt cops and organized crime (go here).
SiriusXM. I will be on Sirius XM's Feedback this Thursday from 9 to 10 a.m. (Channel 106) to talk about the album and spin tracks with Nik and Lori.
Ed Beach. Following my post on WRVR-FM's legendary jazz DJ Ed Beach (above, courtesy of Mark Beach), I received the following from Carl Woideck:
Hi Marc, I listened to Ed’s WRVR-FM shows on tape delay in Cleveland in the early 1970s. I first met Ed when he was living in a suburb of Portland, Ore. I kept seeing him listed as playing piano and singing in the area. When my friend Jon Goldman (who had also listened to Ed’s show in Cleveland) visited my wife Marian and me in Eugene, we decided to call Ed and we arranged to drive up to meet him.
I had already acquired a small stack of Ed’s old LPs at a used-record store, and Ed wanted to autograph one of them. As you can see in the photos above, he annotated each LP with the type of information he would need on his shows.
Later, Ed moved to Eugene, Ore., to be near his son, Mark, and that’s when I really got to know him. We would listen to music together and discuss it. Every so often, we would go to the room where he had his electric keyboard and he'd play and croon songs I wasn’t familiar with, such as Cole Porter’s "Dream Dancing.”
Light Fantastic. Following my post last week on two 1960s films with jazzy soundtracks (Light Fantastic and Joanna), I heard from director Raymond De Felitta, who blogs at Movies 'Til Dawn:
Marc, wow, where to begin? I haven’t even gotten to the second movie yet as ‘Light Fantastic’ is so filled with weird stuff. The fact that Joseph Levine "presented" means he thought it might be worth a buck or two, but it doesn’t come up on his IMDB entry. I wonder whether he had avoided talking about it or the film was always too obscure. A bigger question is: how did Jean Shepherd (above) wind up in this thing? At the time he was a popular WOR host—not national of course—very New York and probably thought this was a good career move, I guess. I love how guys like him are loose and grooving behind a mic, but put them in front of a camera and they clam up. He’s awful in the film.
In one of the cool montages of Dolores McDougal walking around the city, she stops and takes a long look in the window of a bookstore called Paper Book Gallery. This was a place that Shepherd often promoted on his radio show. The store didn’t buy ads. He just liked mentioning it, so I always assumed he owned a piece of it. Giving it a plug in this no-budget movie must have been a stipulation of his participation, I would guess.
As you note, Robert McCarty, the director, had already been nominated for an Oscar for his rooftops short film. But his subsequent work was low-rent New York soft-porn stuff of the late 1960s and early '70s variety. There is no record of him beyond his short IMDB entry which ends in 1975. He seems to have disappeared in the mid-1970s after a multipart movie called "Foreplay."
Clark Terry. Following my post on Clark Terry's Big Bad Band, I heard from celebrated vocalist Nancy Harrow:
Hi Marc, thanks for your post on Clark Terry. I think you would really enjoy hearing the duet Clark did with me on "Hit the Road, Jack." It was originally on an album I did with him called "Secrets," but I reissued this one tune a few years ago on my album, "Partners," which you can find on Spotify under my name.
Here's Nancy and Clark...
More Clark Terry. I also heard from Bill Collins:
Hi Marc. I took the photo above of Clark at the Era’s End Benefit in 1957 in Kenilworth, Ill. Duke Ellington's band was hired to host the dancers on the first floor, and the Johnny Pate Trio was on the second. I was the only 16-year-old bartender on the scene. Later in the evening, with my Yashica camera in hand, I met Clark during a band break. We had a nice chat. A sweet man.
Still more Clark Terry. This from Kim Paris of the FM Radio Archive:
Hi Marc, thanks for your feature this week on Clark Terry and his Big Bad Band. Thanks to Mark Rabin, I can share a broadcast recording of Clark Terry performing with another big band at the 1981 Chicago Jazz Festival. Clark Terry and Louis Bellson were featured with the Jazz Members Big Band at the festival as part of NPR's Jazz Alive coverage, hosted by Billy Taylor and Ben Sidran. Mark recorded this concert from Chicago's local NPR station at the time, WBEZ FM. Go here.
Vince DeRosa, RIP. Last week, I heard from Los Angeles arranger Roy Phillippe, who informed me that French hornist Vincent DeRosa died on July 18 at age 101:
Hi Marc, Vince was probably most famous for the opening notes of "Days of Wine and Roses" and the rip at the end of "Peter Gunn." He recorded not only film scores but other recordings ranging from classical, jazz and pop albums.
In tribute to DeRosa, here's Days of Wine and Roses with his opening notes...
Here's Peter Gunn with DeRosa's ripping octave jump at the tail end...
And this looks like DeRosa, seated all the way to the right (his typical chair) among the French horns. He would have been 40 in 1960...
David Allyn and Johnny Mercer. Les Block and David Cummings produced and conducted extensive radio documentaries paying tribute to singer David Allyn and singer-songwriter Johnny Mercer. You can access David Allyn: A Singer's Singer here, which includes a terrific interview with Tony Bennett (and yours truly). You can access Johnny Mercer 100 here, which features the last interview of singer Margaret Whiting. Both shows are now in the U.S. Library of Congress. Hats off to Les and David for their hard work and determination.
Jazz, digitized. Last week I heard from Walter Gross at Sony's Legacy Recordings. He has been busy digitizing important RCA and Columbia albums for inclusion on Spotify, Tidal and other streaming platforms.
What just went up? Well, a lot, and there's more to come. Here's a list of albums that have been digitized and are up now on music-listening platforms:
- Al Cohn Sextet—That Old Feeling (1956)
- Al Cohn & Zoot Sims Sextet—From A to Z (Expanded) (1957)
- Buck Clayton & Woody Herman—How Hi the Fi (Expanded) (1954)
- Cohn/Perkins/Kamuca—The Brothers (Expanded) (1956)
- Dave Bailey Sextet—Gettin’ Into Somethin’ (1961)
- The Nick Travis Quintet—The Panic Is On (1954)
- Shorty Rogers—Courts the Count (1954)
- Shorty Rogers & Andre Previn—Collaboration (1955)
- Shorty Rogers—Afro-Cuban Influence (1958)
- Shorty Rogers—The Swingin’ Nutcracker (1960)
- Ray Bryant Trio—Little Susie (1960)
Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson radio. On Sunday, from 2 to 7 p.m. (ET), Sid Gribetz will be hosting a five-hour Jazz Profiles radio broadcast on WKCR-FM in New York celebrating saxophonist Willis "Gator Tail" Jackson. To listen from anywhere in the world, go here.
And finally, here's the killer combo of Eddie "Lockjaw" Davis and organist Shirley Scott in 1963—with Wendell Marshall on bass, Arthur Edgehill on drums and Ray Barretto on congas—playing I Wished on the Moon. Love those Lockjaw openings!...