I think that this is what everybody needs a whole lot of—not only in their playing, but in their way of living.
As far as rating this—maybe you should use a different kind of star for rating this from the stars you use rating jazz records. A moving star. Make it five moving stars.
—Charles Mingus, listening to a record by Mahalia Jackson during a Downbeat “Blindfold Test” (1960)
*****
art beat
Lee Friedlander, “Mahalia Jackson” (1956)
***
[I]t almost looks like if you could see the next second after this picture was taken that she would start to ascend.
“Oh, Lady Be Good,” “Memories of You,” live (TV broadcast [Soupy’s On, Detroit]), 1955
*****
Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet (Clifford Brown, trumpet; Max Roach, drums; Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone; Richie Powell, piano; George Morrow, bass)
Live, “Get Happy”
*****
Live, Virginia (Norfolk, Continental Restaurant), 6/18/1956 (Last Concert)
“You Go To My Head”
***
“What’s New”
**********
lagniappe
Don’t take a trumpet player, man. You won’t need one after you hear this young cat, Clifford Brown.
—Charlie Parker (to Art Blakey, when he was going to work in Philadelphia in the early 1950s)
***
Out in California, we had a house, and we had a piano and vibes as well as trumpet and drums. Brownie could play all these instruments, you know. I would go out of the house and come back, and he would be practicing on anything, drums, vibes, anything. He loved music.
He was so well-rounded in all music. He liked Miles, Trane—who was very young then—and Louis Armstrong, and Lee Morgan, who spent alot of time with Clifford in Philly. Eric Dolphy was another good friend of ours. Music was his first love; I was his second, and math was his third. He was a wizard with figures and numbers; he used to play all kinds of mathematical games. . . .
There was only one time I didn’t travel with him. Our child, Clifford Jr., had been born, and I hadn’t taken him home yet to see the family. So Clifford said okay, and he put us on the plane; and of course that was when he was in the car accident and was killed. It was our second wedding anniversary and my 22nd birthday.
Today, at WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University), it’s all Brownie, (almost) all day. (This birthday celebration will be interrupted in the middle of the day for coverage of the Columbia/Yale football game.)
Newton Minow, Chair of the FCC, proclaims TV a “vast wasteland.”
1964
CBS News asks, with a straight face, what jazz “reveals” about “the nature of man” (God, too).
Lennie Tristano Quintet (Lennie Tristano, piano; Lee Konitz, alto saxophone; Warne Marsh, tenor saxophone; Sonny Dallas, bass; Nick Stabulas, drums), “Subconscious Lee,” live, New York (The Half Note), 1964, CBS TV Broadcast: Look Up and Live
music clip of the day 