Ten in the Morning
The Kennedy Center's board votes to close the main building, minutes after a federal judge again keeps the president's name off it. Blue Note gathers Sonny Rollins's complete 1957 Village Vanguard night, and fifty eight musicians answer a ten o'clock call on a Harlem stoop.
LioraThe Kennedy Center's own board votes to close the building, minutes after a judge again keeps the president's name off it. Blue Note puts Sonny Rollins's complete 1957 Village Vanguard recordings into one vinyl set. And the morning fifty eight musicians turned up on a Harlem stoop. It's Wednesday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Wednesday, September 16th. This is The Daily Quintet. I'm Liora. Five stories from the world of jazz, in about ten minutes. Here we go.
One. The Lead: The Kennedy Center's board votes to shut the main building
LioraToday, a building.
The Kennedy Center is closing. NPR reported yesterday that the board voted Tuesday to shut the main building, minutes after a federal judge again stopped a plan to put President Trump's name on it.
Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in a twenty two page decision that the board cannot put Trump's name back on the building or rename the grounds. The defendants cannot install memorials for the president, or for anyone or anything else, he wrote, "without Congress's blessing."
Representative Joyce Beatty brought that suit. She is a board member, and she sued last December to stop the renaming. Her statement Tuesday: "President Trump is holding the Kennedy Center hostage unless he can put his name on this sacred memorial."
LioraThe administration told the board the physical plant is unsafe and the finances are within weeks of bankruptcy. The REACH, the small extension, stays open.
For decades this was a marquee space for soloists, orchestras, theater and dance, with free programs every day of the year. NPR's Anastasia Tsioulcas, on air: "that's come to a close for now."
Two. Listen to This: Sonny Rollins's complete Village Vanguard masters from November 3, 1957
LioraToday's record is a room you will hear again in a few minutes. A Night At The Village Vanguard: The Complete Masters, Sonny Rollins, on Blue Note.
The label's own store has it in the Tone Poet series, three LPs or two CDs, seventy two ninety eight. Blue Note says Rollins walked down the stairs of the Village Vanguard on November 3rd, 1957 to record his first live album, and the first live album ever made at that club.
Two rhythm sections. Most of the set comes from the evening, with Wilbur Ware on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. Two pieces come from the afternoon, with Donald Bailey on bass and Pete La Roca on drums.
The tip. Listen for the drums, and hear where the afternoon ends.
LioraNow the release desk. Blue Note announced yesterday that Joshua Redman will release "If Ever You Would Leave Us" on November 20th, eleven selections from Rollins's book. Redman calls Rollins his biggest influence as an improviser.
Harlem, 1958. A photographer with almost no credits calls the biggest names in jazz to a stoop at ten in the morning, and hopes fifteen might come. Fifty-eight show up, and he has to herd them with a rolled-up newspaper. Sekou has the story.
Three. The Bridge: Harlem, 1958: a photographer with almost no credits calls the biggest names in jazz to a
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Sekou tells it, I ask the questions. Sekou, where are we?
SekouHarlem. East 126th Street, between Fifth and Madison. The morning of August 12th, 1958. The group starts assembling around ten o'clock.
Esquire is preparing a special "Golden Age of Jazz" feature for January 1959 and is open to a big new jazz photograph. This one will become the feature's lead image. A class portrait of the biggest names in jazz, outdoors on one street.
Whose idea that was is still argued. The photographer, Art Kane, said it was his. Other accounts credit Esquire's art director, Robert Benton.
Kane is a magazine art director with almost no photography credits. He has never shot a full magazine assignment. And he is about to line up many of jazz's biggest names on a stoop.
LioraHow do you even invite people to that?
SekouPhone calls to agents and record companies. Notices at the Musicians' Union halls. Word of mouth, player to player.
Marian McPartland was working the Hickory House. The critic Nat Hentoff came rushing in and told her, quote, you've got this date to have this picture taken at 10 o'clock.
Ten in the morning. Kane hoped fifteen might come. Maybe twenty.
Fifty-eight people showed up.
LioraFifty-eight. At ten in the morning.
SekouAnd they will not stand still. Many of them haven't seen one another for a long time. It's a reunion on a sidewalk. Kane said later, quote, I couldn't control it, because we had all these musicians who hadn't seen each other for a long time... paying attention to each other, but not to this idiot kid.
So he picks up that morning's New York Times, rolls it into a megaphone, and shouts directions through the newspaper.
Two borrowed cameras. His assistant is an advertising man named Steve Frankfurt, who has never loaded a camera in his life, and who gets the film in backward. Frankfurt, years later: there I was in Harlem, loading the cameras backward. If anyone wanted to die, it was me.
LioraDoes anybody get lost in all that?
SekouTwo men sit down. Willie The Lion Smith gets tired of waiting and takes a seat on the stoop next door. He came that morning. He is not in the photograph.
Count Basie gets tired of standing and sits on the curb. Neighborhood children gather around him, three more appear in a nearby window, and that is how children end up in the photograph's foreground.
Fifty-seven people are in the finished frame. Fifty-eight were there. Which number you hear depends on whether anyone counted the Lion.
LioraAnd Esquire ran it.
SekouFive months later, January 1959, leading the jazz feature. A plot point in a Steven Spielberg film in 2004.
But the morning itself survives because of Mona Hinton. Her husband, the bassist Milt Hinton, brought a movie camera because he sensed the day mattered. She ran it. Eight-millimeter home footage of the musicians on a Harlem street.
In 1994 the radio producer Jean Bach built a documentary around that footage and around the people still alive to talk. A Great Day in Harlem. Nominated for the Oscar in 1995, and it lost. Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker called it, quote, a brilliant, funny, moving, altogether miraculous documentary.
Benny Golson died in 2024. Sonny Rollins died on May 25th, 2026, at 95, the last living person from the photograph. Everyone in the frame is gone. The frame is not.
LioraA man with almost no credits, borrowed cameras, and a rolled-up newspaper. He got an extraordinary frame. That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: The Bill Charlap Trio holds the Village Vanguard, with rooms open tonight in New York
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket first.
If I had one ticket tonight, it's the room in today's record. The Village Vanguard, New York, has the Bill Charlap Trio, week two, with David Wong and Carl Allen. Sets at eight and ten.
Now the sweep. Also in New York, Smalls has the Vito Dieterle Quartet at six and seven thirty, then the Matt Chertkoff Quintet at nine and ten thirty, thirty five dollars a set. The Jazz Gallery has the Festival of New Trumpet Music, the first of two nights, the Skylar Tang Quartet at seven, Miranda Agnew at nine.
LioraIn Oakland, Yoshi's has John Pizzarelli Presents "Dear Mr. Bennett," show at seven thirty. In New Orleans, Preservation Hall has the Preservation All-Stars featuring Branden Lewis, four sets from five o'clock. In Seattle, Jazz Alley has Vieux Farka Touré at seven thirty, forty seven dollars. In Nashville, Rudy's has PT Gazell and the Side Effects at six, then the Bruce Dudley Trio at nine.
Five. One More Note: Two September 16th birthdays, Jon Hendricks and Charlie Byrd
LioraSeptember 16th, and two birthdays.
Jon Hendricks, born in 1921 in Newark, Ohio. The NEA says he helped create vocalese, crafting songs and lyrics out of the note sequences of famous instrumental solos, in Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.
Charlie Byrd, guitar, born in 1925 in Chuckatuck, Virginia. The Library of Congress says Byrd came home from a State Department tour of Brazil with the music, shared it with Stan Getz, and the two of them made "Jazz Samba" in 1962.
Put "Jazz Samba" on today.
Outro
LioraThat's the Quintet. If today's show earned it, follow The Daily Quintet wherever you listen.
The Daily Quintet is an AI-crafted production, researched and checked by humans. Every listing you heard came from the venue or the festival's own organizer.
That's your Wednesday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.