The Plastic Saxophone
Fencing goes up around the Kennedy Center's main building one day after its own board votes to close it, and Rep. Joyce Beatty asks the court for an emergency hearing. Plus the complete Massey Hall tape in one box, Bobby Watson in Baltimore, and the night five giants of bebop shared a stage in Toronto.
LioraA fence goes up around the Kennedy Center, one day after its own board voted to close it. Today's record is the complete Massey Hall tape, all of it, in one box. And five giants of bebop stand on one stage for the first time, in a Toronto hall that was far from full. It's Thursday. Let's go.
LioraIt's Thursday, September 17th. 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: Fencing goes up around the Kennedy Center's main building the day after the board votes
LioraToday, a fence.
The Associated Press reports that fencing went up yesterday around the Kennedy Center's main building, one day after the board voted to close it.
Congress allocated two hundred fifty seven million dollars for the repairs. President Trump said on social media that the work happens only if the board can go ahead with adding his name.
Representative Joyce Beatty, the Ohio Democrat and board trustee who brought the suit, asked for an emergency hearing the same day. Her filing says it is possible the defendants "intend to undertake immediate steps in order to make public access practically impossible for the foreseeable future," and thereby "evade the court's order."
LioraThe center's spokesperson, Roma Daravi, defended the shutdown: infrastructure failures from decades of neglect have left a crumbling building, and safety concerns require an immediate closure. A chunk of ceiling fell in a main hallway earlier this month.
Maria Shriver, President Kennedy's niece, called it "a sad state of affairs."
Two. Listen to This: Craft's Hot House gathers the complete Jazz at Massey Hall recordings on three LPs
LioraToday's record is the night you are about to hear about.
Hot House: The Complete Jazz at Massey Hall Recordings, on Craft Recordings. Three LPs, a hundred dollars, out in November 2023 for the seventieth anniversary of what the label's own headline calls the greatest jazz concert ever. Toronto, May 15th, 1953. Charlie Parker on alto, Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Bud Powell on piano, Charles Mingus on bass, Max Roach on drums. Nineteen tracks.
Here is why the box and not the album. The original Debut Records LP carried Mingus's bass overdubs. Disc one gives you the quintet without them. Disc three repeats those titles with them.
The tip. Play "Perdido" from disc one, then "Perdido" from disc three, and hear what a bass line does to a room you already know.
LioraNow the release desk. Tomorrow, Blue Note puts out "Dedicated To You," the Branford Marsalis Quartet with Dianne Reeves, a Coltrane centennial record built on six standards from the 1963 Coltrane and Hartman album. Marsalis on choosing his singer: "Dianne's got the thing."
Toronto. Five giants of bebop on one stage for the first time, in a hall that was far from full, because the heavyweight title fight was on television. Charlie Parker played it on a white plastic saxophone. Sekou has the story.
Three. The Bridge: The Plastic Saxophone: five giants of bebop on one stage for the first time
LioraOne true story from this music's history, every day. Sekou tells it, I ask the questions. Sekou, where are we?
SekouToronto. Massey Hall. The evening of May 15th, 1953.
No promoter is behind it. No record company. The New Jazz Society of Toronto is an amateur club of local fans of modern jazz. One of them, Alan Scharf, said fifty years later they did it "as a lark to present modern jazz that we didn't hear on the radio."
Here is the lark. Charlie Parker. Dizzy Gillespie. Bud Powell. Charles Mingus. Max Roach. Signed one at a time, for fourteen hundred and fifty dollars in all.
LioraThose five had played together before?
SekouNever all five at once. Max Roach said they had worked together in various settings, but "we had never all been on the same stage until Massey Hall."
Getting them there ran on other men's bad luck. Mingus had the bass chair only because Oscar Pettiford broke his arm in a softball game. Powell came out of a hospital to make the date. New York State had declared him incompetent that February, and the manager of Birdland was his legal guardian.
The organizers believed the concert needed little advertising and counted on word of mouth.
LioraWord of mouth, for those five?
SekouWord of mouth would carry it. The organizers did not foresee the other event of that night. In Chicago, Rocky Marciano was defending the heavyweight title against Jersey Joe Walcott, on television across Canada and the United States.
Scharf again: "We didn't think boxing fans were jazz fans, and the issue of how full it was going to be didn't occur to us."
How empty the hall was is still argued over, from a quarter of the seats to a little over half. Massey Hall was far from full.
The fight lasted two minutes and twenty-five seconds.
LioraAnd they played anyway.
SekouThey did. And Charlie Parker walked out carrying a white plastic saxophone.
Don Brown was in the audience. Parker, he wrote, looked "like an unmade bed." Brown adds: "We later learned his Selmer was in the pawnshop." How the horn reached him that night is not settled.
Dina Bennett of the American Jazz Museum says Parker "didn't miss a beat, and he played it with the dexterity and the genius that he played his brass saxophone."
LioraDid anybody record it?
SekouMingus and Roach did. Mingus and Roach had started their own record label the year before, and they brought their own tape machine, so the concert was recorded for their label. Which was lucky, because the horns kept leaving. By Max Roach's account, the rhythm section sat there "while Charlie and Dizzy were running in and out telling us what was going on." The bar across the street had the fight on.
Afterward the club took the tapes to a Toronto radio station to hear what they had. Mingus's bass was not on the recording. He played his parts again later, in New York, over the top.
SekouThe money was worse. Ticket sales never covered the club's costs, and the accounts of who got paid still contradict each other. Gillespie said later, of his check, that it "bounced, and bounced, and bounced."
Toronto's own Globe and Mail critic did not call it great. He wrote, "All in all, it was neither a great concert nor a bad one." The word greatest came years afterward, off the jacket of a reissue. Not off that stage.
LioraA plastic horn, a room far from full, and a prizefight across the street. Nothing about it looked like history at the time.
That's The Bridge. Back to today, right after this.
Four. On the Road: The Bobby Watson Quartet at Keystone Korner in Baltimore, plus Chicago, Detroit
LioraTonight, coast to coast.
Tonight's ticket first.
If I had one ticket tonight, it's Baltimore. Keystone Korner has the Bobby Watson Quartet at seven, with Jordan Williams on piano, Curtis Lundy on bass and Victor Jones on drums. Thirty five to forty five dollars. The club bills Watson as a two time Grammy winner and a Jazz Messenger, and after tonight's story about the front line of bebop, that is the room I want.
Now the sweep. In Chicago, the Green Mill has Andy Brown from five, no cover, then Alan Gresik's Swing Orchestra at eight for ten dollars. Cash only.
In Detroit, Cliff Bell's has Paul Cornish, who records for Blue Note, at seven thirty and nine thirty, twenty five dollars.
LioraIn Austin, the Elephant Room has the Elena Diaz Quartet at six and the Tony Bray Quintet at nine. The cover is seven dollars, and nothing before eight.
And in New York, Mezzrow has two piano trios, Noah Stoneman at six, Neal Kirkwood at nine, thirty five dollars a set.
Five. One More Note: Ellington, Mingus and Roach cut Money Jungle in a New York studio on this date in 1962
LioraSeptember 17th, 1962. Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus and Max Roach sit down at Sound Makers studio in New York and cut "Money Jungle."
Seven Ellington compositions. It came out first on United Artists, and Blue Note sells it now in the Tone Poet series.
Now do the arithmetic. Two of the five men on the Massey Hall stage in 1953 are two of the three men in that studio nine years later.
Put "Money Jungle" 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 Thursday. I'm Liora. See you tomorrow.