Swing That Music!

Charles Mingus and sextet play "Take the 'A' Train" at Montreux festival in 1975. The personnel: 
Charles Mingus: bass; George Adams: tenor saxophone and vocals; Don Pullen: piano; Jack Walrath: trumpet; Dannie Richmond: drums; Gerry Mulligan: baritone saxophone; and Benny Bailey: trumpet.

(Two parts)





Anita O'Day, in Tokyo in 1963 TV special, singin' and swingin' on Four Brothers:



Anita sings "That Old Feeling," from the same '63 TV production:



Jazz on a Summer's Day: Anita O'Day, Thelonius Monk, Dinah Washington, Gerry Mulligan, Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, others, the full film:



The background to "Jazz on a Summer's Day": in 1958, fashion photographer Bert Stern (famous for Marilyn Monroe's last photo shoot 'The Last Sitting', six weeks before her death) set out to make a film about the annual Jazz festival in Newport, Rhode Island.

He approached his subject as an occasion to prove that music didn't have to be merely recorded; the film making itself could be as artful as the onstage sound. So the movie is itself a piece of jazz; in the first half of the film, the camera often wanders away from the stage to fixate on the crowd and the boats in the America's Cup yacht races, thus creating a great time capsule.

Fielding five cameras simultaneously, some handheld and some with telephoto lenses, and using the finest Kodak positive-reversal color film, Stern captured brilliant images that, as he said 'just jumped off the screen'. Usually jazz films are all black and white, kind of depressing and in little downstairs nightclubs. This brought jazz out into the sun. It was different.'

Hence the selection for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being 'culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant'.


"JATP Blues," with the colorful Irving Ashby guitar solo I love, from an April 22, 1946 Jazz at the Philharmonic concert. From the original Clef label 3 record 78rpm album set of "Jazz At The Philharmonic, Volume 6." Introduction: Norman Granz. The personnel:

Buck Clayton - trumpet
Charlie Parker, Willie Smith - alto saxes
Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young - tenor saxes
Irving Ashby - guitar
Kenny Kersey - piano
Billy Hadnott - bass
Buddy Rich - drums




"How High The Moon," a buoyant JATP treatment from Feb. 12, 1945, with:

Howard McGhee, Joe Guy - trumpets
Willie Smith - alto sax
Illinois Jacquet, Charlie Ventura - tenor saxes
Ulysses Livingston - guitar
Garland Finney - piano
Red Callender - bass
Gene "Chicago Flash" Krupa - drums



"Tea for Two," a wonderfully easy-swinging version, with a 1944 JATP all-star band that includes Nat King Cole, and Les Paul (who takes a wildly inventive solo):



1950's drum battle on Steve Allen Show, with Lionel Hampton, Don Lamond, and Louie Bellson:



Bucky Pizzarelli and Frank DiBussolo, on "In A Mellowtone." Delightful music, with great views of the guitarists' fingers!