Horace Silver, “Senor Blues “ (1956)
Toby Miller & Freddie McGinnis, 1957.
All the way through college, I worked at Freddie’s Grill. It was located at one end of the Student Union. I worked at least one night on the weekend and one other evening, plus two or three afternoon shifts. I started there my first week in college and didn’t leave until the week before I graduated. At least two nights a week, I closed down the grill at night after everyone left.
My first week on the job, my co-worker Ron Potts showed me how to jimmy the jukebox so we could play it without having to pay. We only did it after hours but once the door closed, we played music non-stop without paying a nickel for it.
Freddie’s juke box was awesome, one of the best I’ve known! There was pop stuff on it but also a lot of jazz, and the jazz was good. Horace Silver, “Senor Blues.” A Shorty Rogers album (Wherever the West winds Blow) spread across two EPs. Anita O’Day and Roy Eldridge singing with the Gene Krupa band on “Let Me Off Uptown.” On the flip side, Anita’s “That’s What You Think.” Claude Thornhill. Duke. Funk organist Bill Doggett playing Ellington (two EPs). Primo r&b too. Fats Domino: ”Blueberry Hill.” Chuck Berry: “House of the Rising Sun.” Little Richard: “Lucille,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly.”
Sixty years later, I’m on my second recording of “Senor Blues.” Ditto the Shorty Rogers album. I don’t have the Krupa cuts with Anita and Eldridge but there’s lots of Anita in my iTunes library. Obviously, I have lots, I mean lots, of Duke’s music and band and I own one album by Bill Doggett, though not the one I listened to at Freddie’s which is a collector’s item now.
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My junior year, I hitched a ride to Kent State to hear the Claude Thornhill Orchestra. Thornhill isn’t someone you hear much about any more but his band was special, with a unique instrumentation. On recordings, it sometimes included two French horns and a six-person clarinet choir plus a tuba, and it had phenomenal arrangers (Gil Evans was one) and soloists (Lee Konitz, trumpeter Conrad Gozzo). I’m glad I heard Thornhill because a few years later, his band was history.
When you hear music, after it’s over, it’s gone, you can never capture it again. (Eric Dolphy)
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time. (Ornette Coleman)
If you don’t make mistakes, you aren’t really trying. (Coleman Hawkins)
ADDITONAL LISTENING
Little Richard: “Good Golly, Miss Molly” (1958)
Claude Thornhill: “Snowfall” (1947), arr. Gil Evans
MUSIC & ME 