Arthur Taylor, drummer. The drawback of being a drummer or pianist at a jam session is potentially having to wait your turn at the chair, whereas horn players can blow one after the other.
Those jam sessions may have been more fun to play than they are to listen to.
—STEVE SWALLOW, 2008
This sounds like one of those planned sessions; one of those sessions that was organized. Somebody would call around and try to get certain musicians to be there.
—HENRY GRIMES, in my rental car riding around Downtown Los Angeles, 2003
January 4, 1964
Multi-reed player Roland Kirk, saxophonist Jay Cameron, drummer Edgar Bateman, and bassist Jimmy Stevenson are on the fifth floor of 821 Sixth Avenue:
“I called Chick Corea.”
“Who was that tenor player?”
“Paul Plummer?”
“How does he play?”
“Good.”
“I just talked to Don Cherry. He said he’s coming.”
“Maybe he’s wrong. It’s four o’clock in the morning.”
“I’m sure he’ll be here.”
“I know a piano player who I bet would like to play, Bob James, you know, Bobby James from Detroit?”
“Yeah, he’s a good player.”
“You got his number? Call him, man.”
Arthur Taylor, drummer. The drawback of being a drummer or pianist at a jam session is potentially having to wait your turn at the chair, whereas horn players can blow one after the other.
“This is the place that was upstairs, right? I remember those stairs. Hmmm, this is very emotional for me to hear. Ahhhh, listen to Zoot. That melody … nobody plays melody like Zoot anymore. You know, I once tried to hire Zoot for my quartet and he was away. He was on the road. I always regretted that didn’t work out.”
—drummer ROY HAYNES, in Durham, North Carolina, 2005, listening to himself playing the tune “Indian Summer” in the loft in 1960 with Zoot Sims on saxophone, Dave McKenna on piano, and Eddie De Haas on bass
“I think Roy and I were at the Five Spot that night. I think we went to this loft after playing at the Five Spot.”
—EDDIE DE HAAS, in Chicago, 2005. De Haas and Haynes had been playing in pianist Randy Weston’s trio at the Five Spot.
“It was freewheeling, I mean the music was freewheeling. But there was a social undercurrent, like a sense that this was an audition. I felt that it was more of an audition, and it was a very hard place. I didn’t feel any love or softness there. I felt that in the music there was the love of the music, and the love among musicians, but you really had to be a pretty extraordinary player to get to play the second tune.”
—ROBERTA ARNOLD, artist manager
“The standard American songbook was a key ingredient of the sessions. You had to have a common repertoire. If you didn’t know tunes like ‘I Got Rhythm’ and ‘Indiana’ you couldn’t make it in those sessions. But in the 1960s the ‘everybody is creative’ hippie movement really changed things. Nobody had the common repertoire anymore. Nobody knew the standards.”
—bass player BILL TAKAS, 1998, in the Bleecker Street apartment where he’d lived since the 1950s. He died a few months later.
“Over time we got so jaded with the session scene. We were sick of every tune. Freddy and I would sit around and try to think of tunes we weren’t sick of.”
—RONNIE FREE, 2003. He lived at 821 Sixth Avenue and participated in countless jam sessions with saxophonist and part-time loft resident Freddy Greenwell from 1958 to 1960.
August 13, 1963
Trumpeter Don Cherry, multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart, bassist and sometime piano player Vinnie Ruggiero, unknown drummer who probably is Earl McKinney, and bassist Jimmy Stevenson, on the fifth floor of the loft:
LISTENGART: Are you using the same chord this many times leading into the third? Is that right?
CHERRY: Yeah, you just augment it, ’til you can play open, so you can play all the open things, like you dig it, it’s like a cycle. [Cherry demos on piano.]
UNKNOWN: Let’s just play, man, fuck it.
STEVENSON: “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise.”
UNKNOWN: Let’s play some blues so Vinnie can play piano.
“You know, I hear on one of these sessions Zoot is playing and for some reason he stops for a number of bars, and the trumpet player Don Ellis starts to play. And Zoot says something like, ‘Wait a minute. I’m not finished.’ And he comes back and plays some more. That kind of thing wouldn’t happen in a club.”
—alto saxophonist LEE KONITZ, 2002
“This sounds like a drummer who wasn’t sure of himself. This sounds like a drummer who is trying to figure out what to play.”
—BEN RILEY, 2006, hearing himself playing in the loft in 1964 with Thelonious Monk’s band
“I just went to the front of the line and said, ‘I’m here. Can I sit in?’ I thought I was as good as anybody in the room, and I kind of projected that. People were taken off balance, but I knew what I was doing.”
—JANE GETZ (no relation to Stan Getz), 2009, a piano prodigy who was fifteen years old and five-foot-two, under one hundred pounds, when she found her way to 821 Sixth Avenue in late 1963 after dropping out of high school in Texas
“There was one night when I believe Monk and Pee Wee Russell first played together. Monk was playing with a group, and Pee Wee was sitting quietly in the back of the room. After a while Pee Wee suddenly got up and started playing his clarinet. It surprised everybody. It was like somebody had thrown a javelin across the room.”
—saxophonist LEROY “SAM” PARKINS, 1999
Christmas Eve, 1959
Zoot Sims, pianist Mose Allison, saxophonist Pepper Adams, bassist Bill Crow, and others in the loft:
“Come on, Mose, one more tune, just one more.”
“I have to make it home. It’s Christmas Eve.”
“It’s actually Christmas Day now.”
“We won’t have a piano player if you leave.”
“One more, come on, just one more.”
Smith recorded actress Claire Bloom reading from Joseph Bédier’s novel The Romance of Tristan and Iseult on WNYC’s radio program Spoken Word at eleven o’clock in the morning. This passage corresponds with comments in 2008 by Smith’s son, Pat: “The loft became my father’s world. I’m not sure if he was king of that world, or just a citizen.”
In her British brogue, Bloom reads:
On the appointed day he waited alone in his chamber and sadly mused: “Where shall I find a king’s daughter so fair and yet so distant that I may feign to wish her my wife?”
Just then by his window that looked upon the sea two building swallows came in quarreling together. Then, startled, they flew out, but had let fall from their beaks a woman’s hair, long and fine, shining like a beam of light.
King Mark took it, and called his barons and Tristan and said: “To please you, lords, I will take a wife; but you must seek her whom I have chosen.”
Tristan, when he looked on the hair of gold, remembered Iseult the Fair and smiled and said this:
“King Mark … I will go seek the lady with the hair of gold. The search is perilous and it will be more difficult for me to return from her land than from the isle where I slew the Morholt; nevertheless, my uncle, I would once more put my body and my life into peril for you; and that your barons may know I love you loyally, I take this oath, to die on the adventure or to bring back to this castle of Tintagel the Queen with that fair hair.”
