Lionel and Gladys Hampton celebrated their 17th wedding anniversary in Copenhagen on the night of November 11th, 1953. They were in Denmark on a concert tour with a star-studded Hampton band that included Clifford Brown, Gigi Gryce, Art Farmer, Quincy Jones, and  a singer named Annie Ross. The Hamptons and band were staying at the Richmond, which was not the classiest hotel in town, but a decent place that suited Gladys' budget—she was her husband's business manager and—as any sideman would tell you—quite frugal.

Gladys' penny pinching had the band traveling on a bus where others flew, but it did not prevent her from throwing an anniversary party at the hotel. Not an elaborate affair, just the band, tour crew, an ice sculpture and two local guests: Timme Rosenkrantz and yours truly. Timme, who had known Hamp for many years, kindly took me in tow, giving me my first rubbing shoulders experience with jazz greats. I was at that time involved in the running of the Storyville Club, so it occurred to me that some off the musicians might be persuaded to cap the night there. Well, not exactly there, but in a larger place that we could rent. Timme thought that was a splendid idea, so, when the party began to ebb, he helped me herd some of these star players into taxis. Hamp himself decided to make a brief appearance and when I mentioned that I had my tape recorder there, he said it was okay to record the "cats," but he wouldn't be performing.

Once there, surrounded by a youthful, enthusiastic crowd of Danes, he changed his mind and seated himself at the keyboard, next to pianist Jørgen Bengtson. Spotting my recorder on a table next to the piano, he told me to keep "that thing" off while he played. As I confessed to Hamp twenty years later, I did hit the record button, but I kept the lid on. In retrospect, Hamp was delighted to hear that I had ignored his request, and he asked for a copy of the tape. It was eventually destroyed by a fire in his apartment.

You can read more about the morning of November 12, 1953 and hear a couple of numbers from the jam session that took place if you go here. But first, you might want to listen to Hamp and the two-fingered mallet-styled piano performance that kicked off the night session. The other fingers belong to Jørgen Bengtson, who moved to Norway, where he lives in retirement. The sound quality leaves much to be desired, the opening bars are missing, and there is a short skip, but Anniversary Boogie—as I dubbed this piece for obvious reasons—is an engaging rapid-fire blues.

Echoes of Humph at Mack's, 1953

In March of 1953, I was an apprentice artist in the art department of Fona Radio, Denmark's largest chain of music stores. Fresh out of art school, this was my first job and I loved it, although my salary was insanely low. The art department created window displays for the company's shops, of which about five were in Copenhagen and the rest all over Denmark. As an apprentice, I was not yet entrusted with creative work, but even handling menial chores, such as painting backgrounds and fills, was better than working behind a counter or desk. Given my personal interests, there was much to be said for working in an art environment for a music-related company, and an added attraction was the employee discount that enabled me to purchase a recording machine on time payment.

We owe the principle of magnetic recording to a Dane, Valdemar Poulsen, who demonstrated it in 1898, but it had to wait a couple of decades before electronic amplification made it useful. During WWII, the Nazis began broadcasting magnetically reproduced propaganda—it sounded a lot clearer than phonograph recordings, and it offered enough playing time to capture an entire Hitler or Goebbels rant, but it obviously did not work as these guys wanted it to. Commercial use was another matter—imagine JATP, Coltrane or Cecil Taylor restricted to three minutes.

Humph at 100 Oxford Street, with slightly different personnel.

In 1953, magnetic recordings had just been introduced to Danish consumers via  Bang & Olufsen's first wire recorder. I had to have it, and working at Fona made that possible, but before I could do anything useful with this wire contraption, B&O launched its first tape recorder. That was it for me, and it didn't matter that it cost a year's salary, so I was soon dragging a sixty-pound black box up three flights of stairs to the back house apartment where I lived with my mother and her third husband. I had become quite good at smuggling in the occasional new jazz record that should have been a new pair of socks, or a shirt, but the wire recorder and subsequent upgrade posed a real challenge. I would not have gotten away with it if my mother was not also what we have since come to know as a "gadget freak." Of course, I lowered the price considerably when she asked about it, but I was a seasoned fibber when it came to such things.

Let me pause here to apologize for the redundant nature of this entry—some of it has appeared here in another connection, but my approach to this blog is not linear, so it was inevitable that I would occasionally cross my own, previously recollected paths. This one can be found in my earlier reminiscences about Karl Knudsen and the Storyville Club.

As I may have mentioned, I was shy to a fault in my younger days, but that—and matching naïveté—may well have been what drove me to do some rather bold things, such as contact trumpeter Humphrey Lyttelton. His Parlophone recordings were among my most prized possessions and, not having the foggiest knowledge of contractual obligations and union restrictions, I dashed of a letter to Humph. In it, I informed him that I would be coming to London for the purpose of gathering material for a jazz program to be aired by Radio Denmark. In that connection, I wished to record his band and an interview. 

The truth was that I had no connection with DR (Danmarks Radio), nor, in fact, the fare that would get me to London. Driven, in part, by a strong need to be accepted into the inner circle of Copenhagen's foot-stomping jazz scene, I naïvely took pen in hand. As I recalled in an earlier entry (Melly, Mick...London 1953), the swift response from Humph's manager, Lyn Dutton, came as a surprise: 

It had never occurred to me that unions might pose a problem, but I had a feeling that Mr. Dutton was leaving the door ajar, so I began to scrape together money for a third class passage to London. On March 12, 1953, leaving behind a drastically diminished record collection, I boarded a third class car on the London boat train with a round-trip ticket and just enough money to get by—or so I thought. What follows, mostly repeats a previous post. 

Customs inspectors gave me a hard time in Harwich, having never before seen a tape recorder and not quite knowing what it was, but I got the nod and made it to London and Mr. Kerpner's Guest House in Earl's Court— £2 a week, with breakfast.

I phoned Lyn Dutton, who suggested that I join him and Humph for lunch at 100 Oxford Street on the following day. It was here that the band played at night. I don't have to tell you that I was a nervous wreck, but I made it through lunch and was delighted when Humph suggested that we do the interview that afternoon and that I record the band that evening, telling anyone who might ask that it was strictly for my own enjoyment.

I have for several decades kept a discography-style list of my recorded sessions. Here are the two

        pages documenting the 1953 Humphrey Lyttelton session. Click on image to enlarge.

Nobody asked and I filled two reels of tape that night. It was monaural, of course, but pure luck had me place my single B&O ribbon microphone advantageously, except for Johnny Parker's piano, which was too far away. I can at last fulfill my promise to post actual recordings if and when I unearthed them and acquired a working reel to reel tape deck. Last week, I found the former in a closet and the latter on e-bay, so here is the first of the Lyttelton recordings, Chicago Buzz. Humph also plays clarinet on this one, as does Bruce Turner, and drummer George Hopkins turns to the washboard. I will include a detailed description of the Lyttleton Club (i.e. Mack's Restaurant) when I post more sounds from this evening.

Osman Tyner 1932 - 1993

Born in Philadelphia to Roosevelt and Estella Tyner on December 5, 1932, Osman Tyner was a self-taught artist of impressive talent. His aunts recall that he began drawing as soon as he could handle crayons and pencils, and that he showed remarkable imagination at a very early age, so it was no surprise that he chose to major in commercial art when he entered high school at South Philadelphia's Edward Bok Technical School.

In 1951, Osman decided to leave Philadelphia and try his luck in New York City. He had yet to decide on a definite career path, but meeting Alvin Ailey in 1951 turned him towards dance. Ailey, who had yet to form his celebrated dance company, taught Osman the rudiments of modern dance for the following year and encouraged him to stay with it, but Osman was more critical of himself. Having danced "awkwardly" in an Ailey revue at the Waldorf Astoria, he concluded that his true calling was in the field of visual arts and design.

One of Osman's cover illustrations (1966)

Between 1953 and 1955, Osman had an opportunity to hone his drawing skills while serving as a Corporal in the 45th Armored Medical Battalion and at Fort Knox. His assignments were somewhat pedestrian, he recalled, laughing at the fact that his Army career culminated with his being promoted to "head of the sign painting department."  In the Sixties, when our paths first crossed, Osman had done some wonderful work for rights and review, the magazine published by C.O.R.E. (the Congress of Racial Equality). 

Looking back on a long life, such as I have had, I can recall a staggering number of people with whom I shared memorable moments. Some came to my memory to stay, others were just passing through, but that does not mean that they were entirely forgotten. It's funny how we can develop a strong association with someone, share a good slice of life with them and suddenly realized that we both have moved on to another chapter in our lives—what we though was permanent really wasn't. That is an experience I have had many times, but even people who dropped out of my life often left something behind, something that forever says "I was here." I say all this because Osman Tyner did not stay long in my sphere, but neither did he become another blurry figure. He had an exhuberant personality and whenever he came to see me, he was a burst of joy. I recall a time when I was applying finish to my living room floor and not at all prepared for a visit. I think I muttered a curse when the doorbell rang, but my annoyance evaporated when Osman burst into the room. He saw what I was doing and immediately insisted on helping with that chore. 

I don't recall how or where we met, but it somehow never mattered. Osman had a presence that made such things seem trivial. He liked jazz and he knew how deeply immersed in it I was, but I think we had known each other for several months before I found out that his uncle was McCoy Tyner. Most people would have made that fact known shortly after the first handshake, but not Osman—he admired his uncle, but he was self-reliant.

There came a time when Osman's calls and visits tapered off and the hand painted Christmas cards he used to send stopped coming. I did not know it then, but he had become a victim of the AIDS epidemic—it was a time when so many of us lost friends to this terrible disease, a timer when the medical world had not caught up with it. When it finally took him away, May 28, 1993, I had neither seen nor heard from him in ten years, and I can't recall how I learned the bad news.

Two of Osman's wonderful Christmas cards were never put away by me. For years, they flanked an old marble clock in my living room and had so much become a part of the decor that I would only have noticed if they disappeared. I want to share them with you, along with a third card that Osman called "Lady in Green." Please click on the images to enlarge them. I hope you  like them as much as I do.

Osman's work occasionally makes it to exhibits and auctions. I find the one below to be particularly striking—it was among his last and I  am indebted to Archibald Arts for giving me permission to display it here.

"Audience" — Osman Tyner 1993 (Courtesy of Archibald Arts, New York, N.Y.)

Visit to a Buffet Flat

Buffet Flats, sometimes called Goodtime Flats, were small, privately owned unlicensed clubs where customers could engage in such mundane illegal pastimes as drinking and gambling—for starters. These fun flats also offered erotic shows that featured sex acts of every conceivable kind and were only too happy to accommodate customer participation—for a fee, of course.

Usually owned by women, these establishments were run with admirable efficiency, catering to the occasional thrill-seeker as well as to regular clients whose personal preferences they knew in detail. Often the hostess also served as a bank, a trusted person into whose hands a customer could safely entrust valuables and sizable amounts of cash. Withdrawals could be made at any time in the course of the evening or morning. This probably ties in to the fact that buffet flats were originally set up to cater to Pullman porters, men whose extensive travels, contacts with the white upper class, gentlemanly manners, and good income earned them considerable respect in black communities. Porters had layovers, and what better place to let it all hang out than a neighborhood buffet flat. These establishments had existed for years, but Prohibition gave loose living a boost and made the flats even more popular. In 1970, when I was doing research for my Bessie Smith biography, I learned that the Pullman Porters Club in St. Louis—a staid gathering place for retired elderly men with many stories to tell—once was a buffet flat.

One might describe the flats as earthlier versions of outwardly legitimate “high-class” night clubs, the kind that have tuxedoed maitre’ds discreetly set up sexual liaisons for “important” patrons.

Buffet flats were as much a part of black urban night life of the 1920s as chop suey joints continued to be around the clock into the Fifties, and they were almost as safe. With the right authorities on their payroll, the better flats could pretty much guarantee that any law enforcement men coming through the front door would be doing so as patrons. Police raids were uncommon, as were incidences of violence or theft.

Whenever Bessie Smith appeared at the Koppin Theater In Detroit, she paid a visit to a buffet flat owned by a friend of hers. This lady even sent one or two limousines to the stage door to pick up Bessie and her entourage of chorines, “girls who knew how to keep their mouths shut”.

From various descriptions I received when preparing my book, I pieced together a composite picture of what a typical buffet flat might have been like:

"Drinks in hand, an eclectic crowd of pleasure-seekers packed the house. While some leisurely ascended and descended the linoleum-covered steps, others lined the staircases that connected the three floors. The air was thick with smoke, giggles, and clashing perfumes; two pianists, on separate floors, pounded the ivory competitively, and oooh’s and ahh’s emanated from activity rooms on each floor. Puffed up by their furs, Bessie and her young ladies negotiate their way down one of the corridors, to a room reserved for coats. It was not a cloakroom in the ordinary sense, but rather a bedroom with fur and wool piled high. 'There were so many fur coats that it looked like a zoo,' recalled Ruby.

"As usual, Bessie more or less restricted her participation to voyeurism. She could ill afford to actively exhibit her prurient interest publicly lest word of it got back to Jack. It was bad enough that she was drinking and patronizing a buffet flat, neither of which activity would have come as a complete surprise to her husband. 'Jack knew she wasn’t being no angel,' observed Ruby, 'but Bessie was kinda careful—well, let’s say she would only go so far when strangers were around—but not always. Bessie was well known in that place'.

“Bessie took her favorite girls and, of course, me. We was all dressed up, she had five fur coats. Each one of us would wear one of the coats. It made us feel like we were very important and loaded. I would always wear the mink. The coat was so big on me, I could wrap it around me three times. I didn't care, I just liked to wear the mink. Bessie would have me carry the bad liquor and anything else we wanted to sneak around with, under the mink. By being so big, no one noticed. As usual, when we went into a joint with Bessie it would start jumping; she was like a magnet, she attracted everyone. She wore a white ermine coat and looked like a million bucks. One girl wore Bessie’s chinchilla coat, one had on her black seal. Her nephew’s wife had on her sable. Even the horse had a monkey on her back, what I mean by horse, was a girl named Eva, who reminded you of a horse when she danced—so we nicknamed her "horse". We looked very nice.”

Here is—preceded by another of her accounts—is Ruby's colorful recollection of one such visit to the Detroit flat:

Hendrix/Shepp: The night a decade bit the dust

It was December 31, 1969 and I turned down a couple of New Year's Eve parties to take on an assignment for Dan Morgenstern, then Editor of Down Beat. He wanted me to spend the evening covering a concert at the Fillmore East, which was not how I ideally wanted to usher in a new decade, but I accepted the assignment, knowing full well that a 10:30 show would not leave time to get to a party by midnight. I also had something else to do for Dan that day, a late afternoon interview with Archie Shepp, who lived around the corner from the Fillmore.

A page ripped out of my desk calendar.

The Sixties was an eventful decade and even if you were't around to experience it, you surely are, in some way, bouncing in its wake. It is hard to believe that some of the "suits" who today slip out of Wall Street boardrooms and into waiting limos were once insurrectionary hippies or beaded flower children. Well, that's what they were called, the truth is that some of them would strangle you with their flower necklace for a hit of the "good stuff." Although I traveled in an world of indulgence, I never took to using drugs, because I liked to be in control of myself, but I was curious about one thing: a good joint's alleged ability to enhance the sound of jazz. 

One day, the late trumpeter, Charlie McGhee, whom I had apprised of my curiosity, discreetly left a couple of joints on my coffee table. I eyed them for a week or so before making my experiment, which had me place a very familiar Bird disc on my turntable, lean back on my sofa, and light a joint. My intention was to play the recording as soon as I felt some kind of buzz, but when that came, I found myself transfixed, unable to move across the room. I eventually fell asleep without having activated the turntable and it was early morning before I came to, awakened by the sound of milk bottles. Not a sound as I had known it, not that quick clink of the milkman stepping off the elevator, placing a bottle at my door and picking up the empty one. On  this morning, what I heard sounded like a dozen bottles in slow motion. Amazing, I thought, these guys weren't kidding. That ended my curiosity and Charlie Parker went back on the shelf.

Getting back to the Sixties, for young people it was a mad scramble to get as far away from the previous decade as possible. The prom queen of the Fifties baked apple pies and found the hills alive with The Sound of Music, the bra-less flower chick of the Sixties munched on watercress and took it all off in Hair. Jazz was still thriving in smoke-filled clubs, but it, too, was on the move, trying to shake the stigma of association with dives and sex. They said that jazz had been a synonym for lewd intimate behavior, so it became a dirty word to some musicians—hence my opening question to Archie Shepp, who represented the new breed of jazz musicians, artists who sought acceptance as musicians rather than entertainers. Earlier in 1969, Woodstock had stirred the pot and given rock music a legitimacy it had not previously enjoyed. Performers and audiences at Woodstock shocked the music industry by throwing off the shackles of propriety and doing their thing, but that shock turned to awe when the money started rolling in. The recording industry—once run by people who knew and loved the music—was in the hands of lawyers and CPAs who increasingly moved it away from the music and and into the realm of product. They wasted no time signing up pop artists with figures and benefits that jazz artists had never seen or known to be possible. More money was spent on press parties than on must jazz sessions, and Miles Davis became the opening act for Blood, Sweat & Tears. It was an insult that NARAS, the Grammy people, carry on to this day, an insult that some of the rock performers became aware of, but did little to correct. Many jazz performers felt cheated and rightly so, and some began to see their rock counterparts as the enemy. You will hear some of that in the hour-long Archie Shepp interview. Mr. Shepp is still very much with us and it would be interesting to hear if the intervening four decades have changed his mind about some of the rock stars he mentions. I suspect so, but that does not justify an industry's dismissal of a musical genre to which it owes its survival. For decades, jazz recordings have served as what the industry calls good "catalog items." That is to say that they have a long shelf life and while they may not initially sell in chart-busting amounts, the accumulated sales figures put many pop records to shame. For example, because it was released under different titles and catalog numbers, an album like Stan Getz's Long Island Sound was never awarded gold status, but it accumulated the required figures a very long time ago.

Getting back on track, this is not so much an interview as it is Archie Shepp talking, with occasional prompts from me. I was preparing to write an article, not produce a radio program, so I approached the task accordingly. I should mention that there were others present in Mr, Shepp's apartment that day, a musician friend of his who I wish had been closer to the microphone, and a Down Beat secretary who I wish had been in another room. If you detect any cuts, rest assured that I did not remove any of Archie Shepp's words, just some of the young lady's intrusive and uninformed questions and giggles. 

  

In 1963, Archie Shepp posed for photographer Ole Brask in the window of a rooming house on New

York's West 82nd Street. It had been my residence until I moved to my present apartment. Ole took

it over.

Here, then, is what I experienced for the rest of the day. This is my Down Beat review as it was published in the March 5, 1970 issue. I have to tell you that reading my old words is enough of a cringe, but actually typing them in and not being able to to make changes is a nightmare.

CAUGHT IN THE ACT


Jimi Hendrix—The Voices of East Harlem
Fillmore East, New York City

It was in many ways a special evening. A new year was about to be rung in, a chaotic decade was coming to an end, and one of the star exponents of the music that so colored that decade was changing direction.

Spending New Year's Eve at the Fillmore is not exactly my idea of a fun way to ring out the old, but I must say the management had done its best to lend a holiday touch to the proceedings—from donning its ushers in greeting-inscribed sweatshirts to placing a small metal tambourine at each seat and projecting, on the large movie screen behind the stage, a caricature of Guy Lombardo, baton in hand.

The press release stressed the group's freedom to drift independently.

The late concert was scheduled to begin at 10:30 p.m., but the doors did not open until 11, and another 20 minutes passed before the houselights dimmed, Lombardo faded away, and the screen showed a film of various black youngsters leaving their respective Harlem homes, gathering by a subway entrance, riding the train, emerging in Greenwich Village, running down Second Ave. and through the doors of the Fillmore East. A quick fade-out and the same youngsters, 20 of them, came running down the aisles of the theater (this time "live") and onto the stage. A cute and effective wy to introduce the Voices of East Harlem and begin the evening's program.

The Voices were formed about a year and a half ago, with the help of urban development programs and an energetic, strong-voice adult Gospel singer named Bernice Cole. Under the guidance of Miss Cole, the group has developed into a spirited choir that can swing, as it certainly did on this occasion, through a repertoire of Gospel and Pop with infectious Vivacity.

It was getting close to midnight when Miss Cole appeared and added her powerful voice to a few Gospel numbers, which had the capacity audience smacking its toy tambourines. The Fillmore East became, for a moment, a gigantic store-front church and 20 youngsters from the streets of Harlem had shared a part of their heritage with 2,639 appreciative downtown hippies and gloriously demonstrated where it all came from.

At three minutes before midnight, a large clock was projected on the screen. The youngsters had danced off stage amid deafening sounds of approval, and the sound of the tambourines grew increasingly louder as the big second hand brought us closer to the new year.

I braced myself as large figures appeared superimposed on the clock for the countdown of the last 10 seconds—10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. It was 1970 and the new decade was roared in by the playing of the awesome opening of Richard Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra, popularized by its use in the movie 2001. With its playing, the screen was lifted, revealing the inner workings of the Joshua Light Show, which now projected its multicolored images on the cheering crowd.

After a few thousand "Happy New Years," the screen slipped back into place, Joshua and his gang cast their imagination on it, and the star of the show, Jimi Hendrix, intoned a most unusual rendition of Auld Lang Syne, turning it into a blusey thing of strange beauty.

Hendrix was changing directions—a new group and a new repertoire. It is no longer the Jimi Hendrix Experience but rather Jimi Hendrix: A Band of Gypsys, with Buddy Miles (formerly of the Electric Flag and the Buddy Miles Express), drums, and Billy Cox (an Army buddy of Hendrix's), electric bass. As for the repertoire, the emphasis is decidedly on the blues. The result is promising.

I say promising because Hendrix had not yet had time to fall into his new groove. He is still over-amplified through his three-unit system, and he still resorts to such crowd-pleasing tricks as playing his guitar with his teeth. There was less of this gimmickry than usual, however, and I suspect that he will eventually give it up.

Hendrix and his Band of Gypsys

That ability of his to utilize fully the technical possibilities of his instrument, combined with his fertile musical imagination, makes him an outstanding performer. His feeling for the blues is strong, and his application of electronic sound effects to the most traditional aspects of that music so charged the emotions of the Fillmore audience that nary a tambourine stirred.

Hendrix never really has considered himself much of a singer, and he is right. Perhaps that is why he let his guitar drown out his voice each time he sang while he did not allow it to interfere with Miles' vocals. Miles is a good blues singer, and I think Hendrix would be wise to let him handle that department. His work on the drums is not bad, but it cannot stand comparison with numerous jazz drummers.

It appears that Hendrix is finding where he should be at, and he might well emerge as the greatest of the new blues guitarists. I only hope that he learns that it is not necessary to amplify to or past the point of distortion. Lesser talents might need that: he doesn't.

I did not cherish the idea of spending my New Year's Eve at the Fillmore, but as it turned out, it was a rewarding experience.  —Chris Albertson

I don't recall whether Dan Morgenstern edited it out or if I omitted mention of the gallon jugs of wine and very loose joints that passed from mouth to mouth throughout the theater, silencing some tambourines, turning others into a nightmarish metallic clatter. I think I detected cannabis clouds above, but I can't be sure, because an exhaled mist of highs made the visibility low. Miss Cole and her little angels left the theater none too soon.

,