Apart from the many great musicians who are no longer with us there are also a whole lot of places that saw the birth of the music and its growth. As I thought of the many cities and venues my imagine ran riot and I visualised jumping into an old police box and being transported back in time to where it all happened. Here are are some of the places...
Storyville (for the music - honest!) Hear those magic names live. Listen to Buddy Bolden from the other side of Lake Pontchartrain and buy his cylinder (review soon). Joe Oliver blowing his horn and 'calling the children home' to a bordello he was working in. Maybe having a drink with Miss Lulu White and ...
Chicago. Hitch a ride on a paddle steamer up to the city where all the bands migrated to after they shut down Storyville. Hang out with Bix, Hoagy and the kids from Austin High School. Just remember not to buy gas from the garage at 2122 North Clark St. on St. Valentine's Day...
The Cotton Club. Slumming on Lenox Avenue, rubbing elbows with the rich and all those millionaires whilst listening to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. It would also enable you to put right those filmmakers who produced the movie of the same name...
The Reno Club, Kansas City. All-night jam sessions although, if you sit in make sure you know the changes or you might get hit by a flying cymbal and, if that failed you could get cut by Lester Young...
The Palomar Ballroom, Los Angeles. Witness the crowning of Benny Goodman as the King of Swing. Time-travelling gamblers could pick up some change by betting a parlay that BG'd be playing Carnegie Hall on January 16, 1938 and that one of his trumpet players, Harry James, would marry a movie star (Betty Grable) in 1943...
The Paramount Theater, New York. Sinatra relegating Crosby and all the other singers into the also sang slot. The bobbysoxers screaming and wetting themselves. With hindsight (no pun intended) a fortune could have been, and probably was, made selling air-fresheners...
52nd St. Just imagine all those clubs and all-time great players blowing in clubs on the equivalent of Northumberland St. with ne'er a Fenwick's, M&S or a Primark in sight...
Club Eleven. Of course you didn't have to go to New York. Ronnie Scott, Johnny Dankworth, Tony Crombie and others had already been there and brought Manhattan to Soho heralding the arrival in Britain of bebop.
Newport 1956. That's Newport, Rhode Island, where George Wein's annual jazz festival came to life thank's to Duke's tenor player Paul Gonsalves blowing more choruses on Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue than you could count on all the fingers and toes of a minor republic. On record it's not that wonderful but, sitting in the open air on a sunny day with a bottle of Bud and a rolled-up newspaper to help the drummer keep pace, it was definitely a case of Blues to be There for those who weren't...
Hotel Prins Hendrik, Amsterdam. An opportunity to say 'don't do it Chet' if your Tardis drops you off there on May 13, 1988. Or, maybe learn the truth about what really happened to the trumpet legend. Lance
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