I was born in Brooklyn but we moved often: Ozone Park, Bellmore, Islip, Rosedale. I commuted on the Long Island to high school, Brooklyn Tech.
Sadly, I didn’t begin to appreciate Ellington until it was too late to hear him live, but I did go to two big-band concerts at the Brooklyn Paramount, one by the Tommy Dorsey band, the other by the Glenn Miller Band (with Glenn Miller himself leading). Part of the excitement was seeing the orchestra pit slowly rise to stage level at at the beginning of the concert, with the band playing its theme song.
There was a hole-in-the-wall record store on Fulton with a loudspeaker over the front door playing over and over again Benny Goodman’s 78-rpm single of Jersey Bounce, which made me a Goodman fan. I drifted away from hearing big bands after joining the Jackson Heights Jazz Club, thanks to which I had the pleasure of an impromptu trip to Laurelton where James P. Johnson was playing in a neighborhood Irish bar. We occupied all the bar seats near the piano and he played for us the rest of the evening. He had the biggest hands I’ve ever seen. When we shook hands my hand vanished inside the great clasp of his hand.
I was born in Brooklyn but we moved often: Ozone Park, Bellmore, Islip, Rosedale. I commuted on the Long Island to high school, Brooklyn Tech.
Sadly, I didn’t begin to appreciate Ellington until it was too late to hear him live, but I did go to two big-band concerts at the Brooklyn Paramount, one by the Tommy Dorsey band, the other by the Glenn Miller Band (with Glenn Miller himself leading). Part of the excitement was seeing the orchestra pit slowly rise to stage level at at the beginning of the concert, with the band playing its theme song.
There was a hole-in-the-wall record store on Fulton with a loudspeaker over the front door playing over and over again Benny Goodman’s 78-rpm single of Jersey Bounce, which made me a Goodman fan. I drifted away from hearing big bands after joining the Jackson Heights Jazz Club, thanks to which I had the pleasure of an impromptu trip to Laurelton where James P. Johnson was playing in a neighborhood Irish bar. We occupied all the bar seats near the piano and he played for us the rest of the evening. He had the biggest hands I’ve ever seen. When we shook hands my hand vanished inside the great clasp of his hand.