Re: Posts by Danielle Mason and Ong Sor Fern: My intention was certainly not to make anyone jealous, but I'm glad you enjoyed the anecdotes and asked for more, so I'll include one more tonight. (Gee, I thought growing up in the 50's kind of sucked, but I guess in terms of the jazz I got to see, it was not so bad after all!) In the 50's jazz in L.A. was both plentiful and inexpensive. You could sit with a 50-cent beer all night, with no cover. I don't know how they paid the musicians! When I was a sophomore in college I had the greatest jazz weekend of my life. One Friday night a friend and I drove in from Claremont (we went to Pomona College) to Hollywood to a club on Sunset (I can't remember the name of the club). There was a triple bill that night that consisted of 1) The George Shearing Trio plus Toots Thielemans, 2) The Count Basie Band with Joe Williams singing -- (and he sang almost every number from the album "Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings") and 3) Lamberts, Hendricks and Ross. Can you imagine, all three of these groups on the same billing the same night -- and all for a 50-cent beer!

If that wasn't enough, my friend, who came from a wealthy New Orleans family (his father was a corrupt politician, part of Huey Long's entourage in New Orleans) had managed to get friendly with some jazz artists in L.,A. by buying them drinks, paying their taxis home, etc. One pianist he got very close with was Hampton Hawes. So on Saturday of that same weekend, he took me to Hawes' home in L.A., which was a very modest typical stucco small L.A. house (like the house Denzel Washington lived in in the film "Lady in a Blue Dress"). Hawes wasn't getting many gigs, so he was teaching piano here and there. That Saturday morning he gave me a one-hour lesson for 10 bucks. He taught me how to use 10ths in my left hand and the use of chromatic scales with the blues. That one hour lesson was the beginning of my becoming a jazz pianist! It was really great. And I think Hawes remains one of the great underrated pianists of his era, perhaps because he didn't get a lot of press and died prematurely. But that weekend in 1958 is one I certainly will never forget!

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