By Janet Sommer

My parents were somewhat worried about the fact that I would hang out, and spend a lot of time late at night roaming around New York, going to various jazz events and jam sessions, and hanging out with musicians, which was, in retrospect, very good training, but at the time didn't seem like anything but some kind of self indulgent behavior. So, that went on until I was drafted, that was during the Korean Conflict, in 1951, January of 1951 I went in the army. I should backtrack a little bit and say that when I came here, they insisted that I go to... not to college, which I would have probably adapted to, but to High School. They put me in a High School, and I just couldn't take it, it seemed to me totally like I was back like a ten year old. It wasn't even a very good school they put me into, and I did it for about six weeks, and then I told my parents, "I'm not going to do this. I want to get a job, I want to work or do something, but not in this silly thing..." I did take a course in American History in night school, because I wanted to learn more about that, but not in that stupid high school. I had some ambitions toward journalism, and my father, who was very friendly with Brooks Atkinson and with Al Hirschfeld, both of whom were New York Times people, got me a job as a copyboy at the Times which I didn't realize then, maybe a little bit, that that was a very hard thing to get. I was only there for about three months when I got drafted, but I did meet some of the interesting people there. Also I worked nights, I went to work at six and got off at two, so that enabled me to go and hang out at two o'clock. There was actually a very nice club called Lew Terassi's, on 47th Street, in the same block as the Times, and I would usually repair to that after I got off work.

When I got drafted that put a little bit of an end to all that, there was not much jazz related stuff when I was in the Army. We were stationed first in Ft. Benning, Georgia, which was a fairly miserable place, but I learned a little bit about the south there. And then the whole Unit, lock, stock, and barrel, it was a field artillery battalion, it was attached but not assigned to a division, so it was kind of a free standing unit... Very interesting, because it was an activated National Guard Unit from West Virginia, and we had the most incompetent officers and non-comms that you could imagine. Eventually they were sort of weeded out and replaced by others. We failed, as we later learned, there was a big exercise at Fort Benning, sort of simulated combat stuff, and we failed in that, we did miserably. Which was good, because instead of sending us to Korea, they sent us to Europe. Here I found myself, less than four years after I had left Europe, I found myself back there. And not just in Europe, but in Germany. Initially, in Manheim, which had been completely razed by bombs, and it was almost nightmarish to walk through that, now of course its completely fixed up. And then they moved us and stationed us very cheerfully in what was called, by the Army, the Munich Military Post Service Center, but it was actually Dachau, not too far from the former concentration camp, so that was very cheerful... Actually, we were quartered in what had been S.S. barracks, and they were very nicely built, so that's where we were until I was discharged two years later, I spent about a year and a half in Germany. The best jazz I heard during that period was on a three-day pass. I went to Frankfurt, where my father had worked for a Frankfurt newspaper, and I had also had some relatives there before the war... Anyway, there was an army non-comm club, and there was a terrific little band, the pianist was Utta Hippe who later came to the United States, then eventually went out of music, but she was an excellent pianist. And Hans Kohler was the tenor player, and they had a good bass player and drummer, but otherwise there wasn't a hell of a lot of interesting jazz during my army period, and there weren't very many jazz fans either, that I met. And we were busy with other things, when you're in the army, you don't have so much time... But the most interesting part of my army career, such as it was, was that during that period, the U.S. Armed Forces in Europe became integrated, that was when Truman passed that law that the Armed Forces had to become integrated. It took a little while to enforce that, but they did it in '52 in Europe, and that was very interesting, because we had a lot of white southerners in our outfit. But it worked, actually a lot better than some people had anticipated. But even when we got that influx of Blacks in my outfit, only one of them was a jazz fan. But I wouldn't hold that against anybody...

When I came back I had the G.I. Bill, by then I had decided that I wanted to go back to school, go to college, because I had passed the two year college equivalency test in the Army, so now I had good academic credentials, so now there wasn't any problem getting in, and actually my father had worked without telling me, behind the scenes, and gotten me into Brandeis, which was then a fairly new thing and he had some friends on the faculty there. So, about a week after I got out, in '53, I went up to Waltham, Mass, and was a somewhat older college freshman. Came in the middle of the year actually. There I quickly found that there was an excellent jazz club in Boston, called Storyville, which was run by George Wein, Storyville upstairs, downstairs Mahogony Hall, which was more traditional jazz. I also found a couple of fellow jazz fans rather quickly, one of whom was the son of Ludwig Lewisohn, who was one of the people who my father knew there on the faculty, who was, at that time, still a very prominent figure in American Literature, he's almost forgotten today. But I became friendly with his son, Jimmy, at that time a very energetic young man, he also had a car, so we used to drive in and catch stuff, not only at Storyville, but also at the Savoy, and so on.

In a very short order, not so much because I was so smart, but also because I was a bit older and more experienced than average... I became editor of the school paper, and at that point I decided that I wanted to make a little propaganda for Jazz, and also, that gave me a little bit of access and influence in how money could be spent for entertainment on campus. What we did was, we hooked up with George Wein, which was the beginning of a long friendship with George, and is culminating now in that George will more likely than not give us all his archives, his Festival Production archives. But, there was a whole Boston Jazz scene, and Nat Hentoff was still there, he was Down Beat's Boston correspondent, and he was on the air, had a radio show on FM. Actually, we brought Nat up for a lecture on Jazz, and we hooked up with George and managed to get, if there was an act appearing at Storyville, they were usually available on a Saturday afternoon, on Sunday afternoon they had a matinee at Storyville, but Saturday was possible. So, first we got Stan Getz, which was musically very nice, but Stan, whom I also became friendly with later, was not very warm at that point in his career, and was very perfunctory. The music was great, but there was no interaction, as soon as they got finished, they packed up and split. At that time they were all either alcoholics or junkies or whatever, so they weren't very interested in talking to the kids or anything.

But then, the other thing which was much more significant, especially to me, was that we got Art Tatum. Tatum was appearing with a trio, but I wanted him as a soloist and he readily agreed, and we brought him on. We got the best piano on campus, and got it tuned to a tee, and we had a Saturday afternoon concert. It was a marvelous, wonderful performance, needless to say. He was very sweet, and talked to the kids who wanted to talk to him, and talked to the faculty members and so on. When we took him back to Boston I thanked him, I had already thanked him but I thanked him again and said how wonderful it was, and he said, "Well, I'm the one who should thank you, because this is the first time I did a solo concert, all by myself." And I was completely stunned, I was still at that time, although I had been reading a lot about jazz, and I had been hanging out with musicians, I'd become aware of a lot of things that were not right in the world, but it just stunned me, I never thought that that was possible... But he said, "No, I've been on bills playing solo with somebody else also, and sharing the bill." For instance, Norman Granz had done a few things like that with Jazz At The Philharmonic, or a Hollywood Bowl concert, but he said, "No, I've never done a whole concert by myself." That was in 1954, and he died two years later. But that was incredible. So, those were little things that we managed to do, or I would write something in the paper about Armstrong on his birthday, but I still wasn't in any way thinking about linking my interest in the music with anything professional. Although, with my experience earlier at Time, and then the New York Times, and then editing the Justice which was the name of the school paper, and also thinking about becoming a writer or a journalist, but I still wasn't thinking about that in conjunction with jazz. With the exception of a few people, like Nat Hentoff, whom I respected a lot, I didn't like jazz critics and it wasn't my idea of anything that I thought I really wanted to do.

So, after Brandeis, I got a job at the New York Post, and I became an editorial assistant in the Drama Department, which means movies, theatre, music... There I initially did very little writing, but I became friendly with Al Davis, who was the nightside managing editor. After I had been at the Post for awhile, Stanley Dance, who was not yet living in the United States then as he would later, had come over for a lengthy visit and we ran into each other quite frequently, because I took up my old habits and was hanging out with musicians, and there was a place now called the Copper Rail, opposite the Metropole in Times Square, which was a bar where all the musicians would hang out. Because I was working nightside again, at the Post, I would have time in the daytime, so guys would invite me to recording sessions, so I would see Stanley all the time during those six weeks or so that he was in New York. When he was about to go back home, he pulled me aside and he said, "Look, you're a journalist, and you seem to know all the guys..." It was the Jazz Journal he was writing for, and they had just lost their American correspondent, and he said to send them a monthly newsletter from New York, and they'll be delighted to have it, and they can't pay you anything, but they'll give you records and books that you can't get here... So, I thought "Well, why not? It might be fun..." so I started doing that, and it seemed to work out well, and Al Davis became aware of it, and he said, "Oh, you're writing about jazz?" so I got to do a review of a Randall's Island Festival for the Post, but he couldn't give me too much to do, because he couldn't step on the toes of people who were already doing that kind of thing there. He also sent me out to interview Ornette, when Ornette opened at the Five Spot I was there, and there was a bit of publicity about Ornette, I wrote about it for Jazz Journal, but Al asked me to interview him, and I did, and Al liked the interview, but it got spiked... It would have been the first interview with Ornette to appear in a major daily newspaper, but that unfortunately didn't get done. But it started my friendship with Ornette, and now with what was happening at the Post, I could see that I wasn't going to get anywhere really, and I was kind of beginning to want to get out of there. And then, as it happened, I got this offer from Metronome.

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