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Jazz on TV: Don Elliott and Hal McKusick

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Hal McKusick
Yesterday, Jim Eigo sent along a terrific video that Evan Spring posted on the Jazz Research List. The video had been up at YouTube since 2014 and features an episode from a WCBS-TV series in New York called American Musical Theatre. The hour-long show aired from 1959 to 1965—a period considered by many to be the golden age of arts coverage on TV by the CBS network and individual CBS stations.

Each week, AMT pulled back the curtain on a corner of the arts through in-studio performances by star guests for a studio audience comprised mostly of of local high school students. The series was created and written by Ethel Burns, who was affiliated with New York's Board of Education. Baritone saxophonist Gerry Mulligan wrote a theme for it.

As Evan notes, Dan Morgenstern, the jazz author, journalist and critic, quoted Mulligan in an essay saying that “[Burns] titled the series American Musical Theatre so the Board of Education would want to be involved with it and would like to have their name on it. But she interpreted it for herself to mean jazz. She didn't think they'd go for a jazz series." Series guests included Bob Fosse, Gwen Verdon, Richard Rodgers, Harry Belafonte, Sammy Davis Jr., Stephen Sondheim, Roberta Peters, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Jule Styne and many others.

In 1960, AMT on WCBS featured an episode on jazz and theater hosted by Jim Morske. A Thurber Carnival had opened on Broadway in February, directed by actor Burgess Meredith. The revue by James Thurber based on his stories, cartoons and humorous short stories in The New Yorker was scored and performed by multi-instrumentalist Don Elliott and a sextet he assembled.

On the WCBS show, we see Elliott on vibes, mellophone and trumpet, leading clarinetist and saxophonist Hal McKusick, guitarist Chuck Wayne, pianist Don Abney, bassist Trigger Alpert and drummer Specs Powell and an orchestra.

A couple of notes: Thurber and Meredith won a special Tony for A Thurber Carnival; the album Burgess Meredith holds up during the show is The Paul Desmond Quartet Featuring Don Elliott (Fantasy), released in 1956. 

Here's the American Musical Theatre episode...

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This story appears courtesy of JazzWax by Marc Myers.
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