Video: Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt, 1971

Yesterday, I found two outstanding YouTube clips that went up in November. Though Gene Ammons and Sonny Stitt recorded extensively together in the late 1940s and '50s, these clips feature Ammons and Stitt separately in 1971.

In June, Just Jazz, a TV show on WTTW, a UHF public broadcasting station in Chicago, welcomed the Gene Ammons Sextet. The show was part of a 10-part series of televised jazz performances. The sextet featured Ammons (ts,varitone), King Kolax (tp), George Freeman (g), Wallace Burton (p), Chester Williamson (b) and Bob Guthrie (d). The 30-minute video comes from a recently discovered 2-inch video dub found in Canada. The original show was produced by Dan Morgenstern and Robert Kaiser and directed by Kaiser.

Here's Jug and the band...



In October of that same year, Sonny Stitt was touring with the Giants of Jazz. The sextet featured Dizzy Gillespie (tp), Sonny Stitt (as,ts), Kai Winding (tb), Thelonious Monk (p), Al McKibbon (b) and Art Blakey (d). I was lucky enough to catch them at Carnegie Hall in July 1972. It was breathtaking to see these outstanding artists together in action on one stage.

Here's Stitt playing Everything Happens to Me with just the trio at Lucerna Hall in Prague, the former Czechoslovakia, on October 30...