Results for "First Time I Saw"
Betty Carter: Along Came Betty

by Rob Mariani
This article first appeared at All About Jazz on May 13, 2006. It's a warm October Saturday, the first year of the new Century. Small leaf storms are rising into the cloudless blue sky. The early autumn peace is broken by the news in the paper that Betty Carter has died in New York ...
Dr. Billy Taylor

by Rob Mariani
He was probably the first person I'd ever heard talk intelligently about jazz. On his New York radio show on WLIB in the late fifties, Billy Taylor spoke with eloquent simplicity about the music he loved. And then he'd play one of his own records and I remember thinking, this is how piano playing should soundexpansive, ...
Who's The Hippest Chick In Town? Anita.

by Rob Mariani
This article first appeared at All About Jazz on November 22, 2006. Who the hell shows up at a midnight jam session at the Loews Sheraton Theater in Greenwich Village wearing white, elbow-length gloves, a little, flowered print dress and a hat that looks like an inverted birdbath? Who dares to show up on ...
Billie's Last Chorus

by Rob Mariani
This article first appeared at All About Jazz on December 27, 2006. She came on last at a concert that started at midnight at the Lowe's Sheraton on Seventh Avenue in The Village. It was one of those big, everybody-gets-to-play jam sessions they called concerts then, and it probably cost the promoters less than ...
Lullaby of Birdland

by Rob Mariani
This article first appeared at All About Jazz on December 26, 2006. This month, instead of writing about a jazz personality, I decided to write about a room. A jazz room which sadly no longer exists but that had a personality as unique as the great musicians who played there. I'm talking about a ...
Just Plain Trane

by Rob Mariani
This article first appeared at All About Jazz on November 17, 2006. He appeared on a bandstand that was at least two football fields away, at the Randall's Island Jazz Festival in 1960. I had already heard him on record and read what the reviewers were saying about him, and indeed, what seemed to ...
Crepuscules With Monk

by Rob Mariani
This article first appeared at All About Jazz on November 18, 2006. Something was happening down on the lower East Side of Manhattan, down south of 14th Street way down in the rusty Bowery as the summer of 1957 was beginning. News of it spread out through the jazz community like the subterranean rumble ...
Miles On A Good Day

by Rob Mariani
This article first appeared at All About Jazz on December 2006. The men's room at Birdland was, like the rest of the club, pretty much about economies of scale. A pair of urinals too close together. One cramped toilet stall. One gray-jacketed, tired old attendant who maybe could feel the vibrations through the walls ...
The Amazing One

by Rob Mariani
This article first appeared at All About Jazz on November 19, 2006. At Birdland, Pee Wee Marquette, the diminutive MC, had a way of shouting into the mike when he announced the names of band members. Anyone who has heard it can not forget it. It made your jaw ache like you'd just eaten ...
Incomparably Quiet: Bill Evans

by Rob Mariani
This article first appeared at All About Jazz in December 2004. It was another one of those sticky, half-sunny, end-of-summer New York Sunday afternoons at The Village Vanguard. Down in the tiny, odd-shaped cellar space on lower Seventh Avenue, it wasn't the usual mid-sixties crowd of jazz fans. Most of the people weren't there ...