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The Great, Late Show with Dakota Staton
by Rob Mariani
She seemed to come out of nowhere. In 1957, suddenly Dakota Staton's Late, Late Show album was even being played on the pop radio stations, as well as on the jazz stations. But she was clearly a jazz singer out of the Dinah Washington school. She had that natural swing built right into her voice, a ...
Betty Carter: Along Came Betty
by Rob Mariani
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 City at the age of 69. None of the accounts I read say just ...
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 sound--expansive, ...
Who's The Hippest Chick In Town? Anita.
by Rob Mariani
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 stage like that where guys like Zoot Sims and Conte Candoli and Al Cohn ...
Billie's Last Chorus
by Rob Mariani
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 what Kenny G spends on hair gel these days. But there were at least ...
Lullaby of Birdland
by Rob Mariani
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 club called Birdland—the original Birdland on Broadway near 56th Street in Manhattan's Times Square ...
Just Plain Trane
by Rob Mariani
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 be emanating from the bandstand on that breezy New York summer night were those ...
Crepuscules With Monk
by Rob Mariani
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 of the subways underneath the clubs up on 52nd Street. Monk was ...
Miles On A Good Day
by Rob Mariani
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 when Philly Joe was playing “Two Bass Hit." But there was no way ...
The Amazing One
by Rob Mariani
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 a quart of ice cream on a bad filling. “Ladies and gentlemen, ...
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