New York Nights: Writing, Producing and Performing in Gotham

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART I: BEHIND THE STAGE

Early Days

The Art of Stand-Up Comedy

The First Wave: Seminal Figures

The Second Wave and Beyond

Musicians Galore: Big Bands

Jazz Orchestras

Singers and Such

Speakers and Lecturers

Terpsichore and Euterpe

PART II: IN THE AUDIENCE

Rosemary Clooney

Dorothy Parker

Thelonious Monk

H. L. Mencken

Opening Night at the Met

Frank Morgan

Paul Winter Consort

Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

Mel Tormé

The Negative Review

Sonny Rollins

Teresa Stratas

Miles Davis

Ned Rorem

Shelle Ackerman

New York Nightclubs

Bird

The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz

Michael Crichton

Budd Schulberg

The Wein Machine: JVC Festival

Hanging Out in the Vanguard with Red Rodney

Reviewing Recorded Music

Paddy Chayefsky

Johnny Mathis

The Joyce Theater and Billy Taylor

Cabaret: Gotham’s Indefatigable Performers

The Unknown Super Singers

The Flowering of Jazz

Hermeto Pascoal

Toshiko Akiyoshi

Barbara Carroll

CBGB’s: Rock and Funk

The Bottom Line

Fat Tuesday’s

Jazz at Lincoln Center—James P. Johnson

Chinese Opera—The Monkey King

Annie Ross

Lou Donaldson

Helen Merrill

PART III: OUTSIDE THE VENUES

Sailing in New York City

A New Brooklyn Experience

A Night at MOMA

Mayor Michael Bloomberg

Dem Bums from Ebbets Field

The Orestia and the Pearl Theater

Super Bowl Reverie

Special Acknowledgement

I am especially grateful to executive editor Charlotte Eichna and publisher Tom Allon of Manhattan Media Inc. for granting permission to reprint the reviews contained herein.

This book is dedicated to the musicians, dancers, painters, opera singers, jazz Broadway, and cabaret vocalists, comics, photographers, authors, conductors, sculptors, athletes, actors, poets and artisans who make Gotham the rival of Pericles’ Athens and Buonarroti’s Florence while adding the aroma of ethnic and cultural pluralism.

The Author With Mayor Bloomberg At

Gracie Mansion In New York.

INTRODUCTION

In their valuable book, Empire City: New York Through the Centuries, Kenneth Jackson and David Dunbar observe that New York always holds out the possibility of the reinvention of the self to achieve one’s aspirations; it allows you to plumb the depths of your most authentic being, to see both the city itself and your own self in new and original ways.

It is this ever-changing relationship between the city and myself that constitutes the theme of this book. All environments influence the people who live in them, and New York’s environment with its pervasive cultural breadth has contoured my life into a shape that would have been impossible anywhere else. The city’s cultural landscape is so vast that one can never visit all of it. But I have always been driven to experience more and more of it along with most of the city’s inhabitants. Long ago, I became convinced that the next play, movie, concert, recital, sports event, ballet, lecture would be a new gourmet meal, and somehow the city has developed in me such an appetite for this pleasure that anything less will simply not suffice. When I read the New York Times Arts & Leisure section, I inevitably get excited because there is always some event that I feel will replenish me once again. All New Yorkers are inundated every minute with flyers, subway advertisements, radio and TV hype, word-of-mouth info, sky writing, e-mails and just about every kind of communication imaginable beckoning us to indulge. We become addicted and cannot endure without the next hit.

The perspectives from which to experience this cultural landscape are endless. I have viewed the city and its denizens from distinctive areas of this landscape. As a young musician on the bandstand, I encountered strippers, debutantes, gangsters, and hysterical teenagers in venues from basement clubs to posh hotel ballrooms. I participated in the last days of the swing band era, was on the scene for the greatest revolution in jazz, and became an unwilling participant in the rock ’n’ roll juggernaut.

As a producer, I introduced early audiences to the comedy of Jerry Seinfeld, Bill Maher, Richard Lewis, Robert Klein, Larry David, Sam Kinison, Richard Belzer, Bret Butler, Ray Romano, and dozens of others. Writing about these people has been a ball and rekindled the wild hysteria of those years. Producing concerts featuring great jazz stars such as Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, Benny Goodman, Maynard Ferguson, Woody Herman, Lionel Hampton, and others has fulfilled many boyhood dreams and afforded opportunities for many anecdotes. Presenting world figures such as Muhammad Ali, Ralph Nader, David Eisenhower, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti has provided considerable ammunition for discussions in my university classes. Introducing audiences to the dance creations of Alvin Ailey, Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp, and Robert Joffrey was a special treat, as was presenting the first American performance of the St. Petersburg Ballet. Recreating ballrooms filled with swinging dancers at special presentations of the bands of Glenn Miller, Harry James, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Duke Ellington, and Larry Elgart in a virtual recreation of the forties was amazing. Conversing with outstanding vocalists and sharing their anticipation before they entertained at my sold-out shows provides more fodder for the retrospective prose herein. Tony Bennett, Mel Tormé, Julie Wilson, Margaret Whiting, John Pizzarelli, and Johnny Hartman all reappear in the following pages. Bud Shulberg, Michael Crichton, H. L. Mencken, and Paddy Chayefsky are among the writers who appear.

As a reviewer and essayist for newspapers, magazines, and Web publications, I experienced yet another dimension of the city’s cultural cornucopia. As a first-nighter reviewing jazz, operas, cabaret performances, dramas, movie premieres, ballets, lectures, art openings, recitals, and debates, I have felt the pulse of Gotham’s relentless excitement. From the intimacy of Rosemary Clooney to the hauteur of Miles Davis, from the irony of Dorothy Parker to the passion of Teresa Stratas, from the romantic rhythms of Johnny Mathis to the majestic power of Placido Domingo, I have watched New York dance at night.

When foreign associates visited the city, I delighted in being a virtual tour guide. In connection with several business, educational, and writing tasks, I escorted colleagues to burgeoning, evolving neighborhoods (some of which I had never visited myself), shared exciting music performances at new venues, and dined in fascinating new eateries featuring international cuisine unheard of even a short time before my arrival on the scene. I have often sailed in the city’s waters, made the acquaintance of scores of its celebrities, and explored many of its mysteries. Many of these experiences are included in commentary and essays throughout this book. The events cover only a fraction of the spectrum of the New York scene chronicled by thousands of others. But they were exhilarating for me and, I can only hope, they will be for others. From the last decades of the twentieth century to the dawn of a new millennium, I have dwelt among legends and bathed in another renaissance. Pretty heady stuff.

PART I: BEHIND THE STAGE

Early Days

As a teenager growing up in the city during the fifties, I found myself between two worlds. World War II had consumed a large portion of American males and, just as the sociology was returning to a semblance of normality, the Korean conflict had broken out and, once again, the youth of America left in great numbers to fight on foreign soil. It was common for me then to encounter large groups of soldiers and sailors hanging out in nightclubs, dancehalls, and bars—places I worked in as a young musician.

I was not quite fourteen when I went to Local 802 headquarters on Eighth Avenue to take a test for admission to the musician’s union. Several of my friends had become members and, in those days, if a union delegate came to your gig and asked you for your membership card and you didn’t have one, there would be trouble. The secretary of the union was a man named Hy Jaffe. I reported to the office on time and was apprehensive as he was going to test me to see if I had enough musical training to become a member of Local 802. I had an ancient Buescher alto saxophone and was wetting my reed when he came out of the office and asked, Who are you? I told him why I was there and he said, Come inside. He sat down behind a large desk strewn with lots of papers. Are you ready? he said. I had fortified myself against the possibility of complex questions concerning intricate chord structures, compositional subtleties, and esoteric musical terms. I stood at attention and tried to focus. Play a C major scale, he said casually and looked down at his desk at the mound of paperwork. I wasn’t absolutely sure I’d heard him correctly. A C major scale? … I promptly complied, playing the scale in the middle octave of the horn. Quickly, I went on to include a version of the scale in a higher octave to impress him, but halfway through it, he shouted, Okay, that’s it … You’re in … See the cashier outside. Blinking with uncertainty, I dismantled my horn and rushed outside lest he change his mind.

I had studied reed instruments since age five and focused on the alto saxophone until I entered Bishop Loughlin High School where I began to play with the tenor.

I have spent decades writing about musicians and other artists. I have studied biographical sketches of their childhoods until the stories reverberate in my head with myriad clichés. So regarding my own childhood music experience, How shall I begin? as Prufrock says …

While practicing clarinet, playing the same exercises that practically every youngster plays, I had seen the movie New Orleans with Louis Armstrong. At age five, I had no idea who he was. Few people in my family knew anything about music. My dad had played some saxophone, and when he started me off had mentioned Glen Gray and the Casa Loma band, and Harry James. When I returned from the New Orleans movie and sat down to practice, I had the urge to play Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? But of course I had no charts … so I played the melody from memory and repeated it several times.

In those days, we had 78 rpm records and I can remember my uncle Johnny, who lived across the street, acquiring quite a collection. His favorite singer was Al Jolson, but he also had records by Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. My dad and uncle used to pal around a bit shopping for bargains. One day, there was a really big deal as they both purchased the same record player/radio—a Philco model. The unit could be adjusted for the new 33—LP records that were coming on the market. By then, we had acquired several Benny Goodman records and that’s what really started me off liking jazz. I listened to Rachel’s Dream so many times that I wore the record out.

On Highland Place in the Cypress Hills section of Brooklyn where I was raised, there wasn’t much going on. I had a couple of friends I played ball with, became a hopeless Dodger fan, and went to P.S. 108 until the fifth grade. I was then transferred to Blessed Sacrament grammar school because my mom had been told it was a better school. It was. I continued my education there at an accelerated pace.

The most important cultural experience I received came from activity at my friend’s house across the street. Franny was a year older than I and taught me how to play chess when I was eight and a card game called Authors. The most important thing that occurred at his house (where I spent huge amounts of time) was the listening and learning of classical music. Franny’s dad had graduated from Fordham and was the first college graduate I had ever encountered. Franny’s family was large and active. His Aunt Valerie came over on Sundays and worked on the New York Times crossword puzzle. Sometimes I was able to give her answers. After school and on weekends, Franny and I spent a lot of time listening to classical music. Early on, my favorite pieces were Brahms’ First Symphony and Schubert’s Second. I soon fell in love with Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and Dvorak’s New World Symphony. Over the next few years, I listened to a huge amount of the European repertoire. But I also continued to listen to Benny Goodman.

On my first day in high school, I was recruited for the orchestra by Mr. Consoli. He also taught music appreciation. Bishop Loughlin was a school for gifted catholic boys in the diocese of Brooklyn. You took a test and if you got accepted, you went and the diocese paid your tuition. The school had great prestige, and when my eighth-grade teacher told me that I had made Loughlin, I became ecstatic. As soon as I arrived, I was impressed with the students and teachers. The curriculum was rigorous and provided us with all the tools for college admission. I became very active at the school—I loved being there. By the time senior year rolled around, I had become so visible in music, theater, and student government that chairmanships and leadership titles were a daily bill of fare. Freshman year, we had orchestra practice on Mondays after school. Almost immediately, I became involved with a couple of jazz groups. One was a large, student-run band that had stock charts from the books of Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Stan Kenton. Tony Monte, a fellow student who would become my best, lifelong friend, led the band. I had met Tony at the regular school orchestra practice. Before Mr. Consoli passed out the classical charts and commenced regular practice, Tony would sit at the keyboard and play beautiful chord changes that mesmerized me. He also played a tune, Lullaby of Birdland, that I needed to hear over and over. Each Monday before practice, I rushed over to him at the piano and begged him to play Birdland.

Another musical group was the jazz combo. A few of the orchestra members (it came down to those of us who played wind instruments) got together and started jamming. Most could play well enough to make contributions, and the rest drifted away. Very quickly, I found myself at a school dance with a quintet playing a real gig. There were many opportunities for us because school dances were popular and live music was de rigueur. The bookings soon broadened to include the standard club date portfolio: weddings, bar mitzvahs, and parties. We immediately acquired Combo-Orchs books—inexpensive collections of standard songs written for club daters. Plenty of gigs were the order of the day. The pay wasn’t astronomical, but if you played a couple of dances or proms a week, you would be earning much more than any teenager around. Naturally, the money was certainly important to us; we all came from modest, lower middle-class families that could not afford any of the luxuries. The money I earned went to Mom and Pop for household expenses; we weren’t starving by any means, but I always dressed in hand-me-down clothes. The fancier the gig, the more money you usually made. During the first months of Local 802 gigs, I was introduced to some of the city’s famous (or infamous) catering halls and ballrooms.

At the Hollywood Terrace on Brooklyn’s New Utrecht Avenue, we opened for some real headliners. Despite the problem getting there (I had to take a train from my house in Brooklyn to Manhattan and then take another train back to south Brooklyn), the room would become a highlight in my young career. When I told my dad that we were opening for Xavier Cugat and his famous wife, singer Abbe Lane, he was really impressed. The bandstand at the club had red velvet sashes around it and was garishly lit. While we were playing, no one bothered to come close to the floor level bandstand, but when the Cugat band and Abbe Lane appeared, there was pushing and shoving to get close to the sashes. By then, about six of the biggest guys I’d ever seen were standing around the sashes and the pushing soon abated. Abbe Lane was the sexiest woman I’d ever seen, and my thirteen-year-old hormones went into high gear during the three-night gig at the club … which leads me to another pivotal recollection …

The most glamorous part of being a young musician was being around girls. As a student at an all-boys high school, I was turned on to the ladies like all the rest of the guys, but on the bandstand, my mates and I soon became objects for plenty of ogling teenage girls. Initially, there was a lot of laughter and macho posturing about this, but when we realized that this attention was not just a one-night thing—but would be there in some form or another every night—our behavioral development took different turns from that of other friends at school. We became more secure emotionally and were able to concentrate on music, academics, and sports because we knew that the girls would always be around.

The most exciting thing for me in three or four gigs at the Hollywood Terrace was opening for Lionel Hampton’s band. This event would presage a lifelong, multifaceted association with jazz referenced throughout this book. From the perspective of a thirteen-year-old who was commencing the love affair of his life—with jazz music—playing on the same stage with Lionel Hampton was phenomenal. Hamp swung wildly and the screaming band absolutely thrilled me. I could imagine nothing more exciting than playing in such a band. My band mates teased me a lot for my jazz idolatry, but that never deterred my headlong rush into learning and practicing as much of the music as I could.

There were interesting moments in the Loughlin High School orchestra as well. Although it was boring having to practice Mendelssohn’s War March of the Priests for some ceremonies at the school, it wasn’t too bad playing it in a joint concert with a girls’ orchestra, which we often did. The idea was to combine the all-boys and all-girls bands for concerts at both schools. I’m not sure what the altruistic educational ideals of the school music directors were, but I know that we all went ape when the concert dates were announced. We played with girls’ bands from Bishop McDonnell, from Mary Louis Academy, from St. Joseph’s, and other schools, and each night we rode back on the bus, we swapped stories of how in love we were and what exactly happened when we danced close with the girls at the six-minute socials that followed the concerts. We weren’t old enough to drive cars, so we could never see these girls again and would have only the memory of a few moments of ecstasy … This would inevitably result in sleepless nights, mournful class days, and in some cases deep psychotic behavior. The repression was truly Machiavellian.

I, of course, had another life different from most of my repressed classmates. I would descend into clubs and dives where customers paid ten cents to dance with wildly sexy girls. I would be playing slow blues on the tattered makeshift bandstands and wondering what conversations were taking place between customers and the girls. Often I would talk with these much older girls during breaks and learn about life in ways far different from the spiritual precepts in catechisms.

Because I brought in substantial paychecks from the gigs, my parents didn’t keep their young teenager on a short leash as other parents in the neighborhood did. But I still didn’t bother to share quite all the stories of my nightlife. Specifically, I’m sure I never told them about the Heat Wave. A trombone player in his thirties had told me about a gig in Greenwich Village on Eleventh Street that paid twenty-eight bucks a night—an astronomical sum in those days. He said that he’d wanted the gig, but the manager wanted a tenor sax instead. He told me where to go and I went in and auditioned. The bartender and manager laughed when they told me that the only music I would play was s-l-o-w blues.

I showed up the next night for work. The club was quite small with a long bar and a diminutive stage. It was so small, I thought there might be a puppet show as the featured act. The band configuration was weird too—bass, drums, and sax. As we got set to hit, the bass player (the nominal leader) gave me some music on skins that must have been through the washing machine; I could barely make out the notes. I knew the tune, however—it was Blues in the Night and we played it over and over. As the house lights dimmed and the stage lights came up, a solitary leg popped out of the curtain. It had a mesh stocking with a red ribbon and it moved provokingly round and round. As we got into the bridge of the tune, the body attached to the leg revealed itself—and what a body!

The gal was tall and blonde and gorgeous in a cheap sort of way. I was grateful that I knew the music by heart so I could look at her taking her clothes off slowly and lasciviously. By the time she was naked, we had played about fifteen choruses of Blues in the Night. After she finished, she arrived quickly at the bar and the patrons shoved five-dollar bills at her. She went along the bar smiling and chatting and collecting the money. She came to the band and acknowledged the guys and hesitated as she noticed me, the new player. Even though I was barely fourteen at the time, I was very tall and looked older. She came close and said, Nice sax, and kissed me. I must have shown embarrassment because the bass player and drummer started razzing me immediately. A lifetime later, I can still sniff the perfume she was wearing—I’ve never smelt it anywhere since.

Each stripper had different ideas for an act and each one of them titillated me. The older guys in the band had played in joints like the Heat Wave for years, but I hadn’t, so the gig was truly momentous for me. I don’t think I ever told anyone about it though—certainly not my parents and, come to think of it, none of the other musicians or the guys at school.

I played the gig for about two months and even got friendly with two of the strippers who thought I was very smart. We had conversations about school, and one gal told me she had dropped out of high school because her father beat her and so she ran away from home. She was from El Paso, Texas, and missed her friends and three siblings. She never could save money, so when I left the gig, I gave her my final weekend’s pay. She cried, saying that no one had ever been nice to her in her life like that. She wanted to … er … pay me back, but I told her to give up stripping and find something else. She finally went back to Texas and kept writing me for years (my mom kept asking me who this person was and I had to make up stories). Finally, we lost touch after she had gotten married and seemed to be happy.

Despite the fun of meeting girls during these early days of puberty, the best thing about performing during that time was the excitement of hearing great jazz players.

Often after a gig, we would go down to Birdland—New York’s marquee jazz room. It was the coolest place on the planet. I was amazed at how hip the midget emcee Pee Wee Marquette was and used to imitate him when I was announcing tunes on my own gigs. Pee Wee had an intro that was my favorite: And now, ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to change the vein of the music, presenting a spontaneous generation of jazz … Please welcome to the bandstand the amazing Art Blakey … Each headliner that came in would give Pee Wee a taste to make sure his intro got the crowd excited. However, legendary trumpeter Thad Jones dismissed Pee Wee as a crude hustler and wouldn’t give him anything. Ergo, Pee Wee’s intro for Thad was much less enthusiastic. That’s when Thad began calling him half a motherfucker.

I can remember seeing the Count Basie band when Sonny Payne was the drummer and Joe Williams was out front belting, Well alright, okay, you win, I’m in love with you. I was so thrilled sitting in the peanut gallery (it was cheaper than getting a regular table) and listening to the band playing Neal Hefti arrangements. The tunes were recorded on an album that had a picture of an atomic explosion and

E = mc². I went out and bought it the first day it was out and still have it. Fifty years later, I play it for my jazz class at the university because it is one of the greatest jazz albums in the literature of big band swing.

Great music was a nightly occurrence at Birdland. I used to fantasize about being a great jazzer and being around music like that all my life. The truth is that I have never seen the like of those nights at Birdland since. I remember a young Maynard Ferguson with Slide Hampton in the band bringing the house down as he played Zs above high C every night. A half century later, he was still hitting those soaring notes as I wrote a review of his appearance at the Blue Note with his latest band—Big Bop Nouveau.

One of the uncanny players was Horace Silver. In 1954, Horace looked like he was a ten-year-old sitting at the piano bench playing those revolutionary hard bop sounds. I looked around the club that night and saw a table of highbrow classical music stars. I knew one of them was Dimitri Mitropoulos, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. My friend Franny and I used to go to Carnegie Hall on Sunday afternoons, and he conducted Beethoven brilliantly. To see him at Birdland applauding the boppers was ironic. It reinforced my feelings at the time that jazz was an art form on the same order of classical music.

When I walked down the steps into Birdland with my saxophone case at my side and went to sit in the peanut gallery, I felt as if I were part of the hippest thing going on in New York. As I look back and analyze it now, it appears that my instincts may well have been right on target.

Birdland wasn’t the only jazz spot where we hung out. A few times in early 1955, we discovered that they were having jam sessions at a small club in the village called Café Bohemia. After a club date one night, we rushed over there to get on a list for the jam sessions. Although there would be truly monster players showing up, we had gotten a bit cocky from holding more than our own in some other jams around town. It would surely be a terrific night because legendary drummer Max Roach would be fronting the rhythm section. Max had been at Minton’s Playhouse with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie at the very start of bebop and he was a hero to all of us. We got to the club and it was packed with aspirants like us, plus a crowd eager to see Max. I was lucky and got brought up early with a bass player and trombonist. We played Duke Jordan’s Jordu and got enough applause to keep us up there for another tune. Then the emcee announced that there was to be a special guest—a trumpeter named Clifford Brown. This short guy with a happy face came onto the bandstand and cordially said hi to us. I