Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker join up for a performance of “Dizzy Atmosphere”. Note, especially, Dizzy's historic trumpet lick at about the 1:30 mark. Crazy, man!
The video includes photos taken (presumably) at Bop City, a famous jazz club established in San Francisco in 1949.
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7 comments:
This is great, as are the visuals. Always wondered where the West Coast met the East Coast: Bop City huh? Explains a lot.
Wouldn't it have been something to enter the club at 2 AM one morning (which is when it opened) and rub elbows with Billy Ekstein and Artie Shaw and Kirk Douglas and Ella Fitzgerald? Solid, Jackson!
Billy Eckstine, rather. And Hazel Scott! That's her in the big dark hat.
Reading into its story I found the forgotten Slim Gaillard. Is it from Slim where Chet Baker and Mulligan got their style, 'birth of the cool'? Sure sounds like it.
Yeah halcyon days. back then NY was claustrophobic and SF had lots of room to spread out and dig the latest jive, and open at 2am. I did spot Kirk Douglas.
Jack Kerouac mentions Vout City in On the Road, maybe people don't realise how optimistic Kerouac's writing is, how he conveys the excitement and optimism of postwar USA.
Good point about Kerouac. A lot of people completely misunderstand what the guy was really about.
You could be right about Slim Gaillard, too. He was one very hip musician.
Thanks for pointing out Hazel Scott, hadn't heard of her.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-conservative-kerouac/
- That article sets out a lot of what I get from reading Kerouac.
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