[Dixielandjazz] Jackie McLean

Fred Spencer drjz at bealenet.com
Tue Apr 4 21:19:32 PDT 2006


Jackie McLean wasn't in the picture--see below
Graham, Charles. The Great Jazz Day. np., Da Capo Press, 2000. 143 pp., 
illus.

. The liberal, descriptive text that accompanies the many photographs in 
this large (12"x 9") book is in three sections:;

I. The Big Picture--a 73-page account of the production and content of the 
truly classic tiered photograph of the 57 famous jazz musicians who, on a 
mid-August morning in 1958, stood on the steps of a brownstone house on New 
York City's 126th Street.

II. The Trumpet Players in Central Park--a 20-page story of the 1961 
photograph of 22 hornmen clustered around the tables of an outdoor café. The 
front row shows Buck Clayton; Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charlie 
Shavers.

III. The Golden Age: Time/Past. Manners and Morals at Mintons, 1941: The 
Setting for a Revolution-a 44-page summary of a time that followed the 
traditional "golden age" prized by "moldy figs."

This book is replete with biographies, and articles by Whitney Balliett, 
Ralph Ellison, Gary Giddins, Dan Morgenstern, and Milt Hinton, who, with his 
wife Mona, filmed their own supplementary pictures.

There is also a videotape of this momentous gathering. In 1988, Life 
Magazine commissioned a re-creation of the picture, featuring the 12 
survivors of the 1958 occasion. Sonny Rollins was in Europe so only 11 were 
photographed.

Benny Golson, 75, a saxophonist survivor of The Great Jazz Day, plays 
himself in Great Day in Harlem, a projected, possibly current  (2004), 
Steven Spielberg movie about a fictional Eastern European citizen who wants 
to collect the autographs of all the musicians in the original photograph. 
In a June 13, 2004 interview with Golson in the New York Times, Ben Ratliff 
said "There are several other notable jazz musicians from that photograph 
who are still alive: Sonny Rollins, Hank Jones, Marian McPartland, Horace 
Silver."

"Brooklyn's Jazz Renaissance", an article in The Institutes for Studies In 
American Music Newsletter (Volume 33, No. 2, Spring 2004) contains a 
photograph of "A Grear Day in Brooklyn" showing some 50 unnamed jazz 
musicians.

Cheers.
Fred

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <Juskeepin44time at aol.com>
To: <dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2006 2:58 PM
Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Jackie McLean


> Wasn't Jackie the last living musician who was pictured in the photo "A
> Great Day In Harlem"?
>
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