[Dixielandjazz] Fwd: Dick Gibson Jazz Parties

[Marek Boym]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Marek Boym <marekboym at gmail.com>
Date: 13-Apr-2007 21:55
Subject: Re: [Dixielandjazz] Dick Gibson Jazz Parties
To: "baglady4 at juno.com" <baglady4 at juno.com>


In addition to Soprano Summit, Gibson organized - and financed - The
World's Greatest Jazz Band, a great band indeed.
Cheers

On 20/03/07, baglady4 at juno.com <baglady4 at juno.com> wrote:
> Sent to me by a fellow Jazz enthusiest..article in Wall Street Journal today:
> His Jazz Parties Brought Down the HouseBy WILLIAM H. SMITH
> March 20, 2007; Page D6
> One crisp September morning in 1967, I drove the 100 miles from Denver to Vail to view the quaking aspen in full color and visit the Colorado ski resort, then just two years old. Strolling down the street, I heard jazz coming from the open second-floor windows of the Casino Vail tavern. I climbed the stairs, peered into a large room, and to my surprise saw that the celebrated saxophonist Zoot Sims, trumpeter Yank Lawson, guitarist Johnny Smith, trombonist Cutty Cutshall and drummer Mousie Alexander were on stage performing. Nearby was a bar, and since I didn't have a badge gaining me entrance to the music room, I sat down on a stool between two gentlemen -- Count Basie's trumpeter Buck Clayton and the renowned trombonist Urbie Green. As a big band/jazz buff, I thought I was in heaven! I asked Clayton what was happening. He said it was the "Dick Gibson jazz party."
> That evening I dined at the Red Lion Inn in Vail and was seated at a table filled with jazz legends, including Bud Freeman, Teddy Wilson, Zoot Sims and the venerable Joe Venuti. Raconteur Eddie Condon was at his best -- telling anecdotes about jazz legends that never made Downbeat magazine.
> I had never heard of Gibson, nor of his jazz parties, so I decided to look into his background. I found that he had a most remarkable and many-faceted career. After graduating from Alabama, where he played left end on the team that soundly beat Southern California in the '46 Rose Bowl, Gibson then served as his alma mater's end coach and scout; he taught creative writing at Alabama, once having his friend William Faulkner as guest lecturer. After several years in academia, Gibson migrated to New York, where his first jobs were selling advertising for Town & Country magazine, and working as a bartender at a club on Long Island, where he met his wife-to-be, Maddie Trudeau, a member of the Canadian clan that included a future prime minister, Pierre Trudeau.
> Soon after Gibson had elevated his status several notches and become financial manager for the New York Herald Tribune, Robert Lehman heard of his financial investment skills and hired Gibson, at age 30, as a vice president of Lehman Corp. One day Gibson became thoroughly disenchanted with commuting between Manhattan and Larchmont, N.Y., and, though conceding that he was "making good money with a great firm," decided to move with his wife and three young children to Denver.
> The family loved the Mile High City. But one day in 1962 Dick confessed to Maddie that he missed the ocean -- and the kind of jazz he wanted to hear, the way he wanted to hear it. Several days later, he told Maddie that although he couldn't do anything about the ocean, he could do something about the jazz. Gibson called the best players in the country he knew to fly to Aspen and, after inviting many of his and Maddie's jazz-loving friends who he thought could afford to help pick up the tab, the first Gibson Colorado Jazz Party was held at the historic Hotel Jerome, Labor Day weekend of 1963.
> This was the genesis of a change in the way fans listened to jazz and the way it was played. Guests were requested to hold conversations to a minimum. Whispering sweet nothings was Gibson's suggestion. Jazz lovers could hear the music in a comfortable place, rather than in a club filled with folks who often were there for every reason other than the music. Musicians did not have to deal with extraneous noise -- and could listen to one another -- as food was not served in the music room and there were no waiters blocking the music stand or busboys rattling dishes.
> Every Labor Day weekend for the 30 years that the parties were held, Gibson asked the guests who came the longest distance to stand up. At the last Gibson party I attended, Denver, 1991, a couple from New Zealand stood. At one party, Gibson noted that of the 500 or so guests, roughly half were from Colorado, and the rest from 30 other states as well as from Sweden, Rome, Mexico and Toronto. A British jazz fan told me that the Gibson party was a very "hot ticket" in London, and that he had dreamed about being invited some day. After the first party in Aspen, the venues varied between Aspen, Vail, Colorado Springs and Denver. The incomparable jazz critic Whitney Balliett attended the Aspen party in 1969 held at the Red Onion night club, and wrote the defining piece about Dick Gibson and his party for The New Yorker -- "Ecstasy at The Onion."
> The musicians were paid a generous fee for the holiday weekend. Gibson insisted that they bring their wives, sent their airfare, met them at the airport, covered their hotel, food and bar expenses. All on just a handshake. I recall visiting with Goodman trombonist Cutty Cutshall after his release from an Aspen hospital. Cutty said that when checking out he was told his bill had already been paid. Both Cutty and I thought his benefactor was Gibson, but Dick never admitted it. When Cutty died in 1968 he left Gibson his trombone; and when Gibson's World's Greatest Jazz Band was playing the Roosevelt Grill in Manhattan in 1971, W.C. Handy's son gave Dick several of his father's original manuscripts. He said "my father would have wanted you to have these."
> Dick Gibson did much more than provide a comfortable venue for fans and jazz musicians. Writer Nat Hentoff suggests that Gibson should be honored for creating jobs for jazz musicians and broadening the audience for their music. The late Larry Orenstein wrote in his piece "The World's Greatest Jazz Party" that the legendary Milt "The Judge" Hinton said in an interview: "If it wasn't for Dick Gibson most of us would have been out of the business long ago. In the '60s and '70s when rock came in, a jazz musician had no place to play." Both Joe Williams and Harry "Sweets" Edison confirmed to me shortly before they died that Gibson had revived and extended their careers, just as he had done for so many others.
> What made the Gibson jazz party so unique? If you were among the some 500 to 600 fortunate invited guests, you would be sure to hear at least 60 of the finest musicians in the world, playing 45-minute sets stretching over 40 hours of a Labor Day weekend -- without rehearsal and paired with musicians with whom they'd never played before. Gibson, who did the casting himself, had an innate sense of what would work musically.
> For example, several such combinations went on to record successful albums after their duets at the Broadmoor event in Colorado Springs in 1972. Pairing Jay McShann with Ralph Sutton led to their album, "Last of the Whorehouse Piano Players." Likewise, bringing together soprano saxophonists Kenny Davern and Bob Wilber playing Ellington's "The Mooche" brought down the house, much to the musicians' amazement. Davern and Wilber realized they had something special going -- and from then on recorded as "Soprano Summit." After the last notes were played late that Monday night, guests and musicians alike left the Gibson Colorado Jazz Party realizing that they had experienced another small, yet significant, piece of traditional, mainstream jazz history.
> I visited with Dick one afternoon at his home and he related that when Louis Armstrong was his guest, Armstrong, verging on tears, asked why he had never been invited to play at one of his parties. Dick said that he explained to Louis that "I didn't think that you would come." Maddie revealed to me the real reason: Dick feared Armstrong would have overshadowed the other musicians.
> Before he died in 1998, Dick Gibson was particularly proud that many of his guests had similar jazz parties in their own cities. Gibson gave generously of his time, experience and energy to help start many of these events -- including San Diego and Scottsdale, Ariz. -- that at the time of his death grew to more than 60 parties in this country and overseas. The 2007 round of parties began with Newport Beach, Calif., February 16-18 and San Diego, February 23-25. They continue with Atlanta, April 20-22; Midland, Texas, May 18-20; Scottsdale, May 26-27; and, in England, the first Norwich Jazz Party, May 5-7. And the beat goes on!
> During every Gibson Colorado party, this jazz impresario would belt out "I Ain't Got Nobody" in his stentorian voice -- once described as "somewhere between tenor and lawn mower." Although the world of jazz ain't got nobody like him anymore, Dick Gibson left lovers of jazz a lasting musical legacy.
> Mr. Smith is a jazz historian and contributor to jazz publications living in Palm Desert, Calif.
>  URL for this article:
> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117434857526842076.html
>
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