[Dixielandjazz] Paul Desmond and the Horse Show gig.

[Stephen G Barbone]

Even Brubeck had some painful gigs, witness Desmond's story below.

As a band leader who performs at Equestrian Events, I feel Paul  
Desmond's pain. However, after 20 years of doing it, we've figured out  
how to perform these days without offending the horses, or the  
teenagers. <grin>

Next one is "The Laurels Combined Driving Event (Horse and Carriage  
Driving)  in West Grove PA. Barbone Street PLUS the fantastic Jonathan  
Russell from Noon to 3 PM on September 13th and 14th.

Jonathan played his first Combined Driving Event with us when he was  
nine. His comment? OK, Steve, just what is going on here?  He was,  
after all, a city kid, and not used to competitive carriage driving, a  
sport started after World War 2 by Prince Philip of the UK, and now  
spread throughout the world.

See:   http://laurelscde.org/   or  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4159605676917178013

You can hear Sonny Troy, our guitarist in the background on part of  
the video.



Cheers,

Steve Barbone

www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband





How Many of you are in the Quartet? By Paul Desmond.

Dawn.  A station wagon pulls up to the office of an obscure motel in  
New Jersey.  Three men enter - pasty-faced, grim-eyed, silent (for  
those are their names).  Perfect opening shot, before credits, for a  
really lousy bank-robbery movie?  Wrong.  The Dave Brubeck Quartet,  
some years ago, starting our day's work.


Today we have a contract (an offer we should have refused) for two  
concerts at the Orange County State Fair in Middletown.  2 p.m. and 8  
p.m.  Brubeck likes to get to the job early.

So we pull up behind this hay truck around noon, finally locating the  
guy who had signed the contract.  Stout, red-necked, gruff and harried  
(from the old New Jersey law firm of the same name), and clearly more  
comfortable judging cattle than booking jazz groups, he peers into the  
station wagon, which contains four musicians, bass, drums, and  
assorted baggage, and for the first and only time in our seventeen  
years of wandering around the world, we get this question:  "Where's  
the piano?"

So, leaving Brubeck to cope with the situation, we head into town for  
sandwiches and browsing.  Since the sandwiches take more time than the  
browsing, I pick up a copy of the Middletown Record and things become  
a bit more clear.  "Teenager's Day at the Orange County State Fair",  
says the headline across the two center pages (heavy move, in that the  
paper only has four pages).  Those poor folk, especially the cattle- 
judge type (who has probably lumbered into heading the entertainment  
committee), thought we were this red-hot teenage attraction, which,  
Lord knows we've never been.  Our basic audience begins with creaking  
elderly types of twenty-three and above.

Nevertheless, here we are, splashed all over this ad, along with the  
other attractions of the day- judo exhibition, fire-fighting  
demonstration, Wild West show, and Animaloraa (which may have been  
merely misspelled).  And right at the top, first two columns on the  
left, is the this picture of Brubeck's teeth and much of his face,  
along with the following text, which I'm paraphrasing only slightly.   
"Hear the music teenagers everywhere thrill to", it began.  "Hear the  
music that rocked NewportRhode Island (an unfortunate reference in  
that only a few weeks earlier the Newport Jazz Festival had undergone  
its first riot).  "Hear Dave Brubeck sing and play his famous hits,  
including 'Jazz Goes to College', 'Jazz in Europe', and 'Tangerine'.

So, now realizing - in Brubeck's piquant ranch phrase - which way the  
hole slopes, we head back to the fairgrounds where the scene is  
roughly as follows:  there is a smallish, almost transistorized, oval  
race track.  (I'm not exactly sure how long a furlong is, but it seems  
not too many of them are actually present.)  On one side of the oval  
is the grandstand, built to accommodate 2,000 or so, occupied at the  
moment by eight or nine elderly folk who clearly paid their money to  
sit in the shade and fan themselves, as opposed to any burning desire  
to hear the music their teenage grandchildren everywhere thrill to.

Directly across the track from them is our bandstand - a wooden  
platform, about ten feet high and immense.  Evidently no piano has  
been located in Orange County, since the only props on stage are a  
vintage electric organ and one mike.  Behind us is a fair-sized tent  
containing about two hundred people, in which a horse show for young  
teenagers is currently in progress - scheduled, we soon discover, to  
continue throughout our concert.  This is hazardous mainly because  
their sound system is vastly superior to ours.

So we begin our desperation opener, "St. Louis Blues."  Brubeck, who  
has never spent more than ten minutes of his life at an electric  
organ, much less the one he is now at, is producing sounds like an  
early Atwater-Kent Synthesizer.  (Later he makes a few major  
breakthroughs, like locating the volume control pedal and figuring out  
how to wiggle his right hand, achieving a tremolo effect similar to  
Jimmy Smith with a terminal hangover, but doesn't help much.)  Eugene  
Wright, our noble bass player, and me take turns schlepping the mike  
back and forth between us and playing grouchy, doomed choruses, but  
the only sound we can hear comes from our friendly neighborhood horse  
show.

"LOPE," it roars.  "CANTER...TROT...AND THE WINNER IN THE TWELVE-YEAR  
OLD CLASS IS...JACQUELINE HIGGS!"

  As always in difficult situations such as these, we turn to our main  
man, primo virtuoso of the group, the Maria Callas of the drums, Joe  
Morello, who has rescued us from disaster from Grand Forks to Rajkot,  
India.

"You got it," we said, "stretch out," which ordinarily is like issuing  
an air travel card to a hijacker.  And, to his external credit,  
Morello outdoes himself.  All cymbals sizzling, all feet working.   
(Morello has several.  Not many people know this.)  Now he's into  
triplets around the tom-toms, which has shifted foundations from the  
Odeon Hammersmith to Free Trade Hall and turned Buddy Rich greener  
than usual with envy.

The horse show is suddenly silent.  Fanning in the stands has subsided  
slightly.

Suddenly a figure emerges from the horse tent, hurtles to the side of  
the stage, and yells at Brubeck, "For Chrissakes, could you tell the  
drummer not to play so loud?  He's terrifying the horses."

Never a group to accept defeat gracelessly, we play a sort of Muzak  
for a suitable period and split.

When we return at eight, all is different.  A piano has been found,  
the stands are packed with our geriatric following of twenty-five and  
above, and we play a fairly respectable concert.

Even so, we're upstaged by the grand finale of the fair - the fire- 
fighting demonstration.  A group of local residents has been bandaged  
and made up to appear as if they've just leapt from the Hindenburg and  
their last rites are imminent.  But instead of remaining discreetly  
behind the scenes until their big moment, they mingle casually with  
friends and neighbors in the audience during the evening, sipping  
beer, munching popcorn, casting an eerie, Fellini-like quality over  
the gathering, and considerably diminishing the impact of their  
ultimate appearance.

After their pageant come the main events of the fair, which have  
clearly been planned for months:  a flaming auto wreck, followed by a  
flaming plane wreck, each to be dealt with instantly and efficiently  
by the Middletown Fire Dept.  At one end of the oval is a precariously  
balanced car; a the other end, a truly impressive skeletal mock-up of  
a single-engine plane, tail up.  Midway, at ground zero, is the  
Middletown Fire Truck, bristling with ladders and hoses and  
overflowing volunteers.

A hush falls over the stands.  At a signal given by the fire chief,  
the car is ignited.  The truck reaches it in two or three seconds, by  
which time the fire is roughly equivalent to that created by dropping  
a cigarette on the backseat for two or three seconds.  It is  
extinguished by many men with several hoses.

A murmur falls over the stands.  The fire chief, painfully aware that  
his moment of the year is at hand, signals for the plane to be  
ignited, also instructing the truck to take it easy, so that the fire  
should be blazing briskly when it arrives.  The truck starts, at about  
the pace of a cab looking for a fare.  The plane goes WHOOSH!, like a  
flashbulb, and by the time the leisurely truck arrives, has shrunk to  
a lovely camp-fire, just large enough for roasting marshmallows.

Later, four pasty-faced, grim-eyed men pile into a station wagon and  
drive away.  It may not be bank robbery, but it's a living.