[Dixielandjazz] Man behind the scenes

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

The risk of overrunning for reasons cited by Marek and others, superabundance of inspiration on the part of musicians of the highest class, is a sufficiently rare occurrence as to be an exception to conventional strictures. 
AN ACT OF GOD!!!
 
If George Wein was worried about the audience that great day at Newport, Duke had after all been playing them for long enough and was in control. 
 
As for overrunning, I once attended a gig featuring the silly but very musical though self-engrossed man referred to below. The main solace concerning that gig with three very big names (in this site's terms maybe NOKOM with lapses too near noKOM) was that although the encore took it just past the time when most gigs at that festival had an interval, nothing of much worth had been done in that time. 
On the other hand there were some respects in which it couldn't have got all that much worse ...  
 
People were still startled that it was all over, what there had been of it, when along come minions of the (since that date now much-changed) festival and attempt to shoo oot people who still had half their beer left (having been short-changed when they'd expected time to sip and listen) with memorised mechanised blather about needing to get the venue ready for the next gig.  Suddenly the venue filled with sounds of inspiration, to wit noble sarcasm. 
 
The next gig was due to start a hundred minutes on. Lord, at that time when we were being told the place needed redding up for the next gig all the other musicians I'd seen under the same programming regime had been playing -- and were going to keep on playing -- for at leasr another forty-five minutes. Why push the punters???  
 
And of course one of the short measure stars had been inadequately audible. 
 I even published this anecdote once 
 
He is a bassist whose obsession with a good acoustic sound is not unqualifiedly commendable. 
I was chatting to a sound man at a different festival, during an interval and with a smile on my face -- the guy was good at his job.
I asked him about this bassist, who had been at the festival a couple of nights before, when I couldn't manage to attend.  
Unlike in my past experience, the sound man reported that both the beautiful acoustic tone and the separate notes with all their values of intonation had been wonderfully audible. 
Because when the bassist had asked about this and that the sound man had done a splendid job of lying about everything the selfobscuring if not selfeffacing  pl..ucker insisted on. 
Next thing I'll be giving you a list of big name musicians who got away with demands which not only prevented people from hearing them properly LIVE
, it put some people off attending venues to which the bad sound had given a bad name.