[Dixielandjazz] Red Rodney

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Red Rodney struck me on brief acquaintance as a very nice guy and a magnificent 
musician. When he worked with Peter King their horns were so much in tune with 
each other it was a wonderful sound which didn't seem like normal unison but a 
unity in which it was hard to know what was coming from where. 


The story about drug problems requires correction. When he was younger and 
locked away for reasons connected with drugs, he studied accounting. When he was 
free again and could not get musical works he decided to apply the training he 
had received behind bars and took up the sort of creative accounting which put 
him back behind bars. He said that when he was arrested he thought that at least 
he might have the chance to get his chops back, but some cop kicked his teeth 
in. 

The drugs were I believe a thing of the past by then, and he only re-emerged 
after a spell of sitting in using false teeth after release from jail, when he 
became the main attraction. I first heard him shortly after hearing Dizzy 
Gillespie, John Faddis and some other trumpeters of considerable capacity, and I 
was still mightily impressed. He was always spoken of as a kind of culmination 
of 1930s swing trumpet playing who played the later stuff with all the beauty 
and lyricism of pre-bop, and that's right. I have a broadcast tape of a gig of 
his I had attended and he engaged in some singing related to his involvement 
with the C. Parker bio-pic, and a ballad expressing his regret that Buddy Tate 
was missing the festival due to open heart surgery, which would make a few 
listmates happy, as indeed would his early solos as a swing prodigy.