[Dixielandjazz] Max Gordon's book, Live at the Village Vanguard

[Norman Vickers]

To:  Musicians and Jazzfans list; DJML

From: Norman Vickers

 

There was a sign in a library which I frequented which stated:

 

Any book is new until you've read it!

 

I've never had opportunity to visit the iconic Village Vanguard but have
read about it for years.  Recently, I came across a reference to the late
Max  Gordon, founder and proprietor.  He died in 1989 and the club is still
run by his widow, Lorraine.  She's 93!

 

I ordered Max's book Live at the Village Vanguard C 1980 published by  St.
Martin's press.  There are 19 chapters usually about eight to ten pages in
length.  He writes charmingly of doing what he loved. Starting in the 1930s,
the room entertained poets, comics as well as musicians.  Then in the 1950s,
he made it exclusively a jazz room.  This book can be found inexpensively
through used book dealers and might be  one to recommend to the novice who
wants to explore some light reading about jazz and jazz musicians.

 

Follow up:  After Max's death, his widow Lorraine has continued to run the
club.  Not to be overshadowed by Max, she published her own memoir,

Alive at the Village Vanguard: My Life in and Out of Jazz Time, C2006.   In
2013 she was recognized as NEA Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the
Arts.    I guess I'll need to add Lorraine's book to my reading list. 

 

________________________________________________________

>From New York Times

 


MAX GORDON NOW A JAZZ 'INSTITUTION'


By GEORGE GOODMAN


Published: September 3, 1982


AMONG the jazz clubs that are hosts to the eight-day Greenwich Village Jazz
Festival, none is better known than the Village Vanguard, the tiny basement
bistro at 178 Seventh Avenue South, near Perry Street, where the
alto-saxophonist Arthur Blythe will be featured through Sunday.

Since 1934, when its doors were first opened, the Vanguard has gained the
status of a jazz institution. It began, however, as a kind of
workshop-showplace, nurturing the talents of singers and comics, with jazz
as a sometimes thing. Not until 1955 did its owner, Max Gordon, switch to a
jazz-only policy.

''In the early days the Vanguard had everything,'' Mr. Gordon, 79 years old,
said the other night. In its earliest, freewheeling Bohemian phase, it was a
room where poets like Maxwell Bodenheim performed alongside Guilherme
Mascato, the baritone. Judy Holliday and Harry Belafonte sang at the
Vanguard, as did Josh White, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. Later, Mr.
Gordon said, there was ''Wally Cox and Woody Allen, and my good friend
Richard Dyer-Bennett, the guitarist - and not one among them was a star.''

In a 1943 partnership with Herb Jacobi, Mr. Gordon opened the Blue Angel
club on East 55th Street, catering to a tonier trade. They served up gourmet
cuisine and entertainment by comics like Elaine May and Mike Nichols, whom
Mr. Gordon brought from Chicago. Barbra Streisand, Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory,
Eartha Kitt and Bobby Short were Blue Angel attractions. ''It lasted for
nearly 20 years, making big money,'' Mr. Gordon said. ''But the Vanguard was
always my favorite.'' 'Like a Family'

In the years the Blue Angel flourished, the Vanguard did well, too, said Mr.
Gordon, who maintains a residence within walking distance of his club.
''People here were more like a family,'' he said.

The Blue Angel closed in 1964. But Mr. Gordon said that even before the
closing television was making serious inroads on the talent pool available
to nightclubs. ''I was listening more to music and hiring more jazz
groups,'' he said. They were usually the top innovators of what used to be
called modern jazz, musicians whose virtuosity and playing styles identified
them as disciples of the saxophonist Charlie Parker. Mr. Gordon still
prefers them to Dixieland or to musicians who try to fuse rock with jazz.

The musicians, who usually work for stints of a week, regularly include the
percussionist Elvin Jones and the Mel Lewis Orchestra, a Monday night staple
for more than a decade. There are small ensembles led by such musicians as
Pharoah Sanders, the saxophonist, and Woody Shaw, the trumpeter. Thelonious
Monk (a performer who was first suggested by Mr. Gordon's wife, Lorraine),
Charles Mingus, Dexter Gordon and Lee Konitz have all appeared at the
Vanguard. Turning to Talk

In response to mounting pressures for social relevance during the 1960's -
both his own and his public's - Mr. Gordon turned his nightclub into a forum
one night a week for talk on such topics as ''What's Wrong with Prurience?''
and ''Is Satire Futile?'' For a time at the Vanguard there were free-for-all
discussions featuring people as diverse as the writers LeRoi Jones (now
Amiri Baraka), Ralph Ginsberg, Paul Krassner and Nat Hentoff. Percy Sutton,
before becoming Manhattan Borough President, was a participant, as was Mario
Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement. John Simon, the theater critic,
spoke there, along with Richard Kuh, the lawyer.

Over the years, while the Vanguard established an identity closely meshed
with its owner's personality and tastes, Mr. Gordon achieved institutional
status in his own right. At a recent celebration held by Dewar's, sponsor of
the Greenwich Village Festival, the impresario was feted alongside Barney
Josephson, operator of the Cookery, and Art D'Lugoff, owner of the Village
Gate.

Asked to account for his club's identity, Mr. Gordon replied: ''I'm not
sure. Once there was the Cafe Bohemia, the Five Spot, Nicks and a little
place called the Half Note, all of them a little like the Vanguard, though
they were different. Now all of them are gone.

''For one thing,'' he continued, ''the mood of those places was relaxed,
which it must be in order for musicians to stretch out. Jazz players have to
be accessible to their fans.''

Because of the Vanguard's intimate atmosphere, it has often been chosen as
the location for live recordings by musicians. Sonny Rollins and John
Coltrane did recordings at the club that critics consider to be among their
best. 'More Like a Clubhouse'

''Look at the way it is on Monday nights,'' said Jay Yampolsky, who on
occasion steps out of his role as dishwasher to make recordings of
commercial performers, such as one he did recently for the Mel Lewis
Orchestra. ''It's more like a clubhouse than a nightclub.''

Part of what gives it that feeling is the dark-lighted interior, with its
rare posters and photographs of musicians, which Mr. Yampolsky called a
''cool'' ambience.

It is there that Mr. Gordon can be spotted almost any night of the week,
sitting alone at a table with a glass of brandy or slowly making his way
through a cluster of people toward the ''inner sanctum,'' a back-room
kitchen crowded with cases of beer and dusty boxes filled with bound stacks
of old bar checks.

Mr. Gordon, a round-shouldered man of 5 feet 6 inches, has the chalky pallor
of the night owl. He is nearly bald except for a thin fringe of gray hair
that hangs about an inch above the collar of a shirt always worn open. He
wears glasses with black frames so thick that they have been compared to an
automobile bumper.

Ater graduating from Reed College, in 1924, he attended Columbia University
Law School, dropping out after a few weeks. Not a Job He Wanted

''I never liked nightclub owners and never wanted to look like one,'' Mr.
Gordon said as he puffed on a huge cigar. Then, pointing to his wrist, he
asserted: ''I paid $14 for my watch, and the most expensive suit I ever
owned was a tailor-made job that cost $300. I bought it because Miles Davis,
who was working at the Vanguard at the time, insisted on sending me to his
tailor for a suit I never liked and only wore once or twice.''

Mr. Davis's fees now place him beyond the financial resources of a room that
rarely charges more than $7 or $8 for its 123 seats or seeks to enforce its
two-drink minimum.

Mr. Gordon said he was never tough about negotiating fees for his
performers. Most of them attract a small but devoted following. Sometimes
fans form lines that snake their way up the Vanguard's steep, narrow
staircase and wrap around the corner of Seventh Avenue and Perry Street.

''Business is good,'' Mr. Gordon said. ''My family expected me to become a
lawyer, but it didn't take long for me to decide the law wasn't my bag. Now
I think I know: jazz is really my bag.''

                                                                --End--