[Dixielandjazz] The Note

[Steve Voce]

I have a piece entitled 'You Can't Get There From Here'  in the current 
issue of 'The Note'. Here are some stories from it that I hope you might 
find diverting.

Steve Voce

When the exquisite coda to the ballad ended, the tsunami of applause 
raged around the theatre as the tenor player bent to speak to his pianist.

/‘Now /who’s your favourite tenor player?’ Stan Getz demanded.

‘Al Cohn,’ said Lou Levy. ‘Isn’t he yours?’

Zoot Sims famously described Stan Getz as being an interesting bunch of 
guys. I was lucky to meet the affable one of the pack that day in Nice 
during the 1980s.

With an interview in mind I’d arranged during the evening beforeto meet 
Stan at eleven the following morning outside his hotel. Naturally it was 
one of the best hotels in town.

As I stood there weighed down by a BBC portable tape recorder I thought 
it quite likely that he wouldn’t turn up. But he did, five minutes late, 
with his very attractive partner and a male friend who he introduced as 
an acupuncturist ‘who does wonders for my back pains.’

Stan led the way to the hotel’s private beach and paid for me, as a 
non-resident, to enter. He chose a good spot, pointed to the towels and 
we all lay down to sunbathe. After about 20 minutes Stan began to talk 
about music and I started up the Uher.

He talked first about his early days and of the band he and Shorty 
Rogers had when they were eleven and how he left school when he was 16 
to join the Jack Teagarden band.

‘Teagarden was a wonderful man,’ he said. ‘The war was on and sidemen 
were hard to get. But my mother and father were anxious about me going, 
so Jack had to become my guardian to convince them that I’d be OK.’

Stan quoted some of the things that Jack had said to him and suddednly I 
jumped. The voice he used was Teagarden’s and I thought for a moment 
that the Texan was lying on the beach with us.

It turned out that Stan, who I knew had a perfect musical memory (he 
never forgot a tune once he’d played it) was also a brilliant mimic.

The morning drifted on and the reels turned. I was ecstatic. I left them 
to it at lunchtime.

I took the recorder back to my modest hotel and set up the tape. It was 
then I discovered that the battery had failed making the tape record 
slow and the playback like a bunch of white mice on a hot plate.

The back pains turned out to be the lung cancer that eventually killed him.

Another tenor player, Bud Freeman, was cited by Lester Young as one of 
his main influences. Bud liked to think of himself as a cultured man and 
a connoisseur of many arts besides his music making.

Very much an anglophile, he had always affected an English accent, and 
was delighted when it became time for his first visit to England in 1960.

When he stepped off the plane he was met by a Rolls Royce sent for him 
by the Hon Gerald Lascelles, a cousin of the Queen’s.

Bud was swept through the beautiful English countryside to Fort 
Belvedere, ancestral home of the Lascelles family and other royals. The 
Rolls passed smoothly along the long winding drive with its beautiful 
poplar trees and up to the magnificent portal of the house, where, as a 
liveried footman held the car door open for him and others scurried with 
his luggage, he stepped out onto a red carpet.

Bud stood and surveyed the scene with satisfaction.

‘Aaah,’ he sighed. ‘I always new England would be exactly like this.’


A Canadian priest, Gerald Pocock, went to hear his friend Duke Ellington 
at New York’s Rainbow Grill in the early ‘70s..

'I sat at the bar to wait for Duke and the small band to arrive. Sonny 
Greer’ (a childhood friend of Duke’s who had left the band in 1951) 
‘joined me at the bar and we chatted. Ellington eventually arrived and 
approached me saying things like "Father Pocock! How wonderful to see 
you! You look wonderful! How have you been? We must get together!" and 
so forth.

Ellington didn't say a word to his old friend Sonny Greer who was 
sitting next to me. Ellington eventually excused himself, saying that 
the band needed to start its set.

Sonny Greer was understandably miffed; how could his old friend ignore 
him like that? Ellington and the band started to play, and at some point 
in the set Ellington made an announcement.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we recently travelled to Ethiopia, where we were 
presented to their king, the man who has more titles than the Pope, His 
Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie,Menelik, the Lion of Judah. We were 
ushered into his his large royal chamber. We were on one side of the 
room and Selassie was at the other side on his throne, with an assistant 
standing at either side. Selassie turned and whispered something to one 
of his assistants. It was very suspenseful. The assistant walked all the 
way across the room, bowed and said to us: 'The emperor would like to 
know . . . . . . what the hell is Sonny Greer up to these days?'"

Sonny Greer broke up laughing,'


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