Word: drummer
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...Mathis. Regulars remember how Eleanor Caccienti refused to ring the cash register when Dizzy Gillespie was talking for fear she would miss a joke. (Now the cash registers have no bells.) They recall the night a trombonist lost his pants in the middle of a solo, and the time Drummer Art Blakey belted a cymbal so hard that it bounced onto a ringside table where (according to Gleason) "two worshipers were sitting with eyes closed. They went six feet in the air, straight...
This week Guide's noiseless cash registers are ringing up drinks and entrance fees to a brisk rhythm, the music of Vibraphonist Cal Tjader and his jazz quartet (quickly convertible to a bongo-congo Latin quintet with the addition of a crack drummer named "Mongo"). Says Owner Guido: "We give the customers good jazz. The musicians we don't bother. We never walked around with big cigars and said, 'I'm Mister Black Hawk and won't you sit at my table, musician?' They can look right across the room when they play...
Diners near the bandstand could hear the squeal of the buzz mute being fitted into the bell of the horn. The pudgy little man with the wispy mustache lifted the tarnished trumpet, looked right to the piano player, back to the drummer. Then Trumpeter Jonah Jones patted out two measures with a soft left foot and took the first three pickup notes of I Could Have Danced All Night...
...combo they formed. The group begins as a trio, built around an astonishingly good young trumpeter. Then the saxman finds a pianist at a Harlem rent party, and the trio sounds even better as a quartet. Bookings pick up, and with the addition of two more saxophonists and a drummer, the outfit seems on the point of blowing itself a big name...
...fond, mellow mood eventually turns sour. Kanin. carefully foreshadowing, leads the reader toward what should be a shocker of an ending. The combo folded, the narrator recalls, after its thunderous Negro drummer died of too many pep pills and too much whisky. Slowly, 25 years later, the sax player is made aware of a horrifying truth: one of the white bandsmen, obsessed with race hatred, deliberately fed the ailing Negro the poison that would kill...