Word: edmond
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...been heard in the Savoy for many years. The stage, used to creaking under the weight of whole sections of braying saxophones, had to support only a trumpet, a trombone, and a clarinet beside the rhythm section, and this unique instrumentation, reminiscent of the old time marching bands of Edmond's younger days, evoked a warm, informal flavor which no amount of script arranging by pianist Charlie Bateman, seemed able to eradicate...
From his appearance one would hardly guess that Edmond Hall has been playing jazz clarinet as long as anyone in the business and can remember when the Methusalah of the trumpet, Bunk Johnson, was still a youngster. As a matter of fact, he says, Bunk wasn't one of the big boys even in the days when he still had his own teeth. Buddy Petit, Freddy Keppard and Joe Oliver were the real trumpet kings...
When young Edmond came of age, he didn't follow the beaten path of his contemporaries up the Mississippi to Chicago, but instead barnstormed the larger communities in the deep south. For a while he played in Florida with an outfit led by a man named Eagle Eye Shields which had "Cootie" Williams, later to become famous with Duke Ellington, playing trumpet...
...find a copy of the disc today would be like procuring one of those proverbial hen's teeth, but quite a few must have been circulated at the time because the whole group got a job at New York's famed taxi dance spot, the Roseland, soon afterwards. Edmond has been in and around New York ever since...
Cyrano de Bergerac (translated from the French of Edmond Rostand by Brian Hooker; produced by Jose Ferrer) drops in on each new generation-Walter Hampden accompanied it in the '20s-as a reminder that high romance once lived in the world, or at any rate in the theater. Brightly tricked out, Cyrano is always welcome, for it offers playgoers the satisfaction of witnessing a "classic" and at the same time reveling in shameless sentiment, noble gestures and high theatrical hokum...