Word: jazz
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...love to have a little boy," says Trumpeter Miles Davis, "with red hair, green eyes and a black face-who plays piano like Ahmad Jamal." Trumpeter Davis is one of the more fervent admirers of the pianist whose group is currently the hottest trio in jazz. Its leader is neither red-haired nor green-eyed-but the spell he casts on his faithful followers, including many a fellow jazzman, sometimes suggests the arrival of the first Martian from outer space...
Ahmad's five Argo albums have sold well, and one of his most recent, Jamal at the Pershing, was for months the top jazz LP in the country. For club engagements Ahmad now gets a top fee of $3,000 per week. Appearing last week at Indiana's French Lick Jazz Festival, he was at the top of his inventive form. A master of the dramatic effects of silence, he sometimes sits for as much as 16 bars without touching a key ("A pattern," he points out, "can be completed in space"). He rarely repeats himself...
...Books. Season after season, the joint was jammed. The Hawk's mascots -pigeons living in a coop right above the men's room-grew fat and happy. The fees that the club was able to pay for its jazz acts rose from less than $300 to more than $3,000 a week. Even after the Nogas sold their interest in the club last year to Max Weiss, secretary-treasurer of San Francisco's avant-garde Fantasy Records, nothing really changed. They did try to straighten out the chaotic books, but it was a foredoomed effort. Accurate accounting...
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...
...Five Pennies (Dena; Paramount). The basic trouble with movie biographies of famed jazz musicians is that the camera is not a horn. What matters about the average music man is the music he makes; what he does with the rest of his life is sometimes too dull for words or too rich for the censor. And since good music is seldom enough to make up for a bad story, the smart moviemaker tries to strengthen his corn section with a couple of side men. In this case, the added attractions are Danny Kaye and Louis ("Satchmo") Armstrong, who have...