Word: sidemen
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...Wynton and other top players can do tremendously well. A popular jazz artist can expect to gross well over a million a year." Of course, they must also pay substantial band-related expenses; Marsalis claims such charges drive his net income far under $500,000. The take of the sidemen is much lower -- typically ranging from $40,000 to $60,000 a year -- but that still puts them in the top 20% of U.S. income earners in a profession that traditionally reduced its practitioners to a hardscrabble existence...
BILL COSBY: WHERE YOU LAY YOUR HEAD (Verve). Jazz buff and drummer manque, the Cos directs an assortment of talented sidemen in five numbers written by Cosby and his longtime musical collaborator, Stu Gardner. The material is mainstream, mostly danceable, occasionally overcalculated -- sounding more like a jazz score than the real thing. This is the first in a projected series of Cosby-produced jazz recordings. Give the man B for a good beginning...
...desk; instead, Hall interviews guests on a modish chair-and-sofa ensemble, leaning forward intently. There is no Ed McMahon- style sidekick; Hall prefers to trade quips with the crowd or play around with the band in recurring bits like the "poetry moments," featuring various sidemen reading silly verse. Musically, the show has brought on a host of rock performers -- Kool Moe Dee, Living Colour, Winger -- who rarely get exposure on mainstream TV. And in contrast to the carefully stage-managed routines on the Tonight show, Hall's manic energy sends a signal that just about anything can happen...
...never openly acknowledged, of how short Bird's passage is bound to be. Samuel E. Wright as Dizzy Gillespie, for whom Conscience might have been a better nickname, and Michael Zelniker as Red Rodney, the white trumpeter who shyly insinuates himself into a black man's world, make splendid sidemen to this life...
Together, book and movie create a portrait of the shaman as showman -- demanding everything of himself and his sidemen so he can give everything onstage. The autobiography shows him honing his lyrics, teasing the word "motoring" into "motorvating" for Maybellene, finding inspiration for a verse of Brown Eyed Handsome Man from Sacher-Masoch's novel Venus in Furs, fretting that while in prison he cannot gain access to a map that would help him chart Po' Boy's itinerary in Promised Land. And once he got it right, he always wanted it to be the same kind of right...