For a while, back in the late 1950s, there was a jazz club in the Plaza hotel. I heard Lionel Hampton’s band there. When they set up on opening night, they found that the piano, a squat upright, was impossible — it was badly out of tune and had some keys missing. There was a Wurlitzer electric piano on the bus, and the musicians quickly got it out and set it up.

Errol Garner lived a couple of blocks away, and he dropped in to visit. Hamp’s piano player gestured for Errol to come to the Wurlitzer and sit in. Errol shook his head and sat down at the upright instead. He hit one chord, and his eyebrows shot up. He quickly stood up and moved to the Wurlitzer, and he played the hell out of it.

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After Zoot Sims passed away, there was an annual Zoot Sims fest at the New School for a while. At one of them, Louise Sims put together a sextet of musicians who also wrote. She called the group “Writers’ Cramp.” I was on bass, Gary Giddins on piano, Dick Sudhalter on trumpet, Loren Schoenberg on tenor, Ira Gitler on alto, and Whitney Balliett on drums. As we played, Clark Terry rushed to the front row of the auditorium and pretended to be writing criticism. Fortunately, his opinion was never published.

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In an interview with Jazz Times in 2006, legendary pianist (and John Coltrane Quartet member) McCoy Tyner was full of praise for Max Gordon, who owned the Village Vanguard. McCoy described him as “a brilliant man… very dedicated to the music.” He had an anecdote to share: 

“Max was a special guy… [he] would sit down there and listen to every set. And he’d even doze off a little bit, man. You’d catch him dozing off once in a while and think he was sleeping, but if you stopped playing a little early, he’d be right there watching the clock.”

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In many jazz clubs and concert halls, Thelonious Monk often got up from the piano during his tenor player’s solo and did a little dance. Pianist Larry Vukovich told me that, while Monk was playing at San Francisco’s Hungry I club, he was doing his dance when the clubowner’s wife came out of the office and saw him. ”Who is that dancing?” she asked with alarm. “We don’t have a license for dancing!” Someone told her, “That’s Monk.” She cried. “I don’t care about his religion! He can’t dance in here!”

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From Peter Hyde:

My old buddy, the now deceased Don Mecca, a trumpet player in Scranton, loved telling about the phone call he got one day from a local polka bandleader:

“Can you play in my band this Saturday night?”

Don had never played in that band before, but he had heard some things. He asked, “I dunno. Is your book hard?”

The answer told him just what he wanted to know.

“Well, it is if you can’t play it!”

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In the 1950s, when Joe Morello and I were playing with Marian McPartland’s trio at the Hickory House on New York’s 52^nd Street, Joe was beginning to attract the attention of the jazz press, and his amazing technique at the drum set was the subject of much praise. Here’s an excerpt from my second book, “From Birdland to Broadway”:

Joe Morello was a spectacular drummer, but he felt embarrassed when people compared him to Buddy Rich, Max Roach, and Louis Bellson. To fend off such discussions, he invented a mythical drummer named Marvin Bonessa, who he said could cut all of them. Marvin was supposedly a recluse who never recorded and rarely came to New York. Marian McPartland loved the joke. She and I abetted Joe in it, as did his friend [guitarist] Sal Salvador, to the point that Bonessa began to accumulate votes in jazz polls. Some of Joe’s old pupils still laugh about Marvin.