Bill Crow with Ray Mosca (1931-2024)

My old friend Ray Mosca, a fine drummer, passed away on June 10, 2024. I didn’t know he was gone until Local 802 was notified in November. (See Ray’s obituary in this issue of Allegro.) I met Ray when he was playing with the Billy Taylor trio. We became friends right away. We both liked the same musicians, and we both liked to swing. Ray played with many good jazz groups. The ones I remember are Cy Coleman, Oscar Pettiford, Mary Lou Williams, Lennie Tristano, Al Cohn and Zoot Sims, George Wallington, George Shearing, Dave McKenna, Dorothy Donegan, Gray Sargent, Earl Hines, and Monty Alexander. We played together for a couple of years at the NY Playboy Club, and a lot with Marty Napoleon and with Joe Puma. The last time was with Marty and Bria Skonberg at a concert in Glen Cove, NY in July 2013. Ray became a bit of a recluse in his final years, and didn’t always answer his phone, but I caught him on some good days, and we had some good telephone talks during the past couple of years. He was bright and funny, and I loved talking with him. Ray was a dear part of my New York musical family. I miss laughing with him and I miss playing with him. For those of you on Facebook, there are some nice tributes to Ray on my page here.

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When I was a little boy in Kirkland, Washington, I loved watching my Dad shave every morning. He used a straight razor, and he would whet it on a leather razor strop that hung beside the wash basin, then stir up the soap in his shaving mug and lather his face with the suds, and then would carefully shave the black whiskers that had grown on his face overnight. I was fascinated by the sharpness of the blade. He always put his razor away on a high shelf where neither I nor my older brother could reach it. One morning at breakfast, I saw that Dad hadn’t shaved. I didn’t ask why, but I wondered. The next morning, he still hadn’t shaved, and the black bristles were beginning to look alarming. On the third day, I asked my Mom, “Why has Dad stopped shaving?” She said it was a surprise, and I got no further information. That night, Mom said we were going to the high school. This was nothing unusual, as many meetings were held there, sometimes for the American Legion, sometimes for elections, and sometimes for organizations that wanted to celebrate something. When we got to the school, Dad disappeared somewhere, and the rest of us found seats in the auditorium. It turned out there was a play being presented, which pleased me. As the play progressed, I saw that the setting was in a Western town, and the main characters were a cowboy and his wife. At one point, a group of rugged looking men wearing Stetson hats and armed with six-shooters came in, and after some conversation, they began to sing ‘Home on the Range.” Suddenly, I realized that one of the men singing was my Dad! So, this was why he had let his beard grow, to look more authentic in the play. I had never heard my Dad sing before, and when I asked him about it, he allowed that he only knew two tunes. “One of them is Home on the Range,” he said, “And the other one isn’t.”

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When I was in the sixth grade in Kirkland, I had been trying to play the trumpet for two years, and I had heard a little jazz among the other music on our radio at home. But my big revelation about jazz came one day when I was walking home and passed my music teacher’s house. He waved to me to come in, and he took me to a room where he had a record player that played flat records with a tune on each side. The one we had at home was an Edison cylinder record player, with one tune on each cylinder, and I thought my teacher’s machine was a wonderful improvement. He put on a record and played Louis Armstrong’s “West End Blues,” with that wonderful trumpet cadenza at the beginning. I was delighted and amazed at what I heard, and I became an immediate jazz fan. After that, every nickel I could call my own went toward buying jazz records, which only cost seventy-five cents at the time. Fortunately, the electric store in Kirkland, besides selling stoves and refrigerators, had a corner with a record player, and a stack of 78 RPM jazz records for sale. In those days, you could listen to a record in the store to see if you wanted to buy it. In my school band, I switched from trumpet to baritone horn. I noticed that sometimes in the music that our band was playing, there was a separate part for the baritone horns, and sometimes we were just playing what the trombones were playing. So, on some of those numbers, I started making up a part for myself that was different from the trombones. The other baritone horn player in the band said to the teacher, “Bill isn’t playing what’s written.” The teacher told him, “For him, that’s okay.” And that was my introduction to improvisation.

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Brian Nalepka posted this on Facebook:

I was playing an Oktoberfest gig with a band this past week. The entire band (except for me) had on Lederhosen, I was wearing shorts, long black knee socks and dress shoes. We were in a barn, playing “Tavern in the Town” or something like that, when a gentleman stepped up and asked to make a request. He wanted to hear “The Folks Who Live on the Hill,” a beautiful Jerome Kern song. The leader thought for a second and said, “How about Blueberry Hill?” The fellow looked dejected and said, “No Thanks,” and walked away. Moral of the story: An educated consumer is not necessarily our best customer!

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Vibraphonist Terry Gibbs, now 100 years old, goes live on his Facebook page every Saturday afternoon at 1 pm Pacific time (or 4pm Eastern time). He answers questions and reminisces about his 80 years as a jazzman. On a recent livestream, he remembered an album of Jewish melodies that he did for Mercury, under the supervision of the late Quincy Jones. He told Quincy that he wanted to play some traditional Jewish music in a jazz mode. On the date,Terry was delighted when Quincy came in wearing a tallis, the Jewish prayer shawl!