I spent the summer of 1953 doing one-nighters with Claude Thornhill’s band, from Erie, Pennsylvania to El Paso, Texas — plus two weeks in New Orleans. He was shy and funny and a lovely pianist, and he had written some beautiful arrangements for the band. He also had those early Gil Evans charts that we all loved. The one-nighters were usually ballrooms or military service clubs, and the pianos were often terrible. Each night he would sit down at the piano that the venue had provided, and he would play several arpeggios up and down the keyboard while he memorized all the notes he never wanted to hear again. Sometimes the pianos were so bad that he hardly played all night. But when he found a fairly decent instrument, he would add beautiful fills and solos to the arrangements. I learned a lot while playing with him.

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I first met the singer Maxine Sullivan on a library concert in New Jersey. When she introduced the band, she said, “…and on the bass, Jim Crow!” After the concert, she said to me, “You know, I had to really watch myself, not to say ‘Jim Crow’ when I introduced you!” She never realized she had said what she was trying not to say.

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A few years ago, a friend of Alex Leonard’s had a backyard party. Alex told me: “His family are accordion players, and after a few drinks the squeeze boxes came out. The neighborhood is a bit haughty and uptight, so at exactly 11 p.m. someone called the cops. When the officers arrived, Alex’s friend asked one of them, ‘Was it the volume, or the repertoire?’”

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From a Facebook post by Steve Little:

I played in Buddy Rich’s band as his relief drummer for a week around 1959 . The only thing he said to me was, “Play the drums just as they are. Don’t change anything.” That was pretty much it for the week. I had brought money to get home just in case he started breaking my chops. He did have some tantrums, once at the audience, but he actually let me alone, much to my amazement. About seven years later, I was playing at Basin Street East in NYC with Charlie Barnet. I didn’t realize that Buddy was there, and after a tune that I had a long drum solo in, Charlie called Buddy up to sit in. I don’t know where I got the courage, but I said, “Just play them as they are. Don’t change anything.” He just gave me a grin. I always liked the guy.

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Gabe Villani posted:

I just finished a book on Mel Brooks. When he was a kid, he played drums, and his teacher was a neighborhood kid name Buddy Rich (true). When “Blazing Saddles” came out, Buddy Rich met Mel, hugged him and said, “You could have been a great drummer!”

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This story was in a Facebook post from Herb Gardner:

In 1964, Wild Bill Davison and I were in Eddie Condon’s band, scheduled to play for a TV broadcast that was opening the Louisiana Pavilion of the World’s Fair in Flushing, by playing the 1928 J.C. Johnson song, “Louisiana.” Bill wasn’t paying a lot of attention to what was going on, so when the signal to play was suddenly given, he grabbed his horn and played the unmistakable beginning strain of “We’ll Take Manhattan” instead! (It has a lot of the same notes.)

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Joe Lang sent me this:

When I was in college at Carnegie Tech, one of the hot jazz tunes was “Moanin’.” I went to a party at one of the fraternity houses where they had an R&B band playing. At one point, I asked the leader if they would play “Moanin’.” He said that they would. After about a half-hour they hadn’t played it, so I went back to him and said, “I thought that you said that you would play “Moanin’.” He looked back at the band and said, “Hey, this cat wants us to play ‘Ramona.’” I realized then that he had never heard of “Moanin’.”

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John Simon sent me this:

I was playing a gig on a borrowed electric keyboard  —  the kind I hate, with too many bells and whistles. I’m always afraid I’ll accidentally hit a button and be lost in Never Never Land. Well, that happened. The button I accidentally hit must have been the “demo” button, because the instrument suddenly launched into a virtuoso Chopin piece on its own. It kept going while, unbeknownst to the audience, I frantically searched the keyboard for the button to stop it. But it was a short piece, and it was soon over. The audience burst into applause. I took a bow.

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When Popsie Randolph was Benny Goodman’s bandboy, he always carried Benny’s brand of cigarettes. When they were playing at Princeton one day, Popsie ran out to buy a new pack and didn’t see a store anywhere, so he stopped a man on the street to ask for directions. When he returned, someone asked him, “What were you saying to Albert Einstein?” Popsie was amazed. “Einstein? I thought he was the janitor!”