When I first moved to New York City in 1950, I met Dave Lambert, who became a good friend. He introduced me to the songwriter Jack Segal, and we spent many happy hours at Jack’s east side apartment, singing songs, reading plays aloud, and enjoying Jack’s friendship. One day, two sharply dressed young mobsters that Jack knew dropped by with a young singer. They asked Jack to listen to him and give his opinion. The guy sang a couple of songs, and Jack gave them the thumbs up, and a little while later we found out that the guy had a hit on Columbia records…and Tony Bennett was on his way to stardom! Many years later, when I was at the New York Playboy Club with the Walter Norris quartet, a similar situation arose. Two wise guys brought a singer to one of our rehearsals and asked Walter to evaluate his singing. The guy didn’t have much of a voice, and Walter was trying to be diplomatic about telling them so. One of them said, “Don’t worry about it, Walter. I think we make a fighter out of him.”

Dave Lambert also told me about a time when he was a young man living in Boston. There was a radio disc jockey that he knew who asked him to go over to his house one day and help him sort out a pile of 78 RPM records he had, which had been sent to him by various record promoters. There were all kinds of records, and he wanted to eliminate the uninteresting ones. Dave and the disc jockey sat among the records, sorting them into two piles, keepers and trash. At one point the disc jockey broke one of the trash records over Dave’s head. This started a ritual of alternate breakage on each others’ heads. They were having so much fun doing this that they ended up breaking all the trash records and all the keepers as well!

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In 1979 I played a Jerry Herman Broadway show starring Joel Grey. It was called “The Grand Tour.” The preview audiences liked it, but most of the critics didn’t, so we only ran a few weeks. Around that same time, I got a call from Joel’s conductor Artie Azenzer, to do some club work with Joel, with Maurice Mark on drums. Joel did well all by himself, with a steamer trunk full of props and material from vaudeville and from his hit performances in “Cabaret,” on Broadway and in the movie. Joel’s father was the comedian Mickey Katz, who played with Spike Jones, and made comedy recordings under his own name. One of Joel’s nightclub bits may have been borrowed from his father. Joel would say, ‘Now, I think I’ll sing a country song.” And then he would sing, “Rumania, Rumania, Rumania!” When the audience laughed, he would inquire, “Rumania is not a country?”

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Back in the 1950s, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis was with the Count Basie band at Birdland. It was the last set, and Lockjaw was taking a solo, but his attention was really on a young woman in the audience, who he was ogling at the expense of what he was playing. The piano was an upright at that time, and was on the top riser of the bandstand, behind Lockjaw. Basie crumpled up one of his piano parts into a ball and hurled it, whacking Lockjaw squarely on the back of his head. Lockjaw didn’t even look around… he knew who had hit him, and quickly got busy playing his solo without any other distractions.

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Leo Ball once told me he was in an airport, going down some stairs to get his luggage, when he saw Rolf Erickson below him, talking to someone. Leo hadn’t seen Rolf for a while, and he ran down the stairs and embraced him, as the man Rolf was talking to walked away. Rolf said, “Leo, I love you, but I was just hitting Duke Ellington up for a raise, and you let him get away.”

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Bill Wurtzel sent me this: On a break at Jimmy Nottingham’s Sir James’ Pub, the bartender said a patron wanted to buy the band a drink. When it was my time to order, I said I’ll pass. One of the other band members poked me and said: “You’re having Scotch.”

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I had the same experience as Bill the first time I played with Vic Dickenson. We were playing with Jimmy McPartland’s band at Toots Shor’s, and Toots offered the band a drink. I wasn’t drinking, so I asked Vic what he was having and ordered the same, and so he got two drinks. We were good friends from then on.

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Many years ago, when Lee Konitz moved to Hoboken to take advantage of the lower rents there. He dropped into the Half Note one night while I was playing there. That jazz club was on Spring Street near the entrance to the Holland Tunnel. Lee was annoyed that they wouldn’t let him walk through the tunnel from Hoboken to the Half Note. He wanted to save the bus fare.