Michel.

Very nice Michel, and certainly well earned given the high quality and high frequency of your comments on the site, which are both well appreciated at this end. If you send me a separate email to al(at)jazzcollector.com with your address, I will mail you the Downbeat, free of charge, and I will pay for the shipping, as always.

By the way, I still haven’t heard from Dan Hodina, who won the Hank Mobley record two weeks ago. Dan, if you’re out there, please check in. Otherwise, we might just have to put that one back into the bin. Either way, we’ll be poring through the collection for another item for another contest by the end of the week. Also, take a look at our latest auctions: We just put up three Warhol covers and several sealed LPs from the Muse label. It’s been a busy night at Jazz Collector. You can view our eBay items simply by clicking Items For Sale at the top of the page.

Bill Eckstine Misses Opening; Claims He Was Assaulted

Singer Bill Eckstine missed his scheduled opening at the Royal Box of the Hotel Americana in New York City Jan. 4 and speculation of foul play ran high. Eckstine reappeared the following day, however, and said he had been assaulted on the street the night of Jan. 3, hauled into a car, robbed of about $600 and a watch, and then drugged.

Eckstine said he was trying to hail a taxi on 125th St. and Fifth Ave. on Jan. 3 when he was approached by three men, who pulled up in a car and asked for his autograph. While he complied with the request, Eckstine said, one of the men hit him on the back of the neck and

pulled him into the car, where he was robbed and made to drink a drugged liquid.

Eckstine said he does not remember anything from that time until he found himself on a bench in Mount Morris Park in Harlem in the early morning hours of Jan. 5. His physician reported that Eckstine suffered one broken and three bruised ribs. An official complaint was filed with the police and an alarm sent out for the three men on charges of assault and robbery. Eckstine was on the job at the Americana the evening of Jan. 5. On the previous night, several of the singer’s friends, including Sammy Davis Jr., Robert Goulet, and comedian Nipsey Russell, stepped into the breach and entertained the opening night crowd.

Miles Davis, Blue Haze, Prestige 7054. This is an original New York yellow label Prestige. It’s in VG+ condition, and sounds quite nice. We put a start price of $30 and it’s already received a bid, so we expect there to be some action.

We also put up a nice-sounding original copy of Clifford Brown, Jam Session, Emarcy 36002. This also has a start price of $30. It’s a great record, with a lot of positive energy. 

As you may have noticed on the Jazz Collector site, we’ve been going through some old Downbeat Magazines, looking for collectibles (we’re even giving one away). We’ve put a few up for sale in our eBay story, and we put a very interesting one up for auction yesterday. It is:

The April 8, 1965 issue of Downbeat with a cover story on Ornette Coleman. What we found most interesting as we perused the issue as a collector, was the original review of John Coltrane’s classic LP A Love Supreme, Impulse 77. The reviewer was Downbeat editor Don DeMicheal, who gave the record five-stars and was able to see that this was a milestone record. We put a price of $12 on the Downbeat and we think it’s a nice collectible to own. We’ll see what happens.

On Eric Dolphy, Mary Ann from Far Cry, New Jazz 8270: “That’s got to be Eric Dolpy — nobody else could sound that bad! The next time I see him I’m going to step on his foot. You print that. I think he’s ridiculous.” Sadly, Dolphy passed away just two months later.

On Cecil Taylor: “Take it off! That’s some sad shit, man.” (Although, of course, Downbeat did not print the word ‘shit’).

There was one track that Miles actually liked and rated with five stars. That was:

Desafinado by Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto. From Miles: “Stan plays good on that. I like Gilberto . . . he could read a newspaper and sound good. And I like Stan, because he has so much patience, the way he plays those melodies — other people can’t get nothing out of a song, but he can. Which takes a lot of imagination, that he has, that so many other people don’t have.”

So, we are making this cool collectible available FREE to one lucky reader of Jazz Collector. All you have to do is comment somewhere on the site during the next two weeks and you will be eligible to enter the contest. There is no charge at all — we even pay for the shipping. You can even just comment right here on this post, let us know what you think about Miles’ comments.

We’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: Our goal in doing these contests is to encourage discussion on the Web site. We’re not trying to gather names for spam or any other nefarious action. We just want to encourage readers to comment on the site and talk to one another. And, thankfully, it seems to be working. Traffic on the site is up considerably in the past few weeks and so is the conversation. And now you can engage in the conversation and win a cool collectible as well. We’ll announce the contest winner two weeks from today, on April 15.

Here’s another item we found of interest from our Downbeat collection. It’s a review by D. Leon Wolf in the Nov. 18, 1946 issue of Downbeat. The headline: Granz Bash a Caricature on Jazz: Everything Bad in Jazz Found Here.” Here’s how the article starts off: “Of all the wretched music ever inflicted upon this earnest devotee of le jazz hot, nothing, I regret to say, has yet to equal Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic concert the night of Oct. 24. Everything that is rotten in contemporary hazz was to be found in this musical catastrophe.” 

Wolf’s view of some of the musicians:  Illinois Jacquet: “The lousiest tenor in the country making over $50 a week, barring none.” Rex Stewart: “Granz, if he had the guts, should have yanked him off the stage during his second number, the most sickening and obscene demonstration ever perpetrated before a mixed audience.” Another The Bean sounded like a little sewing machine, playing everything at top speed and buzzing along with scarcely a trace of his old feeling . . . more than a trace of re-bop has crept into his playing.” Here Wolf sums it up: “I’m no alarmist, no musical reactionary, but where the heck is jazz going anyway, when Jazz at the Philharmonic is supposed to be It?”

In addition to vinyl, I collect jazz books, magazines and other ephemera. Once in a while I go through my old copies of Downbeat. Here’s something I pulled a few years ago:

The Dec. 16, 1946 Downbeat offers a prime example of the divergent fortunes of the two leaders of the be-bop movement. On the front page there is a picture of Dizzy Gillespie having fun and joking around. On page six, at the top of the page, there’s a small article with the headline: “Parker Fund Does Fine at L.A. Benefit.” It was a four-paragraph item, noting that a benefit for Charlie Parker in Los Angeles raised a total of $500.86. The purpose of the money: “To assist Parker, upon his release from a sanitarium, to secure instruments, clothes and what

he needs to get on his way to a new start.

Imagine the indignity for Bird. This was followed a few weeks later, Feb. 16, 1947, by an article headlined: “’Bird’ Parker Working Again.” Here’s the text: “Charlie Parker has been released from a California sanitarium after several months confinement. He suffered a nervous breakdown here last fall. The be-bop altoist has no immediate plans, but it is likely he will return to New York after a couple of recording sessions for Dial with Howard McGhee. McGhee has had Parker working with him recently and says “Bird” is playing as well as ever.” Indeed, after his release from the Camarillo State Mental Institution, Bird recorded some of his best and most lasting work.

Who was the subject of Leonard Feather’s First Blindfold Test in Downbeat Magazine?

We’ll see who comes up with this one.