During television’s early years, jazz was infrequently seen, except when its few popular “names,” such as Benny Goodman and Louis Armstrong, appeared on variety shows like Ed Sullivan’s. But on December 8, 1957, live on Sunday afternoon, many members of the jazz pantheon appeared on CBS-TV’s The Sound of Jazz, among them Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Thelonious Monk, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Red Allen, Gerry Mulligan, Pee Wee Russell, and Roy Eldridge.
Because nearly all the legendary originals on the program are dead, videos of this historic (and never to be equaled) event have been played and replayed around the world. Along with the late Whitney Balliett of the New Yorker, I selected the musicians. For me, it was a jazz fan’s fantasy come true.
Making it all possible was the producer, Robert Herridge, the most creative, and stubbornly independent, force I’ve known in my various television forays. (Among the works he transmuted to the screen were Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, All the King’s Men, and The Trial and Death of Socrates.) His only instruction to Whitney Balliett and me was, “Make it pure!” He didn’t care if most of the players were unknown to a general audience so long as they exemplified what Whitney had described as “the sound of surprise” of this music.
Only one of our choices caused trouble. During a sound check, Herridge received a note from a representative of the sponsor, read it, and tore it up. He paraphrased the message for me and Whitney: “We must not put into America’s homes, especially on Sunday, someone who’s been imprisoned for drug use.” Herridge told the bearer of the note that if Billie Holiday could not go on, he, Whitney, and I would leave.
The show went on.
Because of his extensive experience at CBS, and having worked with many cameramen, Herridge selected those he knew could improvise. “When you see a shot you want, take it,” he told them. “We’ll handle it in the control room.” Director Jack Smight, himself an extraordinary improviser, enthusiastically agreed.
The set for The Sound of Jazz was simply the studio, with viewers -seeing the cameramen, and some of the musicians in informal attire, wearing hats–as jazz players habitually did at rehearsals. I had neglected to tell Billie Holiday that this would not be the usual television setting, and when she found out, she told me angrily: “I just bought a goddamn $500 dress for this show!”
But once in the musical company of her peers, Billie happily swung into the groove. Aware that there would be no splicing out of clinkers in this entirely “live” hour, the unfettered musicians, as at an after-hours jam session, played to impress their peers, as well as themselves. As a viewer wrote to CBS: “One so seldom has the chance to see real people doing something that really matters to them.”
I had heard all the players often in clubs, concerts, and in recording studios. But that afternoon, there was a special exhilaration in their interaction–in part because they knew they were on “live,” going for broke, and also because many had not played together for a long time, adding to the thrust of being challenged, which is the essence of the jazz experience.
Only one of the musicians arrived for the session looking as if he was not up to the challenge: Lester Young–“Prez,” the president of the tenor saxophone–was waiting, alone and weak, in an empty room next to the studio. I told him that he didn’t have to be, as scheduled, in the reed section of the Count Basie/All-Star Orchestra–alongside such powerful, equally famed, and formidable tenor saxophonists as Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. He nodded, but told me he was up to the small group session, later in the show, featuring Billie Holiday.
That sequence turned out to be the climax of The Sound of Jazz, and has been continually shown around the world. Billie and Lester had been very close–musically, as in her early recordings, and personally as well. But as several musicians told me, that was no longer true.
Billie was to be accompanied in this quieter session by Lester, seated in a semicircle with Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, trumpeters Roy Eldridge and Doc Cheatham, trombonist Vic Dickenson, Gerry Mulligan on baritone saxophone, and a rhythm section of drummer Osie Johnson, bassist Milt Hinton (“The Judge,” musicians called him), and guitarist Danny Barker. Her number was her own composition, a blues number, “Fine and Mellow.”
In the control room we expectantly leaned forward. Billie was her usual knowing, tender, subtly sensual, and swinging self. When it was time for his solo, Lester did not remain seated, as I’d suggested to him he could; Prez played a spare, pure, transcendent blues chorus that brought tears to my eyes and, as I looked around, to the eyes of Robert Herridge, Jack Smight, and the sound engineer. Billie, her eyes meeting Lester’s, was nodding, smiling, and seemed to me to be with him, back in time, in a very private place.
Both Billie and Lester died two years after The Sound of Jazz. Lester went first, on March 15, 1959. Until reading Gary Giddins’s perceptive notes for the new Columbia/Legacy Billie Holiday set, Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles, I hadn’t known that Lester’s widow, Mary, prohibited Billie from singing at his funeral. But I’ve since learned, from Dave Gelly’s masterful new biography (Being Prez: The Life and Music of Lester Young) that Mary’s decision was because of the state Billie was in.
Billie died four months later, on July 17, 1959. But the last mutual chorus, across time, between Prez and Lady Day has been preserved in The Sound of Jazz. I have another lasting memory from immediately after the program ended on December 8, 1957. I had come down into the studio from the control room, and Billie was coming swiftly toward me. She didn’t say anything about the $500 dress she wasn’t allowed to wear on the show: Still glowing from the music, Billie kissed me. That award excels any others I’ve received.
Years later, after a showing of The Sound of Jazz at the Museum of Television and Radio in New York, a young man asked me, “How were you able to get so many great players in one place at the same time?”
“They could all use the gig,” I said. And it was a gig they all remembered.
Nat Hentoff is the author, most recently, of Insisting on Life.
