When I wrote that lead for my high school music column in 1944, I had no idea how prophetic it would prove to be in the year 2000!

Those four lines were viewed from the perspective of a young man growing up in Westchester County, New York. This was a time when the records, from which we aspiring young "jazzers" learned our craft, were ten inch 78s, with about three minutes of music per side. I had no intentions of slighting the "cookin' " Kansas City scene that spawned Count Basie, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Jay McShann, Charlie Parker, and a host of others whose creative force infused our great music with innovation and excitement.

The New York City music scene of my youth was a cornucopia of jazz. On a single block of West 52nd Street, on any given night you could hear Billie Holiday, Jack Teagarden, Coleman Hawkins, Art Tatum, Sidney Bechet, George Brunis, Joe Marsala, Shelly Manne and their stellar sidemen. Harlem had the Boppers: Bird, Dizzy, Bud Powell, and Howard McGhee among others. Greenwich Village was home to the Dixielanders like Pee Wee Russell and Eddie Condon. There was also a Second Avenue beer hall replete with sawhorse tables and pitchers of "suds", where the stompin' Bunk Johnson's New Orleans Band blew away even the sophisticates with its sinewy music. This was a band comprised of musicians, many who had been former dockworkers around the seaport of New Orleans. The soaring clarinet of George Lewis was featured and influenced a whole generation of clarinetists and whose echo can be heard by the casual listener in the pop-with-strings recordings of Acker Bilk today.

Those were some days! That was some place — then.     

 - Bob Sparkman  June 5, 2000   

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