Joe Venuti (seated) with Dill Jones, (Standing) Zoot Sims, Spencer Clark, Bucky Pizzarelli and Oliver Jackson,
Downtown Sound, New York City, May 20, 1974
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The only thing that worked on the Joe Venuti Blue Six recording session was this photograph, and even it wasn’t perfect, but what wound up on film was a hundred times better than what wound up on tape. I only worked with Joe Venuti a few years, from September 1973 until our last recording session in April 1977, but in those few years we managed to cram in half a dozen records. These records are among the best in the Chiaroscuro catalog, but the best of all the sessions was never released. This is the story of a failure. In the 1920s and early 1930s, Joe released a number of recordings under the names of the Blue Four, the Blue Five and the Blue Six. In May 1974 we pulled a number of terrific musicians together to recreate the Blue Four. We actually had two different bands with a mixture of musicians, sometimes as many as five. It all worked out very well. Zoot Sims, as usual, was the star, even though he was only on four tracks. The recording went so well I asked Joe and Zoot if they might be up for another session later in the week, with a slightly larger band, a sextet. I wanted more of Joe and Zoot together and to include Spencer Clark, then the last living exponent of 1920s bass saxophone, who was scheduled to be in town for the next few days. Joe, Zoot and Spencer were willing to give it a try and I added Bucky Pizzarelli, Dill Jones and Oliver Jackson. It was a terrific band. I also added a guest photographer, the legendary Andre Kertesz. He was a good friend and had expressed an interest in photographing a recording session. I thought this might be a good one and it turned out I was right and he took some wonderful photographs. He sent me a contact sheet of what he’d taken and when I look at it today, I realize the group photo I took was before anyone played a note. Andre took a picture of the band from a different angle and because of the contact sheet I can tell it’s early on in the afternoon. After the group shot the band set up in the studio and half a dozen other photographers were at work, documenting what was going on. One of them asked me, “Who’s that old man in the corner with a camera?” I said it was Andre Kertesz. The word spread pretty quick and all the amateurs left the room. The music was phenomenal. Eight selections in three hours or so. It sounded so good going into the microphone, but by accident, the engineer was listening to the live sound and not listening from the playback head. I’m not aware of any session at my studio when this happened, when each take wasn’t checked. It just sounded so good, nobody could have imagined there was a technical problem. When it was all over and everyone dispersed we sat down for a playback and discovered everything was out of phase, instruments were interacting with one another in peculiar ways and the tapes were unusable. Maybe some of it could be restored with 2010 technology, but my guess is no one would care. They barely cared in 1974. So all there is are a handful of black and white session shots, the color group shot, and thirty-six terrific photographs taken by the man who is arguably the finest 35mm photographer of the Twentieth Century at the only jazz recording session he ever attended. And no music to go along with any of them. |
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