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It seems to be a mystery who first came up with the name Last Of the Whorehouse Piano Players but it was a good one that caught the attention of the jazz party crowd in the 1980s and early 1990s and generated a great deal of work for the group. It was much easier to attract an audience with that naughty name than a group called the Sutton McShann Quartet. It also did the same for record sales. The quartet was made up of Jay McShann, Ralph Sutton, Milt Hinton and Gus Johnson. The group recorded fifteen titles for Charlie Baron’s ChazJazz label in December 1979 and two LPs made their way into an already struggling marketplace. The records sold poorly because distribution of ChazJazz was non-existent. I have copies of the original LPs only because they were included in the inventory when Chiaroscuro bought all the assets of the company. Even then, only the jackets were useful. The records were warped so badly they wouldn’t track. Ten years later we took the identical band into Rudy Van Gelder’s studio and recorded them under optimum conditions. Even though they hadn’t rehearsed or played an engagement together in some while, Hootie and Ralph proved once again they were perhaps the finest traditional duo in jazz. It was exciting, joyously rollicking music, with the two pianists creating a sound as distinctive as Duke Ellington’s saxophone section at it’s best. We had a dozen great performances, the band had a catchy name, and an award-winning poet, Hayden Carruth, had written the liner notes. All we needed was an appropriate booklet cover and we found just what we needed in Andy Sordoni’s bathroom. Many years earlier he’d bought a painting by perhaps the finest illustrator specializing in pin up art, Alberto Vargas. The painting was dated 1920 and long out of copyright and the luscious naked lady was what every man wants to find in a whorehouse but never does. Everything came together perfectly, the record was released and it became our best selling CD up to that time. Then Playboy magazine picked it up and ran a short blurb on and the sales doubled. It is still the best selling Chiaroscuro CD. A year or so later we reissued the 1979 sessions but with a new cover by George Booth. It is our second best selling CD. We brought the group to the Floating Jazz Festival two years in a row, but the recordings were only adequate and we never released them. Then Gus failed in about 1990, and a few years later Milt began to slow down. A new recording was out of the question, but the two we had were terrific. The photograph of the four guys on the back of the truck was taken outside Rudy’s studio. It was a Steinway truck that had just come to pick up the second piano we used for then session. Or perhaps it was just after the delivery of the piano. I don’t remember, but it’s a cheerful picture of one of the most infectious groups I ever worked with. A side bar. In 2004 I met Hugh Hefner for the first time. It was at the Playboy Mansion and I was there to interview him. It worked out well. I worked out even better when I gave him a CD crammed with Bix Beiderbecke soles and a whorehouse record. When I told him the Playboy review doubled our sales he was even happier. |
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Last of the Whorehouse Piano Players, Gus Johnson, Ralph Sutton, Milt Hinton and Jay McShann, Van Gelder Recording studio, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, March 28, 1989