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I knew Les Paul for over thirty years but never worked with him. I visited with him in Mahwah many times, helped him get back into the swing of things at Fat Tuesday’s in the 1970s, organized a Beacons In Jazz Award for him in 2003 and even managed to convince him he should send his old recordings of Stan Hasselgard from his studio days in California to a Swedish archive, but I never gave him a dollar or vice versa. Not that I didn’t try.

I really wanted Les to be part of a Floating Jazz Festival. I even suggested we’d dedicate an entire festival to him, but he wouldn’t budge because Les didn’t need to work for a living. He’d already done all the work he needs to pay his bills until he’s 193, but he does need to play, and play regularly. He needed the Monday night gig at Fat Tuesday in the late 1970s, to keep his hands working and to try out new material and equipment. He had his Monday night gig for thirty years and didn’t want to miss one night. When Fat Tuesday’s shut down, Les transferred to the Iridium, then headquartered in the basement of the Empire Hotel. When that club shut down and moved to its present location on Seventh Avenue, Les transferred with it and kept playing until he couldn’t play any longer. When he died in 2010 his Monday nights were the longest running, regularly scheduled performance in New York, half of the people in the audience were not even born when he started it, celebrities were always on hand and he never disappointed.

I first met Les in 1975. Bill Gallagher set up the meeting. Bill and Les were pals from their days at Columbia, where Bill was doing everything possible to invigorate Les’ during a time when he was having some hard times.  Since I was working with Bill, Les assumed I was OK and I stayed OK for the duration.

First visits with celebrated people are often a lot of fun. The first time I drove up Les’ driveway in Mahwah I was surprised. I’d been told to come around to the back of the house and did as I was told. That day there was an old rusting Lincoln and a small mountain of magnetic tape of various sizes in residence. The pile of used tape was maybe five feet high, perhaps twelve feet across, about the same size as the car. There was probably enough music on that tape to have launched a couple of independent record companies. Once inside, I was given the grand tour of a remarkable house. The only room that didn’t contain a recording system was a bathroom I visited, and I wasn’t to sure about that because Les had told me he’d once wired an outhouse out back so he could frighten anyone who used it.

I have a lasting memory of a stack of beer cases in the living room. The stack was floor to ceiling. This may not seem like much, but my guess is the ceiling in the living room is about twenty-five feet high. I have no idea how the last few cases made it to the top, but Les isn’t called the Wizard of Waukesha for nothing. I wish I’d taken a picture of that but didn’t.

In all the years I knew Les, we did little more than tell stories and listen to music. I’d taken a few snapshots, but never tried to take serious photographs. I think the most interesting story he ever told me was about playing duets with Charlie Christian in Harlem around 1940. I assumed it was a tall tale but then one day I was talking with Erskine Hawkins who said, “Did I ever tell you about the time Les Paul came up to the Golden Gate and played with Charlie Christian?” So much for my skepticism and I never doubted anything he ever told me again.

In 2000 my young cousin, Jennifer Stroup, telephoned and asked if I knew Les Paul; that she was in charge of organizing a feature story about him for a fledgling publication, Madison Magazine. I said I did, made arrangements for her to meet him and for the first time took some serious cameras along to Mahwah.

I hadn’t been there for a couple of years and there was a new old Lincoln rusting in the driveway, along with a smaller pile of discarded electronic gear. No guitars were in the pile. Once inside I noticed some changes. The office was still as messy as ever, but now there was a large room where all the inventions and assorted tape recorders and guitars were on display. Les, Jr. was there and I could only assume this kind of organization was his doing, but it was a terrific display. While Jennifer spoke with Les, I took photographs of everything in sight.

When I finished with that, I asked Les if he hold still for some photographs with my large format view camera. He held still for more than one and was fascinated with my old camera. It wasn’t as old as he was, eighty-five at the time, but it was pretty old and still working, and just like Les, it delivered the goods.

It is now a few years later. Les worked right up to then end, he died about a year ago at the age of 94, the shows always still sold out and there was always another generation of fans standing in line. Monday nights at Iridium are still billed as the Les Paul Trio with new guitarists each week to perform with the group that accompanied him. He’d probably be happy about that.

Les Paul At Home 2, Mahwah, New Jersey July 15, 2000

In June 2002, impresario/pianist George Wein threw a belated 80th birthday party for John Bunch at New York’s Danny Kaye Playhouse. I don’t remember the number, but there were probably about twenty other great pianists on stage, wishing well to one of jazz’ unsung heroes. I would be hard pressed to think of any pianist who’s had such a fine career, making exceptional music for half a century, with so little recognition.

I don’t remember the first time I heard John, he may have been at Downtown Sound on a session produced by someone else, but I wasn’t generally familiar with his work. For almost all the years I’d been in New York City, he’d either been Tony Bennett’s music director or with Benny Goodman and I’d never seen him with either artist. Those are, however, rather exceptional credentials. Then as now, there was nobody better at his craft than Tony Bennett and Benny Goodman was in a class by himself, even in the early 1970s.

The first time I worked with John was in May 1975. The third Joe Venuti and Zoot Sims project was about to be recorded, and John was set to hold down the piano chair, in a band that also included Milt Hinton and Bob Rosengarden. It may well have been that John was part of the group working with Joe at his Michael’s Pub engagement, but no matter the reason for his being part of the band, I was sufficiently impressed with his playing to suggest a solo piano project on the spot.

It turned out no one had ever asked John to make a solo recording. It certainly wasn’t lack of qualification, but probably no producer looked on John as a soloist, only as a guy who could conduct a major symphony orchestra for Tony Bennett, accompany him in a small group, or hold down the Goodman piano chair, which he’d done off and on since the late 1950s.

John wasn’t then, nor is he today, the kind of guy who’ll come up to you and say, “Please record me.” He won’t come up and say he has a great idea for a recording. When I asked him to consider a solo turn, he didn’t exactly jump at the chance, but said I had to think up a project that would make sense. So I thought about it, spoke with friends who knew John’s work and paid most attention to George Avakian, who suggested it might make sense to undertake a Kurt Weill project, something that would require a pianist with a fertile mind, someone who would work on some of the less familiar music in the Weill songbook, and come up with something special. George, of course, is a big Weill booster, and has been for half a century. But I liked the music as well and the thought of a project that would be a bit out of the ordinary, was appealing.

The first challenge was to get the music. I found a book of standards, but we wanted to go beyond that. George was close to Lotte Lenya and well-connected to a foundation that that propagated Weill’s work, so we were able to find sheet music of some of the more obscure songs from 1930s shows that opened and closed immediately, such as Johnny Johnson and Marie Galante.

The first recording session was pretty rough. John wanted to record on his own Steinway, at his West Side apartment. I put together the remote gear and headed north on a wet May day. I don’t remember how I managed to keep the Revox dry, but I did and set it up, along with two microphones in John’s living room. John played all afternoon for an audience of two, and we got some good takes, but not nearly enough for an album. We had to work around the rain. Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem, but when the rain began coming down in chunks everything was put on hold.

The truth was, we didn’t expect to complete anything that day, except a handful of songs. John worked on all the most unfamiliar songs very carefully. That first session was just to capture the ones he felt were under his fingers. He wanted more time to work on the others, which is exactly what he did. We continued the sessions, once again at his apartment and then a couple of months later, at the newly renovated Downtown Sound, using my Steinway B, instead of John’s. There was a slight difference in sound, but we managed to equalize the various sessions so I still can’t tell which one was recorded where. Maybe John remembers.

The only thing I can tell is the difference between the 1975 recordings and the five that were recorded by Rudy Van Gelder in 1991. I wanted to reissue the record as a CD, and asked John to pick out five more Weill tunes. He selected five good ones, played them with all the finesse and clarity I expected, and the LP was expanded by nearly twenty minutes for the CD release. And the sound was flawless because there is nobody like Rudy, a couple of others have come close, but no one has hand the consistency and longevity.

The original liner note by Lotte Lenya were simple and to the point. She said:

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Since the Weill project was George Avakian’s suggestion in the first place, I urged him to write new notes for the CD, which are as well thought out as John’s performances. But about John, he said:

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The two key words are tasteful and thoughtful. I’ve continued to work with John for over three decades. He was part of The Floating Jazz Festival at least a dozen times, appeared on numerous Chiaroscuro recordings, one which was recorded at the Festival, a rollicking sextet recording featuring Kenny Davern, Joe Temperley, Joe Cohn, Michael Moore and Joe Ascione. He was the star of the recording and I can say that because I believe it, but I’m also pretty sure none of those five guys, all of whom also played extremely well, will read my ramblings about pianists. But John was exceptional and was 79 when he made the recording, doing his best to control a tough Steinway D, rocking on the Queen Elizabeth 2, in the middle of the Atlantic. His ideas were fresh and flawlessly executed; not a cliché to be heard anywhere, and that’s hard to do when you’er mainly playing standards with a loosely organized band in a concert hall setting, trying to get it right on the first take.

I offered him a solo project in 2001 or maybe it was 2002, involving Noel Coward. John worked at it for a while, but it just didn’t work. The songs were fine, but most of Coward’s songs were best suited to the stage and not to interpretations by a jazz pianist. So we thought a little more and came up with a concept that evolved into An English Songbook, which was recorded in 2003.

The CD was a companion to John Eaton’s Made In America, an album that featured jazz standards by non-American composers. In An English Songbook, John picked songs that have been played extensively in the United States, but which were written by English composers. It only made sense that John feature English composers, he made his first visit to that country in 1944, courtesy of the USAAF.  He didn’t remain for long; he was shot down over Leipzig and sat out the rest of the war in a prisoner of war camp in Germany. But now he’s back in that country at least four months each year.

We enjoyed making the record so much that within a couple of months we were back at the studio to record Tony’s Tunes. This CD also had a theme, songs associated with Tony Bennett. John was Tony’s music director and conductors back in the 1960s, and thought it would be a cinch to come up with some good tunes associated with Tony. We added Bucky Pizzarelli and Jay Leonhart to make a trio and recorded fourteen songs in what seemed like fourteen minutes. It was a flawless performance by John and his pals. Tony wandered into the studio during a late night playback and gave the project his blessing, along with permission to reproduce a charming drawing he’d made of John a few years earlier.

It’s all worked out so far. John is now 86 and still as graceful and imaginative as ever. I get emails every so often, usually warning me of an internet virus or an upcoming performance.  His most recent turned up in January 2007; announcing he was playing Billy Stayhorn compositions of Strayhorn’s piano. I stole a couple of hour and sat in the back row. He sounded wonderful and I wasn’t surprised.

Note: I wrote the above in 2008 and see no reason to change anything other than to say that John played well right up to the end. He preformed with Bucky and Jay in early March and died on the 30th of that month. I realize it is written from the standpoint that John is still alive, but why change that. Put on one of his CDs and he’ll come alive in an instant.

John Bunch, New York City, February 12, 2003

Talent is never enough in the big time record business. Just like the hit tunes you have to have a hook, something that will sell itself, to compensate for the sloth- like sales and marketing people who are normally bereft of ideas. If something turns up that is bursting with energy and excitement but comes in outside the normal channels of high powered lawyers or agents, most record guys run for the hills in horror, particularly the sales and marketing guys. Such was the case when an unsolicited cassette turned up in the Hammond Music Enterprises office.

It was a thirty-minute recording taken from a radio broadcast in April 1980. The tape had been sent to Chuck Gregory by a musical horseman, Chesley Millikin. Chuck didn’t want to bother it and tossed it in my direction suggesting I have a listen. He said he’d never heard of the artist and I knew even less. At least he’d heard of the manager who’d sent the tape.

A day or so later I was driving across 9th Street on my way out of town and I popped the cassette into my tape deck. An announcer said something “Live from Steamboat 1874 it’s Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble.” It took about fifteen seconds to recognize that this was real deal, maybe even better than that.

The next morning I returned to the office and told anyone who’d listen that we should bet the ranch on a young kid from Texas named Vaughan. No one listened very hard; John Hammond who I thought would back me wasn’t very enthusiastic. I was shocked. This was the most remarkable young (he was 26) guitarist I’d ever heard and I was met with yawns. There are a bunch of versions of what happened next, mostly true but some a bit distorted.

I kept nagging anyone at Hammond Music Enterprises who’d listen that the ranch was still available, but the company was struggling and without the resources to go after an unknown guitar player. Then Stevie played the Montreux Jazz Festival in the summer of 1982. The crowd didn’t like him much but David Bowie and Jackson Browne did. Stevie recorded with Bowie and almost toured with him and later in the year got some studio time through the good efforts of Jackson Browne. These tapes became the basis for what was released in 1983 as Texas Flood, but Stevie still didn’t have a record deal and HME was as broke as ever.

In late 1982 I had a chat with Chesley Millikin, who told me they had some new material they’d like to play for Hammond. I said I’d set it up but the presentation had to play on John’s ego, that if they were sufficiently humble, asked John to take charge, ask his advice, give him the respect he should have, they might have a chance.

The meeting was held in John’s little office in Media Sound and it worked. I took photographs of three smiling guys who look ready to move on to the next stage, which they did. HME didn’t get the record; John took it to Epic and a minute later took himself along as well. HME wasn’t doing well, John was itchy and Stevie was just the ticket to get back into a nice office at CBS in a consulting capacity, which he continued for the next few years. I don’t know when the deal went down, but I have photographs of John with Stevie and the band, plus Jimmy Vaughan, at the Power Station and they’re dated January 12, 1983. Strangely enough, Chesley Millikin wasn’t at this session.

Some months later the record was released and it did very well. Someone at CBS told me they were spending $1.00 a record in terms of promotion, at least for the first 250,000. It ultimately went gold and was the beginning of a career that burned very brightly until the helicopter crash in August 1990.

Others referred to Stevie as John’s last great discovery. Of course, this wasn’t the case. I never heard John say he’d “discovered” but Stevie was the last artist he backed who had great commercial success after a long run that had begun in the mid-1930s. The people he’d championed at HME, while talented, were not big-ticket artists and had modest careers. It was nice that he was able to go out with a winner.

Long after John had died and two years after Stevie’s death, the master tapes from which the demo I’d heard in 1981 were remastered and a CD entitled In The Beginning was released because Epic had run out of unissued material and Stevie was still a very viable artist. In my mind, this early recording is still the best, raw, exciting and without any rock pretense. Ten years after that, in the early 2000s, Rolling Stone Magazine voted Stevie the seventh greatest guitarist of all time. He sure sounded that way in 1981 when I first heard the demo tape. I never bought the In The Beginning CD; I didn’t have to, I still had the demo tape which I was pretty sure had a better sound, a more gritty feel, that did the cleaned up and remastered CD.

Stevie Ray Vaughan and John Hammond, New York City, 1982

Sunday night, May 16, 2010. I was at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church to attend a memorial service for John Bunch, who’d died a few weeks earlier. Almost every jazz pianist in town of a certain age had turned out, as had a number of instrumentalists and vocalists. One of the people I spoke with was Joe Wilder; he had his camera ready, as well as his trumpet. He told me Hank Jones was very sick and had been moved to a hospice in the Bronx. I asked if he had a telephone number where I might call him. Joe said he’d telephone me the next day and give me the number.

The telephone rang all day but none of the calls were from Joe. Hank had died on Sunday, I don’t know what time, maybe about the time Joe and I were talking about him; all I know it was Sunday evening. His death was all over the Internet, tomorrow there will probably be print obituaries all over the country and all the pianists who filled St. Peter’s yesterday are justifiably sad because they no longer have the gold standard that was Hank Jones to aspire to.

I don’t remember when I first heard Hank on record or even saw him in person, but I do remember when I was supposed to first record him and that was on August 8, 1976 and I had a dozen musicians waiting for him to arrive and fill the piano chair for my second Buck Clayton Jam Session. About an hour after the date was to begin he called and said he’d been in a car crash on the George Washington Bridge. He was very apologetic and said he’d make it up somehow. Fortunately for me, Tommy Flanagan was in town and became my super sub.

This was about the time of the resurgence of Hank Jones. He’d never been away, was always busy in studios and as a sideman, but for some reason the decade leading up to the mid-1970s was a slow time for Hank making recordings as a leader. The Japanese changed that about 1975 and by 1977, when he showed up at Downtown Sound, as a leader and a sideman, he was on a roll that never stopped rolling until yesterday.

He recorded albums for others at Downtown Sound, but he also did one for me that was entitled simply The Trio, with Milt Hinton and Bobby Rosengarden. It was a trio and an awfully good one, but it was Hank’s album. A couple of critics said it was the best album of its sort from the 1970s. Maybe. It was pretty good from start to finish but my favorite tune was the last one that Hank entitled Hank You Thank. As the years bounced by I saw Hank frequently, but not in a studio and he was always too busy to take off a week and be part of a Floating Jazz Festival. It almost worked one year, but something messed up at the end and he didn’t make it. Maybe he had another appointment with a bridge.

Fast-forward a couple of decades to September 2006, the Monterey Jazz Festival and a pre-festival dinner for a select few at Clint Eastwood’s Mission Ranch in Carmel. I find myself seated next to Hank. We greet one another and I pass him the breadbasket and he smiles and says, “Hank you thank,” and we both laugh. He asks why I’m so far away from home and I tell him it because of a film project involving the 50th anniversary of the festival that involves Clint Eastwood and Bruce Ricker. It was at this dinner that Bruce came up with the idea of combining Hank with Oscar Peterson and Dave Brubeck on the final night. A great concept, particularly to be filmed, but one that ultimately failed because Oscar was in declining health, Dave was too tired and only Hank was in a position to play at 100%, which was pretty much the way he always played.

That last night he almost played at no percent. He’d come down with a terrible attack of hives or shingles or something unpleasant that sent him to the hospital for a minute or two, but he was back at the fairgrounds by mid afternoon and ready to film an interview with Clint, play some piano and accompany Roberta Gambarini. Everyone was in a very good mood and someone suggested that Clint should interview Roberta as well, which he did at an outdoor venue with a perfect black backdrop. I took a lot of photographs but my real interest was in getting a good portrait of Hank. I loaded my Rolleiflex with black and white film and as soon as Clint and Roberta were finished I moved Hank into position and got one serious picture I like very much.

There was still some color film in my 35mm camera and Hank began clowning with his friend, Larry Clothier. At one point he grabbed Larry’s hat and put it on, I kept the Nikon going and a couple of those came out as well. Later that night he did he trio performance in Dizzy’s Den, then we put him on a go cart and raced him to the Jimmy Lyon’s Stage, where he tried his best to save the day with Clint taking Dave’s place on one piano and Oscar struggling with one hand on the other. Pretty good for a guy who was 89, or about to be so, who had been in the hospital earlier in the day, who had just played a strenuous 90-minute show and had been interviewed and photographed all afternoon. Thank you Hank.

Hank Jones, 2006

Hank Jones, 2006