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On January 12, 1987 I met with Eddie Durham at the home of a certain Mrs. Parks, the former lady friend of Snub Mosely, a terrific trombonist, then recently deceased. Eddie lived in Brooklyn, but wanted to meet in Harlem, which was only appropriate since the purpose of the meeting was to talk about his days in that part of New York City for my book, The Ghosts Of Harlem.

I’d known Eddie for nearly twenty years and was convinced he’d never received the recognition he deserved. I’d first met him in February 1969; he was part of a Kansas City band I’d helped organize for a concert. He was the guitarist that night and Snub was the trombonist, but they did manage to do one trombone duet together that evening. I was charged with driving Eddie to the job and arranged for him to meet me at my apartment. He arrived about the same time as my father, who was a bit surprised since he’d never encountered a black musician at my home, but he got over it pretty quick and they were soon busy enjoying a bourbon bottle together. Eddie was about four times faster than my father, which may have something to do with his lack of recognition, but this is only a guess.

A few years later, after I built my first recording studio, Eddie was on hand any number of times for recording sessions, but most notably when he was featured in John Jeremy’s film, Born To Swing. He was given an opportunity to play both guitar and trombone in the film, and for the uninitiated, Eddie was probably the first jazz guitarist to use an amplifier on a regular basis. He pre-dated Charlie Christian, not by much, but he was more or less first. This tends to be forgotten because when Eddie joined Count Basie, his leader was quite content to have Freddie Green hold down the guitar chair, and Eddie was in charge of his trombone and writing originals and arrangements of standards.

Jump forward to 1987. I had already taken the photographs for the book and now we were talking about Harlem in the 1930’s. We were well into what was becoming an increasingly interesting interview when the doorbell rang. It was an old friend name Kelly (I pretty sure it was the drummer, Kelly Martin), who invited himself in to catch up on this and that. It shut down the interview while the two old friends caught up on the news of the day. Eddie told Kelly that he was going out with the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band; they’d been offered a Caribbean cruise. I wasn’t happy about this; I’d warned the leader of the Harlem band about the cruise and urged him to be careful. I’d had experience with such things and if the performance schedule wasn’t carefully structured and agreed to in advance, some cruise lines took advantage of musicians, treated them badly and worked them to death. Eddie was sure it would be OK.

We talked for a few more minutes and then Eddie and Kelly decided they needed to be somewhere else. I gathered up my camera cases, tripod and recorder and the three of us walked east on 158^th Street. Eddie knew I’d driven up from Greenwich Village. He asked, “Aren’t you worried about leaving your car on the street.” I shook my head and as we reached my perfectly fine New York City likely to be left alone streetcar, Eddie looked at me and said, “I guess you don’t have to worry.”

I loaded my gear into the car and as Eddie and Kelly headed off to wherever, I headed south. A few weeks later, Eddie shipped out on the shaky cruise ship with the Harlem Blues and Jazz Band. As I’d warned, the people on the ship worked the band to death and there was no one on board to stop the abuse. I never got a chance to finish the interview. I don’t know if Eddie collapsed on board, but he died in early March, a couple of weeks after he returned. A stupid cruise director had literally worked him to death. He was not young, he’d had 78 hard years, but he probably had a couple of good notes left.

Eddie Durham, Harlem, New York City, January 12, 1987

Macho Camacho and Vinny Pazienza beat each other up on a regular basis beginning about 1990. They fought a bunch of times and Vinny was usually on the receiving end. People have loved to look at other people beating one another for as long as there have been people to beat and since these guys put on a good show, they usually filled the arena. Generally, the people who like hang out at fights don’t want to get too close, they don’t want to get their own teeth knocked out or their own noses bloodied or bone broken. They want to just look from safe distance and not get dirty or worse still beaten.

There was a gym around the corner in the early 1990s called Natural Physique. It was a real gym, where boxers trained, people really worked out and weren’t just looking to pick up the girl on the next bench and body builders built themselves into one thing or another, often with the aid of assorted steroid supplied by various friends and associates. Vinny was one of the people who worked out at the gym. That’s the kind of place it was.

Shelley worked out at Natural Physique and knew the owners. She also liked boxing and when the owners, Nicole Bass, then the world’s largest female body builder her husband, Bob Fuchs, suggested that we head down to Atlantic City to watch a championship bout that was to pit their Vinny against his long time rival, the undefeated reigning WBO Middleweight Champion, Hector “Macho” Camacho, she jumped at the chance.

It was a Saturday night, January 14, 1995 and it was quite a circus. Prior to the fight 240 pound Nicole posed with 140 pound Camacho and an hour or so later he pounded their Vinny for twelve bruising rounds and won a unanimous decision. It was a tough fight and a bunch of people in the crowd thought Pazienzo had been robbed, but the guys who control things like that didn’t pay any attention to the crowd.

The next morning we were scheduled to drive back to New York and I spotted an notice in the paper about an sports memorabilia show being held at a local hotel that featured a number of famous boxers from the past. I recognized the names of many boxers who were prominent before Shelley was even born and asked is he’d like to go see some other boxers, great fighters, real champions, men who might have a fight or two a month, when there was only one guy who was world champion in his weight division, not like the half a dozen bouncing around in those and these days. She was game so we headed off to another hotel on the beach.

Shelley M. Shier and Floyd Patterson Atlantic City,  New Jersey, 14,  January 1995

Shelley M. Shier and Carmen Basilio, Atlantic City,  New Jersey, 14,  January 1995

We reached the autograph show an hour or so after it opened and surveyed a sorry sight. The promoter had built a large boxing ring in the middle of a ballroom and the famous boxers of the past were positioned around the ring. Fans could buy a ticket and get an autograph. Except only a handful of fans had showed and the event was being shut down as we entered. The ring was empty and there were just a few people milling about.

I was eager to see Carmen Basilio. He was the local guy who made good when I was a kid in Syracuse in the 1950s. He’d won the welterweight championship in 1953 and moved up a class in 1957, taking the middleweight away from Sugar Ray Robinson. He was as famous as Jimmy Brown, the big football star at the university or any of the Syracuse National basketball players.

I went over to speak with him and get an autograph for Shelley, but he wasn’t interested. He was unhappy that he’d missed a payday and his ego was probably on the floor as well because no one had turned up. I said something like, “Well, it still nice to see you after all these years.” He looked at me and said, “What do you mean?” I told him about the Syracuse connection, how all the kids looked at his fights on TV and in the newsreels. Then he brightened up. “Where’d you go to school?” he asked. “Nottingham,” I told him, “and then I went to Syracuse.” “Did you ever know anybody at LeMoyne (a local Jesuit college)” he asked and I replied, “Sure, I dated a girl from LeMoyne when I was at Syracuse.”

That was all it took. His eyes brightened. He yelled at Floyd Patterson and Willie Pep and asked them to come over. Poise for pictures, no problem. Sign a boxing glove, no problem. Talk about whatever came up, no problem. This lasted for fifteen minutes or so and then Patterson and Pep got called away, but they’d done their duty and Shelley was thrilled.

I’ll never forget one thing Basilio told me. He said he been an assistant athletic director at LeMoyne College for a lot of years after he retired from boxing. He added that if he didn’t have the pension from LeMoyne he wouldn’t have anything except boxing shows like the one nobody just attended.

Macho Camacho fought as recently as 2008 and won something called the World Boxing Empire championship, but he may have quit by now since he’s nearing fifty. Vinny Pazienza became Vinny Paz and had a distinguished career, winning assorted WBC championships and ended his fighting days before someone made mush of his head.

Willie Pep, who had a spectacular career, was featherweight champ forever in the 1940s and at one point had a record of 117-1, lived to the ripe old age of 84, and hopefully was happy doing it. Floyd Patterson, one of the most decent (and smallest) heavyweight champions retired and became Chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission. But he’d been whacked in the head one time too often and was an Alzheimer’s victim at 71. Carmen Basilio is 84, using up his pension and enduring one nasty upstate winter after another.

The first jazz club I ever visited with any regularity was Blues Alley in Georgetown, a little corner of Washington, D.C. that was a unique destination in 1965 and maybe still is today. That was the year the club was founded by Tommy Gwaltney, the clarinet-playing member of the ham producing family. The club has a Wisconsin Avenue address, but the old carriage house really is tucked in a little alley that runs off Wisconsin about twenty yards south of K Street.

When it first opened, Tommy and various groups he led provided most of the music. Then they began to bring in soloists who would appear with the house band. Traditional artists like Jimmy Rushing, Red Allen, Jimmy McPartland, Wild Bill Davison, Vic Dickenson and Clancy Hayes were regulars. Tommy Chase, Cliff Jackson, John Phillips and others I’ve forgotten handled intermission piano. I didn’t get to go as often as I’d have liked because in those days my salary was modest and Blues Alley wasn’t. My friend, Johnson McRee was a part owner and if I was at his table there was no charge at all. If I went with Squirrel Ashcraft, there was a charge, but I never saw it.

It was even better when I was working a tape recorder. Then I could stay all night and some pretty good things were recorded there. A few were awful, notably a solo record with Tommy Chase, because the piano hadn’t been tuned in forty years, or so it seemed. It was better with Cliff Jackson and the sound on nights with Jimmy McPartland, Buck Clayton and Wild Bill Davison was terrific. These recordings were Johnson McRee projects, none of which were ever issued, but it was a good learning experience. In the 1970s I acquired the Buck Clayton tapes from Johnson, but never issued them. In 1969, however, I undertook my first project on my own at Blues Alley, a solo recording with Willie The Lion Smith. It worked out pretty well and I did a second a few months later. The best parts of the Willie the Lion dates were issued on two Chiaroscuro LPs.

I often took my fixed focus Kodak camera to the club. It was loaded with Kodachrome and I usually had a few flash bulbs in my pocket. I wish I had it with me on the nights I saw Jimmy Rushing and Red Allen, but I did have it with me in April 1968 when I recorded Clancy Hayes at the club. I don’t remember all the details, only that Squirrel asked me to come to Washington and do a favor for Clancy. He was still sufficiently connected that he could call me to DC and I didn’t have to give up leave or make any excuses.

I don’t remember everyone in the band and there’s no way to look it up since the recording was never released, but in addition to Clancy, the photographs show Tommy Gwaltney (clarinet), Steve Jordan (guitar), John Phillips (piano), Billy Taylor, Jr. (bass) and Bertell Knox (drums). I recall the music was charming, there were a bunch of Clancy vocals and I managed to get one good picture, one of those lucky accidents where the exposure is better than perfect and everything works. Many of my early Kodachromes were lost. This one wasn’t.

The five guys in the photograph, left to right, are Clancy Hayes, John Phillips, Steve Jordan, Squirrel Ashcraft and Tommy Gwaltney. They’re in the bar and it looks like a rehearsal, or at least they are talking about what they’re going to play. I can see photographs of Bud Freeman, Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, and Cliff Jackson on the wall. The guys rehearsing are long gone and my guess is so are the pictures on the wall, it certainly didn’t look like this the last time I was there, but this is what the best jazz room in Washington looked like forty years ago.

In early 1969, John Hammond introduced me to Bobby Henderson, a marvelous pianist, who was almost too ill to play. A couple of decades later, in 1991, Dick Hyman introduced me, via a cassette, to Johnny Costa. He was also very ill, but the illness had not affected his ability in any way. In fact, it may have even made his playing more remarkable. 

In 1991, I’d never heard of Johnny Costa. The cassette Dick sent revealed a phenomenal pianist, someone with Tatum-like technique and a remarkable sense of melody. I looked him up in the Jepsen discography. There were two entries, LPs on Savoy and Coral from the early 1950s. There was a short entry in The Encyclopedia of Jazz. I learned he was now nearly seventy, had studied with Oscar Levant (which he never mentioned to me) and seemed to be based in Pittsburgh. Nothing else. I remained puzzled. How could someone this good, someone who’d been around for seven decades, be without any current recordings, and totally unknown to me? A telephone call to Dick Hyman provided a couple of clues, but didn’t answer the question satisfactorily. 

This is the short version of the story. Johnny came of age in the 1940s. He loved Tatum and others, served in World War II, became ill, returned to Pittsburgh after the war, played with a number of world class artists when they came through town, met Art Tatum (who was very impressed with Johnny), went to New York City in the early 1950s, made a handful of records, played fancy clubs like The Embers, didn’t like being away from home, returned to Pittsburgh, worked at radio station KDKA and rarely left town. He became the regular pianist and music director for Mister Roger’s Neighborhood and, in the process, brought good melodic jazz to millions of children over the years. He was idolized in western Pennsylvania, but his name barely caused a ripple outside of that area, except among selected pianists who knew better.

I telephoned Johnny; we seemed to hit it off and said I wanted to come out for a visit and possibly some recording. I booked a flight to Pittsburgh as soon as it was practical; I wanted to find out what it was all about, and discovered a modest man who could play rings around almost anyone I knew. He didn’t practice, could lay off for months, and come back without missing a beat. He discovered this during World War II. He came down with rheumatic fever and was bedridden for a year. When he was finally told he could get up and move around a bit, he discovered he couldn’t walk. Yet, when they wheeled him over to the piano, he could still play.

This is a typical Johnny Costa story. One day at a recording session, we finished early. We had everything needed for a fully stuffed CD. There was about twenty-five minutes left of the clock. Johnny said, “Well, you paid for the time, we ought to get something down for the next one.” He sat down and played seven songs flawlessly. No time to slate them; he just played out the time.

On another occasion I went into the studio after he’d completed a take. I leaned against the piano, and asked what he’d like to play. The answer was simply, “I don’t know.” Johnny noodled around a little, looked up and said, “Well, I could try this.” He then tore into a version of Elegie, from Massenet’s opera Thais. The same tune Art Tatum recorded in the 1940s. He played about two minutes, in a Tatumesque manner, then stopped and said, “But somebody’s already done that.” I asked him when he’d last played the piece. He looked at me and replied, “Oh, a long time ago, probably when I played it for Art.”

I never visited Johnny at his home, but I’m told he didn’t have a record player or a piano. He just had everything in his head. The lack of piano or record player may or may not be true, but he definitely had a phenomenal amount of music at his fingertips, ready for a perfect performance at a moment’s notice. Recording sessions were a breeze, there were alternate takes, but never because of a flawed performance, it was just Johnny wanted to try something different. The only person I ever worked with who was this close to perfection was Earl Hines, but the difference was Earl never wanted to try anything a second time. In Earl’s case the challenge was to get it just the way he wanted in one try; with Johnny, perhaps he wanted to see just how many different ways he could play something well.

The most amazing thing about Johnny was that his illness didn’t seem to diminish his ability in any way. About the only restriction was that as time passed he couldn’t travel very far from Pittsburgh. The only time I heard him play outside that city was an outdoor concert in eastern Pennsylvania, where he was only a day away from his doctors and a transfusion if needed. Even then he used his long time trio, just in case he needed some support.

All the recording sessions were proceeded by transfusions; they gave him an energy boost and allowed him to play at optimum level for three hours or so, for two or three consecutive days. My guess is he also had transfusions to do the Fred Rogers tapings and his leukemia was possibly similar to Gene Krupa’s. The transfusions prolong life and, for a few days, allow a modest level of activity is possible, but, eventually, they lost their effectiveness. Despite this, Johnny had incredible determination and somehow managed to complete the last two projects we undertook, a George Gershwin CD, and one dealing with songs featuring lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

There was one day during the Gershwin recording that I didn’t think he could continue. He was just wiped out. Then a strange thing happened. The recording engineer pulled Johnny aside and suggested they go into another room for a chat. I didn’t know what was going on, but the two men went off together. It turned out the engineer was a very religious fellow and felt a little prayer and spiritual contemplation might get Johnny back on track. I still don’t know what went on in the back room, but whatever it was, it worked. Johnny completed the date and didn’t miss a note, even though he did make some inserts for a couple of parts of the Rhapsody In Blue segment, the only time he didn’t play something from start to finish.

The Mercer project was recorded in the spring of 1995, and by this time, Johnny was failing. He was moving slowly, looked terrible (there are no photographs from these sessions) and required more transfusions and medication. Yet, somehow, Johnny rose to the occasion and recorded in excess of thirty songs, and each was exceptional. In the process he may have produced the best CD of his career.

When it came time to assemble the CD, and there wasn’t much time between the end of the recording process and the beginning of assembly, it was virtually impossible to make a selection based on “this one is better than that one.” We asked Johnny to pick out his personal favorites. He insisted we include Dream, the only song that featured words and music by Mercer. He may have picked two or three others, but the selection chore fell to Bill Hillman, Elsie Hillman and myself. It was sort of like I’d pick one, then Bill and then Elsie, then back to me and so forth.

Bill Hillman designed a wonderful cover. Commentary on each song was supplied by Ginger Mercer and Bob Bach, thanks to Jean Bach, who allowed us to quote liberally from Our Huckleberry Friend, her husband’s wonderful book about Johnny Mercer. Johnny was pleased with the CD, lasted a month or so, and died in October 1996. He was much mourned in Pittsburgh, but his passing still didn’t cause a ripple in many other places. Sales of the new record were negligible.

I was probably one of the people in New York City who was deeply saddened because I lost not only a friend, but I also sensed a loss of opportunities. I regretted I hadn’t met him earlier, because I felt there wasn’t any type of solo piano project he couldn’t undertake and not only accomplish, but also accomplish in an extraordinary way. I never encountered anyone like him and probably never will again. If you don’t believe me, just listen to any of his late recordings. You’ll be hooked in a second.

Johnny Costa, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 11, 1991