“RIGHT ON IT”: The EarRegulars SHOW US HOW (Berlin, March 26, 2014)

The EarRegulars — that flexible, wise, hilarious, and swinging group led by Jon-Erik Kellso and most often featuring Matt Munisteri — has been one of the pleasures of living in or visiting New York since 2007. (Almost every Sunday night of the year, they hold court at The Ear Inn, 326 Spring Street, New York., from 8-11 PM, more or less.)

This year, thanks to the Bohem Ragtime and Jazz Festival, they had the opportunity to share the good sounds in Hungary and in Germany to properly appreciative audiences.

The EarRegulars recorded their first CD — with Jon-Erik, Matt, Scott Robinson, and Greg Cohen — in beautiful sound.  Want a copy?  (It’s $15.)  Click TheEarRegulars and tell them you saw it on JAZZ LIVES.  If you don’t “do Facebook,” send me an email at swingyoucats@gmail.com., and I will pass it along.

But there’s more: a new video recorded in a Berlin jazz club on March 26, 2014:

And if you didn’t see the beautiful video of SINGIN’ THE BLUES from the Bohem festivities, here it is.

Sal sends her love.

May your happiness increase!

JAZZ STUDIES PROGRAM, NOVEMBER 1948

Sixty-five years ago, if you found yourself deeply entranced by hot music, you studied it in the ways available to you.  You collected records and talked about them with other devotees: Lee Konitz and Omer Simeon, bootleg reissues on labels like Temple and Baltimore. If you tended towards the dogmatic, you quarreled over Bunk Johnson versus Dizzy Gillespie. If someone had records you’d never heard, you had listening sessions where each of you could share the good sounds. You sought out live performances and talked to the professional musicians. You read Marshall Stearns and Barry Ulanov, Rudi Blesh and Art Hodes, DOWN BEAT, METRONOME, THE JAZZ RECORD, and more.

But perhaps most importantly, you didn’t find your jazz in classrooms, but in frat houses, dances, basement rec rooms, and the houses of friends and friends’ parents.

If you were any good (and even if you weren’t) you formed a band. One of the best was a Harvard group — The Crimson Stompers — of such fame that Ed Hall, Bobby Hackett, Bob Wilber, a young Barbara Lea (then a Wellesley girl) Frank Chace, and Vic Dickenson sat in.

From drummer Walt Gifford’s scrapbook, thanks to Duncan Schiedt, here’s a portrait of what embodying the jazz impulse at college was sixty-five years ago:

Bill “Hoagy” Dunham is still with us and still playing Monday nights at Arthur’s Tavern in Greenwich Village, New York City.  Any memories of this, Bill?

The photograph is before my time, but I salute the young men enjoying themselves.  What is college for if you can’t explore new subjects?

May your happiness increase!