Yasuhiro Fujioka, founder of the John Coltrane House of Osaka, uncovered the long lost audiotape of John Coltrane’s last performance in Philadelphia. The November 11, 1966 concert was aired live on WRTI, Temple University’s then-student run radio station.
To purchase the album, go here.
Linton’s was a 24-hour diner located on the “Golden Strip.” After their gigs, jazz musicians would hang out here, hold jam sessions to hone their craft, and exchange ideas. In an interview with All About Jazz, Jymie Merritt recalled:
AAJ: That sounds like great fun and very productive at the same time. Another general location at around the same time, as I understand it, was on Columbia Avenue [now Cecil B. Moore Boulevard- eds.] in North Philadelphia near Temple University. There was a restaurant called Linton’s.
JM: Oh, yeah. Right on Broad Street off Columbia Avenue.
AAJ: Yes, exactly. And were you involved with the guys who used to gather there?
JM: Yeah. I used to eat there. And when we’d finish eating, we’d leave a tip. And then Philly Joe [Jones] would go around and collect the money for himself as we went out the door. [laughter]
AAJ: So he’d keep the tips!
JM: He was really ingenious.
From Wikipedia:
Irvine Auditorium is a performance venue at 3401 Spruce Street on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was designed by the firm of prominent architect Horace Trumbauer and built 1926–1932.[1] Irvine Auditorium is notable for its nearly 11,000-pipe Curtis Organ, the world’s 22nd-largest pipe organ (by ranks),[2] originally built for the Sesquicentennial Exposition of 1926 and donated to the university in 1928. The building was opened in May, 1929.
The 1987 Mellon Jazz Festival was dedicated to the Heath Brothers who performed in the auditorium on June 25, 1987.
The Broadwood Hotel was the former headquarters of the Benevolent and Paternal Order of Elks, renamed Philadelphia Lodge No. 2 BPOE.
On November 16, 1948, Duke Ellington performed here in the Crystal Ballroom. A notice in Billboard read:
This marks the first time in three years for a name band dance promotion in the hotel’s large ballroom and the first time for a Negro band to play the ballroom on a one-night promotion.
The Crystal Ballroom was used as a recording studio by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Symphony. Nat King Cole Sings My Fair Lady was recorded in the ballroom in 1963.
The historical marker out front notes the home games of the SPHAs basketball team (South Philadelphia Hebrew Association), a predecessor of the Philadelphia/San Francisco Warriors, were played in the Crystal Ballroom.
The Broadwood Hotel was replaced by a parking garage in 1994.
The Arts Bank is a historic bank building owned by the University of the Arts. The building houses a 230-seat main stage and the Laurie Beechman Cabaret Theater on the first floor. It has played host to a number of jazz greats including organist Shirley Scott and saxophonist Tim Warfield.
Opened in 1857, the Academy of Music is the country’s oldest concert hall and opera house. The “Grand Old Lady of Broad Street” has welcomed jazz, blues and R&B legends, including Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Lee Morgan, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Shirley Horn, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin and James Brown.
On June 5, 1945, the Dizzy Gillespie Quartet, featuring Charlie Parker, was in the house. Seated in the next-to-last row were Benny Golson and John Coltrane.
In an interview with the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Project, NEA Jazz Master Benny Golson recalled:
When we heard – John and I, when we first heard Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie] – I told you he was sounding like Johnny Hodges – our lives changed that night. We had never heard any music like that. Never. We were screaming like these Beatles groupies, when they used to hear the Beatles. They played this Latin tune. We never heard any Latin tune like that in our lives. The Latin tunes that we played were like Lady of Spain, the stock arrangements, My Shawl. But this Latin thing, we had never heard it. Then they played an interlude, and they made a break, and Charlie Parker made a pickup by himself. Usually it was two bars, but he did it four bars, double-time. We were going crazy. We almost – of course we were up there with the cheap seats – we almost fell over the balcony. It was A Night in Tunisia. We never heard that before. Oh my goodness.
Golson expounded on that fateful night in his autobiography, Whisper Not: The Autobiography of Benny Golson:
The concert was staged at the Academy of Music, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra. We took our places, greatly excited, in the cheap seats in the uppermost level. Diz’s band kicked off with the strangest Latin-sounding tune we had ever heard. John thought it sounded “like snake charmer’s music”: Dizzy’s “A Night in Tunisia” was weirder than anything we had heard before, but intriguing. The band moved through the melody, dove into an interlude, then opened into a bravura set of riffs, or glissandi, a sustained high-octane break by the alto player, Charlie Parker. To us, the sound was way out there. Parker was dressed in a double-breasted suit with all of the buttons closed. He looked like an adult stuffed into his grade school graduation suit. …
We both nearly fell over the balcony rail, all the cells and nerves in our bodies wild with abandon. Their music was crazy and we went into an exuberant delirium, doubtless a form of higher awareness and pure joy. John tried to crawl up my gyrating body while I was grabbing onto him with barely contained amazement. We were both screaming like schoolgirls. We had heard strong performances in our young lives, but nothing like this. This was beyond “good.” It was completely new, innovative, and profound. We were drunk with happiness and bewilderment. I felt like crying. We didn’t know then, but our musical world changed that night.
Published by Temple University Press, Golson’s autobiography is available for purchase here.
A private late-night club, it was a favorite hangout of Del Shields, Billboard jazz editor and host of “Modern Music” on WDAS-FM.
Johnny Hartman performed here.
Drummers Philly Joe Jones and Edgar Bateman, Jr. were regulars at Trey’s Lounge.
A North Philly mainstay, Dowling’s Palace hosted weekly jam sessions with Lucky Thompson and the Budesa Brothers. Now closed, Dowling’s Palace will reopen in the Hotel Indigo planned for the repurposed Blue Horizon.
Stacey Dowling shared:
Hotel Indigo at The Blue will be reborn as one of Philly’s premier cultural destinations. Whether it’s an overnight stay, oldies but goodies, live jazz, blues or poetry, The Blue will again be where it happens.
For updates, check out Mosaic Development Partners.
In his autobiography, Jimmy Heath recalled that erstwhile jazz drummer Bill Cosby was a bartender at Jazz in the Underground:
I still kept going back to Philly for gigs, and between 1960 and 1964, in addition to the Sahara, the Showboat, the Uptown, and Pep’s, another club I worked in Philly was the Underground, located at Broad and Pine streets. The Underground had a number of rooms and a few different bars. In one room were women dancers, and in another was a comedy act. I was playing in the Underground with Sam Dockery, Mickey Roker, and Buster Williams when I first met Bill Cosby, a Philly native, who was bartending at the Underground and telling jokes at the same time. When we talk about those days, I tell him, “I was big-time and you were behind the bar.”
By the way, Cosby wrote the foreword to Heath’s biography “I Walked With Giants” (Temple University Press, 2010).
