It’s an amazing how much detective work goes into figuring out who is who on some of these tapes from the Newport Jazz Festival. Take yesterday, for example, when we were trying to solve the riddle from the 1955 festival. There were two unidentified tracks that featured a very smooth sounding alto saxophone fronting a quartet with piano, bass and drums. Now, the alto was not that “dry martini” sound of Paul Demond, but closer to that than the hard-edged school of boppers coming out of Charlie Parker. So my immediate guess was Lee Konitz, who was also on the program. I’ve come to known Lee’s sound over the past 20 years of attending dozens of his gigs (most recently at the 30th edition of the Montreal Jazz Festival) and I think I’d know it anywhere. Certain phrases seemed similar, although the penchant to swing in a conventional sense seemed very un-Lee-like. But this was, after all, 1955. Maybe he was more conservative then. He’s certainly become a lot freer in his expression in the past decade to the point where he walks on stage and plays stream of consciousness from a completely blank slate (kind of like Keith Jarrett at the Koln concert). Anyway, who was this mysterious alto man? Was it Konitz? Turns out, it was Woody Herman, playing alto instead of his customary clarinet. No wonder I was stumped. That’s like trying to guess Jimi Hendrix on harmonica. You would never associate him with that instrument. And so, I was foiled on that one. But happily, I was able to catch the mistake and make the correction (thanks to some research at the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, where I looked up the Newport Jazz Festival review on microfilm in an August 24, 1955 issue of Down Beat magazine). We’re really getting into some Sherlock Holmes stuff down here in the Vault.
