All That Jazz

Life on the South Coast is so rich it is easy to just sit back and let it flow over you and not do a thing but enjoy.

And there is no reason why you shouldn't do just that. And the Ole Trawler has run across the right music for this mood of plenty in the wonderful. fantastic, amazing Live at the Sprague, Left Coast Jazz CD with Will Hubel.

Now if you have ears and have had them open you know all about Left Coast Jazz, the smooth, rich, retro Cool School echo from our own South Coast. Okay so they aren't exactly from OUR South Coast but the are here enough that I'm laying claim to them.

So many groups think that loud is the same as good and that being soft and mellow is too ordinary to attract any notice, but the rule in theater and in life as well is if you want people to listen lower your voice and that is just what Left Coast Jazz does so well. They lower their magical voice and make you want to listen.

Guys, this is silky, smokey lounge music and I mean that in the most complimentary way.

There are those, and I hate you, who are too young to remember when jazz was a dirty secret best kept in tiny, out of the way, smoke-filled clubs that only a select few knew about and passed the words from father to son in a arcane ritual of manhood. The cats wore sunglasses inside, in the dark and talked about riffs and blow and axes and worked on a stage so small that the table tops were often larger. The waitresses wore lace and fishnets and brought you drinks which might have contained alcohol and called it coffee and every so often a guy would light up a smoke which smelled of tar and old tires and probably wasn't tobacco.

To get the SCENE you had to be in the KNOW and only RIGHT GUYS could come in and the gig started at dark thirty and went until way past when the cows came home and the cops might come in and shake the place down looking for herbs and dried flowers and this was not for arts and crafts and it was soooooooo good it would make you want to slap your momma.

And then there was rock.

And everything changed. The clubs were still there and the same guys came and went and the glasses were still dark and the smoke made your eyes water and the cops still raided but it wasn't the coolest any more and only a few listened to jazz and the radio never played it and the nice people never talked about it cause, you know THOSE PEOPLE used drugs and were promiscuous and you never knew where they had been or who they had been with and besides those people mingled with minorities, like black people and gays and lesbians although they never said exactly what a lesbian was or why they should get a whole separate word but they were NOT LIKE US and so you had to stay away from them and besides the Rock musicians were a lot worse and made for bigger stories so let's just talk about them.

Gasp!

And yes, the Ole Trawler was one of those people mingling in the dark and smokey jazz clubs. Somewhere around 1958 or 9 I was frightened by Ella Fitzgerald and never recovered.

The city of Dallas owned a FM radio station back in the days when you had to be an audiophile to even know what an FM station was and they didn't know what to do with it but they had to fill up the day with something so they used the least offensive thing they could think of and broadcast classical music from 6AM to 6PM. And from midnight to 6AM they did farm reports so that just left the time between 6PM and midnight. The firs three hours were easy cause they filled it with news. John Cameron Swayze before Timex, but that left the nine to midnight slot and that's where they made a terrible mistake. They let Jim Lowe, known as Old Jim Lowe for as long as in heard him on the radio, have the slot and he did a jazz show called Kats Karavan: How Blue Can You Get?

Yes, he was the voice of Big Tex at the state fair but that has nothing to do with jazz.

On Kats Karavan listening in my room at night on the big upright RCA console unit, I heard Ella Fitzgerald sing Mr. Paganni. She sang like an angel and then she stopped saying words and just used her voice and sounds to accompany the melody! It sent an electric shock all the way to my dark and twisted soul. I was never the same.

Years later I found Charlie Shavers and Lana Cantrell, (Yes, I listened to the album but only after the worst of the testosterone poisoning passed) and Ramsey Lewis and Vince Guarldi, before Peanuts and Miles and Mingus and Monk and there just never was anything in rock to compare.

And now after all these years of listening to jazz I have a local band as good as those I listened to on the Ole Jim Lowe show and I really want to call Jim and tell him that Left Coast Jazz should be on his show but that would take a time machine and a bit of magic cause ole Jim Lowe passed away a few years back, so I';m telling you.

And if my word isn't good enough, celebrity chef Jardin Kazaar provides the percussion and Victoria Tierney did the cover photography, (Victoria I am jealous and more than a bit envious cause an artist not a photographer, but then you are and artists and a photographer, got the cover gig) so there is a lot of talent on this one CD and you should go to Second Street Gallery, you should do that anyway, it is next to Coastal Mist so you will want a chocolate, and get Susan Lehman, a respectable artists in her own right or Candace Kreitlow, some kind of special musician if I do say so and I do say so and get them to sell you the Left Coast Jazz CD before they are all gone and you have to cheat Will out of his rights by dubbing someone else s CD and that would be wrong and you wouldn't want to do it so don;t and get your official Cd form second street gallery.