Here's Basie with Tony Bennett, who sings For Once in My Life,All Of Me,Don't Get Around Much Anymore and I'm Just A Lucky So And So on Jerry Lewis's telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association over the Labor Day weekend in 1977...
And here's Basie with Dionne Warwick, Joe Williams, Stan Getz, Lionel Hampton, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Herbie Hancock and others on TV's All Star Jazz Show in 1977...
Jazz has much in common with a seabed littered with sunken ships that once transported gold. In addition to the musicians who today are household names, there are many other terrific musicians who didn't quite reach that status but were hailed by peers and disappeared early. Some abandoned their instruments for a more steady job. Others moved into teaching. Or they passed away too young. In each case, they became forgotten and their reputations drifted downward until they settled on the jazz ocean's floor, awaiting discovery. [Photo above courtesy of Jazz Profiles]
No matter how many times I've put on my research "gear" and plunged down in search of sunken treasure, I invariably have come up with fist-fulls of glittering coins. In this case, however, the "diver" who tipped me off to the treasure was George Coppens from Duiven, the Netherlands. Several weeks back, he wondered whether I was familiar with Don Ferrara. I was, but I admitted that I hadn't done an excavation, since his identifiable output is rather scant.
Ferrara was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and learned to play trumpet by listening to records and the radio, most notably the jazz of trumpeter Roy Eldridge. In 1945 Ferrara played in Jerry Wald's band before joining Georgie Auld’s group. Next came the U.S. Army in mid-1946, where he played in a service band that included bassist Red Mitchell and drummer Howie Mann. He also met tenor saxophonist Warne Marsh, who interested him in the teachings of pianist Lennie Tristano. Upon discharge, Ferrara studied with Tristano into the early 1960s.
Ferrara began recording in 1950 on a band date led by bassist Chubby Jackson. Later that year, he joined Woody Herman's Capitol band and remained until 1951 before gigging and recording in small groups. First came a Lester Young quintet in 1956 followed by the Gerry Mulligan Sextet as well as groups led by Lee Konitz and Peanuts Hucko. Ferrara was back in bands in 1960, most notably a record date led by Urbie Green for Command and then a long stretch with Gerry Mulligan's Concert Band that lasted until 1962.
Ferrara played a regular engagement in the early 1960s with Tristano (above) at New York’s Half Note and continued teaching students throughout the decade. He relocated to the West Coast in the early 1970s, joining Gary Foster’s teaching studio. He remained in California into the 1990s. For more on Ferrara, read Gordon Jack's 1999 interview at Jazz Profileshere.
Ferrara died on January 18, 2011.
There are only two available small-group studio recordings that feature Ferrara as the sole trumpter:
Here's the Gerry Mulligan Sextet playing La plus que lente...
And probably the best studio example of Ferrara in a small group is Lee Konitz's Very Cool, recorded on May 12, 1957 for Verve. Here'sthe full album...
Between the release of João Gilberto in 1961 and Boss of Bossa Nova in 1963—and three weeks before the famed bossa nova concert at New York's Carnegie Hall on November 21, 1962—João Gilberto performed at Club 676 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. But he wasn't alone. Traveling with him were Os Cariocas, a phrase that translates as the "guys from Rio de Janeiro." The Cariocas were a four-man pop vocal-harmony group that sang while accompanying themselves on instruments. [Photo above of João Gilberto on guitar with Os Cariocas]
Recently produced by Jordi Pujol and released on his Ubatuqui Records, João Gilberto with Os Cariocas in Buenos Aires is available on the Fresh Sound site. The album's previously unreleased 22 tracks feature João Gilberto (g, vcl) plus the Cariocas—Severino Filho (vcl, p, arr), Badeco (vcl, g), Quartera (vcl, perc) and Luiz Roberto (vcl, b). The songs performed are mostly Brazilian bossa nova standards, plus three songs Gilberto had never sung previously.
The sound isn't studio quality, but it is a historic recording that was restored and allows us to hear Gilberto with a vocal-harmony group just before he became a household name. He performed with the Cariocas throughout 1962 in an attempt to widen his commercial appeal at clubs in South America. The quintet's musical relationship would end in November when Gilberto left Brazil for the U.S. and stardom as a solo artist. We also hear a talkative Gilberto talking to the Argentine audience, which is unusual, since Gilberto has long been viewed as highly introverted.
As Carlos Marcelo Lesgart's fascinating liner notes point out, the vocal arrangement of Só Danço Samba (Jazz 'n' Samba)—a song that appears three times during the group's different sets on the album—is different than the hit version released a month earlier in 1962 on the soundtrack of Copacabana Palace, an Italian comedy film shot in Rio.
This new album represents their last known performance together and gives us an an opportunity to hear an audience's joyful reaction to the bossa nova a little more than a year before the global release of Getz/Gilberto in March 1964 and Brazil's military coup that April. At first a youth-culture movement in Brazil, the bossa nova would shift to adult contemporary after February 1964 with the arrival of Beatlemania. In this regard, it's an amazing audio snapshot captured on the cusp of several seismic shifts in popular music.
João Gilberto died in 2019.
JazzWax tracks: You'll find João Gilberto with Os Cariocas in Buenos Aires (Ubatuqui) here.
Marc Myers writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal and is author of "Rock Concert: An Oral History" (Grove), "Anatomy of a Song" (Grove) and "Why Jazz Happened." Founded in 2007, JazzWax has won three Jazz Journalists Association awards
