Plugged-in Odyssey
This woman, Anita O’Day, is really all she appears to be and much more. How I came to hear her performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival is an improbable journey possible only in our wired world.
It started in the summer of 1967, when I was a guitar teacher in Lima, OH. It so happened that Bill Smith, the owner of the music store Custom Percussion, has hired a hotshot band from New York City, Climax (not to be confused with The Climax Blues Band), to teach in his store that same summer. All these guys went on to be major studio artists in the 70s and their residence in bucolic Lima was short-lived, but they left a lasting impression. Just before they left at summer’s end, Elliott Randall (of later fame with Steely Dan and Asia) lent me his technique book written by jazz legend Sal Salvador. Each exercise was scribbled with personalized instructions from Mr. Randall’s teacher, who happened to be Mr. Salvador himself.
Fast forward to the early 1990s. There wasn’t much on the World Wide Web back then, but Elliott Randall had his own website (which he also had built and designed, a genuine pioneer). There was a “contact me” button and so I did. He didn’t specifically remember me after nearly 30 years, but he did recall Lima, OH as one of the best times of his life. In a follow-up note, I mentioned that I had his Sal Salvador book and jokingly asked if he’d like me to return it. The idea of it amused both of us so much that he sent me his address and I returned it with a letter saying I’d noticed he hadn’t finished the exercises in the back of the book (a fairly common guitar student phenomenon) and, “just think how good you might have been if you had completed your studies…” Just a side note here, Mr. Randall is one of the most respected guitarist among his peers and his solo on Steely Dan’s Reelin’ In The Years is routinely placed in the top 50 rock guitar solos. Fortunately, this irony amused him and he complimented me on my choice of packing materials – I had sealed the Salvador book using my FoodSaver to protect it in shipping.
A few months ago, just for laughs. I started playing guitar again. Nothing special, just a couple hours of scales and exercises each day to reconnect to the fretboard. I purchased a few technique books from Amazon, checked a few online resources, and finally decided that what I really wanted was the Sal Salvador book I had returned to Elliott Randall. I’m not going to ask for it back, of course, but I googled about and ended up on the Mel Bay site.
Mel Bay. That blue method book, first written in 1947, the one with his custom D’Angelico guitar gracing the cover from corner to corner. The book that every student guitar player by the mid-60s had at least started. Songs like Lightly Row. Good fundamental material, but few students finished even the first book. Even if they had a teacher, he would be showing them “the real stuff” by the time they got the basics down. The book that was mainly a prop to fool parents into thinking their children were learning to read music when, in fact, their teacher was showing them how to play the evil rock’n’roll. That Mel Bay.
Mel Bay (who died in 1997) had bought the rights to Sal’s books. Strangely some of them, including The Complete Book Of Guitar Technique I sought, were available as “downloads.” Here’s how that works: you pay for the book, download it as a PDF, and then you have 5 hours to print as many as two copies. I’ve not seen a process like this before, so I tried it. Worked like a charm and now I have that book, three hole punched and in a binder. I’m most interested in finding the exercise Elliot Randall showed to me one summer afternoon in his studio. It sounded as though he was playing something incredibly complex that began low on the guitar then went up way high and came back down again. “Do you practice arpeggios?” he asked me. I did, but the arpeggios you play on classic guitar have your left hand fixed in one position while the right hand picks a pattern across the strings, then a different chord with the same right hand pattern. What he played had his left hand traveling all over the fretboard in a single note style rather than the sustain pedal sound of classic arpeggios. So I said, “No,” and that’s when he handed me the book. I never found that in there before, but I want to look again.
So what does all this have to do with the lovely white-gloved lady in the frilly brimmed hat? Well, I wanted to hear Sal Salvador play, so I started checking out his discography (I hope they still call it that, even though the soulful vinyl disks have been replaced by sterile compact ones). References to Jazz On A Summer’s Day, a DVD, kept showing up, accompanied by enthusiastic reviews. I got Netfilx to send it to me post haste.
Liz and I listened to it Tuesday evening. True, it is an incredible movie, perhaps the first concert documentary of any type (Woodstock was over a decade later). Big names from the heyday of jazz; Thelonious Monk, Jimmy Guiffre, Sonny Stitt, George Shearing, Dinah Washington, oh my, Big Maybelle, Gerry Mulligan, Jack Teagarden, Mahalia Jackson, even Chuck Berry was there, and ohmigod, Satchmo himself, the great Louis Armstrong. All against a backdrop of proper New England architecture, yachts, seagulls, and a small but enthusiastic, mostly white audience in suits and hats. Best of all, I got to hear Sal Salvador play. He played a solo with his left hand mostly stationary (unlike the all over up and down the neck style of rock guitarists) with his fingers bubbling all over the place in a way that would seem random until you listened and then it sounded like the kind of musical line you’d expect to hear from a saxophone, not a single note chosen because it would be easy on the guitar. It was a matter of minutes before I tracked down and ordered a CD of his recordings.
But the persona of Anita O’Day is the right picture to accompany a DVD review of this documentary. Despite some filthy habits, well—documented in this review, she was a real lady. Trading scat with the band, teasing them with vocal riffs nearly impossible for them to mimic instrumentally (on one single note riff, the drummer answers with a multitimbral beat that sounded like “splat!”). The big names, the ones everyone knows, come later in the concert, but you still cannot forget her face.
5:24:10 PM 
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