November 2009
4 posts
I had heard enough stories about Bird to know that if you took him to an airport and went to make a phone call, that was a mistake. So I stayed with him all the time. I took him to the plane, we traveled together, I put him in his hotel. At the end of the job I knew that I was going to have to take Bird back to New York because I didn’t want him winding up in Alaska. So after the gig I took...
Bird had all sorts of musical combinations in mind. He wanted to make a record with Yehudi Menuhin and, at least, a forty-piece orchestra. He mapped out things for woodwinds and voices, and Norman Granz would holler, “What is this? You can’t make money with this crazy combination. You can’t sell this stuff.” He stopped by my place a number of times….He’d come in...
JSIM Breakdown
We’ve gotta get that teed up so we can hit the pitch.
I did not dislike Pasetti, in spite of his mediocrity and his almost unbelievable psychological obtuseness; and there had grown up between us a relationship that was in a way well-balanced, he being a man without imagination and without nerves, but conscious of his limitations and fundamentally modest, while I was all nerves and imagination, morbidly sensitive and complex.
Alberto Moravia, from...
