PAUL DESMOND TRIBUTE
I write this to show my tribute and respect for Paul Desmond, a great
and underrated Alto Saxophone original.
As talented as he was on Alto, he mirrored this in his facility with
words, and had received his college degree in Literature.
Paul loved puns, and the worse the better. He once said he wanted to record an
album called ‘Jazz Goes to Ireland’,
containing such songs as ‘Fitzhugh or No
One, The Tralee Song, Mahoney a Girl in a Gilded Cage, & Lovely Hoolihan’.
In 1954 the ‘pun connoisseur’ composed probably the longest pun in
history:
It concerns a boy of Italian parentage named Carbaggio, born in
Germany. Feeling himself a misfit, with his dark curly hair, among all those
Teutonic blonds, he tries to be even more German than the Germans. In late adolescence he flees to Paris,
where he steals one of those brass miniatures of the Eiffel Tower. Arrested by the police, he is given a
choice of going to jail or leaving the country. He boards the first outbound ship and arrives in New
York. Thinking he would like a
career in communications, he goes to the RCA building in Rockefeller Plaza,
takes an elevator, and walks into the office of General Sarnoff. Sarnoff tells him the only possible job
is as a strikebreaker. The boy
takes it. When the strike ends, he
finds himself on a union blacklist.
He goes to work making sonar equipment for a company owned by a man
named Harris. After several years,
his English is improved to the point where he gets a job on a radio station as
a disk jockey. His show is called Rock Time. And he has fulfilled his destiny:
HE’S A ROUTINE TEUTON EIFFEL-LOOTIN’ SARNOFF GOON FROM HARRIS
SONAR, ROCK-TIME CARBAGGIO.
(He’s a rootin’, tootin’, high falootin’, son-of-a-gun from
Arizona, Ragtime Cowboy Joe.)
A final quote from Paul was on the mental condition for playing
jazz:
“-With wanton heed and giddy cunning!”
Errol Weiss Schlabach – February 27, 2011
A resident known as 'Boy' of the Waldorf Astoria leaves his bran new shoes out for the Boots. Next morning he finds his shoes ripped to pieces, and the Boots tells him there is a wild cat loose in the hotel, chewing all the shoes left out overnight. The resident offers a $50 reward to the Boots if he can capture the cat. Two hours later, a knock on the door reveals the Boots holding a dead cat by the tail, saying, 'Pardon me Boy, is this the cat that chewed your new shoes?' (Chatanooga Choo Choo)
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