The 1958 Playboy All-Stars

More than 25,000 Playboy readers made the scene, picking their favorites in the second annual Jazz Poll for a plac e with the 1958 Playboy All-Stars. In selecting the top stars of jazzdom for this dream aggregation, readers proved themselves hip indeed; and comparing the winners with the results of last year's poll confirmed that the champions wear their crowns snugly and it takes a mighty effort to upset them.

The year between polls has been a big one for jazz – for hot and cool and all the schools between, for the very young as well as the very old: W. C. (St. Louis Blues) Handy was honored on his 84th birthday in a memorable, celebrity-packed banquet at New York's Waldorf-Astoria, while a group of youngsters some 70 years his junior were blowing up a storm in the Farmingdale High School Band at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Trends? You could spot them by the dozen, because there was room, in this wonderfully expanded jazz cosmos, for styles to shoot off in every direction at once. Sure there was calypso, sure rhythm and blues kept rocking and rolling; but, too, there was the jazz-with-poetry kick that was shaking up the San Francisco set; the experimentation with new time values (jazz waltzes yet); the first presentation of a series of concerts featuring both classical and jazz musicians (at Town Hall and Cooper Union in New York); and the growing open-air trend, reflected in such new ventures as the Great South Bay Jazz Festival, for which most of the Fletcher Henderson band of the Thirties was reunited; and Michael Grace's summer-long Theatre Under the Stars in Central Park that flopped with a variety of musical and dramatic presentations and was rescued by the week-around use of jazz.

As for night clubs, which trend you spotted would depend on where you were standing. In the warm light of Sunset and Vine, jazz withered, as almost every Los Angeles club gave up on it during the year. Looking from Sheridan Square, though, you could see bright new lights flashing on jazz, as New York's Greenwich Village became the new center for modernists, with places like the Village Vanguard, Cherry Lane, the Five Spot and the Half Note all offering the coolest in combos. On the other hand, Hollywood had its weekly televised Stars of Jazz (with a sponsor!) and New York had nothing comparable.

National TV still toyed cautiously with the sounds. CBS used jazz stanzas on Odyssey and The Seven Lively Arts, and guests like Kenton and Garner on Patti Page's The Big Record. NBC carried the Nat "King" Cole show clear through the year, frequently featuring jazz-oriented (continued on page 76)All-Star(continued from page 40) guests – but, unable to snag a national sponsor, the show folded the week before Christmas. Radio offered Bandstand USA, with two hours of live jazz from Eastern clubs filtered across-country via Mutual every Saturday; NBC's Monitor discontinued its visits to Chicago jazz spots at year's end and planned henceforth to limit its weekend wandering to jazz in New York.

There were some interesting academic notes during 1957: Brandeis U. commissioned six compositions from avant-garde jazzmen to be premiered at its Creative Arts Festival, and at Music Inn in Lenox, Mass., a unique summer "School of Jazz" was inaugurated, with students from the U.S., Brazil and Africa boning up on piano, trumpet and drums under such teachers as Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie and Max Roach.

It was a fantastic year for jazz on records, with sales almost doubling those of the previous 12 months. The 10 topselling jazz LPs of the year, by our own rough estimate, were Miles Davis – 'Round About Midnight, Duke Ellington at Newport, Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book, Ella and Louis, Four Freshmen and Five Trumpets, Erroll Garner Concert by the Sea, Jimmy Giuffre 3, Shelly Manne and His Friends Play My Fair Lady, Modern Jazz Quartet and Modern Jazz Quartet at Music Inn. Near year's end, Playboy produced its first All-Star Jazz album, an intraindustry recording venture on Playboy's own label, featuring the winners of the first annual Jazz Poll on two 12" LPs, with 10 pages of liner notes, photographs and an extensive LP jazz discography.

As fans mourned the loss of George Girard, Joe Shulman, Serge Chaloff and Jimmy Dorsey (who passed away less than a year after his brother Tommy), new stars twinkled on the scene. Johnny Richards's crew stirred up the most talk among the big bands, while Jimmy Giuffre's threesome seemed the likeliest combo comer. On the solo level, tenor sax man Sonny Rollins was the most talked-about cat of the year.

The movies continued to make only sporadic use of jazz, though jazz-like sounds were showing up more often in background music. Two traditional jazz stars were honored with celluloid biographies: W. C. Handy in St. Louis Blues, with Nat Cole as W. C., and Louis Armstrong in Satchmo the Great with Satchmo as Satchmo. A French company hired John Lewis and his Modern Jazz Quartet to write and play the background music for Sait-On Jamais; Red Norvo helped with the yelps in Screaming Mimi, a Gypsy Rose Lee – Anita Ekberg opus.

But more important than these developments on records, at clubs, in TV and movies, were the international rondos played by top U.S. jazzmen. Stars like Lionel Hampton were in such heavy overseas demand that they spent more time out of the country than at home. Haile Selassie presented Wilbur De Paris with a gold medal as the trombonist's traditional-type combo toured Africa. Princess Margaret sent a note backstage to Count Basie at the London Palladium: "Your band was wonderful. I enjoyed it immensely." Travel became so easy that Satchmo and Hamp flew from New York to London for a one-nighter benefit and flew right back; Barney Kessel winged to Caracas, Venezuela for the local jazz club's concert; Ella Fitzgerald played one show in Monte Carlo for a fabulous five-figure fee, plus transportation from Los Angeles and back again.

As jazz grew bigger and the world smaller in inverse ratio, Ray McKinley took his reincarnated Glenn Miller band behind the Iron Curtain; Hal McIntyre's orchestra played U.S. bases in Britain; Harry James bypassed England (because there were complaints that his band had become too square), but played to full houses in France and Germany.

Solo jazzmen who wandered off independently, picking up local accompaniment across the Continent, included Bob Cooper, Bud Shank, Herbie Mann, Lucky Thompson and Tony Scott. Tony even went to southernmost Africa and blitzed the apartheid laws by playing for mixed audiences. Even in countries notoriously antipathetic to Americans, the jazzmen left behind gobs of good will (except for one combo leader who left nothing but a trail of empty bottles).

In the U.S., too, jazz appeared in places where it had never been heard before. Sarah Vaughan and Count Basie broke attendance records at the Starlight Room at the Waldorf, from whence had previously come only the squarest of musical sounds. All things considered, 1957 was probably the greatest year jazz has known to date.

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While the foreign tours multiplied wildly and domestic LP sales swept upward along with concert and festival grosses, Playboy's readers, who know what they want and want what they know, allowed no overnight sensations to change their 1957 choices as they picked the sidemen for the 1958 Playboy All-Stars. Except for a change at piano and the second seat on tenor sax, plus a little game of musical chairs in the brass section, our bold-face winners' list, with leader, eight brass, five saxes, clarinet, five rhythm, two singers, vocal group and instrumental combo, remains the same.

There were, however, some interesting and turbulent undercurrents beneath the calm surface. Specimen: while Stan Kenton remained the undisputed custodian of the All-Star baton, a tickertape parade of Ellington votes brought the Duke from fourth to second place, reflecting the impact of his CBS A Drum Is a Woman TV spectacular and his popular Columbia LPs. Records must account, too, for the swift lift in enthusiasm for Britain's Ted Heath, who came from the bottom of the barrel to fifth place despite having been seen in this country for only a few weeks on a concert tour. And Dizzy Gillespie's big band lifted Diz from 12th to sixth among leaders as his intercontinental hegiras and Verve LPs earned him prestige and royalties respectively.

Louis Armstrong gave up his firsttrumpet position to Chet Baker; Dizzy Gillespie and Shorty Rogers retained their third- and fourth-place spots. Miles Davis jumped from ninth to fifth, just shy of a silver medal position.

There's an interesting similarity between the trumpet voting in this largest of all jazz polls and the results of polls conducted by several publications in the music field here and abroad. Readers of the British Melody Maker placed the same five men on top, but not in the same order: Louis, Dizzy, Miles, Chet, Shorty. So did Down Beat, with Miles, Dizzy, Chet, Louis, Shorty; Metronome had Miles, Chet, Dizzy, Roy Eldridge and Shorty in its 1957 results.

Despite their split as a team, after a year of recording separately for Columbia, J. J. Johnson and Kai Winding are firmly ensconced in first and second place in the All-Star trombone section. J. J. received more votes than any other musician in the 1958 poll: four out of every five voters picked him for a place on the four-man tram team. To complete the section, modernist Bobby Brookmeyer, who spent most of his year freelancing around New York with Mulligan and others, changed chairs with traditionalist Jack Teagarden, who at press time was gassing the Dixieland-inclined British fans with a fine touring band.

Paul Desmond and Bud Shank are sitting in on alto sax for a second time; Stan Getz again takes top honors among tenor men, but Coleman Hawkins has moved from fourth to second place, replacing Charlie Ventura in the All-Star sax section. Gerry Mulligan received over 60% of all votes cast for baritone sax, nearly 10 times as many as his closest competition.

The clarinet vote, as in the first poll, was like a chronological history of the horn in its win-place-show selection, with Goodman, De Franco and Giuffre as unvanquished spokesmen of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. Oldster BG copped his second silver jazz medal and secured his spot among the 1958 Playboy All-Stars.

It should come as no surprise that Erroll Garner sneaked past Dave Brubeck to take top honors on piano, for 1957 saw Erroll reach a new high in record sales; and if salaries are any yardstick of success, his $5000-a-week asking price for appearances in recent months could have been the tip-off. But there is plenty of room at the top, as Brubeck's continued supremacy in the combo voting indicates.

That you can mix jazz with corn and still be rated no square in hip circles was neatly demonstrated by Barney Kessel, who spent much of his time in '57 organizing everything from pop vocal to country-and-western dates, as an A and R man for Norman Granz, while doubling as jazz LP star for Contemporary Records. It was a close race on bass again between the peripatetic Ray Brown (of the Oscar Peterson Trio and JATP) and the more or less motionless Oscar Pettiford (of the New York recording studios). Shelly Manne's bestselling LPs (My Fair Lady, Li'l Abner) enabled him to widen his margin of victory over others in the skin game. Significantly, all of our first five drummers are also combo leaders, with the Sweet Smell of Success (literally as well as on celluloid) hoisting Chico Hamilton from sixth place a year ago to third in the 1958 poll.

Lionel Hampton probably spent less time within 3000 miles of the polling place than any of our other winners, but his numerous Verve waxings kept him with us in spirit while his band fastened seat belts to rock and roll its way from the Thames to Tel Aviv. Cal Tjader, seen with his cooking combo from Ciro's on the Strip to Birdland in the Apple, jumped from sixth to third among miscellaneous instrumentalists.

Frank Sinatra received more than half of all the votes cast for male vocalist for the 1958 Playboy All-Stars; another honor for one of the most phenomenal show business talents of the 20th Century. Nat "King" Cole and Sammy Davis, Jr., repeated in second and third place. Johnny Mathis was nominated in the first Playboy Jazz Poll, but couldn't corner enough votes to place among the top 15 vocalists listed. T-his year, riding the crest of a series of smash Columbia records, the ex-track-star jumped into fourth place.

Last year Ella Fitzgerald won her spot with the Playboy All-Stars by little more than 200 votes. The First Lady of Song had it much easier this time, for there wasn't a week of the year that one or another of her great Verve albums – The Cole Porter Song Book, The Rodgers and Hart Song Book, Ella and Louis – wasn't on the best-seller lists. Julie London moved from 12th up to fourth place among female vocalists and Eydie Gormé came out of nowhere with two swinging albums (Eydie Gormé, Eydie Swings the Blues) to take sixth.

The Dave Brubeck Quartet beat out the Modern Jazz Quartet a second time as the most popular instrumental combo in the land. And Louis Armstrong's All-Stars placed third, though Satchmo slipped from first place in the trumpet division and from fourth to eighth among jazz vocalists. Neither J. J. Johnson nor Kai Winding did as well with their individual combos as they did last year together.

Breathing with superbly integrated four-part breath control down the necks of the Four Freshmen, the Hi-Lo's made a much closer race of the All-Star vocal group this year. Their summer triumph at the Theatre Under the Stars in New York's Central Park was just one of a dozen major events that gave their humor and harmony a maximum of exposure. At the finish, the Freshmen were still fresh, however, and they finished in first place a second time.

More than 25,000 readers cast their ballots in the second annual Playboy Jazz Poll, making this the greatest popularity poll ever conducted in the field of jazz. The winners receive silver jazz medals and a place of honor with the 1958 Playboy All-Stars.

Leader

Trumpet

Trombone

Alto Sax

Tenor Sax

Baritone Sax

Clarinet

Piano

Guitar

BASS

Drums

Miscellaneous Instrument

Male Vocalist

Female Vocalist

Instrumental Combo

Vocal Group

Lionel Hampton, vibes

Bob Brookmeyer, third trombone

Chet Baker, first trumpet

Shorty Rogers, fourth trumpet

Stan Kenton, leader

Gerry Mulligan, baritone sax

Dizzy Gillespie, third trumpet

J. J. Johnson, first trombone

Jack Teagarden, fourth trombone

Kai Winding, second trombone

Benny Goodman, clarinet

Louis Armstrong, second trumpet

Dave Brubeck Quartet, instrumental combo

Erroll Garner, piano

Frank Sinatra, male vocalist

Ray Brown, bass

Bud Shank, second alto sax

Barney Kessel, guitar

Ella Fitzgerald, female vocalist

Paul Desmond, first alto sax

Stan Getz, first tenor sax

Four Freshmen, vocal group

Coleman Hawkins, second tenor sax

Shelly Manne, drums