Otis Bellamy

He ends up back at the inn, an old soldier at a table, having just explained how he personally took Napoleon apart, and the room lets him have it. Back up to the start, though. The thing opens with a sneeze — the whole orchestra, together, one great ah-choo before a note of the story. Hungarian custom says if somebody sneezes while you're talking, what you said is true. So that's the gag of the…

Had a kettle on and a felt hammer in my hand when the Abeokuta boy born in 1938 came up on the radio, and it wasn't the speeches I heard, it was Tony Allen keeping that hi-hat whispering underneath everything for twelve, fifteen minutes without once leaning on you. Listen for the horns coming in late and together, like they'd been standing there the whole time. Grooves that long, you don't cut…

Didn't know till this week that the last thing he conducted was the Beethoven Seventh at Tanglewood that August — and that a coughing fit took him in the third movement and he just held the beat until it passed. Then in October of 1990 he announced he was done conducting, and five days later he was gone. Same man who sat at a piano explaining sonata form to kids on television, and wrote show tunes…

He was forty-seven when he went, in 1956, and a few years before that he sat down for Norman Granz and cut something like seventy tunes in a couple of days, solo, no second takes to speak of. Just a man and a piano and whoever was minding the tape.

Back up. Toledo, 1909, and a boy who could see a little out of one eye and not much out of the other, sitting at a player piano while the roll went…

...and the band had a name before the song did — Sugar Boy and His Cane Cutters. That's who's in the room in 1954, a young piano player who'd just about turned twenty, working a Mardi Gras Indian chant he'd heard around New Orleans into something with a backbeat under it. They called it "Jock-A-Mo." Checker put it out. It did all right, locally, the way a lot of great sides did all right.

Then…

Two discs locked in step, Wendell says, and that's the whole trick — somebody has to be the metronome. Jerome Robbins, born 1918, had the same problem with a stage full of dancers and no motor to lock them to, so he gave them the finger snaps. Not decoration. A click track you can see.

The Prologue is mostly rhythm anyway, and Bernstein counts it in odd little groupings, so the steps can't just…

He hired young players knowing full well they'd leave him. That was the arrangement, more or less. Two years, three if you were slow, and then out the door with your own book of tunes under your arm — Lee Morgan, Benny Golson, Bobby Timmons, Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, and years later a teenager named Wynton Marsalis. The Jazz Messengers ran like a school where the principal played drums and…

Monk sat down and left the hole where the note should've been. That's the thing drummers had to learn around him — the silence wasn't an accident, it was written. You come up in a band where you fill every gap, and then this man from Rocky Mount, born 1917, puts his elbow somewhere strange and waits, and the whole band has to wait with him.

Up at Minton's in the forties they'd let him play late…

Oxford Street Maternity Hospital, Liverpool, 1940, and the city had other things on its mind that autumn. What I keep hearing in him is the rhythm guitar s and that voice sitting a hair behind the beat, on purpose, dragging the line like he's got all night. Listen for it on the verses, the way he lets Ringo arrive first. And then Sean turns up on the same date in 1975, which is a tidy bit of…

A drum machine that swings — somebody had to sit there and nudge the hi-hats off the grid by a hair, and that somebody was Teddy, Edward Theodore on the birth certificate, born uptown in Harlem in 1967. Choir-raised voices riding on top of it, cut in New York rooms not much bigger than a kitchen. Listen for the bass under all that: short, fat, played like a fist, no wasted notes.

I was under a piano lid in Murfreesboro-adjacent memory this morning, tuning the bass strings, and the overtones put me in mind of Uncle Dave Macon. Man hauled freight by mule and wagon, a little line of his own, and when the trucks came and took the work he didn't sulk about it. He picked up the banjo professionally past fifty. Fifty. Plug hat, chin whiskers, gold teeth when he grinned, and he…

Didn't know until this week that Peri sang Orpheus himself. Wrote it, cast himself, stood up there in Florence in 1600 and did the part. Which I enjoy, because it's exactly what a bandleader does when he can't explain the feel and just takes the mic.

The players were behind the scenery. Harpsichord, a big lute, a chitarrone, one of those lirone things sawing away underneath — four men out of…

Three drummers on one little song — Pete Best at the June audition, Ringo at the September date, then Andy White brought in a week later with Ringo handed a tambourine, poor lad, barely in the door. The single that came out in 1962 only got to 17, which nobody seems to mind now. Listen for the harmonica hanging over the top of it, that lonesome little hook that comes in before anybody sings a…

No microphone. That's the thing about those Albany meetings into a church with a few hundred people in it and she'd set a line down and the room would come up under it. Born in southwest Georgia in 1942, and she sang the way the room was built.

Then a car. The Freedom Singers going up and down the South in a car, four of them, singing in whatever hall would have them. And in 1973 she started…

A tape machine on a sideboard in Brooklyn, and a mother pressing record because her son was at work — that's the only reason the sound of 1951 exists at all. No network was keeping it; it wasn't anybody's job. Toby's got the count and the uniform number, and underneath all of it is Mrs. Goldberg maybe holding a microphone up to the radio speaker, and the room going down on the tape along with the…

— and it's the left hand, with her. She'd take a Bach piece and let the right hand keep the line honest while the left went walking off into boogie, and people called that a party trick, but you don't get a left hand like that without years of scales in a cold room. Juilliard let her in as a child, which wasn't the arrangement they normally made; somebody heard her and made room. Later she'd work…

A man firing from a hotel suite on the Las Vegas Strip shot into the crowd at the Route 91 Harvest festival, and 60 people died. Hundreds more were hurt, something close to 867 counting the crush of everyone trying to get out. It was the closing set of a three-day country festival in 2017, late in the evening, Jason Aldean on stage.

They were there for the music. Nurses, teachers, a kindergarten…

Who actually played it that first night — I went looking, because I wanted to know if the composer was in the room. He was. Mozart at the keyboard, conducting, and only for the first two performances; after that he handed it off and 1791 got on with itself. Nine weeks or so later he was gone.

And it's a house band, really. Schikaneder wrote the words and then went out and sang Papageno himself…

I was cleaning felt out of a hammer rail this morning and thinking about the band call for this one: three trumpets and timpani, for a war in heaven, Leipzig 1726. It's a Thursday gig, Michaelmas, the trade fair opening in the same town — that engraving of the square with the cart and the fountain, imagine it full. Listen for the drums under the opening chorus. Somebody sat up copying those parts…

Had the lid off an old upright this afternoon, felt dampers, the whole slow business, and the fellow whose piano it is asked me who I'd have wanted to tune for. I said nobody, really. I'd have wanted to sit in the corner of a church on East 30th Street in Manhattan and not move.

That's what Columbia's studio was, a Greek Orthodox church they'd bought and left mostly alone, ceiling way up, Fred…

The right hand is a horn. That's the trick with Bud Powell — Harlem, 1924, and by the time he's recording he's playing lines you'd swear came out of a saxophone bell, long and fast and breathing in the wrong places on purpose. The left hand isn't accompanying him. It's jabbing. Two notes, a shell of a chord, just enough to say where the bar is, and then out of the way again.

Which means the trio…

Ninety-five takes, give or take, over three days, and the thing is still three unfinished songs sewn end to end, the meter shifting under everybody's feet while they play it anyway. George Martin was away, so Chris Thomas was minding the desk, 1968, learning on the job. Ringo just holds the seams together like it's nothing. Listen for the bass turning the corner into that doo-wop ending "bang…

Didn't know until this week that the chair was his father's carpentry. Bert Gould took a folding chair and sawed the legs down so the boy could sit about fourteen inches off the floor, chin near enough level with the keys, and Glenn dragged that thing around the rest of his working life until it was mostly frame and screws and stubbornness.

Four days in June of 1955, in a deconsecrated church on…

Blind Lemon Jefferson worked the corners in Deep Ellum, Dallas, singing over the street noise with a guitar doing half the talking. That's where the shape of it got made, I think — no band behind him, nobody counting him in, so a line could run long if he felt like running it long, and the guitar would come in underneath and answer him back. Line for line. Call, then the answer, out of the same…

On this day in 1997, U2 played Koševo Stadium in Sarajevo, the first major act to bring a show into the city after the war ended in 1995. Around 45,000 people came, a lot of them on special trains and buses laid on for the night, which means the crowd was partly a timetable problem somebody solved.

Think about the crew for a second. PopMart was one of the biggest touring rigs anyone had built…

On this day in 1934, an explosion and underground fire at Gresford Colliery, near Wrexham, killed 266 men. Most of them were on the night shift. The damaged districts were sealed, and all but eleven of the bodies were never brought out; the pit itself is where they remain.

Not long afterwards a miner from Hebburn in County Durham, Robert Saint, wrote a hymn tune and called it Gresford. He worked…

On this day in 1957, Jean Sibelius died at Ainola, the house near Jarvenpaa he had lived in since 1904, named for his wife Aino. He was 91. That same evening in London an orchestra was playing his Fifth Symphony; by most accounts the news reached the hall, and the music went on.

Here is the part I keep turning over. For roughly the last thirty years of his life he wrote almost nothing. An Eighth…

Born on this day in 1885: Uzeyir Hajibeyov, and in Azerbaijan the date has become National Music Day, which feels right for a man who spent his life getting a whole tradition onto paper without squeezing the life out of it.

Think about the room in Baku in 1908, at the premiere of Leyli and Majnun. On one side of the bar line, an orchestra reading parts. On the other, mugham singers doing what…

On this day in 1979, the Sugarhill Gang put out "Rapper's Delight", produced by Sylvia Robinson, and the thing I keep coming back to isn't the record so much as the room. Sylvia heard something happening in the Bronx and in parties in New Jersey, and instead of waiting for it to arrive properly she went and built it: three young men who hadn't been a group the week before, a house band, a tape…

On this day in 1741, Handel put the last of the ink down on Messiah. He'd started on 22 August. That's about twenty-four days, score and all, which in my old trade is called a fast session and in his was called Tuesday.

You can hear the speed in it, and I mean that kindly. A man working at that clip doesn't build every brick fresh; he reaches for what's already in the room. Some of the brightest…

On this day in 1819, in Leipzig, Clara Wieck was born. Sixty-one years of concert work followed — not a season or a splash, a career, the length of most people's whole working life.

The things I keep coming back to are the working ones. She played from memory when that was still an odd habit, and helped make it ordinary, which means she was carrying the whole evening in her head, night after…

On this day in 1724, in Leipzig, Bach put a new piece on the stands for the fourteenth Sunday after Trinity: Jesu, der du meine Seele, BWV 78, built on Johann Rist's hymn of 1641. Understand what that means as a working schedule. He was deep in a year of chorale cantatas, one for nearly every Sunday, copying parts, rehearsing boys and town players, and then a downbeat on the morning it was due. No…

On this day in 1971, Apple Records put out Imagine, John Lennon's second solo album. Most of it was cut at home, in the studio he'd built at Tittenhurst Park in Ascot, with a small band standing close together: Klaus Voormann on bass, Alan White and Jim Keltner on drums, Nicky Hopkins at the keys, George Harrison on guitar for a good few tracks, King Curtis blowing tenor on a couple. Then off to…

Three hundred years ago today, on 8 September 1726, Bach put a cantata on the stand in Leipzig with no choir in it at all. Geist und Seele wird verwirret, BWV 35, the twelfth Sunday after Trinity: one alto voice, oboes, strings, and an organ carrying a concerto's worth of work. Both halves open with the organ playing a sinfonia before the singer says a word. No closing chorale either. Just the…

Ninety years ago today, in Lubbock, Texas, in the middle of the Depression, Charles Hardin Holley was born into a family that sang. He kept the name and lost a letter of it somewhere along the way.

What I love is the room. Norman Petty's studio out in Clovis, New Mexico, a few hours' drive from home, where the clock wasn't ticking by the hour and you could stay until three in the morning chasing…

On this day in 1994, Nicky Hopkins died at fifty. You know his hands even if the name went past you. That tumbling, spilling piano at the front of the Stones' "She's a Rainbow" — that's a hired man who came in for the day, played it, took the flat session fee and was gone long before anyone thought about a mix.

He was born in 1944 and he was ill a great deal as a boy, which is part of why he…

Eighty years ago today, on 5 September 1946, Farrokh Bulsara was born in Zanzibar. The world came to know him as Freddie Mercury, and most of the world knows him standing up, arm out, a stadium singing back at him. I keep thinking about him sitting down instead: on a piano bench, in a studio, doing it again.

Because that's where the miracle happens. Those stacked choirs on the Queen records…

On this day in 1892, Darius Milhaud was born near Aix-en-Provence, and a good deal of what he heard later he carried home whole. Two years in Rio as a young secretary at the French legation gave him maxixes and tangos off the street, and they turn up unembarrassed in his music afterwards — Le boeuf sur le toit, Saudades do Brasil, tunes with their hips still in them. Then a night in a Harlem club…

Eighty years ago today, on the second of September 1946, William Everett Preston was born in Houston. Gospel first, then Little Richard's band at sixteen, then Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, the Everly Brothers, Reverend James Cleveland — a resume most session players would happily split three ways.

Picture Apple in January 1969. Four men who had been in each other's pockets since they were boys, a bit…

Fifty-seven years ago today, on 31 August 1969, Bob Dylan walked out at Wootton Creek and played his first concert in three years. Roughly 150,000 people across the three days, on an island you can only reach by water, which means somewhere in this story there are ferrymen who moved a small city across the Solent and then moved it back again. Rikki Farr and the Foulk brothers put it together, and…

On this day in 1919, in Nashville, Ellen Muriel Deason was born. You know her as Kitty Wells, which is a stage name borrowed from an old song, and the sweetest kind of borrowing there is.

The story I love is 1952. She goes in for a session, sings an answer song called "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," takes union scale like everybody else in the room, and goes home thinking she may be…

Sixty-seven years ago today, on 29 August 1959, Mona Best opened the Casbah Coffee Club in the cellar of her own house in West Derby, Liverpool, and the Quarrymen played the first night. She'd got the idea from a television report about the 2i's in Soho, and rather than wait for anyone to build her one, she went down her own stairs with a plan.

This is my favourite kind of room. Low ceiling, damp…

On this day in 1963, before Martin Luther King Jr. stood at the Lincoln Memorial, Mahalia Jackson sang "I've Been 'Buked and I've Been Scorned." No band. Just her, and a microphone, and about a quarter of a million people down the length of the Mall.

I listen to the programme as much as the podium. Marian Anderson, who had sung on those same steps twenty-four years earlier. Joan Baez, twenty-two…

On this day in 1909, in Woodville, Mississippi, Lester Young was born into a family that made its living on the road. He came up in the family band, and the story goes he started on drums and gave them up partly because breaking down the kit took so long that everyone else was already out the door making friends. Every drummer I ever knew has nodded at that one.

What he did with the tenor was…

On this day in 1968, America got "Hey Jude" — seven minutes and eleven seconds of it, the longest single to go to number one in Britain to that point. First record out on Apple, so the label was brand new and the song was already enormous.

Here's the bit I love. They cut it at Trident, off St Anne's Court in Soho, and Paul is at the piano and Ringo has slipped out for a moment, and the story goes…

Fifty-one years ago today, Columbia put out Bruce Springsteen's third record, Born to Run. The sessions ran from January 1974 to July 1975, and six of those months went to the title track alone. Six months. Most bands make a career in six months; this was one song, built up like a wall, layer on layer, glockenspiel sitting on top of piano sitting on top of strings until the thing shimmered.

He…

On this day in 2001, a small Cessna 402 took off from Marsh Harbour Airport in the Bahamas and came down shortly after. Aaliyah was twenty-two. Eight other people died with her, most of them working members of her record company and her crew, and the pilot. The aircraft was overloaded.

She had spent the previous days filming the video for Rock the Boat on the water there, and was flying home. The…

On this day in 1905, Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup was born in Mississippi. By the mid-forties he was recording in Chicago for Bluebird, mostly under Lester Melrose, and the setup was about as plain as a session gets: a voice, an electric guitar, and often just Ransom Knowling on bass and Judge Riley on drums behind him. You can hear the room in those sides. Nobody smoothing anything over.

One…

On this day in 1989, about two million people took hold of each other's hands and made a line 675 kilometres long, from Tallinn through Riga to Vilnius. Fifty years to the day after the pact that had handed those three countries away. Three republics, roughly eight million people between them, and a quarter of them standing on one road at the same hour.

What gets me is that the instrument was the…

On this day in 1917, John Lee Hooker was born in Mississippi, a sharecropper's son, and thirty-one years later he sat down in a Detroit room and made "Boogie Chillen'" — a national hit built out of one man, one electric guitar and one foot. Bernard Besman produced and engineered those sides, and the story goes that the percussion was Hooker's shoe on a board with a microphone aimed at it. Cheapest…

On this day in 1904, William James Basie was born in Red Bank, New Jersey. By 1935 he had a band of his own, and he kept it going for close to fifty years, which is longer than most marriages and all my cars.

Here is the thing people miss. The Count Basie Orchestra swung because of four men who mostly never took a solo. Freddie Green played rhythm guitar with no amplifier at all, four beats to…