Your life can change in one brief moment...

Originally Posted June 28, 2015:

It was 1960. I was in New York City with my mom as my chaperone, having just started playing "Kurt Von Trapp" 4 shows a week in "The Sound Of Music".
 After the show one night, I asked one of the pit musicians where he was going later and he told Mom and I that he was going to Small's Paradise. After hearing his description of the place and the people there, I talked Mom into taking me.

We took the subway up to Harlem and went into Small's Paradise about midnight. Joining some of "The Sound Of Music" band, we listened to the wonderful jazz music. it was an open jam session - any musician in the room would join in. Someone would call a tune and a key and count off - and away they would go. I sipped my Shirley Temple and entered a brand new world.

Mom had been a teenager during the height of the Big Band days and played her Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw records at home so I wasn't completely unfamiliar with the music, but hearing it live was amazing. We only stayed about an hour or so because I had gone through a big day, but the music carried me out on floating feet.

Mom and I became regulars at Small's Paradise one or two nights a week. And then...

We were sitting listening and this saxophone player 

 came to the table and said, "Hey kid, I hear you're a singer."

"Yes, sir."

"Well, get your butt up there and sing something." And with that, he took me by the arm and led me to the guy at the piano.

The piano player said "Well, kid, what do you want to do?"

The only thing I could think of was - "Ain't Misbehavin' - E flat".

The sax player took up his horn, the other players crowded around the microphones, the piano player counted off, and we began.

When it came time for me, I sang, luckily remembering all the words. The various players passed the tune around, contributing their own choruses, I sang another chorus and we closed the tune to a great round of applause.

(For those of you who may not have recognized them from the pictures, the sax player was the great Coleman Hawkins and the piano player the equally great Bill "Count" Basie.)

From that night on, that little 8-year-old kid would never be the same....and Small's Paradise became my second home until I joined the Army ten years later. Over those 10 years I got to listen to, jam with and talk with some of the greatest jazz musicians who ever played a note - Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Johnny Hodges, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Sarah Vaughn, Dinah Washington and so many more. 

From then on, no matter what I did to pay the bills, I WAS A JAZZ MUSICIAN - and I will be one till the day I die.