1970s jazz revisited...
Saxophonist Andrew White
A Facebook friend recently posted a link to this article about jazz saxophonist Andrew White that awakened the following memory:
It's circa 1975, and I'm in the elevator with my Mom traveling up to our family's apartment on the 28th floor. Buddy Rich happened to be there too; he was also a tenant of our building (as was Lionel Hampton, but that's a different story).
During our ascent, my Mom turns to Rich and says, "My son likes jazz. Cliff, why don't you show Mr. Rich the records you bought today?" And of course I was mortified, in part because the discs weren't all jazz (I'd bought some British art-rock), and the jazz discs weren't by big names.
I weakly protested, and Rich smiled and asked me to show the LPs to him. One of them was a record by Andrew White on the saxophonist’s own label, Andrew's Music. Rich hadn't heard of White before, and as I started to fill him in about White's study of Coltrane's music, he took a closer look at the record cover.
As was usual for Andrew's Music issues of the time, the cover’s design consisted solely of sparse gold-colored text printed on a white LP jacket. Rich turned to me with a scarily dark look on his face and said, "This isn't a bootleg, is it?" In terror, I explained, "No, no! White put out the record himself." So Rich smiled again. And I was very glad when we got to our floor and got out of the elevator.
Getting back to the present day, the article prompted me to pull out my copy of White's "Live at the Foolery, Vol. 1" LP for the first time in years, and I enjoyed the music greatly (It's a 33% chance that this was the disc Rich saw; I own two other White discs from the same era.).
Since White mentioned in the article that all of his LPs are still in print, I looked up his phone number online and left a message on his answering machine saying that I'd be interested in buying the other volumes in the "Foolery" series (there are 6 of them, altogether).
White called me back almost immediately, and I'm placing a vinyl order today. Only $8 per disc; a bargain!