Timex All-Star Jazz Show Celebration Part 5: Final January 7, 1959 Rehearsal

We originally envisioned today’s post as the conclusion of a multi-part series on the Timex All-Star Jazz Show, broadcast live on CBS television on January 7, 1959, and planned to build up to sharing the final aired broadcast–but in putting it together, we’ve uncovered a bunch of new research about the aftermath and response to the show so we’re going to stick to photos from the final rehearsals today and save the broadcast for a sixth and final part next week. But for now, to catch you up, here are the links to the first four parts:

Part 1: Pages from the original script, audio of Louis and Lucille going over the script, and Maynard Frank Wolfe photographs of the first rehearsal on January 5, 1959.

Part 2: The first part of the January 6 rehearsal, heavy on photos of Duke Ellington with his orchestra and Armstrong jamming with various Ellingtonians.

Part 3: The second part of the January 6 rehearsal, with Gene Krupa and Bobby Hackett joining the All Stars and eventually Dizzy Gillespie teaming up with Armstrong to go over “Umbrella Man.”

Part 4: The first half of the final rehearsal on January 7, show day, with an emphasis on photos of Armstrong with Jackie Gleason and/or Dizzy Gillespie.

Today, we’ll pick up the January 7 rehearsal with photos taken, I believe, a little closer to show time. In the previous installment, Gillespie was seen exclusively wearing a sweater, but now he has switched to the suit he’d wear on the show, though Armstrong is still wearing his same button-down shirt. Let’s get the party started with more photos of Armstrong, Gillespie, and Gleason rehearsing the “Umbrella Man” segment, with members of Diz’s quintet in the background (Junior Mance on piano, Les Spann on guitar, Sam Jones on bass, and Lex Humphries on drums):

Looks like Gleason got ’em in this next photo:

A taste of the vocal hijinks:

Dizzy goes up for the final high notes at the end, as Gleason appears:

With everyone satisfied, Louis got to take a little break to allow Duke Ellington and His Orchestra rehearse their number with vocalist Ruth Olay; Maynard Frank Wolfe snapped this photo:

The Dukes of Dixieland also ran down their spot in the dress rehearsal and Wolfe took two photos of the front line, Freddie and Papa Jac Assunto on trombones, Frank Assunto on trumpet, and Jack Maheu on clarinet:

At some point that afternoon, special guests Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Vic Dickenson, Marty Napoleon, Marty Napoleon, and Jo Jones finally arrived. Eldridge and Hawkins had been mentioned in the script since the first draft but by the time they got to rehearsal, there was only time to feature them on one number, “Body and Soul,” which would also include a scat singing duet between Ruth Olay and Dakota Staton. Maybe Wolfe was finally running out of film or he just wasn’t present when that sequence was rehearsed because we have no photos to share from it, except for one photo of Jo Jones and Gene Krupa in conversation:

Wolfe also didn’t take any photos of singer Barbara Dane rehearsing her spot with the All Stars, Bobby Hackett, and Gene Krupa–but fortunately, Milt Hinton was there with his camera and got this shot with (from left to right), Billy Kyle, Barbara Dane, Bobby Hackett, Louis, Jackie Gleason (on drums!) and Louis’s close friend, Slim Thompson. (This is not one of our photos so the quality isn’t as high, but we still had to share it for completeness.)

(And speaking of Milt Hinton, a Facebook post of these rehearsal photos led some commenters to assume Gleason was a “rabid racist” who looked “uncomfortable” around Black musicians. I think it’s worth quoting this passage from Hinton, in conversation with Gene Lees:
“I’m walking down the street one day, and I run into Jackie Gleason. I knew Jackie Gleason when he couldn’t get arrested. I worked clubs in Jersey when I had to buy him a drink. Bullets Durgom was his manager. And I knew Bullets when he was a song-plugger at the Cotton Club. He’d bring songs to Cab. So Bullets and Jackie Gleason are walking down the street. It was around 55th Street.” Milt has an uncanny memory for exact locations and dates.
“Jackie says, ‘Milt Hinton, where’ve you been?’
“I said, ‘Nowhere.’
“Jackie said, ‘Bullets, we’re doing this record date tomorrow, I can use Milt.’ But they ain’t used no black guys in any of those big string bands. You know that.
“Bullets says, ‘Jackie, we’ve got a bass player.’
“Jackie says, “Yeah? Well we’ve got two now.’
“I went to the date the next day, and everything was wonderful.”
“Were they the string dates with Bobby Hackett?” I asked.
“That’s right,” Milt said. “I made every one of them. It was called Music for Lovers Only. The problem wasn’t the musicians. The powers that be were the problem. Nobody had ever bothered to change things. I showed up, I’ve got a good bass, and I can play and I can read music. We had 65 men there. And all the big contractors were there. They heard me play, and the string players were interested in my bass, a Mateo Groffella, made in 1740. Wonderful bass. And so the guys all came over to me and were talking to me and the contractors took my name down.
“And that’s when I got into the recording business. I did Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand, I worked with Percy Faith. And it all started with Gleason.”
Back to the original post!)

Eventually, Louis returned to the stage wearing his show suit and it was time to rehearse the jam session finale. As already detailed, the original script laid out a plan for Armstrong and the other featured artists to team up with the Ellington orchestra for a rousing performance of “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue.” When Louis and Lucille rehearsed the second draft of the script after the January 6 rehearsal, “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” was still there. Yet when it came to airtime, that piece was out, replaced with a free-for-all jam on “Perdido.”

Why the change? None of the participants ever talked about it, so I’m left with conjecture. “Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue” was a brilliant Ellington arrangement with a built-in “wailing interval” over the blues that would have been perfect but it had two strikes against it: to properly perform the “Diminuendo” and “Crescendo” portions of the arrangement would take six minutes and the Timex shows usually ended with “all hands on deck” so the chart would have to be adapted to accommodate Armstrong, Ellington, Hackett, Krupa, the Eldridge-Hawkins group, Dizzy, etc.

Thus, a last minute decision was made to switch to “Perdido” as Ellington had an arrangement that would come in handy to get the ball rolling, but then, depending on if the show was running long or short, all assembled could just blow on it until the credits rolled. What could go wrong? (Come back for Part 6 to find out.)

Wolfe might have been growing stingy with the amount of photos he was taking (it’s possible that more images still might turn up buried somewhere in Jack Bradley’s home!), but he did at least grab three images of the rehearsal for this finale–what a lineup! In this one, you’ll see Duke Ellington, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Bobby Hackett (obscured), Gene Krupa, Marty Napoleon, Louis Armstrong, Milt Hinton (obscured), and Jo Jones:

Wolfe then got a better shot of what was going on on the left side of the studio: that’s part of Ellington bassist Jimmy Woode on the far left, trumpeters Harold “Shorty” Baker, Cat Anderson, and Ray Nancy up top, trombonists Britt Woodman and John Sanders, Duke, then guests Vic Dickenson, Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, and Dizzy Gillespie:

Greedily, I wanted a photo with Armstrong and Ellington in it together, but Wolfe turned his attention to the right side again and captured this absolute gem of a photo:

Dress rehearsal ended at 6:45 p.m., allowing some time for the audience to file into CBS’s Studio 50, located at 53rd Street and Broadway. Perhaps some audience members saw the big advertisement for the show that ran in the New York Daily News that day, complete with David Stone Martin illustration:

8 p.m. eventually rolled around and the Timex All-Star Jazz Show was on the air! Maynard Frank Wolfe must have had an agreement to not take any photos of the actual telecast, but he managed to sneak in a few from the sidelines. The entire Timex series was the brainchild of Oscar Cohen, Joe Glaser’s assistant–and eventual successor–at Associated Booking Corporation. Wolfe managed to get a few photos of Cohen during the Armstrong-Krupa-Hackett segment:

This next photo was taken at the moment when Krupa’s cymbal stand went awry on live TV:

Then Wolfe noticed a pit of executives, including script writer George T. Simon, watching the show, and captured a photo of them as Johnny Hodges soloed on “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be”:

But that was it for Wolfe, his three-day assignment was through. As shared last time, Joe Glaser turned one of his rehearsal photos into a publicity photo, but otherwise, I have not seen any of these images published anywhere else. Wolfe eventually sold his negatives to Jack Bradley and they remained in Bradley’s possession until being discovered by Mike Persico in 2018, with digitization finally completed in 2023. (And note: Wolfe took just as many photos, if not more, during the rehearsals of the second Timex All-Star Jazz Show from 1958 with Louis, Jack Teagarden, Lionel Hampton, and more–if there’s interest in a similar series on that show, leave us a comment!)

That concludes five packed posts devoted to Wolfe’s photos, but we’re going to quit now and come back in few days with audio and video of the broadcast and a discussion of the response to it at the time. Til then!