DICK GIBSON’S ORIGINAL LINER NOTES, MARCH 1, 1974 (unedited).

Joe Venuti and Zoot Sims are remarkable musicians. Everybody knows that. But until this masterstroke of a recording by Hank O’Neal, few knew how extraordinary Joe and Zoot are together. It’s hard as hell to write about music. Words and music are as different as root and branch. So, if you pardon me, I am not going to write about the various numbers in this album. Nothing has become more hackneyed to me, than the tune by tune description of liner notes, e.g., “Flailer McGee’s contrapuntal drum resonances and staccato rimshots perfectly augment the linear melody of Plumber Bill’s trombone, etc.” Such hyperbole is not only tiresome, but usually it is also both incorrect and, worse, meaningless. Cliff Leeman is the drummer on this album, and he is about as good as a jazz drummer can be. He plays drums exceptionally well on this album. Either your own ears will tell you that as you listen, or they won’t. Liner notes won’t help Cliff, or the listener, a bit. The same approach may be used for the splendid support work of Dick Wellstood on piano and George Duvivier on bass. In fact, the biggest secondary reason this album is so good is that it is built upon a superb rhythm section. The primary reasons for this album’s excellence are of course Venuti and Sims. Let me tell you a little about them, and how this album, in effect, had its long-ago start. Joe Venuti is 78 (he is supposed to be 68). This paring away of official years stems from Joe’s habit of telling anthologists that his birth year is 1906, the year he arrived in Philadelphia from Italy. Venuti’s family, in Philadelphia, is huge, old and, shall we say, serious. One of Joe’s uncles told me one night, in New York’s Roosevelt Grill, that when Joe got to Philadelphia in 1906, Joe was ten and moreover, “Joe could play the violin good when he got off the boat.” If that fierce old uncle had told you that, you would believe it, too. Zoot Sims is 48, in fact. He was born and raised in California, in the Los Angeles area. His father was a vaudevillian, and from several accounts, a good one. Zoot’s whole family was musically inclined, and Zoot, like Joe, was good early. At 15, Zoot was playing in “name” Jazz groups. By 1947, at 22, Zoot was one of the “Four Brothers” that comprised the saxophone section of Woody Herman’s band, which section is probably the most famous instrumental unit to ever exist within a big swing band.

In an odd way, this album began in 1968. Each year my wife, Maddie, and I fling a private Jazz party in Colorado, in September. That year the Jazz party was in Vail and for the first time we had invited Venuti and Zoot, and among about 40 other musicians, including Phil Woods, who flew directly to Denver from Oslo, Norway. We had spent three months tracking Venuti down to Seattle. The address we dug up was amazing. There were at least three street names and a huge street number, way up in tens of thousands. No Venuti was listed as having a telephone in Seattle and our letters kept coming back marked, “No Such Address.” Finally, a drunk in a San Francisco bar told us that we should append the direction “West” to the address. We did, and there Joe was. Venuti is not an easy man to find, to handle, to describe or, even, to comprehend. His music, however, is another matter. At that Vail party, I introduced Venuti on Friday night for his first set. Zoot and Phil Woods detached themselves from the Vail Casino bar and walked right down front up against the apron of the bandstand. They stood there shaking their heads throughout Joe’s first dazzling number, I Got Rhythm. Later, Zoot said, “I never saw him before. I’ve heard stories about him all my life. Wild stories. I wasn’t sure he was real, you know, maybe he was invented, like that Paul Bunyan guy with the ox. Man, he’s real though. Gee, he can really swing.” I should have figured out the obvious right there, but I didn’t. For some reason, the obvious is always tough for me to spot. Over that 1968 Jazz party, my records show that I assembled musicians into 46 sets. Yet, it never even occurred to me to put Joe and Zoot together. Dumb. Next year, in Aspen, the deed was done. Joe and Zoot got together at about midnight on the stage in The Red Onion and almost burned the joint down. It certainly was one of my three or four greatest listening experiences in 35 years of drinking in Jazz. People in the room went wild at the end of their opening number, which was (what else), I Got Rhythm. Ira Gitler, then with Downbeat Magazine, leapt to his feet and bellowed, “Jazz Ecstasy!” Whitney Balliett, sitting next to Ira, agreed. When Whitney’s article on the Jazz party came out a month or so later in The New Yorker, it was entitled, “Ecstasy at the Onion.” Reverberations of that set continued to ring in Whitney’s ears, obviously, long afterward. His latest book, a compilation of dozens of his New Yorker articles over a four or five-year period, is also named “Ecstasy at the Onion.”

The point of all this is to convince the reader of these notes that to say Joe Venuti and Zoot Sims together are fabulous is not just more liner notes. They are fabulous. This album swings as hard as Jazz can be swung. Also, it has moments of serene beauty in the solos. Joe Venuti and Zoot Sims have in common several things. Venuti is a legend, and Zoot is fast becoming one. They are both men of musical passion, although in social behavior, they display it differently. Venuti bashes people who annoy him, whereas Zoot’s lips tighten as he walks away from them. They both swing extremely hard. One might say that Zoot swings furiously and Venuti swings in a rage. When both of them are roaring on an up-tempo tune, a sort of animal excitement takes over. Zoot seems to be trying to blow the bell of his sax, and Joe appears to be attempting to saw his violin in half. But amid the howling of the tempest, the one supremely important musical effect is still there: they are still playing the right notes. Furious passion artistically controlled is a rare and wonderful thrill. As for ballads, Zoot’s are lovely, airy, deeply poignant songs of caring, and Venuti’s ballads absolutely spill love all over the room. Venuti’s ballads are hypnotic, as you will perceive on this album. Perhaps ten years ago, Maddie and I were in the big room of The Desert Inn, in Las Vegas, to hear Phil Harris. Phil was laying his crowd in the aisles. The room, packed with at least 1000 gamblers, freeloaders, drunks, lovers of the risqué, and “Dark Town Poker Club” fans, was in an uproar. Suddenly, Harris changed pace and, amid the din, to our amazement, introduced Joe Venuti. The old man marched sternly out into a single hot blue spotlight and began playing a ballad. I thought Harris had just pushed Joe off the rear of the sled to the wolves. Was I ever wrong! Within eight bars, the vast room grew silent, and it stayed that way until Joe wrung out the last note of the song. Then, hoarse shouts and shrieks erupted, and Venuti marched off into the wings. He had not once given any indication that he was playing for an audience. The tumultuous ovation continued for several minutes, but that was that. It was a magnificent response from people who could not have expected five minutes earlier to hear any violinist, and who, having now heard one, could not have had, in the main, the slightest idea who Joe was. Harris’s act never did quite recover from the glorious shock of Venuti. Isn’t it strange and sad that a musician as occult as Joe Venuti is now virtually unknown to the public? On an all-round, no holds barred basis, Venuti is one of the finest musicians in the world. Not just Jazz musician, as meaningful as that term is, but musician period. He can do musical things well that few other musicians can do at all. Zoot is Jazz’s great catalyst. His presence in even an ordinary group boots it into life. It’s some sort of elfin quality he has, a joie de vivre, that instantly communicates itself to other musicians. And, Zoot has played with just about everyone in Jazz over the past thirty years. It doesn’t matter what “kind” of jazz they play; they are happy to have Zoot aboard. I doubt that there are two more universally popular musicians within Jazz than Zoot and Milt Hinton, the “other” great New York jazz bassist, along with this album’s George Duvivier. So, here it is, Zootie-Venuti, sui generis. It’s a wonderful album; it swings; it’s beautiful; it’s musically valuable, and it is unique. Please don’t miss it just because you may not believe the truth I have told you here about it.

NOTE: According to his birth certificate (no. 159545), Joe Venuti was born on September 16, 1903, at his family home, 1010 Christian St., (south) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.