Quote from Percy Heath (MJQ) in the 50s

We wore Brooks Brothers and other Ivy League clothes. We had them tailor made. We ended up, the Quartet, with very expensive uniforms. They'd last for 10 years, even though I'd sweat 'em up. They'd last for 10 years.

RH

Twixt Zoot (Malcolm X!) and Ivy (Miles!) came the" Professor Bop" era - Jazzmen in mock-Academic dress to show that Jazz was serious...
Oversized dead straight suits & white shirts with berets and go-fuck-yourself ties. Dizzy!

Jazz as Black classical music.   With attitude.

j.

Paul Gorman is great.
All my favourite chats with Chris_H start with Chris saying that he'd just been into J. Simons and John had just got off the phone with PG...

Great place Ivy style London - Quality not quantity.

j.

I'll see what I can look up...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kind_of_Blue

^ Miles in Paul Stuart. 1959.

Best -

(Used to play that record in The Ivy Shop, have I ever mentioned The Ivy Shop?)

Last edited by Russell_Street (2008-07-03 13:01:53)

Don't forget to send FNB his cheque, after Our Ralphie eventually pays you.

I received this e-mail from a jazz critic:

Your list is rather short and fairly strange.  Chet may have dressed up at some early stages of his quite varied life, but for the most part he had a junkie's disregard for how he looked.  Paul Desmond was on the whole less involved with clothes than many other West Coast players, although virtually all of them settled for a kind of placid variation on the Brooks Brothers style.  (Incidentally, J. Press never was really much more than the Hollywood, lower-lower-price tag version of Brooks.)
that hold.  Roy Haynes, probably.  The Modern Jazz Quartet's dress code would seem to have been more a matter of wearing the equivalent of a band uniform.  Percy always dressed that way; Connie (the last to join the quartet) seemed above all to want to fit in with the others; Milt Jackson only dressed that way on the bandstand.  Besides, most people thought of the M.J.Q. as wearing tuxedos.  Ahmet had no jazz relevance (are you perhaps thinking of Nesuhi?).  And no matter where Horace bought his clothes, he was never memorable for what he wore -- except for looking kind of rumpled.