LINER NOTES TO: Dodo Marmarosa on The Coast, 1945-‘52 (Uptown) by Kirk Silsbee

[Dr. Nelson Harrison]

LINER NOTES TO: Dodo Marmarosa on The Coast, 1945-‘52 (Uptown) by Kirk Silsbee

He was a born dreamer, a man enslaved in a universe of sound. Every sound had a secret meaning for him. Certain sounds issued imperious orders. If he was walking down a street and a cathedral began chiming vespers, he would stop and listen, rooted to the spot until the sounds stopped and he was released from their spell. One of his favorite things was to stay up all night so that he could stand barefoot on the dewy plot in front of the house, listening to the cries of birds as they awakened to the California dawn. For kicks he continued to whiz through the Bach Two Part Inventions, playing them at perilous speeds, never faltering on a note. And confiding to intimates that he was doomed as a piano player because his hands were too small. The hands that were so quick, sure and equally matched. –Mark Gardner

Four young pianists addressed bebop in Bud Powell’s immediate wake in the mid 1940s: Joe Albany, Al Haig, George Wallington and Dodo Marmarosa. While Powell emphasized a blazing right hand that approximated the ferocious horn lines of Parker and Gillespie--while minimizing his left--Marmarosa developed both hands equally. And unlike the others, he did not copy Bud to any appreciable degree.

Like Earl Hines and Art Tatum before him--and his contemporaries Erroll Garner, John Lewis and Lennie Tristano--Michael Marmarosa (1925-2002) was immersed in the classical piano literature of the 19th century. Dodo was uncommonly fast, harmonically inventive and rhythmically sophisticated. While that equipped him to effectively interpret modern jazz in many settings, it disqualified him as an authentic bebopper to some ears.

What’s indisputable is that Marmarosa was an original, and by far the most versatile of the four with an appetite and aptitude for challenging music. (Is it a coincidence that, aside from Haig, the other three were Sicilian-Americans?) As guitarist Barney Kessel told Ira Gitler of Dodo: “…the thing that we both had and that I liked very much was the same kind of inquisitiveness that Charlie Christian and the people that were playing at Minton’s had—to take certain standard tunes but to find different notes and then make up original songs that would fit the chords. And be able to play things that didn’t sound just like improvisation that’s diatonic in nature in the Swing Era, where everything is sort of scale-wise. There was that desire to do that.”

Marmarosa was the most prepossessing of modern jazz pianists yet, though his discography is voluminous, he’s seldom heard, and the least understood of postwar jazz piano giants.

Born in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty section, Dodo (the nickname came from his childhood inability to pronounce his own name) was the product of that city’s piano culture that produced Garner, Billy Strayhorn, Ahmad Jamal and Horace Parlan. Teachers like Evelina Palmieri, who tutored Dodo, taught promising youngsters in their homes. Andrew Carnegie built Pittsburgh auditoriums and libraries, and the largely black Hill District was the hub of entertainment and musical activity. Cultural awareness was in the air at all times. “You could walk down the street,” trombonist and practicing psychotherapist Dr. Nelson Harrison contends, “and hear music coming out of every other house.”

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Pittsburgh jazz piano is that for all of the greats that city has nurtured--Hines, Mary Lou Williams, Strayhorn, Marmarosa, Garner, Jamal and Parlan)—there never was a consensus style. “Pittsburgh didn’t turn out clones,” Harrison insists.

The prodigious Marmarosa was an introverted young man, the son of Sicilian immigrants. He played in local outfits and went on the road with trumpeter Johnny ‘Scat’ Davis’s band before he was out of his teens. During his tenure with the Gene Krupa Orchestra, five sailors in Philadelphia beat Dodo and clarinetist Buddy DeFranco. The pianist got the worst of it and was sent into a day-long coma. While he recovered to eventually meet the demands of his job, the incident exacerbated his eccentricities and put further distance between him and reality.

Dodo played in the forward-looking orchestra of Boyd Raeburn. His son, jazz historian Bruce Boyd Raeburn, says of the beating: “It doesn’t seem to have adversely affected his playing, but it did create a mystique. He probably wasn’t suited to the rigors of big band life but playing in them was kind of what Dodo knew. I think he was conflicted about the day-to-day reality of it, but if there was a comfort zone for him--that was it. I think he coped by being a musician in this specialized atmosphere; I think it shielded him somewhat. I can’t testify to the oncology but with that kind of trauma, brain damage is not out of the question for Dodo. Post Traumatic Syndrome was probably a daily reality for him.” A rarely performed Marmarosa original from his 1946 hitch with the Raeburn band would be poignantly titled “Amnesia.”

Still the 17-year old pianist was up to the task of the Ralph Burns mini-concerto written specifically for him, “The Moose,” recorded by the Charlie Barnet band in October 1943. It’s a modern jazz milestone that, while grounded in the commanding technique of Art Tatum, pointed to new directions. But Barnet recalled Dodo pushing a piano out of three-story window because he wanted he hear what chord it sounded at ground zero. More importantly, Marmarosa and DeFranco heard Charlie Parker upon his arrival in New York.

It’s not entirely clear when Dodo first set foot in Los Angeles but his tenure with Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra saw the band spending an uncommon amount of time in L.A. From ballroom to radio station to nightclub to soundstage to recording studio, Marmarosa was kept very busy running from one to the other beginning from June to October 1944.

By November he was a member of Artie Shaw’s first post-Navy orchestra. It was a fascinating band, with swing trumpet titan Roy Eldridge as featured soloist, with guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Morris Rayman and drummer Lou Fromm; all of them made up Shaw’s Gramercy Five. Dodo’s work on “Grabtown Grapple” reflected the emerging bebop. Shaw commented in 2003: “Listen to a record of mine called ‘Grabtown Grapple’; Dodo takes off on a double-fast tempo that’s marvelous. He was an excellent player; he knew what he was doing. He had good ears, good chops. I liked his playing very much.”

Author and scholar Richard Sudhalter sizes up Shaw’s youngbloods: Pianist Dodo “Moose” Marmarosa, guitarist Barney Kessel, trombonist Ollie Mitchell, and others were clearly fascinated by, and embracing, the new sounds and inflections being developed in those years by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, and others. Not only in the notes they play, the chromaticism and chordal substitutions now becoming standard features of their work, but in matters of delivery: beside them, the romantic tone and “singing” vibrato of Shaw’s earlier work seem a thing apart, separated by time and circumstances.

Though the band traveled, Shaw made a concerted effort to stay in L.A. with his new bride Ava Gardner, and he kept his band quite busy. While booked at one of the downtown theaters, the curtain came up one morning and the pianist was missing. Two days later, one of the band members dropped his clothes off at a nearby Chinese laundry, only to be shocked at the sight of Marmarosa--silently ironing handkerchiefs in the back. Pleas to return to the band were met with cries of “Leave me alone!” Joe Albany recalled in 1981 that he heard stories of Dodo ripping strings out of pianos that were out of tune. Musicianship aside, Shaw later noted, “Dodo didn’t fit in to an audience-run business.”

Beginning in March 1945, Marmarosa was anchored in L.A. for what would become a nearly three-year Hollywood jazz odyssey. It would prove the most productive, well-documented period of his career.

This album is the largest recorded concentration of that little epoch. It coincided with the explosion of small, independent, and usually short-lived post-war record labels: Philo, Dial, Modern, Bel-Tone, Downbeat, Atomic, Sunset and Rex. All of them competed for a market share of what Dial owner Ross Russell called “the independent record derby.” For a versatile journeyman who could quickly grasp new musical concepts like Marmarosa, L.A. was a target-rich environment.

In May, MGM’s Thrill of a Romance, with Van Johnson and Esther Williams, opened. Musical sequences with the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra contained Dodo’s only screen appearance. On June 7, the Shaw band recorded three titles for Bluebird; a splinter group under Kessel’s name (with added tenor saxophonist Herbie Steward and vibraphonist Johnny White) cut four numbers the same day for Atomic. The music clearly illustrates how the young swing band players were embracing bop, and how Marmarosa was one of the most exciting pianists in jazz.

When Shaw disbanded in November, Dodo was at liberty. He took full advantage of Hollywood’s work opportunities: recording with Lionel Hampton and Eddie Heywood’s alto saxophonist Lem Davis, working with Slim Gaillard at Billy Berg’s nightclub, recording with Kessel for the Atomic label, and beginning his association with band leader Boyd Raeburn.

Though a white band, Raeburn hired fine black soloists (Eldridge, Gillespie, Oscar Pettiford, Lucky Thompson, Trummy Young, and Britt Woodman) and arrangers (Tadd Dameron and Budd Johnson). The band had been an insider’s delight in New York; favored by the young Lenny Bruce, among others. When Raeburn reorganized on the West Coast, he plunged into modernism through the arrangements of Tadd Dameron, Ed Finckel, Johnny Richards and former Aaron Copland student George Handy. “I see George as an offshoot of Billy Strayhorn,” Bruce Boyd Raeburn notes, “but with his own influences and eccentricities. He loved Dodo’s playing and I think he saw him as an equal. There seems to have been reciprocity of respect on Dodo’s part, too.”

Compositions like “Tonsillectomy,” “Dalvatore Sally” and “Boyd Meets Stravinsky” were more avant-garde than anything heard from the Stan Kenton and Woody Herman orchestras. That new music yielded mostly public indifference, and it required lots of effort to keep it together. “Boyd had to contend with the cliques—the potheads, the alcoholics and the junkies,” Bruce Boyd Raeburn contends. “That’s what it was like for him. But he believed in the band and the music, and he fought for it. When there was a problem with union cards or something like that, he’d go up against (Musicians Union boss James Caesar) Petrillo himself! That’s how he attracted those talented kids and kept them challenged, and kept them loyal.”

Raeburn drummer Jackie Mills, indispensable to the band’s music, took the place of Lou Fromm and acted as a kind of caretaker for Marmarosa. According to Bruce, “There always had to be someone around to keep track of Dodo, because he was liable to miss busses, trains and planes. They’d turn their backs on him and he’d disappear. Dodo was very valuable to the band but he was high-maintenance.”

Marmarosa’s virtuosity often placed him in the musical company of Eli ‘Lucky’ Thompson, the brilliant tenor saxophonist who had landed in L.A. with the Basie band in September. He was a transitional figure: swing-rooted but up to the demands of the new music. Dodo and Lucky shared superlative reading skills, great knowledge of chord changes and harmony, and improvisational wizardry. Their personalities couldn’t be more different: Marmarosa the introvert as versus the self-assured Thompson. (Lucky was part of the cooperative Stars of Swing band, after Buddy Collette and Charles Mingus had invited him in. He repaid their confidence by surreptitiously changing the opening night billing to the Lucky Thompson Quartet—thereby risking the violent Mingus temper.) It’s not hard to imagine that Lucky and Dodo held their most meaningful exchanges on bandstands and in studios.

Much of the Raeburn band was at Billy Berg’s on December 10 for the opening of the Dizzy Gillespie-Charlie Parker band. A Raeburn Jubilee transcription saw Britt Woodman in the trombone section, Thompson on tenor, and Dizzy sitting in on tunes by Handy, Johnny Mandel and “Night in Tunisia.” 19-year old Dodo also took the piano chair for Lester Young’s first post-army session for the fledgling Aladdin label, supervised by Norman Granz. Though he was the bopper’s pianist, Marmarosa also proved an adept swing player. As Richard Sudhalter wrote of Lester’s “D.B. Blues”: Pianist Dodo Marmarosa, on his way to becoming a key figure in the evolution of bebop, finishes it out with a solo that dwells attractively on the sixth and ninth chordal voices, a practice that, whether intentionally or inadvertently, seems to be built on foundations long since laid down by Lester Young.

Around this time Dodo moved into a two-story house on Gardner near Santa Monica Boulevard. It was practically walking distance of Hollywood’s “Radio Row”--where radio execs, song-pluggers, disc jockeys, actors and musicians went from studio to bar to nightclub around Sunset and Vine. Legend has it that Marmarosa painted his bathtub green—the better to soak in private reveries between a Raeburn Jubilee and a couple of Slim Gaillard sessions.

The famous “Slim’s Jam” date with Parker, Gillespie and tenor saxophonist Jack McVea, contained good-natured jiving over a borrowed reed and agreeable music. But McVea later recounted, after it was over that Parker went back to the Civic Hotel in Little Tokyo and smashed his horn against a wall. Parker’s mood, indeed.

Dodo’s Jan. 11, 1946 Atomic Records date is full of typically febrile Thompson solos. “How High The Moon” is the work of a versatile master with one foot in swing and the other in bop: he plays all the changes as they come by and adorns the melodic line, yet floats in the most confident, liquid manner on the bright tempo. If Thompson acknowledges his debt to Coleman Hawkins, Marmarosa tips his hat to the arpeggio style of Art Tatum.

Two trio numbers from that date show the pianist at his most graceful and sunny (“Mellow Mood”) and prophetic: the locked-hands of “Dodo’s Blues” would later codify in George Shearing’s style.

Jubilee’s buoyant emcee, Ernie ‘Bubbles’ Whitman, introduces two solo piano titles. “Deep Purple” is appropriately lush but expertly plays with rhythmic displacement, while “Tea For Two,” with its stride piano and arpeggios, is the work of a first class Tatum acolyte.

At that time, Hollywood had the biggest concentration of jazz-friendly nightclubs that it ever would. Big band musicians and lone-wolf jammers all headed on Sunday afternoons to the square half-mile that included Billy Berg’s, Club Morocco and The Hangover (with its neon sign drunk leaning on a lamppost) on Vine Street, to Zardi’s, The Streets of Paris, The Jade and Billy Berg’s Swing Club on Hollywood Boulevard. Art Tatum, Coleman Hawkins, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Teddy Wilson, Charlie Parker, Willie Smith, Eddie Heywood, Vic Dickenson, Slim Gaillard, Slam Stewart, Leo Watson, Big Sid Catlett, Nellie Lutcher, Marie Bryant, Barney Kessel, Allen Eager and soloists from the touring white dance orchestras and the black bands on Central Avenue could all be heard for the price of a couple of drinks.

Jazz fan Mary Sullivan, in an unpublished 1987 letter, recalled her teenage years and gave a little bit of the Sunday jazz flavor in Hollywood: …those deliciously seedy places that could hardly be called night clubs (they looked so strange when you walked into them from out of the sunshine, like coming out of a movie in the afternoon), full of smoke and colored lights, and in the corner four or five musicians dressed in their ordinary clothes would be playing “How High The Moon,” and the bar would be packed, the small tables full of people, and we would sit down and light cigarettes…

On a Sunday in March of 1946, the subterranean Streets of Paris was the site of a KXLA broadcast by Los Angeles Daily News theatrical columnist Ted ‘Lamplighter’ Yerxa, anchored by a handful of Raeburn Orchestra stars. Frankie Laine was an aerospace worker on a quest to, in his own words, “sing like a spook.” He mixes Louis Armstrong phrasing with Italian-American solfeggio on “Rockin’ Chair,” with soulful backing from Lucky Thompson’s tenor sax. Trombonist Britt Woodman’s rapid-fire articulation on “How High The Moon” shows why Duke Ellington later recruited him. Dodo’s solo is a delicious mixture of up-tempo block chords, parallel hands, and rhythmic hide-and-seek.

A couple of months later, Armed Forces Radio Services caught the Thompson Quartet and Vivien Garry Trio at Art Martin’s Club Morocco on Vine Street, on a bill that opened May 23. Bassist Garry, guitarist Arv Garrison and pianist Winnie Beatty landed on the cover of the July 1 issue of Down Beat. The photo, taken on the Morocco bandstand, shows the women in slinky off-the-shoulder gowns and arm-length gloves; Garrison has one of his characteristic hollow-body guitars. The lively cocktail trio mixed sharp arrangements, novelty tunes (Handy’s “Rip Van Winkle” had been recorded by the Raeburn band the previous September) and solid musicianship. The fleet, smart picking shows that Barney Kessel wasn’t the only guitarist worthy of playing and recording with Charlie Parker during his SoCal exile.

Thompson luxuriates in the big-toned Hawkins mode with absolute fidelity to the changes on “Body and Soul.” As much as anything else contained in this album, this track is a heart-stopping wonder. “What Is This Thing Called Love” sadly ends too soon after vibrant fours between the tenor and piano and a fine solo from Lucky. It must’ve been a thrill to hear him put up next to Dexter Gordon, Wardell Gray and Teddy Edwards at the Central Avenue jam sessions.

After seven months of struggle in L.A., Raeburn found a residence at the Morocco on June 26. His wife, the talented singer Ginnie Powell, joined the lineup but watched with frustration as the composer-arrangers took increasingly strong hands in the direction of the orchestra. “My mother sacrificed a lot for that band,” Bruce Boyd Raeburn discloses. “She was a very good singer with great chops and could have easily had a career after the big band era. But she supported Boyd and she believed in the band, too.”

Dissonance wasn’t confined to the band’s charts. Handy, a difficult and eccentric personality, had a heroin habit by that time and there were dressing room screaming matches. In August, Handy, Marmarosa, trumpeter Ray Linn, bassist Harry Babison and singer David Allyn left the band. Unmoored from the security of an orchestra, Dodo made his way in Hollywood solely as a freelancer.

At the end of March, Miles Davis, Thompson, Marmarosa and Arv Garrison were on Charlie Parker’s “Moose the Mooche”/”Night in Tunisia” date for Dial. Parker biographer Ross Russell recalled Dodo at the date: From the piano came the pleasing chords and runs. That was Dodo Marmarosa, with his short, strong figure and excellent position at the piano. An enormous head dwarfed the body and was responsible for his nickname, Dodobird. He was a jazz pianist who warmed up for the session at the Finale Club by playing the Bach two-part inventions at high speed, and his keyboard texture had a Bach-like quality.

… Three of the sidemen on the session—Dodo Marmarosa, Miles Davis and Lucky Thompson—went on to win awards as Down Beat’s New Stars of 1946.

In April, Dodo joined Benny Carter, the King Cole Trio, Thompson, Miles Davis, Joe Albany, Garrison and others for UCLA’s first jazz concert, presented by the on-campus Carver Club. Marmarosa was probably the pianist when Charlie Parker and Lester Young teamed for a well-received duet.

Lucky Thompson’s Down Beat session in September is excellent from start to finish. Like the two January titles on Atomic with Ray Brown on bass, Red Callender’s suppleness was a big improvement on Harry Babasin’s plodding beat. Dodo intones the changes under the tenor like a mallet on a chime on the pensive “Dodo’s Lament.” The stop-time “Slam’s Mishap” shows the pianist’s rhythmic sophistication, and the marvelous “Smooth Sailing” and “Scuffle That Ruff” yield sparkling piano solo gems. On the riff-based but cynically titled “Commercial Eyes,” Dodo plays it simple but can’t help adorning his cut with decorative notes.

Saxophonist Jack Kelson (known professionally as Jackie Kelso) played in a short-lived Thompson band at the Elks Hall on Central Avenue where Dodo was probably the pianist. In 2010, Kelson said: “Lucky was an incredible player and he had such generosity with his knowledge. He said: If you want to learn to play fast, you must first learn to play slow.”

Another Atomic trio date under Dodo’s name that same month utilizes Kessel’s guitar and yields two titles. The gracefully swinging “Raindrops” and purportedly Marmarosa’s vocal on “I’ve Got News For You,” shows confident rhythm and phrasing.

Nothing is known of singer Miss Dana, though she sounds like a darker version of the young Kay Starr. The latter was an intermission fixture at clubs like Streets of Paris.

Arrangers Tom Talbert and Lyle Griffin (Atomic Records owner) wrote the ultra-modern and whimsically-titled “Flight of the Vout Bug” as a Marmarosa feature. Recorded on November 4, 1946, he was more than up to the task. There was probably no one else in Hollywood who could have delivered such multi-faceted piano. But scrape off the Stravinsky-like horns and you’ll hear the chords of “Yesterdays.”

Marmarosa produced a magnificent descending piano introduction Charlie Parker’s “Relaxin’ at Camarillo” on February 26, 1947. As record producer Ed Michel notes, “Dodo was his own man, rhythmically, and he was the best at rhythmic displacement—his intro is every bit as rhythmically advanced as Monk.”

Two titles from a Jubilee transcription of late April 1947 catch an all-star aggregation with the underappreciated tenor saxophonist Herbie Steward in swinging form for “The Great Lie” and “Rose Room.” Dodo was also playing in similar settings in this period with Wardell Gray.

If Marmarosa’s comfort and assurance displayed on the July 1947 trio date are any indication, he must have been in a particularly beatific frame of mind. He is authoritative yet relaxed: skipping around the bar lines on “Opus #5,” romantically pensive on “You Thrill Me So,” “I’m in Love” and “Smoke Gets Your Eyes,” romping “Dodo’s Bounce” and “Campadoo” (a “Sweet Georgia Brown” variation), and “Lover Come Back To Me,” and delivering vibrant sketches of Hollywood on “Cosmo Street” and “Escape.” The give-and-take between Dodo and Kessel is symbiotic; hear the guitar-piano counterpoint in “Dodo’s Bounce.” This session, as much as anything is Marmarosa at his most realized.

Trumpeter Ray Linn’s nine-piece “Escape” encore from 1946 is convenient for comparison. Pianist Tommy Todd spells Dodo and the mood is like an all-star one-shot like “Make Mine Music” under Benny Goodman’s leadership. There are modern flourishes in the ensemble horn writing but it’s essentially a swing tune.

After a Slim Gaillard session in October and a new recording ban in January 1948, Marmarosa’s L.A. period effectively ended. He rejoined Artie Shaw, who was in tax trouble, in September 1949.

Shaw told a story about Dodo’s exit from the band. “Frenesi” sounded tired and dated to Shaw and the band but the public called for it repeatedly. “It was a rent-payer,” Shaw later conceded. “Something we had to play.” In Minneapolis he lectured the band that their musicianship could carry them through the drudgery. “So Dodo,” he continued, “who was a weird little guy but a marvelous player, said ‘I can dig it, I can dig it!’ One night we had just played it and somebody called ‘Frenesi’ again. After the third time in one night, Dodo said, ‘If I have to play that thing once more, I’m leaving.’ I said, ‘Dodo, I gotta play it.’ He said okay. So Dodo left. Never saw him again. That was his exit from the music business. I had a grudging respect for him: if I could have done it, I would have left too. I can’t blame him. He could afford to do it; I couldn’t.”

Marmarosa gave Bob Sunenblick a different account of his exit in 1995, and recounted a conversation with Shaw after a date at a military base outside of Chicago: “I got drunk when I was playing in the Officer’s Club and I broke some windows. I pushed a plate glass window. I was drunk…they said, ‘You’re subversive…or something like that. I’m going to have to let you go. I don’t want to, but you will get me in trouble if I keep you on the band.’” With a tinge of regret, he added: “It was a good band, a swinging band.”

Both versions indicate that as early as 1948 or ’49, Marmarosa was exhibiting psychotic behavior.

He returned home. Joe Albany, playing a businessman’s bounce with Russ Morgan’s band, heard that Dodo was playing somewhere near Pittsburgh and tried to find him. “I called the club and they said, ‘Well, no, not that week, but he’d been there the week before.’ So I never did get to see him after his Hollywood days.”

Marmarosa married a Pittsburgh woman and had two daughters. In 1952, she initiated a move back to L.A. Once there she asked for a divorce. He tried to make a go of the club scene but couldn’t land an A-list booking. For one particular job, a drummer was needed and pianist Gerry Wiggins had a referral: a street tough who was valet/bodyguard to Wig with no previous musical background--future record producer and composer David Axelrod. He could at least keep time. Amateur audio engineer Bob Andrews caught Dodo sitting in with the nascent Lighthouse All Stars on a couple of titles. The band is cooking and Marmarosa fits very well with the Hawaiian-shirted players. It was young Larry Bunker’s first job of note and it launched his laudable career as trap drummer and studio mallet percussionist.

Dodo tried to reconcile with his wife before he returned to Pittsburgh for good, after having fought the Hollywood Jazz Wars. On his way home, he was jailed in Oklahoma for drunkenness and his father had to bail him out.

He could be heard from time to time in and around Pittsburgh but Marmarosa was off the national radar. However, a few ears picked up a faint beacon from an earlier era. In 1956, Lyle Griffin’s Hip label released a poorly received novelty single, “Flight of the Saucer.” It was a studio-altered monologue by comic Lord Buckley, grafted onto the original recording of “Flight of the Vout Bug.”

A 1960 Chicago recording of Dodo and Gene Ammons briefly rekindled interest in the pianist upon later release, but by then he was no longer performing. He lived with his sisters until those arrangements became untenable. Marmarosa’s schizophrenia was being treated with long-term medication. When Sunenblick met him in the 1990s, Dodo was staying in dorm-like veteran’s housing.

As every reader of The Odyssey and The Iliad knows, soldiers take ten years to decompress from war. That seems to be what Dodo Marmarosa did. --Kirk Silsbee

March 2017

Sources:

Durst, Greg, liner notes to Open the Door Richard, Jukebox Lil ‘84

Mark Gardner, liner notes to Dodo’s Dance, Spotlite ‘75

Ira Gitler, Swing to Bop: An Oral History of the Transition in Jazz in the 1940s, Oxford University Press ‘85

Peter J. Levinson, Tommy Dorsey, Livin’ in a Great Big Way, DaCapo Press ‘05

Burt Korall, Drummin’ Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz (Oxford University Press ‘02

Jack McKinney, liner notes to Boyd Raeburn: Jewels Savoy ‘80

Ken Poston, liner notes to Jazz in Los Angeles, The 1940s, KLON ‘92

Alastair Robertson, liner notes to Boyd Raeburn: The Transcription Performances, Hep ’93

Russell, Ross, Bird Lives: The High Life and Hard Times of Charlie Parker, Charter House ‘73

Dieter Salemann & Fabian Grob, Flights of the Vout Bug, BearManor Media ‘09

Sudhalter, Richard, liner notes to Giants of Jazz: Lester Young, Time-Life Records ‘80

Richard Sudhalter, Lost Chords: White Musicians and Their Contribution to Jazz, 1910-1945, Oxford University Press, ‘99

Mary Sullivan, unpublished letter '87

Sunenblick, Bob, liner notes to Dodo Marmarosa: Pittsburgh 1958, Uptown '97

Bruce Talbot, Tom Talbert, His Life and Times: Voices From a Vanished World of Jazz, Scarecrow Press ‘04

Author interviews: Joe Albany, Terry Gibbs, Barry Harris, Jack Kelson, Dr. Nelson Harrison, Ed Michel, Jack Segal, Artie Shaw