Word: bandstands
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Retreat, a smoky riverfront club on Decatur Street. Last year, when Sancton started playing at the Cajun, a Manhattan night spot, he discovered that his pianist occasionally filled in with Woody's group at Michael's Pub. The pianist later told Allen about Sancton's return to the bandstand. "I met him in 1971," the filmmaker responded. "Do you think he remembers...
...sandy-haired man in an open-necked white shirt and corduroy trousers saunters in and heads for an empty table. He nonchalantly opens a tattered case and removes, then hooks together, the sections of an antique clarinet. Peering through his familiar black-rimmed glasses, he hops up onto the bandstand and takes his usual seat next to the piano. The trumpet player snaps his fingers twice, and suddenly the whole room is reverberating to the strains of a 1905 pop tune, In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree...
...past 18 years, with rare exceptions, Woody Allen has spent every Monday night on this bandstand. He even skipped the 1978 Academy Awards, where he won an Oscar for Annie Hall, in order to play his regular gig in midtown Manhattan. Why does a man who has had such a successful career as a writer, comedian, actor and filmmaker feel a compulsion to go out and play the clarinet once a week? Certainly not for the money -- he refuses to accept a cent for playing. Nor is it for self-promotion -- he insists that his appearances not be advertised...
That quip was uncharacteristic of a man who scrupulously separates the clarinetist from the comedian and never tells a joke on the bandstand: when Woody is playing jazz, he's all stick and no shtick. Not that funny things haven't happened in connection with Woody's music. When he and his New Orleans Funeral and Ragtime Orchestra first got together in the early '70s, they were summarily ejected from the first few clubs they played in because their music was so noncommercial. At one establishment, the band was fired in the middle of a particularly lugubrious spiritual, after...
...grew up with rock 'n' roll. He gawped at Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show. He thought Jerry Lee Lewis on Steve Allen's TV program was the wildest and altogether greatest thing he had ever set eyes on. When Chuck Berry showed up on American Bandstand, one young world got jolted into a different orbit. The music was that strong. All velocity and no drag...