Almost one hour of fantastic live clips of the late great Illinois Jacquet

Thanks for the positive feedback gents . Actually we should thank >hoffmannjazz<, who posted these great clips and a lot of other nice stuff on YouTube (and SOTW member and great tenor player LiAm84 who informed me about this).

sideC said:

... I see Eddie Barefield on the first vid. Man, now there's a legend. EB taught Lester Young, he taught Ben Webster, and he taught Jacquet. Jacquet told me that he started his career as a child dancer doing soft shoe on street corners for pennies. Soon he was able to bring his act to the stage. When he hit the stage, EB checked him out, and took the very young IJ aside to give him some help. IJ said that Barefield liked what he saw, but he made Jacquet change the order of his routine around, made him do a different opening, different middle, and then a proper finale. All with the elements IJ already had in his act, but in a better order of secquence. I don't think that IJ ever forgot that. And you see Jacquet doing his soft shoe on "On The Sunny Side of the Street." Man, it warms my heart to see that...

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Mr. SideC, thanks (again!) for taking the time to share your great stories and background information on Illinois Jacquet and his band with us, it's highly appreciated as you know. You can see the respect on the face of Illinois during Eddie Barefield's solo (around 6:25 in the first clip). Also thanks for the background on the dancing qualities of Jacquet (shown at around 13:55 in the first clip) and the roll of Eddy Barefield in that .

Good to see IJ playing Sonny Side on tenor in the first clip. During the concerts of the Band I saw in The Netherlands he played this tune on alto (also sounding fantastic on that horn). Didn't make any difference for him at all to play it in another key (alto versus tenor), always sounded great .

For those who never heard IJ on alto, check this 1996 clip (posted before here on SOTW):

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