Clifford Brown Max Roach on the Suppy Sales Show 1955.

[Hardbopjazz]

Has anyone here old enough ever seen this?

[JamesJazz]

Not old enough to have seen the original broadcast, but viewed it a few years ago. It's good, decent quality video and sound.

[bertrand]

Max brough this to the Library of Congress a few years ago. There was a public showing. Beautiful stuff.

I don't know where the clip resides now.

Bertrand.

[Hardbopjazz]

Max brough this to the Library of Congress a few years ago. There was a public showing. Beautiful stuff.

I don't know where the clip resides now.

Bertrand.

I know someone that has a copy. I didn't think video was around then. I thought video didn't come into play until 1958?

Edited August 21, 2006 by Hardbopjazz

[Allan Songer]

Kinescope

[Guest youmustbe]

I only have Brownie talking to Soupy and then playing in front of a curtain, with band not seen. Is this the same? Or is there one with band?

There is in movie Max and if I remember Brownie{?} 'Carmen Jones"

Soupy was a very hip cat. Had Jazz musicians on his Detroit show every week, Erroll, you name it, but the Brownie is only one that survived, I was told by a friend of his. In NY, he would hang at Birdland.

In my pre-Jazz Rock and Roll phase, my friend Jerry and I would watch Lunch with Soupy Sales, his kiddie show, ...White Fang, I forget all the characters. Lunch on the show was always a tuna fish sandwich with potato chips...the humor was 'in' adult, the show was a hoot.

[brownie]

The Brown-Roach clip was used by Ken Burns for his Jazz series.

There was an interview of Soupy Sales in Cadence magazine (February 2003) where he recounts he kept videos of all his shows. Soupy says he gave a copy to 'a jazz organization in California' and adds 'Clifford's wife LaRue, and his - Clifford Brown - kids, get a percentage of the proceeds. His kids had never seen any footage of their father until they received that clip'.

youmustbe, I have watched Preminger's 'Carmen Jones' a number of times and never caught sight of Clifford Brown in the sequence where Max Roach plays behind Pearl Bailey

Edited August 21, 2006 by brownie

[Guest youmustbe]

Never watched Ken Burns, any of his things. Maybe because I've run accross him on the street and he looks so, earth shoes like! Know what I mean?

If Soupy gave 'all' his shows to an organization, it's news to me! Will inquire. As I said, I was told by one of his buddies at the Friars' Club, that they didn't survive. Whatever.

[BFrank]

There's a video of it available on the BELDEN VIDEO NETWORK. Lots of good stuff there, actually.

To see Clifford on Soupy Sales, download the file named: "CB-Medley.m4v"

Edited August 22, 2006 by BFrank

[DukeCity]

Soupy was a very hip cat. Had Jazz musicians on his Detroit show every week, Erroll, you name it, but the Brownie is only one that survived, I was told by a friend of his. In NY, he would hang at Birdland.

Make that "Soupy is a very hip cat." He's still alive, and a buddy of mine was recently at the Blue Note in NY to hear Clark Terry's big band and ended up at a table with Soupy.

[Jim R]

I only have Brownie talking to Soupy and then playing in front of a curtain, with band not seen. Is this the same? Or is there one with band?

The Brown-Roach clip was used by Ken Burns for his Jazz series.

Brown-Roach? In the Burns segment I've seen, there's no sign of Max, nor any other musicians for that matter. As youmustbe indicates, it was just Brownie alone in front of the curtain, and the brief interview with Soupy.

I haven't tried the Belden download (not on my good computer at the moment), but I'm not aware of any further footage...

Brief or not, a grainy kinescope... this is still a total treasure.

[Hardbopjazz]

Here's a story I wrote ten years ago for the Detroit Free Press about the Clifford Brown clip and Soupy's close relationship with jazz.

MS

July 28, 1996 Sunday METRO FINAL EDITION

SECTION: FTR; Pg. 1F

HEADLINE: A STUNNING GLIMPSE OF JAZZ HISTORY COMIC SOUPY SALES FOUND FILM OF TRUMPET LEGEND CLIFFORD BROWN IN HIS GARAGE

BYLINE: MARK STRYKER Free Press Music Writer

BODY:

It was like stumbling upon a lost Rembrandt in the attic.

Comedian Soupy Sales, a television pioneer, began rooting around his Beverly Hills garage in 1994 at the request of a documentary producer at the A&E network. Eventually, he exhumed a film canister containing a handful of episodes of "Soupy's On," his five-day-a-week, late-night variety show, which aired live from 1953 through '59 on WXYZ-TV (Channel 7) in Detroit.

There, nestled among the pie-in-the-face comedian's collection of goofy characters like Wyatt Burp and Ernest Hemingbone and Charles Vichysoisse, was five minutes of priceless jazz history -- the only surviving film of Clifford Brown, one of the greatest trumpeters in jazz.

"It's like finding one of the lost tombs in Eygpt," says David Baker, chairman of the jazz department at Indiana University. "To find a film of Clifford Brown is something of cataclysmic importance because people can now see a man who shaped a whole generation of trumpet players."

The film features Brown -- or "Brownie" as he was known to friends and fans -- roaring through the Eubie Blake ballad "Memories of You" and George Gershwin's "Lady Be Good" in early 1956, just months before he was killed in an auto accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike at the age of 25. Brown segues between the two tunes without a break, and the segment concludes with a brief interview with Sales.

"When we'd come into Detroit, we'd play the Rouge Lounge at that time, but we'd always do maybe five minutes or so to promote the gig on Soupy's show," says drummer Max Roach, who, with Brown, led an influential quintet from 1954-56 and also played on Charlie Parker's seminal bebop records in the '40s.

"In this particular instance, Clifford just ran down and did it with the rhythm section that was on Soupy's show. But it's an unusual tape in that all you see is Clifford from different angles. You can see the way Clifford's chops and embouchure are and the way he used his right hand; it's a fabulous study in the way Clifford dealt with the the trumpet. It's just unbelievable."

Brown is among the most exhilarating soloists in jazz. The film captures the soaring melodic sweep of his improvisations, his honeyed tone and his breathless technique, which linked fire with grace. Brown played like the hippest angel in heaven, and his style reverberates in nearly every major trumpet star since the '50s, from Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard to Wynton Marsalis.

Lost forever Archaeological film discoveries aren't unprecedented in jazz. For years, people assumed there was no film of Charlie Parker until a collector tracked down the now ubiquitous 1952 clip of Parker with Dizzy Gillespie. Rumors swirled that record producer Norman Granz had more Parker film, and, sure enough, it turned up recently in Hollywood.

But scholars say the clip of Brown is a blessing because it's all that exists of this important musician. "Little pieces of history continue to be filled in," says Dan Morgenstern, director of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University.

As word of Sales' Indiana Jones-like discovery spreads through the jazz community -- and videotape copies of the Brown film are traded like talismans -- speculation has become rampant among musicians and fans: What other treasures lie buried in Soupy's archives?

The answer, tragically, is almost nothing, even though "Soupy's On" featured the most remarkable collection of jazz talent in television before or since.

A short list of the jazz giants who performed on the program includes: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Chet Baker, Coleman Hawkins, Gerry Mulligan, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Lee Konitz, Illinois Jacquet, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Earl Hines and Thelonious Monk. Miles Davis, who lived in Detroit for five months in 1953-54, was a regular, as were Detroit-bred stars such as Pepper Adams, Tommy Flanagan and Yusef Lateef.

But these were the days before videotape, and unless a program was shot on film or saved via a kinescope -- a film of the TV screen -- it simply vanished. That was the fate of "Soupy's On," except for a few episodes that Sales had a friend film in order to document his comedy characters. It's serendipity that Brown happened to be on a program that survived.

"Don't forget, you're talking about 1955, and nobody ever thought about taping stuff like that in those days," says Sales, 70, speaking from a hotel in Huntington, W.Va., where he was performing.

Other than Brown, the only jazz musicians captured on Sales' private films are pianists Eddie Heywood Jr. and Erroll Garner; Heywood is a minor figure, and film of Garner is plentiful. Even the shows near the end that were actually videotaped were all erased in the '60s by the station in order to recycle tape.

"If these shows were around, they would've surfaced by now," Sales says.

A good gig Sales was the biggest TV star in Detroit in the '50s, making a reported $100,000 a year by 1958. His noontime show for kids, "12 O'Clock Comics," was so highly rated that he replaced "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" on the ABC network for eight weeks during the summer of 1955.

"Soupy's On" ran from 11 to 11:15 p.m. in the early days, growing eventually to a full 30 minutes. Each show featured sketch comedy, talk and a healthy dose of jazz. The show's theme song was Charlie Parker's bebop anthem "Yardbird Suite."

Detroit's thriving club scene ensured a steady stream of top jazz performers, who Sales says were paid scale -- $25 -- to appear on the show. There was never any rehearsal. A soloist would choose a standard and a key that everyone was comfortable with and just play, says Jack Brokensha, who played drums and vibes with the Australian Jazz Quintet in the mid-' 50s and left the road to become a staff musician at WXYZ during the final year of "Soupy's On."

"It was live TV, and you only got two or three minutes per tune. And I remember one night Thelonious Monk played 'Round Midnight' and you couldn't stop him, and we had to roll the credits over him," says Brokensha of Bloomfield Hills.

Though not a musician, Sales was an aficionado who hung out in clubs and knew jazz like an insider. The show's original producer and director, Peter Strand, remembers that Sales' knowledge of the music led to the kind of incisive interviews you never see today.

"It was not idle chat. Soupy knew why they wrote what they wrote, so they opened up and could be themselves," says Strand, now of Glenview, Ill.

Sales says he knew at the time that the nightly parade of jazz stars was special. "That always occurs to people who star in their own shows . . . and it's only afterwards that everybody else says, 'We should've saved that.' "

Even as the jazz world elevates Sales to sainthood for his magical discovery, there's an inevitable undertow of regret at the realization that most episodes of "Soupy's On" have dissolved into the dust of history. All that remains is the steeple of an extraordinary Atlantis -- the film of Clifford Brown proves that this televised city of jazz was no myth.

Roach quartet returns to Detroit

These days, you're just as likely to find veteran drummer Max Roach performing an original orchestral piece or a multimedia piece as working in a traditional jazz context. But as Roach returns to Detroit for the first time in a decade, he'll strip down to basics: His longtime quartet -- trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, tenor saxophonist Odean Pope and bassist Tyrone Brown -- headlines the Legends of Jazz Homecoming Concert Friday at the State Theatre. Also on the bill are Detroit's own Straight Ahead and the New Graystone Jazz Orchestra.

Legends of Jazz Homecoming Concert

7 p.m. Friday

State Theatre, 2115 Woodward

$30, general admission. Tickets to a preconcert reception with Max Roach, including food and gifts from sponsors, are $50.

1-810-645-6666 anytime for concert tickets; for VIP tickets or concert information, call 1-313-963-3813 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday.

Soupy on the 'Cats'

Soupy Sales remembers a few of the jazz greats who appeared on "Soupy's On."

Ella Fitzgerald, vocalist: "Ella was wonderful. She was just the sweetest lady who ever lived. She was like sugarcoated; you just wanted to hug and kiss her. Anything you wanted she did."

Duke Ellington, bandleader: "With Duke, you were in the presence of greatness, you know. He sat down and played "Satin Doll" and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore."

Chet Baker, trumpet: "There you're looking at a potential big movie star. He was like another James Dean had he kept himself straight. He had such a beautiful face, and he was really a nice guy, a great personality, and he could sing. It was a shame to watch a man destroy himself in front of your very eyes."

Billie Holiday, vocalist: "Some people had a concern when we had her on. They said, 'You gonna let that junkie on?' And I said: 'Listen, I have her on 'cause she's a great singer. I don't care what she does in her private life.' She came on and sung her ass off. . . . She sang 'Fine and Mellow' and 'Lover Man.' I'll never forget that."

SOUPY MEMORIES

* Stan Getz, tenor sax: "He was so whacked out. He said, 'Just let me know when you want me to go up there.' And he'd play, and we could not get his attention 'cause he played with his eyes closed. He got through and said, 'How was it?' And I said, 'We went off the air five minutes ago.' "

* Milt Jackson, vibes: "He once was doing the show, and he pulled out a glasses case, and a joint fell on the floor, and I stepped on it. Afterwards, I said, 'You look underneath my shoe, you'll see something you dropped.' He said, 'Oh, thank you so very much.' "

Very nice. Thanks for sharing this.

[medjuck]

One can always hope. Supposedly lost film clips and even features do keep turning up. I think I read interviews with Don Pennebaker where he said all the footage of the '66 Dylan tour had been destroyed by Dyaln and Howard Alk. He also said the opposite-- that he (Pennebaker) had all the raw footage buried in his back yard.

Then all this amazing footage (including the "Judas" moment) shows up in the Scorcese PBS documentary with no explanation as to where it came from.

[Chuck Nessa]

Brown roach clip, brown roach clip. That seems to ring some sort of bell.

[Lazaro Vega]

That's what Bags said.

[Cali]

In my pre-Jazz Rock and Roll phase, my friend Jerry and I would watch Lunch with Soupy Sales, his kiddie show, ...White Fang, I forget all the characters. Lunch on the show was always a tuna fish sandwich with potato chips...the humor was 'in' adult, the show was a hoot.

As a kid in Detroit, my friends and I loved Soupy. His noon-time show was a crack-up. It was a kids show but he would do all this risque humor. We thought we were getting one over on our parents, like we were insiders. I remember those characters so well, White Fang, Black Tooth and in particular, Pookie!

[Jim R]

Here's a story I wrote ten years ago for the Detroit Free Press about the Clifford Brown clip and Soupy's close relationship with jazz.

MS

Mark, thank you very much for sharing that very informative and well-written article. I had Googled like crazy looking for details like this, and found almost nothing.

[Chalupa]

In my pre-Jazz Rock and Roll phase, my friend Jerry and I would watch Lunch with Soupy Sales, his kiddie show, ...White Fang, I forget all the characters. Lunch on the show was always a tuna fish sandwich with potato chips...the humor was 'in' adult, the show was a hoot.

As a kid in Detroit, my friends and I loved Soupy. His noon-time show was a crack-up. It was a kids show but he would do all this risque humor. We thought we were getting one over on our parents, like we were insiders. I remember those characters so well, White Fang, Black Tooth and in particular, Pookie!

Didn't he get fired for telling all of the kids to go into their parent's bedrooms and find all of the green pieces of paper w/ President's picture on them and send them to him???

Edited August 22, 2006 by Chalupa

[.:.impossible]

Brown roach clip, brown roach clip. That seems to ring some sort of bell.

I prefer your sense of humor to Alexander's...

[Hardbopjazz]

In my pre-Jazz Rock and Roll phase, my friend Jerry and I would watch Lunch with Soupy Sales, his kiddie show, ...White Fang, I forget all the characters. Lunch on the show was always a tuna fish sandwich with potato chips...the humor was 'in' adult, the show was a hoot.

As a kid in Detroit, my friends and I loved Soupy. His noon-time show was a crack-up. It was a kids show but he would do all this risque humor. We thought we were getting one over on our parents, like we were insiders. I remember those characters so well, White Fang, Black Tooth and in particular, Pookie!

Didn't he get fired for telling all of the kids to go into their parent's bedrooms and find all of the green pieces of paper w/ President's picture on them and send them to him???

Yeah, that's what did him in. Didn't Soupy make a come back in the late 1960's very early 70's?

[JSngry]

A few years ago, on The Game Show Network, I saw a late-60s episode of What's My Line (syndicated version) where Dizzy was the Mystery Guest. A blindfolded Soupy guessed it was Diz.

Also saw Jack Cassidy guess Duke under similar circumstances, but this was hipper.

[catesta]

Brown roach clip, brown roach clip. That seems to ring some sort of bell.

[Jim R]

A few years ago, on The Game Show Network, I saw a late-60s episode of What's My Line (syndicated version) where Dizzy was the Mystery Guest. A blindfolded Soupy guessed it was Diz.

Was it an actual blindfold, or coconut cream with whipped cream, or...? Mmmm, I gotta go get dessert.

[ghost of miles]

Terry Gibbs did a tribute to Sales called "Soupy's On."

Good to see you here, Mark--I really enjoyed your article on Jackie McLean earlier this year.

[ghost of miles]

Ghost:

It's good to be seen. Thanks for the kind words re: Jackie Mac. Also, in case you didn't know, Bloomington is my hometown. Grew up listening to Michael Bourne on WFIU ...

MS

No, I didn't know! Michael, of course, went on to WBGO & was replaced by another Bourne--Joe, whom I sometimes sit in for. And Dick Bishop turned me on to the Gibbs-Sales connection when I was working on a program about musical tributes to jazz DJs. I've inherited Afterglow from him... I always say it's like trying to play centerfield for the Yanks in the wake of DiMaggio and Mantle around that joint!

Edited August 23, 2006 by ghost of miles