Jazz Condition -- UPI Arts & Entertainment

A splendid part of the jazz tradition took hold some 36 years ago in the basement home of a famous Greenwich Village jazz club in New York.

Monday nights traditionally had been a night off, generally without pay, for musicians and a "dark" night for jazz clubs that usually were closed after a hopefully hectic and financially successful weekend.

But trumpeter-composer Thad Jones and drummer Mel Lewis had been rehearsing freshly arranged charts with a "rehearsal" band they had pulled together with the help of some of New York's finest musicians.

It was the development of an idea they had first talked about when crossing paths in the 1940s while playing with the Count Basie Band and the Stan Kenton Orchestra respectively.

One night while their quintet was performing at New York's Half Note club, Lewis mentioned the rehearsal band to jazz broadcaster Alan Grant, who was doing a remote live broadcast from the club for his "Portraits in Jazz" show on WABC radio. Grant regularly presented live broadcasts from local clubs, a practice he continued later from Las Vegas.

Lewis invited Grant to stop by A&R Studios and check it out.

The rest, as they say, is history.

"The spirit of the band was dynamic, grooving in the freedom of what jazz improvisation was all about, and yet the discipline of section work rang out," Grant recalled.

Grant was excited by what he heard and talked owner Max Gordon into opening his club, the Village Vanguard, on a Monday night. Grant figured he could draw in a crowd of paying customers by talking up the band on his radio show and plastering the Big Apple with posters. The band would just split monies collected at the door. (Some things in jazz don't change much, if at all.)

And what a band it was.

Snooky Young, Bob Brookmeyer, Jimmy Owens, Jimmy Nottingham, Bill Berry, Joe Farrell, Pepper Adams, Jerome Richardson, Hank Jones, Richard Davis, Jerry Dodgion, Eddie Daniels, Garnett Brown, Jack Rains, Cliff Heather, Saul Herman and Marv Holliday were among the members on that historic night of Feb. 7, 1966.

"That opening night, I was in the kitchen (the Vanguard's makeshift dressing room and office) with Max Gordon while the band was setting up. We heard a lot of murmuring and when we peeked out, the place was so jammed people were not only standing on the staircase, they were lined up around the block. The band completely overwhelmed the audience with the joy and love the band created," Grant said.

More than 36 years later, the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra lives on, with a name change and having survived the deaths of its two co-founders. And, just as importantly as keeping the doors open at the Village Vanguard each Monday night as well as getting an occasional weeklong booking at the club or on the road, it also gave rise to a Monday night big band or jazz orchestra tradition in some New York clubs and in other cities across the United States.

Sure, they may get just beer money, a bar tab, or see "the door" divided 17 or 18 ways, but participating musicians get to play some of the finest charts and play music mostly for the sheer pleasure it affords them -- and their energetic listeners.

That's why the Toshiko Akiyoshi Jazz Orchestra has Monday nights nailed down at Birdland, and why there has been big band jazz every Monday at Bovi's Town Tavern in East Providence, R.I., since 1967 by either the Duke Belaire Band or the John Allmark Jazz Orchestra.

And it is why a Monday night big band tradition exists all over the United States -- with a succession of weekly big bands, for example, at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles and at Steamers Jazz Cafe in Fullerton, Calif., and why the Contemporary Jazz Orchestra plays Monday nights at Jazz at Pearl's in San Francisco.

Boston's serious jazz crowd has had several over the years to choose from, though not on a sustained basis. Pick a city, look hard enough and you may find a big band playing or rehearsing somewhere.

The Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Big Band has seen a succession of talents move through the unit. Dee Dee Bridgewater cut her teeth on serious jazz while singing as a guest soloist with the band early in her career when her ex-husband, trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, was a member of the horn section. From the band's successor groups, pianist Jim McNeely has emerged as one of today's great jazz arrangers.

And fortunately for lovers of the fat big band jazz sound, Alan Grant saved his broadcast tapes of that historic first night of the Jones-Lewis orchestra at the Vanguard.

He's packed some 70 minutes of solid big band performance by the aforementioned musicians, and a brief air check interview with Mel Lewis, onto a newly released, independently produced CD called "Opening Night." It may be ordered from Grant's website at alangrantjazz.com on the Internet.

It more than preserves more than a little music history.