My mother being a Jazz singer & father Chet Baker's manager certainly put Jazz very prominent in my musical upbringing. As a kid, I respected Jazz, but especially the traditional jazz my parents were into... was for me an acquired taste. My father's next venture "The Ninth Circle" started out as a bar/steak house, & I had a lot of odd jobs there as a kid. Like every other bar in NY at that time, they had a jukebox, & like every other bar was pre stuffed with the current top 40 pop music... with little variation, as you would suspect, it was pretty tiered.
Somehow my father learned of a record distributor on 10th ave. that could press a single copy of anything you want & put it on a 7" vinyl record for $10. It wasn't long before the jukebox was stuffed with 7"s that didn't exist anywhere else, a lot of album cuts & a lot of hot Jazz. This attracted a whole artist/musician scene, that probably didn't even realize how unique the jukebox was, it just had this unique atmosphere.
I had no clue at the time how much this music was influencing me... as my taste was still primarily rock n soul, which being in the heart of Greenwich Village, was literally all around me. By the end of the 60's, my best friend & class mate was Creed Taylor Jr, & While visiting his house, his father Creed Taylor Sr, who hadn't started CTI records yet, but was already making a lot of noise with his productions on the Impulse! ABC, & Verve labels. He had just renovated his 3 story brownstone into a combination home & full on recording studio.
When I came over with Creed Jr. after school, Creed Sr. made sure we had to meet some of his musicians that were hanging around in the foyer... Freddie Hubbard, hank Crawford, Ron Carter, & Stanley Turrentine. Me & Creed Jr. were just there to smoke pot in his room... & were pretty unfazed.
Towards the end of the 60's I actually started hearing a lot of Jazz I could finally get into, a lot of it on Creed Taylor's new CTI label. When I proudly showed my parents this new Jazz I had recently discovered... they winced & said "that's that fusion crap". But I really liked it, & there was one song I kept hearing in the Ninth Circle that really stuck with me, Les McCann & Eddie Harris "Compared To What". Like so much of the music of that time, the message was so relevant & still is today.
There was this great live version from the Montreux Jazz Festival, & The Ninth Circle actually had a full 8+ min ver. on a promo 7". Not what you would generally call a dance record... but it still very much made me groove & moved my soul in a big way It also really contributed to opening up my musical taste at just the right time. Les McCann & Eddie Harris had another collaboration I got into, but I more often was following Eddie Harris on his own. I really enjoyed a track of his called "Is It In", great groove... but the intro & outro was always a dance floor killer, so I finally straightened it out with an edit, hope you like it too, Danny