Quintet of the Year - Hardcover

ory of the greatest jazz concert ever

It has entered musical legend as simply “the Massey Hall concert,” the night in Toronto in May 1953 when five of the most creative and influential jazz musicians of all time took the stage together, for the only time in their lives: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, and Max Roach.

The event did not have auspicious beginnings. There was no rehearsal not even a sound check. A world heavyweight title fight on the same night meant the hall was less than half full. Charlie Parker turned up with a white plastic saxophone. But a tape machine was running, and the recordings of the concert became an album that has been reissued over and over again for nearly fifty years – sometimes entitled, with little exaggeration, The Greatest Jazz Concert Ever.

Quintet of the Year is the tale of that historic concert - but to fix its co-ordinates in history this ground

Geoffrey Haydon began his career writing and producing music programmes for BBC radio, then moved to television. Films include The Three Faces of Jazz, The Friendly Invasion, Satchmo at Seventy, A Conversation with Duke Ellington, and Stan Tracey Original. His 1992 film about the composer John Tavener won the Indies Award for Best Music and Arts Programme. Author of John Tavener: Glimpses of Paradise, he lives in the United Kingdom.