MUSIC MAN OF
COMBLAIN-LA-TOUR
A mud-spattered
soldier from Brooklyn USA wandered, late in December
1944, into the little town of Comblain-La-Tour,
Belgium. It was a village, really, with fewer than
1,000 inhabitants. The town was battered by buzz
bombs and artillery, and only a handful of people
had clung to it.
Joe Napoli, a Brooklyn
boy, was at this stage just plain homesick; he was
also wet, cold and generally miserable. He wanted to
forget the Battle of the Bulge for a few hours. He
wanted to talk to somebody who did not wear a
uniform; somebody who did not have "kill or be
killed" on the brain; somebody who would not keep
reminding him that Von Rundstedt had to be stopped.
On that cold, foggy
day in Comblain-La-Tour Joe got his wish. The first
man he met simply said, "Would you like a hot drink?
Or a chance to warm your feet?" It was the first
real kindness Joe had encountered in a long time.
All he could do was nod. The man led him into one of
the few houses that had escaped the flying bombs.
Right behind the house was a big kitchen where
shining pots were hanging and a glowing stove was
giving out a wonderful heat. Joe was introduced to
half a dozen people who were talking about crops and
what the priest had said at mass - all just as if
the war had never existed! "They took me in," Joe
said later in awe, "as though I was one of them.
They fed me and gave me a place by the stove and
suddenly I wasn't homesick anymore. Man, it was
wonderful!"
After that Joe's love
affair with the little Belgian town blossomed
rapidly. He came back to visit his new friends as
often as possible, and they always welcomed him like
a long lost son.
Eventually, Joe
Napoli, like millions of other G.I.'s, was shipped
back to the States. Yet even then he never forgot
Comblain-La-Tour, and he never stopped asking
himself one question "How can I show my gratitude?"
The answer was a long
time coming. Joe had to earn a living first of all.
It took him almost 10 years to become established as
a manager-producer of bands, and an as agent for
singers. But in 1955 he was solid enough to make his
first trip back to Europe, managing bands touring
the continent. Before the tour was over, Joe found
time to pay a quick visit to Comblain-La-Tour. Most
of the homes had been rebuilt and the fields and
mountains seemed more beautiful than when he'd seen
them before. "But all I could do," he remembers now
"was go around shaking hands and say how glad I was
to be back." Then early in 1959 he got his big
inspiration, "I heard," he says, "that the town
needed money to rebuild it's church. That's when I
knew I couldn't let the people down. My business was
music and handling bands. I decided to get some
bands together and stage a big festival to raise
money for the church, and stage it right there in
the village square!"
From any point of
view, it was a crazy idea. Nobody outside Belgium
had ever heard of Comblain-La-Tour. The town was too
small to accommodate hordes of people - even if they
did come. Joe had never staged a big festival in his
life.
But his enthusiasm
worked wonders. Paul Gabriel, chief of the newspaper
La Meuse, got behind the project and became its
sponsor. Two others who worked closely with Joe were
Willy Henroteaux, ace publicity man, and Madame
Raymonde Lismonde, a genius on plans and details.
Working together, the
group decided that August 2nd,1959, would be the big
day. Then they beat the publicity drums in a
non-stop effort to let the whole of Europe know that
the International Festival of Jazz would soon be
coming up in Comblain-La-Tour.
The mayor, the priest,
the postmistress and schoolmistress worked overtime
to make the town pretty. Joe scouted around and
lined up some pretty good talent: Romano Mussolini,
the George Gruntz trio, Lilian Terry, and Rolf Kuhn.
Then, when everything
was ready, it rained. "But," says Joe, "the Lord was
with us. The rain slacked off a little in the
afternoon. Before the programme was over, 8,000
people had showed up."
With the help of his
friends, the ex-GI had made history, and it would
have been hard to find a happier man. For, in the
end, there was not only money to start rebuilding
the new church, but also enough for a bell. And the
best was yet to come.
Joe and his associates
were so jubilant they decided to try it again. For
196O they picked some name attractions - Britain's
Petula Clark, France's Charles Aznavour, America's
Bill Coleman and Kenny Clarke, among others. They
gave the festival a two-day run, and when the final
count was made, they discovered that 22,000
spectators had joined in the fun More
encouraging-more than 100 journalists had been on
hand to Write it up, and a dozen radio and TV
stations had spread the message throughout Europe.
It kept on getting
better. In 1961, just over 30,000 were in attendance
- and the one-day record (16,000) held previously by
the Newport, R.l., festival in the U.S.A. was
broken.
By 1962
Comblain-La-Tour was the place. On Aug. 4-5,
visitors came from all over Europe, with a few even
from the U.S.A. America's Cannonball Adderley and
Frankie Avalon were the top stars - but there were
also bands and singers from France, Germany,
Holland, Denmark, Switzerland, Italy, Great Britain,
Belgium, and Yugoslavia.
Attendance in 1962 set
a new record: 42,000 in two days. And right now
Joe's adopted town is the most envied and
talked-about little place in Europe. It isn't hard
to figure out why. In four years, Joe Napoli's
efforts have attracted 102,000 visitors to
Comblain-LaTour.
Joe is the first
American to be made an honorary citizen of
Comblain-La-Tour. Because of him, the town' s main
square has a new name, Times Square, plus a genuine
Times Square-sign sent over from New York in 1961.
There had to be
something in this story of the war that brought Joe
and Comblain-LaTour together, but mostly it is about
how sudden fame came to a little-known village
because a man with a debt of kindness just had to
pay it off.
more about comblain
and Cannonball
Comblain is still as
much a "fête" as ever-a sort of Belgian equivalent
to the French 24 hour Le Mans road race attracting a
large percentage of its visitors solely by the
fairground atmosphere. However, the festival has
steadily grown in stature and the year 1952 saw its
coming of age as a jazz festival.
That the 1962 Festival
was such a success was nothing short of a miracle
achieved in the face of what was probably the worst
ever festival weather imaginable. This was the
festival during which "the rains came." The rains
came, and so then did the mud. Mud of the variety
which made the Belgian World War I battlegrounds so
infamous. Cars were stuck in it, spectators were
stuck in it, and musicians were stuck in it. That
the festival did not get stuck in the mud was due to
the almost unbelievably efficient organization by
Joe Napoli - the calmest festival promoter in the
business. A continuous and varied supply of jazz for
two days fortified the damp shivering masses against
the elements.
The inevitable
backstage panics disappeared smoothly and silently.
The appearance of the Adderley band was undoubtedly
the biggest single factor in establishing Comblain
solidly on the jazz map. The band was flown to
Europe from New York especially for the Festival and
their appearance on stage at 10.30 P.M. on the
second day marked the climax of the entire
proceedings. The band had actually arrived in
Belgium two days earlier and had been holed up there
after at a small family type hotel in the middle of
nowhere just watching the rain and eating.
The release from the
tension and dynamism of New York plus inactivity for
three days made the band understandably somewhat
nervous before they went on stage to face the
40,000, plus an amazing battery of Eurovision TV
cameras, radio and recording mikes and literally
masses of amateur photographers.
Any inhibitions were
quickly dispelled as Cannon got to grips with the
biggest jazz audience he had ever seen with some of
his by now customary happy and hip articulations.
And so to the music:
Yusef Lateef's
intriguing P. BOUK (Personal Bag) gives all the
front line a chance to produce what's in their
personal bag. Fine ensemble and solo playing by
Cannon, Nat and Yusef with the incredible work out
by Nat not the least noteworthy feature.
Jimmy Heath's jazz
waltz GEMINI has appeared before on one of the
Sextet's previous albums (Riverside 404). The
interpretation given here at Comblain makes an
interesting comparison and enables one to ponder on
the influence that Yusef Lateef has had on the band.
Nat in particular makes a bow in Yusef's direction
before ending his solo with a delicious quote from
"My favorite things." Yusef himself gets off a gutty
meaty tenor solo in between his flute work on the
opening and closing themes.
WORK SONG: by now an
established jazz standard produced some of the best
solo playing of the concert. Cannonball's work is
both earthy and humorous and he too exhibits an
Eastern influence in his solo. Nat is thoroughly at
home on his own tune and displays his incredible
capacity for playing "hot" by building his
contribution to a searing climax.
The old classic blues
TROUBLE IN MIND is largely a feature for the
extremely personal, sound of Yusef's oboe and Joe
Zawinul's thoughtful piano. The proceedings being -
climaxed by Yusef with a dramatically intense
sustained note.
So, Cannonball moves
on Stockholm, San Remo, Japan, San Francisco we hope
he'll be back before too long; in the meantime we
are glad he came to warm up Comblain on a very cold
and very wet weekend.
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