StLJN Saturday at the Movies: A little Night Music from Dizzy and David

This week, we're featuring a couple of clips from the television series Night Music (aka Sunday Night), a late night program that originally aired on NBC for two years in the late 1980s and has since attained near-legendary status for its eclectic mix of musical guests. St. Louis native David Sanborn was one of the hosts of the program, and in the first video you can see him performing "Ooh Shoobie Doobie" with trumpeter (and, not incidentally, entertainer extraordinaire) John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie. This one is worth watching just to see Dizzy's facial expressions as he delivers the nonsensical yet catchy lyric and the band members grinning maniacally as they join in on the chorus.

The second clip features Diz clowning a bit with co-host Jools Holland before settling in for a version of his bebop-era classic "Tin Tin Deo". Sanborn and Gillespie are backed on both numbers by the program 's house band, which at this juncture consisted of Omar Hakim on drums, Marcus Miller on bass, Phillipe Saisse on keyboards and Hiram Bullock on guitar.

With so many old television programs being reisussed on DVD these days, I find it hard to understand why Night Music has languished in the vaults. Perhaps there are clearance or rights issues with some of the performances or compositions; perhaps there are other business reasons for not issuing the shows on DVD. I don't know enough about the economics of DVD sets to guess at how many units a Night Music/Sunday Night set would need to sell to turn a profit, but given how fondly the program is remembered by those who saw it when it first aired originally, it would seem that there's definitely some sort of market for the material. In the meantime, it's nice to have clips like these which, though they may have a few technical flaws, are still fun to watch and give those who missed it a reasonably good idea of what the program was like.