StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: The further adventures of Clark Terry

This week, we're continuing our tribute to the late trumpeter and St. Louis native Clark Terry to celebrate the centennial of his birth, which is coming up on Monday, December 14. (Previous installments have included a collection of videos of Terry playing the music of Duke Ellington, a two-part look at his Big Bad Band, and a compilation of Terry performing with some of his famous friends.)

Today's post features a handful of later-career performances from Terry, plus what appears to be a genuinely little-seen rarity. That would be the first video up top, which has nearly half an hour of film of Terry in 1967, fronting a big band for a local telethon performance on WHAS, then the CBS affiliate in Louisville, KY.

This clip seems significant for several reasons - not only is it an extended performance, documented with reasonably good sound quality, but the film is in color, which would have been somewhat unusual for a local broadcast at the time. (The national networks had just gone all-color the previous year.) Moreover, at a time when rock music was dominating radio, TV, and popular culture, a local TV station in the US giving this much time to jazz would have been unusual in itself.

Given that this video currently has fewer than 100 views on YouTube, it would seem that it hasn't yet been discovered by Terry's fans around the world, but perhaps this post will help call a bit more attention to it.

After the jump, you can see the first of several later performances by Terry, a concert staged in December 1990 at the University of New Hampshire (which eventually named its annual jazz festival after him) to celebrate his 70th birthday.

That's followed by a quartet performance from August 1994 at the New Morning Jazz Blues Festival in Geneva, Switzerland, for which Terry was backed by pianist Dado Moroni, bassist Pierre Boussaguet and drummer Alvin Queen.

Next, there's another performance at the University of New Hampsire, marking Terry's 75th birthday in December 1995 with a special for local public television and featuring a lineup of musicians including Hal Crook (trombone), Fred Haas (tenor sax), Bill Humphrey (alto sax), Doc Cheatham (trumpet), Ryan Kisor (trumpet), Herb Pomeroy (trumpet), Gray Sargent (guitar), James Williams (piano), Milt Hinton (bass), and Louis Bellson (drums).

The last two videos document more small group performances from jazz festivals overseas. The penultimate clip shows Terry with drummer Sylvia Cuenca, pianist Don Friedman, bassist Marcus McLaurine, and alto saxophonist David Glasser, performing in 2000 at the Internationale Jazzwoche Burghausen in Germany.

The final performance was recorded in 2001 during the Saint Lucia Jazz Festival on the Carribbean island of the same name, and features Terry leading a quintet with Donald Harrison on alto sax, Anthony Wonsey on piano, Curtis Lundy on bass, and Victor Lewis on drums.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...