Fact #91430
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HILLY KRISTAL (Interviewed by Johnny Black in January 2002)
Hilly Kristal : I was born on 23 September 1931. I was born in New York City but when I was six months old my parents moved to a farm in New Jersey, so I was raised on a farm in Central Jersey. I started studying music when I was very young. I studied violin, theory and composition at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. I sang and played music in school, concretised a little, until I ran away.
I ran away from home when I was sixteen, went all over Canada, United States, Mexico. Then I came home and started studying voice for opera, with Dr Gibbs, Cambridge had a section attached to Columbia University, so I studied there. I did so many things. But I also sang pop music. I had a four-string guitar, then a six string, and I would sing pop music at parties.
I got married when I was very young, unfortunately or fortunately, but I still kept singing and working, and my first real regular singing job was at Radio City Music Hall. I was in the chorus and did some solo stuff, which was a lot of fun for a while – I mean, there were 36 of those Rockettes so, you know? We did a new show every four to six weeks.
It meant I could study and sing. This was the fifties, so I started going down to sing in coffee houses in Greenwich Village, until I was drafted into the Marine Corps for a couple of years. It was the time of the Korean War, but I never went to Korea.
People liked my singing, and I was a good-looking kid, so an agent (Irvine Arthur) and I were going to open a coffee-house together on the island, but the deal fell through. Irvine, who was a really good agent, told me that Max Gordon needed a manager at the Village Vanguard, so I applied and got the job and started managing the place. It was wonderful.
I knew jazz a little bit, but I came in there with Miles Davis, Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, Oscar Peterson, Modern Jazz Quartet … everybody, Getz, Mulligan, Monk … I was able to hear these people many, many times, and I got paid for doing it. I didn't book the bands, Max did that, but I opened them, made sure the waiters didn't steal, you know?
I left the Vanguard when a company called Gilbert Marketing needed an advance person to do promo for a concert tour that the Ford Motor Company was backing. Ford had a problem, in that their product had become identified as an older person's car. They needed to reach the younger people, and they did it by launching a new model, the Mustang, promoted through these concerts in order to give the kids in the colleges some means of identifying with Ford. Folk and jazz were important in colleges then, so the idea was to do seven or eight concerts as a test programme, but it became over 300 college concerts all over the country, and I ended up producing all the shows.
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Hilly Kristal : I was born on 23 September 1931. I was born in New York City but when I was six months old my parents moved to a farm in New Jersey, so I was raised on a farm in Central Jersey. I started studying music when I was very young. I studied violin, theory and composition at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. I sang and played music in school, concretised a little, until I ran away.
I ran away from home when I was sixteen, went all over Canada, United States, Mexico. Then I came home and started studying voice for opera, with Dr Gibbs, Cambridge had a section attached to Columbia University, so I studied there. I did so many things. But I also sang pop music. I had a four-string guitar, then a six string, and I would sing pop music at parties.
I got married when I was very young, unfortunately or fortunately, but I still kept singing and working, and my first real regular singing job was at Radio City Music Hall. I was in the chorus and did some solo stuff, which was a lot of fun for a while – I mean, there were 36 of those Rockettes so, you know? We did a new show every four to six weeks.
It meant I could study and sing. This was the fifties, so I started going down to sing in coffee houses in Greenwich Village, until I was drafted into the Marine Corps for a couple of years. It was the time of the Korean War, but I never went to Korea.
People liked my singing, and I was a good-looking kid, so an agent (Irvine Arthur) and I were going to open a coffee-house together on the island, but the deal fell through. Irvine, who was a really good agent, told me that Max Gordon needed a manager at the Village Vanguard, so I applied and got the job and started managing the place. It was wonderful.
I knew jazz a little bit, but I came in there with Miles Davis, Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, Oscar Peterson, Modern Jazz Quartet … everybody, Getz, Mulligan, Monk … I was able to hear these people many, many times, and I got paid for doing it. I didn't book the bands, Max did that, but I opened them, made sure the waiters didn't steal, you know?
I left the Vanguard when a company called Gilbert Marketing needed an advance person to do promo for a concert tour that the Ford Motor Company was backing. Ford had a problem, in that their product had become identified as an older person's car. They needed to reach the younger people, and they did it by launching a new model, the Mustang, promoted through these concerts in order to give the kids in the colleges some means of identifying with Ford. Folk and jazz were important in colleges then, so the idea was to do seven or eight concerts as a test programme, but it became over 300 college concerts all over the country, and I ended up producing all the shows.