Con Alma Duet W Dizzy & Hal

This track is a 1986 radio broadcast from Karlsruhe, Germany when Dizzy toured Europe as a guest with Phil’s Quintet for a week. Probably one of the most formative week‘s I’ve ever experienced in my career. One of the highlights of every concert was playing a duo with Dizzy on Con Alma. It was an edge-of-your-seat moment. Dizzy was so free he could play anything anywhere. You never could predict where he was going to go, which meant, as the accompanist , I had to wait for him to play before I could respond and waiting is a challenge in a duo context. But I never feared because he always was clear about what he was playing and left plenty of room for me to interact. The concert must have been close to the end of the tour as Dizzy and I are pretty tight by this time.

To have been so intimate with one of the inventors of the music and a such great man was a privilege I’ll treasure for the rest of my life.