Fifteen years ago, Joe Bushkin was the kind of talented kid who could sit in at the piano in any jazz joint in town and earn himself $10 a night. He couldn't read music very well, but he could climb all over the piano with a solid, hard-riffing style that earned him a lot of respect from people like Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman and others of "the mob."
His first big job was playing piano for Trumpeter "Bunny" Berrigan in a hole in the wall in Manhattan's "Jazz Street" (West 52nd) called The Famous Door. In 1938, Tommy Dorsey, who then had...
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