Author: seabreeze
Date: 2017-08-19 03:42
The only book length bio I know of Pete Fountain is "A Closer Walk: The Pete Fountain Story," published by Regnery around 1972, and now out of print but easily obtainable from Amazon and others. Probably ghost written (by Bill Neeley), it covers his New Orleans origin and his career up to that time pretty well. There's also "PETE," a Public Broadcasting System documentary from 1980 (in which the narrator actually calls him "Peter") that graphically presents some of the reality of what it means to be a working jazz player in the French Quarter of New Orleans. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Pete+Fountain+PBS.
Details about Fountain's life also appear in the two-hour YouTube video of Fountain's funeral at St. Louis Cathedral. Lawrence Welk's son, for instance, (who originally recruited Fountain to play on Welk's TV show) confirms that Fountain played everything by ear on the show and never did develop the interest the bandleader dad had hoped he would to read the charts with the sax section.
Finally on the Clarinetbb search index are over 1200 hits about Fountain, including the mouthpiece and facing he played (copied from the crystal piece Fazola gave him that eventually broke) to all sorts of biographical trivia.
Post Edited (2017-08-19 06:30)
|
|