DESCRIPTION:
I want to be Happy Venuti 1969

In 1969 George Wein brings his Newport All Stars to Copenhagen, Denmark.
In the band are Ruby Braff cornet, Joe Venuti violin, Barney Kessel guitar, Red Norvo vibraphone, Larry Ridley bass, Don Lamond drums and of course George Wein piano.

Joe Venuti is featured in "I want to be Happy". One of Joe's specialties was to loosen the hairs on his bow and play with the hairs over the strings with the bow underneath the violin

Giuseppe (Joe) Venuti (September 16, 1903 -- August 14, 1978) was a U.S. jazz musician and violinist. Venuti claimed to have been born aboard a ship as his parents emigrated from Italy, though many believe he was simply born in Philadelphia. Considered the father of jazz violin, he pioneered the use of string instruments in jazz along with the guitarist Eddie Lang, a childhood friend of his. Through the 1920s and early 1930s, Venuti produced many recordings. He worked with Goodman, the Dorsey Brothers, Bing Crosby, the Boswell Sisters and most of the other important white jazz and semi-jazz figures of the late 1920s and early 1930s. However, following Lang's early death in 1933, he began to slip off the radar. After a period of relative obscurity in the 1940s and 1950s, he was 'rediscovered' in the late 1960s and established a musical relationship with tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims, that was almost as fruitful as his previous collaboration with Lang. Venuti and Sims produced a number of very exciting recordings in 1974/75: an appropriate coda to the great violinist's career.