The cover to a 2021 reissue of the album "Jazz From The North Coast, Volume 2" reads "Rare and Obscure," but to fans like Brad Eggen, the 1956 recording is simply legendary.
Pianist Herb Pilhofer had his pick of top Twin Cities sidemen to fill out his arrangements.
The drummer? "Of course, his first choice was Russ Moore on the trap set," Eggen said.
Russell "Russ" Moore, who later put in nearly 30 years as the day-to-day, straight-talking union leader representing the interests of fellow Twin Cities musicians, died in September at age 94 — never having had to work a "straight job" outside music to support his wife and three children, son James Moore said last week.
"Completely cool, always," Moore said of his father. "Kind but unwavering and totally committed to the Minnesota music scene."
Russ Moore grew up in St. Paul and often accompanied his father, Sidney, to the elder Moore's job as a motion picture operator at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis. There, artists like Cab Calloway and Ella Fitzgerald performed, and Russ hung out with the musicians backstage, eventually picking up a desire to play drums at age 13.
This was an era when nightclubs doubled as strip joints along Hennepin Avenue, and a jazz musician could make a living playing six nights a week, Moore said in a 2014 YouTube interview with the singer Patty Peterson.
But it was in St. Paul at a show at the Lowry Hotel where Moore — fresh out of Mechanic Arts High School — learned that the drummer for Joe Sanders of Nighthawks fame was leaving the band and his professional career began.
