Coolest Cape musical moments

Jazz highs, rock and blues getting down, rarely noted local scores

Feb 14, 2025

The Cape is famous for many things, fish to First Encounters, artistic and theatrical innovators, world-class beaches (and summer traffic).

Music is not on that list, but we have our share of amazing interludes.

Here’s a sampling with an initial focus on jazz, then branching out. Many more moments could be conjured — I’m already improvising:

‘Lady Day’ in Provincetown, early 1950s

Reggie Cabral, legendary owner of the historic Atlantic House, shared memories of his nightclub with Mary Klein in The Cape Cod Times, December, 1976. This was included, edited a tad:

I think you all know the great Lady Day, Billie Holiday. She played two engagements in Provincetown.

The last time Billie came down the alley (was) in a huge, black, chauffeur-driven limousine. She came heavily guarded, surrounded by people. She was heavy merchandise. Even though she couldn’t perform publicly in New York, she was very valuable property because her records always sold.

When she got out of the car, that was a nightmare in itself. You talk about taking a bad trip, that was really a bad trip. To begin with, all of her gowns were thrown over one arm. She had shoes and her makeup, personal things in a paper bag. The first thing she wanted was a bottle of gin. When she said she wanted a bottle of gin, she wanted a bottle of gin.

That night before Billie went onstage, all of a sudden she got hungry and looked at my partner Frank Hurst and said, “Baby, I’ll have a pork chop sandwich and I want it right now.” And she lifted up her dress and took out two 100-dollar bills and gave them to Frank.

We finally got her on stage and what was unbelievable was her drawing capacity. She outdrew anybody who ever played the Atlantic House and we paid her the least of what we paid anyone of known status.

I was kind of delighted when her engagement was over, because at the end I really couldn’t take it.

I think she’d been terribly hurt. I think she felt alone. She was terribly unsure of herself until she sang.

When Louis Armstrong opened Storyville in Harwich

“Storyville” is a storied name, harkening back to New Orleans and its red light district, jazz clubs cheek-to-jowl, fertile ground for the emerging American genre.

So on July 4, 1957, when “Storyville Cape Cod” opened, who could be more appropriate than Louis Armstrong as the headliner?

That’s what happened.

Storyville was the creation of George Wein, one of the great music impresarios of the generation, founder of the Newport Jazz Festival, who already had a Storyville club in Boston. The Cape version was located in Harwich off Route 124 beside Long Pond (people in Brewster could outboard over), and held 600, according to Paul Nossiter, a local clarinetist who became Wein’s partner.

Armstrong’s two sets, each 70 minutes, vanished into the jazzosphere. But he was not alone in making an ephemeral trek to Cape Cod’s Storyville. In three seasons, headliners included jazz giants Ella Fitzgerald, Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and Errol Garner.

The club closed for the reason most clubs close; unprofitable, despite amazing jazz (and a kitchen featuring killer ribs). Later it burned to the ground.

Great riffs, with ribs to spare

The coolest album cover in Cape history must be “An Evening at Johnny Yee’s,” tunes recorded live at a legendary restaurant on Route 28 in West Yarmouth in the mid-1970s.

Johnny Yee’s was classic Cantonese, spare ribs, pork fried rice, egg rolls, chop suey, pu pu platters, late-night Mai Tais. Johnny Yee also liked jazz, and had a cavernous scene.

Some of the best musicians around decided to become Yee’s “The Magnificent Seven,” led by trumpeter Lou Colombo, featuring piano man Dave McKenna, Dick Johnson producing, Art Pelosi on sax, Tony Defaio on bass, Lou Santos on drums. They recorded an album that swings to this day, then ate Chinese food courtesy of Johnny (was he the magnificent seventh?).

Colombo was a local giant, a sometimes one-handed trumpet player Dizzie Gillespie admired. Dizzie also played Johnny Yee’s, maybe that’s where they met, though Colombo had toured with the Artie Shaw Band.

Dave McKenna was nationally renowned, a top-shelf player who created the “three-handed swing piano style” because his left hand, holding bass and rhythm, was so profound and prolific under right-hand melodies that people couldn’t believe he did it with two hands.

When Polynesian dancing and fire shows weren’t featured, Johnny Yee’s attracted major talent like Buddy Rich’s band, and Maynard Ferguson (who had a 10-man horn section). An odd act with an odd name also showed up; Tiny Tim.

But The Magnificent Seven created the best high notes.

The Dead, live, at Cape Cod Coliseum

Bonafide Dead Heads like John Pappalardo, CEO of the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, know that yes, the Grateful Dead resurrected on Cape Cod.

“The bootleg from that concert, I still play it,” says Pappalardo. It’s considered among the best underground tapes of the band, and as aficionados know, the Dead encouraged bootlegging; thousands remain in circulation.

The Dead played the Cape only once, two nights, October 27 and 28, 1979, first night bootlegged. The venue? A place in South Yarmouth on White’s Path called Cape Cod Coliseum.

The coliseum was built to be home to a semi-pro hockey team, later occupied by infamous Vince McMahon of professional wrestling fame, in later years a warehouse for The Christmas Tree Shops. As a live music mecca it could hold 7000 people.

Dead tickets were $8.50, general admission. This being a Dead crowd, people showed early to hang in the parking lot, throw frisbees, alter consciousness one way or another. Yarmouth police reported big but not unruly crowds; for other concerts they often carted 20 or so people into custody, these two nights less.

Per usual, there was no glittery showmanship. The Dead walked on, tuned up, and played — for hours. To this day, a version of “Dancin’ in the Streets” is considered “one of the essential live recordings of the song,” as one critic put it.

Here’s that bootleg: The Dead live on Cape Cod. Personal favorite: Cut #13, “I Know You Rider.”

Another super-influential band also played the coliseum, though their performance was not saved for posterity: The Clash, 1982.

Taj Mahal closes the first OMR Fest

In 1994, stalwarts at Provincetown’s funky outermost radio station, WOMR, decided they wanted to bust way out of the box:

Produce a massive music, food, and wine festival at the Cape Cod Melody Tent in Hyannis — at the height of summer, August.

It was crazy ambitious, but amazingly enough started coming together. Sight unseen (good thing, there was nothing to see), Cape Air’s Dan Wolf pledged $3000 to get it off the ground. Some of Provincetown’s great restaurants like Bubala’s, Napi’s, and The Lobster Pot jumped in. So did The Roadhouse in Hyannis (owned by “Magnificent Seven” trumpeter Lou Colombo’s son Dave), even iconic Casablanca in Harvard Square. Big wine distributors (arms twisted by their restaurant accounts?) donated case after case.

A musical potpourri stewed, from jazz great Marie Marcus to folky Rory Block to mostly unknown genius Vinx to bluesman Luther “Guitar Junior” Johnson, all booked for a fest designed to start mellow around 3 pm, build up and party down until the Melody Tent shut it down.

One element was missing:

A headliner.

The OMR team — Tom Conklin, Deb Ullman, John Yingling, yours truly — couldn’t come up with the right name, price, or availability. Then Boston restaurateur Patrick Bowe, who owned a house in Dennis and was all-in, noticed something:

Taj Mahal was playing the night before in Boston. Taj has Massachusetts roots, loves most anywhere he can go fishing. Maybe we could piggyback on his tour, convince him to cross the canal?

We pitched it to the agent, the agent pitched it to Taj. OMG, he said yes.

The fest was a huge success. Taj closed, playing in his inimitable, soulful way. He included one of his favorites, “Fishing Blues,” which begins, “I’m a-going fishing, all the time …” Fitting indeed for the venue.

The WOMR Music Food and Wine Festival lasted more than a decade. To this day people talk about meeting future spouses and lovers there, reuniting with long-lost friends, settling old feuds, realizing that Hyannis and Provincetown are on the same planet.

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Speaking of coolest musical moments, be on the lookout for next week’s Voice: A Cape Cod guy made it to Havana, Cuba, on an intense musical exploration.