KING 4328; DECEMBER, 1949

I don’t know if Earl Bostic, alto saxophonist extraordinaire, had many outside interests in life. He may have been a poet or a pool hustler, someone who liked talking philosophy while seated in leather couches sipping cognac or talking trash standing in an alley while swigging gin.

But whether he had an affinity for rolling craps to make some extra dough or rolling dough to make delectable pastries, if going by the differences found in his recording sessions somewhere around mid-1949 maybe Earl Bostic fell under the sway of German artist Hans Hofmann, an expressionist painter and teacher who said: “The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak”.

Maybe he never picked up a brush himself, but Bostic seemed to have applied that advice to his own art and finally got back to tackling a song in a simple straightforward manner.
 
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