Up for auction "Jazz Legends" Vido Musso & Neil Hefti Hand Signed Album Page . This item is certified authentic by Todd Mueller Autographs and comes with their Certificate of Authenticity.

ES-5712

Vido William Musso (January 16, 1913 – January 9, 1982) was an American jazz saxophonist. Musso moved with his family from Sicily to the U.S. in July 1920, having arrived at the Port of New York on the Italian steamship Patria. They lived in Detroit, where Musso started learning to play clarinet. Ten years later, he went to Los Angeles and formed a big band with Stan Kenton in 1935. Musso dropped out the next year to work with Gus Arnheim, Benny Goodman, and Gene Krupa. He accompanied Billie Holiday and pianist Teddy Wilson on recordings in the late 1930s. He replaced Bunny Berigan as the leader of his band and tried unsuccessfully at other times during the 1930s and 1940s to be a big band leader. But most of his career was spent as a sideman. After returning to Goodman, he was a member of big bands led by Harry James, Woody Herman, and Tommy Dorsey. He went back to play with Kenton during the middle 1940s. Having moved to California, he retired around 1975 

Neal Paul Hefti (October 29, 1922 – October 11, 2008) was an American jazz trumpeter, composer, and arranger. He wrote music for The Odd Couple movie and TV series and for the Batman TV series. He began arranging professionally in his teens, when he wrote charts for Nat Towles. He composed and arranged while working as a trumpeter for Woody Herman providing the bandleader with versions of "Woodchopper's Ball" and "Blowin' Up a Storm" and composing "The Good Earth" and "Wild Root". He left Herman's band in 1946. Now concentrating on writing music only, he began an association with Count Basie in 1950. Hefti occasionally led his own bands. Neal Paul Hefti was born October 29, 1922, to an impoverished family in Hastings, Nebraska, United States.[1] As a young child, he remembered his family relying on charity during the holidays. He started playing the trumpet in school at the age of eleven, and by high school was spending his summer vacations playing in local territory bands to help his family make ends meet. Growing up in, and near Omaha, Hefti was exposed to some of the great bands and trumpeters of the Southwest territory bands. He also was able to see some of the virtuoso jazz musicians from New York that came through Omaha on tour. His early influences all came from the North Omaha scene. He said, We'd see Basie in town, and I was impressed by Harry Edison and Buck Clayton, being a trumpet player. And I would say I was impressed by Dizzy Gillespie when he was with Cab Calloway. I was impressed by those three trumpet players of the people I saw in person... I thought Harry Edison and Dizzy Gillespie were the most unique of the trumpet players I heard. These experiences seeing Gillespie and Basie play in Omaha foreshadowed his period in New York watching Gillespie play and develop the music of bebop on 52nd Street and his later involvement with Count Basie's band. In 1939, while still a junior at North High in Omaha, he got his start in the music industry by writing arrangements of vocal ballads for local Mickey Mouse bands, like the Nat Towles band ]Harold Johnson recalled that Hefti's first scores for that band were "Swingin' On Lennox Avenue" and "More Than You Know," as well as a very popular arrangement of "Anchors Aweigh". Some material that he penned in high school also was used by the Earl Hines band. Two days before his high school graduation ceremony in 1941, he got an offer to go on tour with the Dick Barry band, so he traveled with them to New Jersey. He quickly was fired from the band after two gigs because he could not sight-read music well enough. Stranded in New Jersey because he did not have enough money to get home to Nebraska, he finally joined Bob Astor's band. Shelly Manne, drummer with Bob Astor at the time, recalled that even then Hefti's writing skills were quite impressive: We roomed together. And at night we didn't have nothing to do, and we were up at this place — Budd Lake. He said, "What are we going to do tonight?" I said, "Why don't you write a chart for tomorrow?" Neal was so great that he'd just take out the music paper, no score, [hums] — trumpet part, [hums] — trumpet part, [hums] — trombone part, [hums], and you'd play it the next day. It was the end. Cooking charts. I never forget, I couldn't believe it. I kept watching him. It was fantastic. Hefti would not focus on arranging seriously for a few more years. As a member of Astor's band, he concentrated on playing trumpet. After an injury forced him to leave Bob Astor, he stayed a while in New York. He played with Bobby Byrne in late 1942, then with Charlie Barnet for whom he wrote the classic arrangement of "Skyliner".[1] During his time in New York, he hung around the clubs on 52nd Street, listening to bebop trumpet master Dizzy Gillespie and other musicians, and immersing himself in the new music. Since he didn't have the money to actually go into the clubs, he would sneak into the kitchen and hang out with the bands, and he got to know many of the great beboppers. He finally left New York for a while to play with the Les Lieber rhumba band in Cuba. When he returned from Cuba in 1943, he joined the Charlie Spivak band, which led him out to California for the first time, to make a band picture. Hefti fell in love with California. After making the picture in Los Angeles, he dropped out of the Spivak band to stay in California.