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Sandwiched in between his turns with Kenton and Goodman was a short New England road trip with Boyd Raeburn's orchestra in June of 1948. It was during an engagement in Shelbourne, New Hampshire, that Eddie was witness to another Jazz history moment. A new lead trumpeter, Al Killian, and drummer, Mel Lewis, had just joined the band. On that night, a supporting sextet of Canadian musicians led by a very young trumpeter caused quite a stir. So much so that Killian urged Raeburn to hire the trumpeter. The Canadian was Maynard Ferguson and thanks to Eddie Bert's diary, we know the origins of Ferguson entry into the American big band scene. After Raeburn, Ferguson played with Charlie Barnett, became a star in the Kenton band, and went on to lead his own big bands.

Back in New York, Eddie began making all kinds of gigs. At Nola Studios, he rehearsed four times with Miles Davis' ten-piece Birth of the Cool ensemble. But when he "went there for the fifth time, Kai Winding was the trombone player. Twenty years later I ran into Junior Collins, the french horn player on Miles' band. He said he had told Miles that I had said the band was out of tune. So, twenty years later, I found out why I was replaced! I hadn't said that but Junior always liked to stir things up. Miles though, was always friendly with me after that and never mentioned it."

In 1950, he returned to the Herman Herd, then Gene Krupa, and Lionel Hampton, but although he was tagged a road musician, he preferred working in New York, to be with his family. Eddie's wife had a solution. She "suggested I use my GI Bill benefits," he remembers, "and I went to Manhattan School of Music. A t the time, it was almost like a Jazz school; my fellow students were Joe Wilder, John Lewis, Max Roach and John LaPorta. While I was at the school, I did some one-nighters with the Sauter-Finegan orchestra and I sometimes went out of town with Charlie Barnet. When I was on the road, the school would send me homework to complete. Because I working, I couldn't go full time, but I finally graduated in 1958."

Also in 1950, Eddie rehearsed with another band at Nola's, assembled by arranger Gene Roland as a feature for Charlie Parker. "It was an enormous band," Eddie recalls, "with eight saxes, five trombones, eight trumpets and four rhythm but Gene was like that--he liked to be different. It became known as 'The Band That Never Was' because it never worked, just rehearsed."

In the early 50s, Eddie worked at the Paramount Theatre with Buddy Rich's band backing Frank Sinatra. Eddie remembers that the engagement was "just before 'From Here To Eternity,' in 1953, when Frank's career had taken a big dive, so the audiences were small. His voice was sometimes hoarse. We didn't always know if he was going to show up; it was weird. Harry Edison, Zoot Sims and Davey Schildkraut were in the band and Ava Gardner was there too; I used to ride up in the elevator with her and even without make-up she looked fantastic."

It was during this period that Eddie began to work in the thriving studio scene, doing two or three sessions a day in addition to gigs at night. He remembers, "The session contractors knew that I was established in town and unlikely to be going on the road with every band that came to New York, so I started to do a lot of commercial work."

The camaraderie of musicians during the 52nd Street era, and during the hyperactive studio scene of the 50s and 60s, engendered a spirit of brotherhood that enhanced the music significantly. Eddie Bert was one of a group of a hundred players whose creativity, and professionalism, made their music special. These remarkable individuals hung out, in between studio dates and gigs, at a bar called Jim and Andy's. Eddie remembers it was the "place to congregate. Everybody would stop by there. There's no place like that now in town. Guys are just not around now, everybody lives out of town. Plus there's not as much work. It's different, you don't see the guys. It was a great era, and at the time, it seemed like it would go on forever. Then electronics came along and it became a whole different scene.

Eddie also worked regularly with his own Jazz group, and began recording as a leader. "We played at the Café Bohemia," he recalls, "and on Mondays, the off night, at Birdland. I had a set group with Vinnie Dean on alto, Clyde Lombardi on bass, Duke Jordan on piano, and a variety of drummers, including Eddie Shaugnessy, Gus Johnson and Osie Johnson. Osie of course was a great drummer and for a while he, Milt Hinton and Hank Jones were known as the New York rhythm section. My group did an album for Savoy called 'Musician of the Year,' after Metronome magazine nominated me as one of the musicians of the year in 1955, along with John LaPorta, Bud Shank and Barry Kessell. The recording at Hank Jones on piano and Kenny Clarke on drums, with Joe Morello on some tracks, in fact, and it may be Joe's first recording."

Another Jazz legend entered Eddie's life at that time, Charles Mingus. He first met the fiery bassist in "San Francisco when I was with Benny Goodman; I remember Clyde Lombardi saying that we just had to see this bass player who was at the International Quarter in a group with four basses and drums. We went and there was Charlie playing lead bass! When we both got back to New York I started rehearsing and working with Mingus' Jazz Workshop along with Art Farmer, John LaPorta, Teo Macero and Teddy Charles and I found that as long as you did the right thing, you could get along with Mingus."

In 1955, he recorded with Mingus at "the Cafe Bohemia when he was starting to formulate his ideas. George Barrow, Mal Waldron, Willie Jones and I would go to his house where he would play something on the piano, which we had to learn by rote because he wouldn't write it down. He felt that instead of just reading the music, you could get more feeling into a piece when you have it in your head. The funny thing is when Fantasy included the Bohemia material on a twelve CD box set it released a few years, there were eleven previously unissued titles, so I called them and asked for a cassette to be made of the unissued material for me, because I played on it. But they wouldn't do it; they wanted me to buy the whole set for one hundred and seventy five dollars, which I really did not want to do. Eventually they agreed to sell me the box set for sixty dollars. When I checked in my notebook, I realized that's what I was paid for the original date, sixty dollars!"
Eddie also hired Mingus to play with his own group. "One night at Birdland," he recalls, "Clyde couldn't make it so I hired Charlie Mingus. I was giving Oscar Goodstein the list of musicians and when I told him Charlie Mingus would be on bass, he said, 'No, you can't use him. He just knocked a the cop down the stairs and he's barred from Birdland.' I called Mingus and told him I couldn't use him because of what had happened. He asked, 'You want me to play with you?' 'Of course!' So he called Morris Levy, the owner, and got permission to work. On the gig, after the first set, Mingus came over and said, 'What's the matter with this band? Nobody argues!'"

In 1954, Eddie recorded with the father of the modern Jazz saxophone, Coleman Hawkins. He remembers the date: "Hawk had just flown in to New York with his horn stored in the luggage compartment where it gets very cold. At the date he was oiling his tenor and I remember the producer complaining that we had been in the studio for forty-five minutes without recording anything because he was fooling around with his sax. I only mention this because there is a good picture of Coleman and I taken at the session by bassist Milt Hinton, who was also a great photographer, and you can see it in Milt's book."

Of course there were also the sessions he almost made, including one with fellow trombonist J.J. Johnson. Eddie explains "he wanted to make a two trombone album for Savoy with Benny Green who was unavailable so he called me but I was contracted with Discovery who wouldn't let me do the date. J.J. then called Kai Winding and that is when they made their first album and although the name Jay and Kai sounds better it could have been Jay and Eddie."

Eddie own recordings continued on the Savoy label. "A month after Discovery refused to let me record with Jay Jay they went bankrupt so Ozzie Cadena of Savoy called and asked if I would do a two trombone album myself, only I would be the only horn because they were going to overdub. Remember that this was 1955 so I didn't know what overdub meant but I went to Rudy Van Gelder' s studio and put down the basic track with the blowing and added another part later, when Rudy figured how to do it. On 'Stompin' At The Savoy,' I played open and with a solo tone mute which was the type of mute used by Tommy Dorsey for that commercial sound, and when Jimmy Cleveland heard it on a Leonard Feather Blindfold Test he said that it sounded like Jay and Kai at their best and gave it five stars. I did get to record with Jay and Kai later when they did their octet album."

Eddie first met Thelonious Monk when he was hired for a Steve Allen show on which Monk also played in the mid'50s. "When I was packing up," he recalls, "I heard Monk say to Steve, 'Whaddya mean, scale?' That's when I left." But in 1959 Monk remembered Eddie from that show and hired him for a ten-piece band Monk assembled for his historic Town Hall concert, as well for his 1963 Philharmonic Hall Concert, four years later. Eddie fondly remembers the Town Hall rehearsals, which took place "at Hall Overton's apartment on Sixth Avenue. Monk would be in the other room, dancing; Hall would say 'Are you ever going to play the piano?' And he'd say, 'When the tempo's right.'"

Another legendary entertainer who crossed Eddie's path was Lena Horne. "During the fifties and sixties," Eddie fondly recalls, "I worked a lot with Lena. I was on her album 'Lena At The Waldorf,' which won an award. We had first met back in 1941 at the Cafe Society because she was there one night when my friend J. C. Higginbotham persuaded me to sit in with Red Allen's band. Lena was truly amazing but she was always just one of the guys."

In the 50s and 60s, during the hectic days of the studio scene, in addition to jingles, recording dates and gigs, Eddie worked on Broadway. His entrée into legitimate theatre happened because "I was working weekends with Elliot Lawrence and he decided to take the band into the Broadway theatres to play in the pits. We did a whole series of hit shows like 'How To Succeed in Business,' with Rudy Vallee, 'Golden Boy' with Sammy Davis and 'Golden Rainbow' with Steve and Eydie. Elliot had a fine band with people like Aaron Bell, Jimmy Crawford, Kenny Burrell, Art Farmer and Frank Wess."

"In those days nobody wanted a pit job," Eddie recalls, "because you couldn't take off to do other things. But we went into 'Bye Bye Birdie' in 1960, and Elliot told the contractor 'these guys are going to be taking off.' He asked, 'Don't they like the job?' The show was a big hit and we just went from show to show. So even though I was working regularly on Broadway shows, I was also playing Jazz gigs. I stayed in the theatre for 22 years. I also did the Dick Cavett television show along the way, for four years, with Bob Rosengarden."
At the end of '65, Eddie became one of the original members of the Thad Jones/Mel Lewis Orchestra, a group comprised of New York's finest players. "On Monday nights I worked with Thad and Mel at the Village Vanguard," he remembers, "which I would do after my theatre gig. I did their European tour, as well, in 1969. That was a really great band but one night Thad had a meeting in the Vanguard kitchen and told us that we had to go on the road if the band was going to function properly, which was when a lot of guys like Snooky Young, Eddie Daniels and I left because we had commitments in town."

. Eddie believes the band was particularly strong because "Thad was writing for a certain personnel, who stayed more or less consistent. When you write for certain guys, you can write a certain way, like Duke did for his band. Thad's style of writing was like the way he played, and he was a great trumpet player. When Thad was out in front of the band, he was painting a picture. He would change things on the spot, telling the trumpets to lay out, or when somebody would be really blowing, he'd let them play. He made the arrangements different every night."

Eddie's globetrotting continued in '75, when he toured Russia with the New York Jazz Repertory Band under Dick Hyman's direction: "We were playing Louis Armstrong music. We had five trumpets, Jimmy Maxwell, Ernie Royal, Doc Cheatham, Bernie Privin, and Joe Newman. And Bernie Privin said, 'See, it takes five guys to play what Louis played!'"

Another treasured road memory occurred in 1989, when Eddie toured with Gene Harris and the Phillip Morris Superband, with an itinerary that included Morocco, Hungary, Egypt, France, Turkey, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Korea, the Philippines. Australia, Taiwan and the U.S.A. The all-star ensemble included Frank Wess, James Moody, Urbie Green, Harry "Sweets" Edison, Ray Brown, Herb Ellis and many others. Eddie sums it up: "What a band and what a trip!"

Eddie still gets the same kick from playing with a big band, and the revival of swing bands that happened in the 90s has helped introduced larger groups to a new generation of listeners and dancers, something he's seen in his gigs for the George Gee Big Band, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

As for his own recordings, Eddie feels that he "must mention Duke Jordan, who I have worked a lot with over the years, because he is my favorite pianist. He plays great solos that sound like a horn and when he accompanies you it is like an arrangement, never getting in the way, just 'goosing' you. He played on my last Fresh Sound album along with Jerry Dodgion, Carmen Leggio, Ray Drummond and Mel Lewis and it was one of Mel's last recordings. Mel and I had first worked together years ago in Boyd Raeburn's band and his playing might have seemed laid-back, but the time was always going on underneath like a drone-it was fantastic. We called the album 'The Human Factor' because there were no electronic tricks or splices and we did the entire CD in one day, from 10 in the morning until five in the afternoon."

Although he's played with everyone, he still wishes he had the chance to work with Duke Ellington. It almost happened, three times he explains: "The first time was when Lawrence Brown was sick, and they were working down in Washington at the Howard Theatre, but I got the message too late. The second time, Oscar Pettiford tried to get me on the band, but I was too busy with the recording scene, and didn't want to leave town. The third time, I had just been called for the Dick Cavett Show band with Bobby Rosengarden. That afternoon, Ruth Ellington called. Duke wanted me for a tour of the Far East, Australia and all that. But the Dick Cavett show was four year's work."

In the 90s, Eddie started working with drummer T.S. Monk's group. "We did a European tour in 1997 and an album that featured a lot of Thelonious' new material that T. S. had found around the house. He hired me because I had played with his father-if you hang around long enough, you find that you have played with everyone's father!"

About to begin his eighth decade, Eddie Bert is still playing the trombone, still traveling, and still married to Mollie. With three daughters and four grandchildren, he enjoys spending time with his family and when not playing, also likes photography.

With all the changes he's seen in his lifetime, he remains an optimist: "There's still some music around, some good bands still playing. I get big band gigs, as well as gigs with duos and trios, just guitar and bass and me, so I have to keep practicing, every day, because you have to be prepared for the musical situations you're in. Last week I had a gig where we played the music of Mingus, Monk and Miles. I played with all three of those guys, but never on the same gig. So I have to keep playing. It's a physical thing."

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