from Lona Rosner: "By 1979 I had come back from two quarters of the PhD or die program in English and American literature at UC-Berkeley with my tail between my legs and decided I wanted to learn as much as I could about jazz and the American Popular Songbook. Berkeley hadn’t been a total loss because I discovered Tower Records and the radio station KJAZ out of Alameda where I first heard Carmen McRae (singing
All the Things You Are).
"Back in NYC, I started going out to hear jazz almost every night and by day I was at the Lincoln Center Library Archives learning songs. I called up Ira Gitler and he set me to transcribing interviews for articles and chapters which became the basis of his book, "Swing to Bop"; I typed the manuscript for his publisher. He turned me on to a concert at the nearby Church of the Heavenly Rest with four Detroit piano players. This I guess was the first time I must have heard
Barry Harris play live (also there were Tommy Flanagan, Bess Bonier, Roland Hanna, Major Holley, Oliver Jackson).
"It might have been Ira who told me about a class Barry had just started that met at the Jazz Forum on Broadway in the Village, or a fellow record collector and singer, Bobby Casanova who turned me on to the class which met Monday nights. Needless to say, i became a part of the class and a student of Barry’s methods. He started with the piano class and then had them accompany the singers in a song of their choice. I was in attendance at the concerts that took place May 1 and 2, 1981 at the Jazz Forum with Tommy Flanagan, Barry Harris, Art Davis and Leroy Williams. I recorded those sets and Barry’s medium tempo version of
Strictly Confidential got burned into my brain the more I listened to it.
"A few weeks later I was on my way to a friend from the class, Lenny Azzarello’s house for a piano lesson. I had been working on a lyric for
Strictly Confidential, and walking on the quiet streets, getting off the R train in Bay Ridge I found that I was walking at the same tempo as Barry’s version of the tune playing in my head and parts of the lyric began to fill in for me, walking and singing at the same tempo. I recall having a little crush on Lenny at the time so some of the lyric is partly, gently autobiographical. There is some tone painting (vestiges of grad school in English training) in there. By luck when Barry later decided to make the class sing the last “A” section a minor third higher, the long “ee” sounds are easy to squeak out after a lot of singing, or at a higher pitch.
"I had already written my lyric when I met the Sicklers at Thelonious Monk’s funeral in 1982 and it only took more than 40 years to get this lead sheet published. I joined BMI seven years ago at their urging. I am told that jazz folk all over the world sing it so I will have some aural immortality. While I was still young and wanting to see how far my talents could take me, I was able to perform at a few small clubs, restaurants and concerts and make a few recordings. I wrote more than a dozen liner notes for artists and continued to write lyrics as they came to me. I was jazz journalist and interviewer. I was asked to pick songs for Ruth Brown and Lena Horne to record. My good friend Rodney Jones got me the gig as editor of "JazzAGoGo," the jazz publication of the Akwarium Club in Warsaw. I was an intern at the Rutgers Institute of Jazz studies during my library school days (still trying to sneak back into academia as a librarian). As an avid record collector I compiled cassette tapes for up-and-coming musicians, many of which ended up in taxicabs all over NYC.
"My favorite interview was with bassist Dennis Irwin for "All About Jazz." That and the photos I took of him at his Washington Heights apartment and the lyric
This is Strictly Confidential will probably outlive me. Tommy Flanagan once said to me, ”Your lyric for
Strictly Confidential—it shows that you’re listening to good music.” Tommy and Barry and so many musicians were very kind to me. But without Barry there would have been no lyric to
Strictly Confidential from me. With much appreciation for all the time and love given to me.--
Lora Rosner
The lyric was also performed at a Queens College concert in 2012 with Jimmy Heath.
