I was a student at Hialeah High School in 1970, when my Orchestra Director Mr. William Bobrick told me that he was going to be in the violin section on a Jackie Gleason album.
The sessions were held at the Criteria Studios in Miami.
The trumpet soloist was supposed to be the legendary cornet player Bobby Hackett.
However, at the last minute, Hackett became very ill. He suffered his whole life with diabetes.
The last minute replacement was Miami local trumpeter Don Goldie.
Mr. Bobrick told me how Jackie Gleason came into the recording studio, had several photographers from Capitol Records shoot pictures of Gleason in various postures of conducting the Orchestra.
After the photographers were done, Jackie Gleason disappeared, leaving the REAL Orchestra director, George Williams to lead the sessions.
There were twin banks of string players on either side of a small riser and music stand where Don Goldie played his solos.
The solos on the three Gleason albums that Don Goldie performed on, remain some of the most beautiful sounds ever to come out of a trumpet.
Don Goldie was one of the more visible and versatile jazz trumpet players of the postwar era, a talented soloist with a wide range who became especially visible in the late '50s working with Jack Teagarden. Born Donald Elliott Goldfield in Newark, NJ, he had serious musicians on both sides -- his father, Harry Goldfield, had played trumpet for many years with Paul Whiteman, while his mother, known as Claire St. Claire, was a concert pianist. While still a young boy, Goldie had started learning the violin, the trumpet, and the piano, and he was good enough on the trumpet to earn a $1,000 scholarship to the New York Military Academy, and he later studied with New York Philharmonic member Nathan Prager. He was in the Army for three years, from 1951 through 1954, and rather than serving in combat was pressed into service on radio and television, helping to produce programs recruiting soldiers to serve in the Korean War. He relocated to Miami to join his mother after returning to civilian life, and appeared (and won an award) on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts and with Dave Garroway.
A gig with Bobby Hackett in New York led to more engagements in the city as well as recording work with Lester Lanin, Neal Hefti, and Jackie Gleason, which in turn brought Goldie to the attention of Jack Teagarden. He joined the latter's band in June of 1959, in time to appear on the first of his Roulette Records recordings, At the Roundtable, where he distinguished himself as a soloist and an integral member of the band, scarcely two weeks after coming on board. He stayed with Teagarden until late 1962, sharing the vocals (including a spot-on impersonation of Louis Armstrong that he did on-stage, as part of \"Rockin' Chair\") with him and, along with the leader and clarinetist Henry Cuesta, all of the solos, also writing a few notable pieces for the group as well.
After leaving Teagarden's group, Goldie led his own band for a time, and by the late '60s was working with Gleason in Miami Beach, as well as playing gigs of his own -- in many different jazz and pop idioms -- in the south Florida region, at various hotels and restaurants. Goldie had cut albums for Chess Records' Argo offshoot and the Verve label in the early '60s, and in the 1970s reemerged with his own Jazz Forum label, for which he cut a string of eight LPs, each dedicated to the works of a single composer. He released his final LP, Don Goldie's Dangerous Jazz Band, on the Jazzology label in 1982.
In subsequent years, however, declining health -- mostly associated with diabetes -- forced his retirement from playing, and Goldie committed suicide in 1995. One of the more talented and notable soloists of his period, Goldie never achieved the recognition he deserved despite some very visible gigs.
