Man on the Street and ace trombonist Mal Sharpe talks with Derk about his partnership with the late James Coyle and plays tracks from (and left off of) the new box set, These 2 Men Are Imposters.
Jim Coyle and Mal Sharpe met in a boarding house in San Francisco in 1959 and found they had a mutually sick sense of humor. They did their best to avoid real jobs and see if they could make a living pulling pranks, or "Terrorizations," as they then called them. Using one of the first miniature tape recorders, which they hid in a brief case, they roamed the streets of San Francisco capturing their bizarre encounters with unsuspecting citizens.They released one LP on Warner Brothers Records, were hired by KGO radio to do a nightly show, and, in 1964, went to Hollywood to do a television pilot, The Imposters. Coyle died and 1993 and Sharpe lives in Berkeley, where he has done hundreds of man-on-the-street interviews and leads the swinging Big Money in Jazz band.