The enjoyable,  the irresistible, the incomparable, the impeccable, the alpha and omega -- which is the beginning and the end -- the fantastic, the magnificent, the terrific, the talented, the omnipotent, the sensuous, the luscious, the effervescent Harry ''Sweets'' Edison had been playing his trumpet all evening, tossing off one brilliant moment after another.

Now, in his trademark sign-off, he was calling himself all these nice names as the bassist Monte Budwig and the drummer Sherman Ferguson brought into the homestretch their nightlong race to outswing one another behind him. While Edison tossed rose petals at himself, pianist Art Hillary took a burning but muted solo on Sweets' closing theme song, ''Centerpiece,'' a sturdy blues with a sly harmonic strategy that Edison wrote and used to call ''Keester Parade.''

Once you've heard it, you never forget it, this tune. The same with Sweets. Nobody else even approaches the trumpet like he does: Never too much and always plenty.

On the bandstand of the Loa in Santa Monica this night, Edison distilled the labor and learning of nearly 60 years in the front ranks of jazz, including the 12 he spent as one of Count Basie's most elegant soloists, rivalling the great Lester Young and the great Buck Clayton on the all time suave output scale.

Earlier, when he introduced the Ram Ramirez song, ''Lover Man,'' he said that playing on the Billie Holiday recording of that tune after he joined the Basie band in June 1938 was one of the highlights of his life.

With a Harmon mute in his battered old horn, Edison stood still as an oak tree while he gave a touching statement of the yearny old melody. His sound, like Holiday's, was simple, rich and tactful.

Hillary backed him with the utmost delicacy, finding exactly the right things to do as the trumpeter shifted gears and began to swing the song in an urgent and bluesy way, lightly  basting it with a touch of ''Coming through the Rye'' or some such levity here and there to skirt any excess sentimentality. You got the feeling Sweets knows this number from top to bottom.

''That song can never be done by anybody else but Billie,'' he said modestly through the applause when it was over. ''She really nailed it down.''

Coming from Sweets, a statement like that covers a lot of ground, since his studio career after he left Basie in 1950 includes recordings -- nobody can play an obbligato like Sweets, nobody --  with Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Joe Williams, Pearl Bailey and Diana Ross, who he backed in ''Lady Sings the Blues.''

Next from the Loa bandstand came ''Satin Doll,'' that grand  old Basie crowd pleaser, on which Edison traded fours with  drummer Ferguson just like he used to do when he toured with Jazz at the Philharmonic in his post-Basie years, before he formed his own combo.

On the familiar bossa nova ''Wave,'' Sweets snapped his fingers and waggled his 74-year-old hips a little before launching into a series of blistering passages that included triplets within triplets and a pianissimo series of high Cs that not too many trumpet players would even attempt. His articulation was light as any flutist's.
 

Afterward, somebody asked him how he was feeling down here in the 1980s, far away from alpha and nearing omega.

''Never felt better,'' he said with the smile that led Lester Young to give him the name Sweets.

Then he raised a mocking  eyebrow. ''And I never made less.''
 
 

Off the bandstand, Sweets liked to sit around with a guy like Teddy Edwards, the tenor saxophonist, and reminisce. Here's a double interview from back in the 1980s on the eve of the Playboy Jazz Festival in Los Angeles.

Teddy on the stand at Alfonse's.

Debonair Harry Sweets Edison, who became a trumpet star with Count Basie in the pre-World War II era, and suave Teddy Edwards, a tenor saxophone stalwart in Los Angeles who's been with Gerald Wilson and Howard McGhee and led many a cooking crew big and small in the postwar era, got together not long ago to recall those golden days when the jazz immortals walked the earth or at least the alleys.

It's hard to believe sometimes that the ears of people like this still hold sounds uttered decades ago and thousands of miles away by musical poets the rest of the world has forgotten.

''When I hit L.A. in '44,'' said Teddy, who's from Jackson, Miss., ''it was really happening on Central Avenue. Oh, man, music everywhere, all up and down the street.''

''That's the first time I heard Big Sid Catlett. I was working with a big band, we had a show, and dancers and all this stuff, and on my first intermission I went down to catch Big Sid. Boy, I'm telling you, when I walked in the door, the pulse met me. I'll never forget that, man.''

''Where was that, the Downbeat?'' asked Sweets, who was preparing spare ribs in a tiny kitchen in his apartment in mid-Wilshire, not far from where Edwards lived over a garage in an even tinier one-bedroom.

''Yeah, the Downbeat, on 47th and Central,'' Teddy answered. ''That was really a jazz club.''

''Right across the street was the Say When,'' Sweets went on.

''And the Last Word,'' Teddy continued, as though they were trading fours.

''The Last Word, where Nat Cole was playing...,'' added Sweets.

''Dynamite Jackson's, the Plantation out south at 96th...''

''Club Alabam...''

''The Jungle Room, Jack's Basket, the Lincoln Theater...''

''Oh, they had, right on Central Avenue...''

''Oh, everybody!''

''You see everybody! Everybody!''

Still, as Sweets remembered it, ''I never did think I'd live in California, because New York was so beautiful in those days. It was a sweet city. Then it deteriorated.''

Edison had left Columbus, Ohio, his native burg, as a lad in his 20s, toting the York cornet his mother bought him for 50 cents down and 35 cents a month, to join Lucky Millinder's band in the Apple, which was carried then as now on the Main Stem. In those days, you transported your horn not in a gig bag but in the cut-off leg of an old pair of wool britches.

Also in New York, it turned out, was a chorus girl of his acquaintance, who later became his wife, dancing in those days in the chorus line at the Cotton Club.

''That's the one part about that movie, 'The Cotton Club,' that's true. They didn't allow blacks in there. I couldn't even go there to pick up my wife. I had to stand on the corner and wait for her to come out.

''So I finally got to the point I wouldn't even go down and pick her up. Cause I was having too much fun in Harlem, anyway.

''New York was a school, it was a lesson. You could go to a joint, here Chu Berry, Prez, Herschel Evans,  Don Byas, Ben Webster, Dick Wilson... I had so much fun in New York that when I first went there, I never went to bed.

''I fell out one night and went to the hospital. I couldn't go to sleep. I was afraid I'd miss something.''

''Just to see all those guys walking up and down Seventh Avenue that I had seen in Columbus on the bandstand when I was 14 or 15 years old. Chick Webb! Jimmy Lunceford! Duke Ellington!''

 

Sweets and Teddy at the Hollywood Bowl.

Teddy at this point begins to sing a little tune, ''do bleed oo do blee doop.''

Sweets calls it: ''Let's Get Together!'' Written by Edgar Sampson, it was Lunceford's theme song.

''They had joints for everybody, all the instruments. There was a place called Anchors Aweigh where all the trumpet players used to play, between 125th and 126th on Seventh. Roy Eldridge, Charlie Shavers, Taft Jordan, everybody played in there.

"Everybody except (the trumpeter) Erskine Hawkins. Erskine Hawkins would never jam, because Roy Eldridge had a thing against Erskine Hawkins. I don't know why. But if he heard Erskine was playing any place, he'd jump off the bandstand with his horn...''
''And go get him!'' Edwards said. Sweets nodded.

''Well, Lucky fired me for Dizzy," he went on. "I was in the trumpet section with Charlie Shavers and Carl Warwick, but they had been playing with Dizzy at Boys Town in Philadelphia. So they said, 'Well, you know, since we played with Dizzy, you know...'
''It was one of those things. They wanted Birks in there.  The three guys were used to being together.

"In the meantime, Basie had a little trumpet player named Bobby Moore. Well, he took sick. He was only 18 years old, and (Count Basie drummer) Jo Jones and (bassist) Walter Page and (saxophonist) Herschel Evans and I were all living in the same apartment house there in New York.

''They told Basie, 'Well, why don't you get this guy Harry from St. Louis.' So I went to the Woodside (hotel) and tried out with the band, and I got the job. That was in 1938.''
 

''Bobby Moore was with Jay McShann,'' Teddy put in, ''and I heard that Bobby Moore was the one who really opened Dizzy's eyes to that advanced harmony.''

Edison agreed. ''Oh, he used to rip Dizzy up every night! Every night! At jam sessions, you know. And not only Dizzy, he'd rip Charlie Shavers every night. He was a bad little trumpet player, and he lost his mind, and he's still in the hospital ever since 1938. I took his place. He's the one played the solo on 'Out the Window.' ''

''Be you do don't be yabba to deet deet,'' sings Teddy, who remembers the solo note for note, even though he is a tenor player.

''Oh, he was mean," Sweets went on. "He had funny teeth up front, you know? They call them cat teeth. They came down to a point, like. And he went to the dentist, and he fixed his teeth, and he never did get straight after that.''

Teddy let this one go by.

''But every night in those days, you'd go someplace, and there was jam sessions going on,'' Harry said. ''Where I lived, on 132nd and Seventh Avenue, in the next block there was a place called the Bird Cage, where Art Tatum played.

''He'd start at 9 and get off at 4. Right up the street was Connie's Inn. Then the Ubangi Club was there on Seventh Avenue. And then Small's Paradise was on 135th Street. The Yeah, Man Club was on 138th, where Billie Holiday used to sing every night. And after she'd get off at 4, she'd go to Monroe's on 134th Street.

''He didn't open till 4. That's where you'd hear Charlie Parker, Sid Catlett...everybody used to come from downtown, all the guys from the Black Cat and every place down in the Village, would come uptown to Monroe's, and there'd be a jam session till 1 or 2 o'clock in the afternoon.

''Charlie Parker,'' mused Edwards, as Sweets went off to wash the sparerib slabs.

''I first met Charlie Parker in '42." Teddy was not at all tired out by all this pub crawling.
''And you know, the day he recorded 'Yardbird Suite' and 'Moose the Mooche' out in Glendale., he called me and said, 'Listen to this,' and he sang it for me. He was living on the East Side on McKinley Street near San Pedro in a room in a lady's house.

''Yeah, we played many, many nights together, man, we played with a group with Howard McGhee at the Finale Club, and ironically, that's the only club where the building is still left downtown, on First and Weller. We used to live together down on Brennan and San Pedro.

''In fact, the last day he was on California soil, I took him to the train station in San Francisco. I was working at Bop City after hours, and he'd come and hang out with me after the gig, till 6 in the morning, and then we'd go sit over the chess board all day. We were friends for years.''
 
 

Sweets comforts a fellow mourner at the funeral
of Marshal Royal, his old Count Basie band mate, on May 8, 1995.