Archive for Month: June 2014

News from The Duke Ellington Center

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THE DUKE ELLINGTON CENTER FOR THE ARTS

WE TOAST THE COLLABORATION OF
DUKE ELLINGTON AND DJANGO REINHARDT:
DJANGO and DJUKE – A Celebration of the Jazz Guitar
Sunday, June 15 at 2:30 PM
FREE! At the Bank Street Book Store – Broadway and 112th St.

Join guitarist Marc Daine and Mercedes Ellington,
plus other talents, as we pay homage to this legendary Gypsy musician!
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Breaking News! Ellington in New York City 2016
Mercedes Ellington, Guest of Honor at the 22nd International Duke Ellington Study Group Conference in Amsterdam, is proud to announce that the 23rd International Conference will be held in 2016 in New York City, produced by The Duke Ellington Center for the Arts. Planning begins immediately. Watch this space as we progress.
Graveside Music

Honoring Ellington at The Woodlawn Cemetery on May 24
Mercedes Ellington, family, and friends paid tribute to the 40th anniversary of Ellington’s passing with the laying of a wreath and much more! Art Baron (trombone), James Zollar (trumpet), Mark Gross (sax) and Jennifer Vincent (bass) from AFTER MIDNIGHT were on hand to play, while Brothers from Duke’s fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha, conducted a service and presented a proclamation honoring Ellington. The surprise of the day was the spontaneous appearance of a group of swing dancers paying homage at the nearby grave of dance legend Frankie Manning. The group came bounding over and began to dance to the music when it wafted in their direction. It was a real happening and a wonderful tribute to The Maestro. He would have loved it madly.

Duke Way Sign
Duke Ellington Way
It was an exciting afternoon on June 4th asMercedes Ellington and the cast of AFTER MIDNIGHT unveiled Duke Ellington Way at Broadway and 47th Street. Art Baron, trombonist, who played in the last Ellington-led band was on hand, along with Dule Hill, Karine Plantandit, Jared Grimes, Adriane Lenox, and many other great talents appearing in the show. The event was widely covered in the media and certainly made a large street crown jump for joy!
Group
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CONGRATULATIONS TO WARREN CARLYLE,
WINNER OF THE TONY AWARD FOR BEST CHOREOGRAPHY: AFTER MIDNIGHT

IT’S A GREAT SHOW! DON’T MISS IT! SAVE 35% WITH
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Broadway’s Cotton Club Musical features Ellington
and Ellington-arranged music, performed by a superlative cast of musicians, singers and dancers.

And Don’t Forget These New CDs from the Manhattan School of Music
Symph Elling
THE SYMPHONIC ELLINGTON, led by Justin DiCioccio, features Ellington’s rarely performed orchestral works, and QUE VIVA HARLEM, led by Bobby Sanabria, has Ellington”s “Oclupaca” and Billy Strayhorn’s last work, “Blood Count.” Both CDs/downloads are available from Jazzheads.com (http://cts.vresp.com/c/?TheDukeEllingtonCent/47be99a3bc/7165fb763b/8b8f66f238) , amazon (http://cts.vresp.com/c/?TheDukeEllingtonCent/47be99a3bc/7165fb763b/cad0d8d7a3) .com (http://cts.vresp.com/c/?TheDukeEllingtonCent/47be99a3bc/7165fb763b/676a531e88) and iTunes.apple.com (http://cts.vresp.com/c/?TheDukeEllingtonCent/47be99a3bc/7165fb763b/a4d31178b0)

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SHOP! SHOP! SHOP!
Go to www.smile.amazon.com (http://cts.vresp.com/c/?TheDukeEllingtonCent/47be99a3bc/7165fb763b/5b90420bee) and choose The Duke Ellington Center for the Arts as your favorite charity. When you shop, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your purchase to us! How cool is that! It”s a fabulous win-win! If you purchase The Maestro”s CDs and MP3s it”s a double whammy!

The mission of THE DUKE ELLINGTON CENTER FOR THE ARTS is
to preserve, promote and further the music and philosophy
of this American genius through performance and education.
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There”s a lot more upcoming from
THE DUKE ELLINGTON CENTER FOR THE ARTS

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vital part of the work.
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The Duke Ellington Center for the Arts
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Grammy-winner Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks have played in New York nightclubs appeared in films (The Cotton Club, The Aviator, Finding Forrester, Revolutionary Road, and HBO’s Boardwalk Empire) and for concerts at the Town Hall, Jazz At Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival. Other recording projects include soundtracks for Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd, Sam Mendes’s Away We Go, Michael Mann’s film Public Enemies, and John Krokidas’s feature, Kill Your Darlings; along with HBO’s Grey Gardens, Todd Haynes’s HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce and an upcoming Haynes’ film called Carol. The Nighthawks are also seen and heard in the USA Network series Royal Pains and the PBS series Michael Feinstein’s American Songbook.

A Brooklyn native, Vince Giordano’s passion for this music and the people that made it began at age 5. He has amassed an amazing collection of over 60,000 band arrangements, 1920s and 30s films, 78 rpm recordings and jazz-age memorabilia. Giordano sought out and studied with important survivors from the period: Whiteman’s hot arranger Bill Challis; drummer Chauncey Morehouse; and bassist Joe Tarto. Giordano’s knowledge, passion, and commitment to authenticity led him to create a sensational band of like-minded players, the Nighthawks.

Giordano has single handedly kept alive an amazing genre of American music that continues to spread the joy and pathos of an era that shaped our nation. This summer, Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks will perform at Lincoln Center’s Midsummer Night Swing; Town Hall’s American premiere of Cole Porter’s La Ambassadeur Review; Music Mountain; Old Westbury Gardens; Kingsborough College; Pier 84’s Moon Dance; the Newport Jazz Festival; Morgan Park in Great Neck; and Levitt Pavillion in Westport, CT. Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks can be heard every Monday and Tuesday at Iguana NYC.

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This evening’s program is the last before our summer recess. We will resume either in September or October. Mailing list members will be notified of our first meeting by Labor Day.

HAVE A HAPPY SUMMER!

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DIRECTIONS TO THE SONIC ARTS CENTER
Subway: Take the 1 train to 137^th Street City College and walk north to 140^th St. & Broadway,
then go east to 140^th St. & Convent Avenue. Take the A, B, C, or D trains to 145th St, go south on St. Nicholas to 141st St, (one long block), then west one block to Convent Avenue, and south one more block to 140th & Convent Avenue.
Bus: M4 and M5 on Broadway; M 100, 101 on Amsterdam Ave (one block West of Convent Avenue.)

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The Sonic Arts Center at CCNY offers 4-year Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Music with a concentration in Music and Audio Technology. Their program provides an in-depth curriculum emphasizing real-world skills with a project-based approach. Students enjoy a well-rounded program, with emphasis on audio technology, music theory, orchestration, and history to help them compete in a field that today demands
an ever-growing and highly diverse skill set.

All ARSC NY Chapter meetings are free and open to the public.
Voluntary contributions to help defray our expenses are welcome!

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June 10, 2014 / No Comments / More

Vince Giordano @ ARSC Meeting Thursday, June 19th 7 P. M.

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ARSC New York Chapter
JUNE 2014 Meeting
7 P. M. Thursday, 6/19/14
at the CUNY Sonic Arts Center
West 140^th Street & Convent Avenue, New York
or enter at 138th Street off Convent Avenue
Shepard Hall (the Gothic building) – Recital Hall (Room 95, Basement level)

** An elevator is located in the center of the building
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Vince Giordano
jazz historian and leader of The Nighthawks
will discuss the music from Boardwalk Empire
Grammy-winner Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks have played in New York nightclubs appeared in films (The Cotton Club, The Aviator, Finding Forrester, Revolutionary Road, and HBO’s Boardwalk Empire) and for concerts at the Town Hall, Jazz At Lincoln Center and the Newport Jazz Festival. Other recording projects include soundtracks for Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World, Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages, Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd, Sam Mendes’s Away We Go, Michael Mann’s film Public Enemies, and John Krokidas’s feature, Kill Your Darlings; along with HBO’s Grey Gardens, Todd Haynes’s HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce and an upcoming Haynes’ film called Carol. The Nighthawks are also seen and heard in the USA Network series Royal Pains and the PBS series Michael Feinstein’s American Songbook.

HAVE A HAPPY SUMMER!

** ↂ
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All ARSC NY Chapter meetings are free and open to the public.
Voluntary contributions to help defray our expenses are welcome!

To join ARSC, visit http://www.arsc-audio.org

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June 9, 2014 / No Comments / More

RIP Alan Douglas

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June 9, 2014 / No Comments / More

Jimmy Giuffre’s Music Finds New Appreciation – NYTimes.com

** Jimmy Giuffre’s Music Finds New Appreciation
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A rigorous composer, clarinetist and tenor saxophonist, Jimmy Giuffre made a conscientious break from the jazz mainstream in the 1960s; by today’s standards, his music sounds quite modern. Credit Herb Snitzer

It’s anyone’s guess what Jimmy Giuffre was thinking when he improvised the stark, intriguing solo clarinet pieces intended for his 1962 Columbia album, “Free Fall.” Along with the five that made the cut (http://youtu.be/UDGb1ex1Kc8) , there were five others that saw the light of day some 35 years later, as bonus tracks on an overdue reissue. Small gems of oblique investigation, they bear titles that seem to hint at Giuffre’s state of mind; among them is one with a lonesome air, played in shadowy subtones, that he called “Time Will Tell.”

That would have made a decent mantra for Mr. Giuffre (pronounced JOO-free), who died in 2008 (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/arts/music/26giuffre.html) , of complications of Parkinson’s disease. A rigorous composer, clarinetist and tenor saxophonist, he’d had a few tastes of critical and commercial success before “Free Fall,” which also features the bassist Steve Swallow and the pianist Paul Bley, and belongs to the small category of jazz recordings that truly were ahead of their time. Its dismal reception cost Giuffre his recording contract and his momentum: He didn’t make another album for a decade, missing the peak years of the ’60s avant-garde.
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Seeking recognition in Europe: In Germany in 1961, from left, Carla Bley, Paul Bley, Steve Swallow, Jimmy Giuffre and Juanita Giuffre.Credit Juanita Giuffre

“The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4: New York Concerts” (Elemental), due out on Tuesday, is a startling dispatch from that season in exile. Comprising a pair of previously uncirculated live recordings from 1965, it illuminates a murky period in Giuffre’s career. Atypically for him, both sessions feature a drummer, the superbly alert Joe Chambers, who brings a firm rhythmic push without muddying the music’s intent. “They sound great together, just so natural and flowing,” said the trumpeter and composer Dave Douglas. “If they had made a Blue Note (http://www.bluenote.com/) record, it would be considered one of the big classics of the period.”

The urge is almost irresistible, when discussing Giuffre, to dwell on what might have been. But the new release also encourages some thoughts of what might yet be. It happens to arrive at a moment of growing admiration for Giuffre among current jazz musicians drawn to his chamberlike counterpoint and thoughtfully abstracted form.

There are more of those now than there were even five years ago, when the guitarist Joel Harrison and the drummer George Schuller formed Whirrr (http://joelharrison.com/projects/whirrr) , a Giuffre repertory band whose ranks include the trombonist Jacob Garchik and the saxophonist Ohad Talmor. Mr. Douglas, Mr. Swallow and the Doxas brothers (Chet on reeds, Jim on drums) make up Riverside, a Giuffre-inspired quartet that released its self-titled debut album (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/arts/music/new-rocordings-by-riverside-jessica-lea-mayfield-and-august-alsina.html) this spring. And the Swiss-born trombonist Samuel Blaser has a sharply realized tribute — “Spring Rain,” featuring the saxophonist Ravi Coltrane — due out next year. “His music sounds like today’s music,” Mr. Blaser said of Giuffre, voicing a common theme.

Born in Dallas in 1921, Giuffre began playing clarinet at the age of 9. He earned a music degree from North Texas State Teachers College, and after a stint in the Army, he established himself as a composer-arranger. “Four Brothers (http://youtu.be/hK_9otl3sZ0) ,” which he wrote in 1947 for the Woody Herman Orchestra, became a popular anthem for the band.
Continue reading the main story

Its central feature — a smoothly blended yet boppish line for the saxophone section — pointed in the direction of West Coast cool jazz. Giuffre took part in that boom, notably as a member of the Lighthouse All-Stars (http://youtu.be/5g1JIqG_P8Q) , but by the mid-’50s, he had adopted a more purely contrapuntal ideal. “I’ve come to feel increasingly inhibited and frustrated by the insistent pounding of the rhythm section,” he declared in the liner notes to one of his albums, stating his preference for a beat that’s “acknowledged but unsounded.”

He carried that fairly outré conviction forward with a small series of drummerless groups, starting with the Jimmy Giuffre 3, featuring Ralph Peña on bass and Jim Hall on guitar. A subsequent edition, with Hall and the valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, appeared in the film “Jazz on a Summer’s Day (http://youtu.be/pfLsEH4csQ4) .” That trio’s intuitive rapport, along with its feel for pastoral Americana and the blues, made it an approachable outlier during jazz’s commercial heyday of the mid to late ’50s — and an influential one since then, with stylistic heirs including the guitarist Bill Frisell.

But it’s the Giuffre 3 with Mr. Bley and Mr. Swallow that present-day musicians cite most often as an influence. Giuffre formed this trio after an encounter with Ornette Coleman in 1959 at the Lenox School of Jazz, a summer program in Massachusetts. Struck not only by Mr. Coleman’s force of sound on saxophone but also by his radically unrestricted notions of tonality and structure, Giuffre abruptly changed his own direction.

“We rehearsed incessantly as a trio,” Mr. Swallow recalled, “and often there was more talking than playing at the rehearsals.” The driving subject was a pursuit of atonality and rhythmic license, and yet Giuffre distributed complete scores for his compositions. “There was this wonderful paradox,” Mr. Swallow said. “The music was wild and woolly on the one hand, and on the other, he was really insistent on the fidelity to the notes on the page, and on a kind of ethic of contrapuntal interrelations that governed the music.”

The trio’s first two albums, released on Verve in 1961 and reissued on ECM just over 30 years later, have a restless elegance, with themes either by Giuffre or Carla Bley, who was married to Mr. Bley at the time. The group received encouragement from contemporary composers like Stockhausen and Cage, and at least a few in the jazz fold saw its music as in tune with that genre. Mr. Chambers, the drummer, said that when he heard “Free Fall,” it connected with the Schoenberg and Webern he’d been studying in college.

Mr. Bley, when asked about the trio’s affinities with classical modernism, replied in an email that the idea was hogwash. (Not his exact wording.) “Giuffre started as a jazz composer and played jazz all his life,” he said. And the music readily supports that interpretation, though jazz audiences didn’t at the time. In a story that Mr. Swallow delights in retelling, the trio played its final gig at a coffeehouse on Bleecker Street, after dividing the earnings from the door and coming up with 35 cents apiece.

Giuffre licked his wounds but kept furthering his concept, even as jazz’s vanguardist energies began to solidify around Mr. Coleman and the expeditious fervor of John Coltrane. Giuffre appeared in “The October Revolution in Jazz,” a pioneering free-jazz festival organized by the trumpeter Bill Dixon in 1964. But revolution, as a cultural and rhetorical strategy, wasn’t really at the heart of his enterprise. The compositions he was playing in 1965 have titles related either to geometry (“Angles,” “Quadrangle”) or movement (“Syncopate,” “Drive”). As a white musician who’d made a conscientious break from the jazz mainstream — and by all accounts, a figure of earnest, gentle introversion — he was crucially out of step with the black nationalist spirit of the age.
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Mr. Chambers, who had recorded with the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and the pianist Andrew Hill, was strongly connected to the African-American jazz pulse, and his work on “The Jimmy Giuffre 3 & 4: New York Concerts” is fine and bracing. The first of the two dates took place in May, a few months after Giuffre’s new trio had been booed at a concert in Paris, playing opposite Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. The addition of Mr. Chambers to Giuffre’s band, which otherwise included the pianist Don Friedman and the bassist Barre Phillips, could have been intended as a corrective.

Whatever the case, the quartet — taped without an audience in an auditorium at Columbia University by George Klabin for his student radio show on WKCR — benefits enormously from the presence of drums. “I knew the concept,” Mr. Chambers said, “and I tried to stay out of the way.” But in addition to executing Giuffre’s notated drum parts, which involved great gulps of silence, he brought a sense of smartly grounded propulsion — and implicitly, a link to the evolving post-bop tradition.

Mr. Klabin recorded Giuffre again in September at Judson Hall, across the street from Carnegie Hall, on a concert that also featured the Charles Lloyd Quartet. And while Giuffre kept Mr. Chambers, he used no piano this time, and enlisted the prominent bassist Richard Davis. There are no boos. The music doesn’t quite feel settled — Mr. Davis said he suspects it was the only time he ever worked with Giuffre — but it has an essential gravity. Working with bass and drums, Giuffre favors the tenor, occasionally flashing signs of his admiration for Sonny Rollins. He also includes “Crossroads,” an early piece by Mr. Coleman, offering it like a totem.

“New York Concerts” was produced by Zev Feldman, who acquired the rights from Giuffre’s widow, Juanita, and Mr. Klabin. Along with provoking a reappraisal of Giuffre’s lost decade, it may lead to more of his music being heard. Mr. Friedman said he had already noticed the tide beginning to turn; he has been booked to play a Giuffre tribute with the clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Ken Peplowski, on Sept. 13 at the Kitano New York hotel.

There’s probably no single reason that Giuffre, who taught at the New England Conservatory for more than 15 years, couldn’t personally inspire the reverence now found among younger players. Mr. Schuller and Mr. Douglas each had him as a teacher and said they wished they’d known to take advantage of his insights.

“I think what Jimmy was looking to achieve was a particular state of heightened alertness on the bandstand,” Mr. Swallow said, “with a sense of the individual parts and their relationship to the whole.” That sounds a lot like a prescription from the current moment in jazz, which raises a possibility: that for once, at least in this sense, the timing might work out in Giuffre’s favor.

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June 6, 2014 / No Comments / More

Ways to Spend a Virtual Day With Louis Armstrong – NYTimes.com

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** Ways to Spend a Virtual Day With Louis Armstrong
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Photo
Jason Prover, with tie, and Ricky Riccardi at the Queens College archive. Credit Willie Davis for The New York Times
Continue reading the main story

MAYBE it was the 50th anniversary of “Hello, Dolly” having knocked the Beatles off the top of the pop charts (May 9, 1964), but it occurred to me recently that with a little advance work, I could spend an entire day in New York with Louis Armstrong.

Yes, I know, that idea seems absurd at first. Even a devoted fan like me has to acknowledge that as much as his music lives on, Armstrong, the renowned jazz musician and beloved entertainer known worldwide as Satchmo, died on July 6, 1971.

But he died in his sleep in the king-size bed on the second floor of his modest brick-clad house on 107th Street in Corona, Queens. His widow, Lucille, eventually left the house to the city, and it has been preserved largely as it was in his last days — right down to a bathrobe and a pair of slippers — and is open to the public six days a week. That would be my first stop.

The same people who curate the Louis Armstrong House Museum oversee a collection of Armstrong papers, commercial and homemade recordings, artwork and memorabilia. The archive is housed in the library of Queens College in Flushing and is open to anyone who calls ahead to arrange an appointment. And if you bring your own mouthpiece, you can play one of five Armstrong trumpets kept there. I’ve studied the trumpet for nearly 50 years, with lackluster results. I do own a number of mouthpieces. So my afternoon was booked.
Photo

Clockwise from left, A display at the Louis Armstrong House Museum; John Douglas Thompson as Louis Armstrong in “Satchmo at the Waldorf” at the Westside Theater and trumpets thatwere owned by Armstrong. Credit Clockwise: Willie Davis for The New York Times; Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; Willie Davis for The New York Times

I planned to move into the evening with a cocktail at Birdland, the jazz club in the theater district, where every Wednesday for the last 16 years, the tuba-playing lawyer David Ostwald has led a band devoted to preserving the infectiously swinging musical style introduced by Armstrong’s pioneering small group recordings of the 1920s.

From there, it would be just a short walk to the Westside Theater on 43rd Street to catch the 8 p.m. performance of “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” the one-man show written by the Armstrong biographer and The Wall Street Journal’s theater critic Terry Teachout. John Douglas Thompson portrays an ailing and somewhat embittered Armstrong reminiscing in his dressing room after what would be one of his last public performances. Mr. Thompson also does turns as Joe Glaser, the white manager who controlled Armstrong’s life and career (some say not always in his client’s best interests), and a grumpy Miles Davis, who criticized Armstrong for what he considered a racially demeaning stage persona.

Sometime during this day, I was hoping to grab a plate of red beans and rice, Satchmo’s favorite dish.

I woke up on my Louis Armstrong day and did what I do many mornings: played him performing “Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo.” There are more important recordings among the 100-odd Armstrong numbers on my smartphone: his “West End Blues,” with its eight-bar opening cadenza that plants a signpost to guide all jazz musicians to come, or the sublime duets with Ella Fitzgerald from the ’50s. But I’d introduced this song from Disney’s “Cinderella” into my routine during a gloomy winter spell, because it displays Armstrong’s ability to transcend trite material, infusing it with musical integrity and good humor. I smile every time I hear it. Sometimes I laugh out loud.

“Louis was a musical alchemist,” the director of the Louis Armstrong House Museum, Michael Cogswell, told me later that morning. “He could take the most stupid Tin Pan Alley ditty and turn it into high art.”
Photo

David Ostwald (playing the tuba) and his Louis Armstrong Eternity Band at Birdland, the Manhattan jazz club. Credit Willie Davis for The New York Times
Continue reading the main story

Starting in the basement gift shop and gallery, Mr. Cogswell walked me through the house, which is remarkable mostly for its modesty. Except for an elaborately mirrored guest bathroom with gold-plated fixtures and a futuristic kitchen (considering when it was installed, in 1970) with lacquered custom cabinetry, Louis and Lucille lived in middle-class style. He made lots of money. The week I was visiting coincided with Armstrong’s “Hello, Dolly” chart-topping milestone. He kept the gold record on the wall of his den.

“I don’t want to be any more than I am,” Armstrong wrote to a British biographer less than a year before he died. “What I don’t have, I don’t need it.”

He often toured 300 days a year, and when he landed at home, he spent much of his time in his wood-paneled second-floor den, making mixtapes on his two reel-to-reel recorders and decorating the tape boxes with elaborate and often humorous collages.

Those boxes and tapes are stored at Queens College, where I met the archivist Ricky Riccardi that afternoon. Mr. Riccardi, 33, was first captivated by Armstrong’s recording of “St. Louis Blues” at the age of 15. He has since learned so much about Satchmo that friends call him Rickipedia. His book about Armstrong’s later years, “What a Wonderful World,” was published in 2011.

“We have 750 tapes made by Louis that we’ve transferred to CDs,” Mr. Riccardi said. “He was creating this archive throughout his life. There’s almost nothing he does not talk about — racism, threatening to retire unless he got a special permit to smoke marijuana, him telling dirty jokes.”
Photo

Third-grade students from P.S. 33 at the museum, looking at logs of Armstrong’s home recordings in the den of his former home in Corona, Queens. Credit Willie Davis for The New York Times

Armstrong even taped himself drunkenly propositioning his wife for sex and the strange, funny and poignant conversation that followed, in which Lucille accuses him of thinking only about sex. Armstrong counters that he has another primary concern. “You know that horn comes first,” he tells his wife, “then you and Joe Glaser.” While listening to that recording and some others, I felt at times what Mr. Cogswell said he’d experienced when he first heard them: I got chills from their unvarnished intimacy.

I asked Mr. Riccardi if I could play one of Satchmo’s horns. “Sure,” he said. “Did you bring your mouthpiece?” I had forgotten my mouthpiece.

Good thing, because I probably would have tried to play that revolutionary opening to “West End Blues,” which is something I’ve practiced many, many times and never once played right. Not even close.

The Canadian trumpeter Bria Skonberg can almost nail it. These days, she is a regular member of the Louis Armstrong Eternity Band at Birdland on Wednesdays. The evening I visited, during a break between sets that included “Sleepy Time Down South” and “Swing That Music,” the bandleader, Mr. Ostwald, explained that his goal was more to salute Armstrong’s spirit than to imitate his sound.

“There are people occasionally who ask us to recreate Louis,” Mr. Ostwald said. “And I say, ‘No, we can’t.’ And sometimes, when I use a new trumpet player for the first time, he or she might ask, ‘Do I have to play like Louis?’ And I say: ‘What, are you kidding? Nobody can.’ ”
Photo

Boxes of Armstrong’s audiotapes decorated with collages he made himself. Credit Willie Davis for The New York Times

When I met Mr. Thompson on the sidewalk outside the Westside Theater after watching his performance as Armstrong in “Satchmo at the Waldorf,” he said much the same thing. He has played Satchmo nearly 200 times, and gives a skilled and subtle portrayal of a lifelong entertainment workhorse facing his inevitable decline with a cantankerous pride and a certain wounded dignity. Mr. Thompson never overtly imitates Armstrong, though he steps up to the precipice a few times. Those moments, he explained, help build a foundation for the very last scene when, standing stooped a bit and wearing a golf hat and windbreaker, the actor dons the kind of thick-framed black glasses Armstrong wore and, without saying a word, becomes the man.
Continue reading the main story

Mr. Thompson spent a number of days at the Armstrong house and archives preparing for the role, studying video and audiotapes. “Once you touch the guy, you’re changed,” he said. “The play gave me contact. Research gave me contact, and that contact gave me love. I love this guy.”

Me, too. It was late then, and I decided to head home, never having found red beans and rice, but full in other ways. Before I went to sleep, I played another song from Armstrong’s Disney recording, “When You Wish Upon a Star.” I’d learned this day about a letter Satchmo wrote to the producer of the record telling him that the song was so beautiful that he was listening to his own rendition of it three or four times every night.

That was all the recommendation I needed.

Words and Music (and Furniture)

LOUIS ARMSTRONG HOUSE MUSEUM 34-56 107th Street, Corona, Queens; open Tuesday through Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday noon to 5; 718-478-8274, louisarmstronghouse.org.

ARMSTRONG ARCHIVES Rosenthal Library, Queens College, by appointment. Click on Museum Collections at louisarmstronghouse.org.

DAVID OSTWALD’S LOUIS ARMSTRONG ETERNITY BAND Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m., Birdland, 315 West 44th Street, Clinton; 212-581-3080, birdlandjazz.com.

‘SATCHMO AT THE WALDORF’ Westside Theater, 407 West 43rd Street, Clinton; 212-239-6200, telecharge.com.

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June 6, 2014 / No Comments / More

Eric Offner, the founder & president of The Sidney Bechet Society, passed on, early Tuesday morning.

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Greetings jazz lovers, and longtime friends,

It is with sadness that we report that Eric Offner, the
founder & president of The Sidney Bechet Society,
passed on, early Tuesday morning.

Eric’s declining health had prevented him from attending
our last two concerts. He passed quietly in his sleep, in
the comfort of his own home, where he had hosted many
SBS events over the years.

A memorial service will be held on Long Island,
Sunday, June 8th, at 1:30pm, at the
Unitarian Universalist Congregation at Shelter Rock (http://www.uucsr.org/discover/getting-to-shelter-rock/)
48 Shelter Rock Rd, Manhasset, NY 11030
(516) 627-6560

A further memorial, in Manhattan, will follow in the
coming months. We will keep you informed & updated.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be sent to:
Drug Fighters School
c/o Reach the Children
Attn: Mary Harris, Executive Director
14 Chesham Way, Fairport, NY 14450

All the best,
Donald, Phil, Geri and the SBS family

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Phil Stern
philstern5@aol.com (mailto:philstern5@aol.com)
516-209-1437
The Sidney Bechet Society
www.sidneybechet.org (http://www.sidneybechet.org/)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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June 5, 2014 / No Comments / More

LondonJazzCollector | Adventures in collecting “modern jazz”

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** LondonJazzCollector (http://londonjazzcollector.wordpress.com/)
————————————————————

** Adventures in collecting “modern jazz”: the classical music of America from the Fifties and Sixties, on original vinyl, on a budget, from England. And writing about it
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June 5, 2014 / No Comments / More

Doyle New York to Auction the Jazz Collection of Bruce Lundvall on June 25, 2014 – 2805 – Doyle New York

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** Philip Harrison Hays American, 1931-2005 Bessie Smith – The World’s Greatest Blues Singer, 1970 (CBS 66258)
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Estimate: $1,000 – 1,500

Jim Marshall American, 1936-2010 Miles Davis at Newman’s Gym, 1971 Robert L. Weaver American, 1924-1994 Charlie Parker, Bird with Strings: Live at the Apollo, Carnegie Hall and Birdland Marshall Arisman American, b. 1937 Bud Powell Paul Davis American, b. 1938 Clifford Brown: The Beginning and the End 1952/56, reissued 1973 Philip Harrison Hays American, 1931-2005 Bessie Smith – The World’s Greatest Blues Singer, 1970 (CBS 66258) Robert Weaver American, 1924-1994 Charlie Parker, 1977 Thomas B. Allen American, 1928-2004 (i) Lester Young (ii) Eric Gale – I Know that’s Right Laszlo Kubinyi American, 20th Century Thelonious Monk, Straight No Chaser Thomas B. Allen American, 1928-2004 Lester Young – The Lester Young Story Volume 1, 1975 Bruce Mitchell American, 1908-1963 Jazz Orchestra from the Wings Robert Andrew Parker American, b. 1927 Art Tatum, Piano Starts Here, 1968 Ink and watercolor on paper 17 x 17 i… Al Hirschfeld American, 1903-2003 Bruce with Sax Robert Weaver
American, 1924-1994 Coleman Hawkins/Clark Terry – Back in Brown’s Bag, 1963 John Berg American, 20th Century Dexter Gordon – Homecoming: Live at the Village Vanguard, 1977 Thomas B. Allen American, 1928-2004 Lester Young

** DOYLE NEW YORK TO AUCTION THE JAZZ COLLECTION OF BRUCE LUNDVALL ON JUNE 25, 2014
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** Longtime President of Blue Note Records
————————————————————

** The Bruce Lundvall Collection Will Be Offered as a Featured Section of the June 25 Doyle at Home Auction
————————————————————

** The Collection Comprises Approximately Thirty Lots of Original Jazz Album Cover Art, Photographs and Ephemera
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Doyle New York is honored to auction a remarkable collection of original album cover art, rare photography and related ephemera assembled by Bruce Lundvall, longtime president of the renowned Jazz label, Blue Note Records. During his half-century in the music industry at record labels Columbia, CBS, Elektra, Manhattan (EMI) and finally Blue Note, Bruce Lundvall discovered and signed a number of Jazz legends.

The Bruce Lundvall Collection comprises approximately thirty lots documenting the history of Jazz. Featured items include the original artwork for Thelonious Monk’s groundbreaking album, Straight, No Chaser (Colombia: 1966) and Charlie Parker’s Bird with Strings: Live at the Apollo, Carnegie Hall and Birdland (CBS: 1977), as well as a rare 1972 photograph (printed in 1982) of Miles Davis that captures the mercurial genius in a boxing ring at a San Francisco gym. Additional highlights include original album artwork for a number of jazz legends, among them Art Tatum, Woody Shaw, Bessie Smith, Lester Young, Bud Powell and others.

The Bruce Lundvall Collection will be offered as a featured section of the Doyle at Home auction on June 25, 2014 at 10am. The public is invited to the exhibition on view from June 21 through 24 at Doyle New York.

The Internet catalgue for the Bruce Lundvall Collection will be available on Wednesday, June 11. Please check back.

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June 5, 2014 / No Comments / More

Buddy Bolden biopic to resume production, but without Anthony Mackie | NOLA.com

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** Buddy Bolden biopic to resume production, but without Anthony Mackie
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buddy bolden and band circa 1905.jpg

Hyatt Hotels scion Dan Pritzker is finally ready to resume production on his long-gestating biopic on New Orleans jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden. But he’s going to have to do it without leading man Anthony Mackie (http://topics.nola.com/tag/anthony%20mackie/index.html) , according to Deadline. (http://www.deadline.com/2014/05/seven-years-after-production-began-dan-pritzkers-bolden-skeds-new-shoot-sans-star-anthony-mackie/)

The planned three-month shoot for “Bolden!” — which Pritzker wrote and is directing — will be the third round of production on the film, which is described on IMDB as “a mythical account of … the first Cornet King of New Orleans.” It first went before cameras in 2007, and then underwent reshoots in 2009. This latest round will see Pritzker reshoot approximately half of his film.

Mackie, a New Orleans native who has seen his star rise significantly since production began — thanks to roles in such films as “The Hurt Locker (http://topics.nola.com/tag/hurt%20locker/index.html) ” and “Captain America: The Winter Soldier (http://topics.nola.com/tag/captain%20america/index.html) ” — participated in both of those shoots, which took place in New Orleans and in Wilmington, N.C. This time, however, he will be replaced Gary Carr (“Downton Abbey”).

Other cast members — at least in the previous shoots — include Jackie Earle Haley, Michael Rooker, Omari Hardwick and Mackie’s fellow New Orleanian Wendell Pierce. Locally reared jazzman Wynton Marsalis composed the film’s score.

The project, which Pritzker is self-financing, has cost a reported $30 million. So far. But as a billionaire member of Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans, he’s got pockets deep enough to keep shooting until he gets the film the way he likes it. “Obviously, I’ve had a steep learning curve, and I just decided that I wanted to tell the story in a different way than I had captured it,” he told Deadline’s Mike Fleming Jr. in a story published this week.

The three-month shoot for “Bolden!” is expected to take place largely in Wilmington.

The talented but troubled Bolden is among the more colorful characters in New Orleans’ exceedingly colorful jazz history. A cornet player, he was a huge draw in his hometown of New Orleans in the early 1900s, with “Funky Butt (Buddy Bolden’s Blues)” among his more celebrated numbers, one widely covered by other musicians.

Bolden’s career was hampered, however, by a struggle with mental illness — before it was halted all together by the onset of what is described as alcohol-related psychosis. By the time he was 30, he was institutionalized at the Louisiana State Insane Asylum at Jackson, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He died at 54 years old and was buried in a pauper’s cemetery in New Orleans.

His musical influence, however, long outlasted him. No known recordings of his work exist, and facts about his life have become intermingled with no small amount of mythology. This much is certain, though: Bolden’s improvisation-heavy blend of ragtime and blues — which he performed with his Bolden Band under the name King Bolden — is widely recognized as an originator of the musical form that would become jazz.

“Bolden!” isn’t the first time Pritzker has been motivated to make a film about a New Orleans jazz icon. He also wrote and directed a black-and-white silent film on the early years of Louis Armstrong, titled “Louis” and also featuring Mackie as Bolden. That film has played a handful of one-offs but has yet to land a distribution deal.

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June 4, 2014 / No Comments / More

The art of noise: how music recording has changed over the decades | Music | The Guardian

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** The art of noise: how music recording has changed over the decades
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giant exponential horn
Big audio dinosaur … the giant exponential horn at the Science Museum. Photograph: Jennie Hills

One of the great changes in the British countryside is that hedgerows and verges no longer glisten in the way they did 20 years ago. No longer does the sunlight catch the strands of tape that used to festoon thorns and grasses, lost reminders of another cassette jammed in the car stereo. It would eject, but would emerge trailing a loop of slender, slippery tape, the end snagged deep in the player’s insides. A helpful passenger might tease it free and painstakingly spool the tape back into its case, ready to play and jam again; more likely they would rip it from the machine and throw it out of the window.

Driving today has fewer distractions, hour after hour passing as the MP3 player shuffles through its enormous repertoire, and listening at home is equally trouble-free, a laptop and headphones doing away with the need for all those records, cassettes, CDs, turntables, amplifiers, wires and speakers. So much time filled, so much space saved; never before has music been so available and yet so immaterial. Perhaps it’s this immateriality that has provoked a revival of interest in older audio technologies, in ways of recording and listening that involve something more tangible than a stream of digital code. Tellingly, this is a revival led by people too young to have used these technologies when they were state of the art, probably even too young to have thrown that cassette tape (http://www.theguardian.com/music/cassette-tape) out of the car window. It’s this generation that is buying vinyl (http://www.theguardian.com/music/vinyl) , and it’s musicians of the same generation who
are making the records, experimenting with tape recorders and enthusing about analogue sound.

Some of this is fashion, of course, an audio equivalent of steampunk or hipster beard-growth, but there’s something more significant going on as well. The march of progress has taken us from innovation to innovation – mechanical to electrical, 78 to 33⅓, mono to stereo, LP to CD, Walkman to iPod – each new technology overwhelming us with its superiority and the way it solved recurrent problems in audio engineering – fidelity in recording, more signal and less noise in playback, longer listening times. Resistance was futile because the two halves of the recording industry marched hand in hand, phasing out production of older playback equipment as new formats were introduced.
audio cassette tapes Missing from the English countryside … old audio cassette tapes. Photograph: Alamy

Only now, when that march seems to have reached some sort of destination – all the music in the world available at any time, usually at little or no cost, in crystal-clear recordings – is it possible to question whether this is really where we want to be, or whether we might instead like to revisit some of the points along the way. It’s this retrospection that is allowing us to take pleasure in the special characteristics of old recording formats, to savour the realisation that technologies are not transparent, but put their particular stamp on the experience which they mediate. Etching, silk screen and lithography have all been superseded by more efficient printing methods, but visual artists continue to use them; perhaps music has reached this point too.

A process such as etching, cutting an image into a plate and then printing it affects what can be depicted and how we see it. In the same way, recording formats shape how musicians work and how we listen. Pop songs are short and sharp because in the days of analogue recording a song could last no longer than the time it took the gramophone needle to cross the narrow gap between the edge of the record and the maker’s label in the middle. Whether it was a 10-inch shellac disc turning at 78rpm, or a seven-inch single turning at 45rpm, the musical discipline was the same: there was time for variety – introduction, verse, chorus, middle eight, instrumental – but there had to be a beginning, middle and end too.

How the music was recorded was also important. For the first 50 years of the recording era the manufactured cylinder or disc was a duplicate of a live performance. As the musicians played, the disturbances they created in the air were caught by a horn, later a microphone, and etched into a groove. But with the advent of magnetic tape it became possible to combine layers of time, recording different performances side by side on the same length of tape. As tape technology developed in the 50s and 60s, the number of tracks multiplied, and musicians’ imaginations could wander through a labyrinth of takes, re-takes, overdubs and patches. With more and more tracks available nothing needed to be thrown away; recording became a sort of musical hoarding. Not sure about the bass line? Don’t delete it, just mute that track and add another version.

Multiple options can breed indecision, otherwise known as remixing. The history of pop music in the 1970s is full of tales of release dates postponed while artists agonised over how to create a definitive version out of all that accrued studio time, stacked up, track upon track, on the master tape. In the 1980s indecision became a marketing strategy – release one mix, then another, then another. In the age of the internet indecision was even promoted as a sort of shared creativity – don’t decide, just put everything you’ve got online and let the fans do the work.

But it is recording formats that matter most to listeners, and now that the LP is with us again it’s easy to see why we missed it. There’s room for enough of one sort of music – a Brahms symphony, Kind of Blue – but not too much. There’s a necessary break which, especially in pop music, imposes a set of helpful creative questions: is side two a variation of side one or should each new side offer a new style, a new energy? Above all, analogue formats remind us that in recording and listening we don’t have to be passive. In an age when we can wallpaper our lives with a random shuffle of MP3s, there’s something splendidly willed about choosing to put a record on a turntable. It’s a choice that necessitates more choices. CDs end in silence, but the scratch and click of the centre groove on an LP is a nagging call to action: get up, turn me over, or choose something else. There’s a hint of wilful destruction too, knowing that each playing spins the disc a little closer to its
ultimate ruin.

My involvement with the record industry began just as the last LPs were being cleared from the shelves, so I’ve only made CDs. But a year ago I began to make plans for an LP of music I have written for the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze (http://www.antonlukoszevieze.co.uk/) . As we only had enough music for one side of an LP I needed to write a new piece for the other side and I decided the music should, in some way, be about recording itself. The result is called re:play and begins with the cellist making a series of recordings of himself; as he listens back to what he has recorded and then tries to play the same music again, the recordings provide audible evidence that, try as he might, he can’t recapture what he initially played. To make this even clearer, each recording is made with a different technology, and in the version we made for BBC Radio 3 last month we used a Dictaphone, a Studer tape recorder and an Edison wax cylinder phonograph.

The first two were easy to find. The Studer was the work-horse of BBC radio studios until the digital age and the Dictaphone has been a lo-tech favourite of experimental musicians for many years; it’s battery-powered, fits in the palm of a hand, and distorts any sound it records. Edison’s machine, on the other hand, is a real antique and came with its own curator, Aleks Kolkowski, who carefully attached a large conical horn to the hand-cranked recorder and warmed up a wax cylinder with a hairdryer to soften the wax. The hairdryer may not have been authentic but everything else was, and when the recording was played back it sounded as if my music had been transported back in time to the early 1900s.

After the session I talked to Kolkowski, a violinist who works mostly in free improvisation, about the allure of the phonograph. “I saw my colleagues playing with laptops”, he told me, “and I wanted to do something else.” In particular he wanted to make music “influenced by post-1945 electronic music but using pre-electric technology”. He told me too about his most recent project, an installation called The Exponential Horn: In Search of Perfect Sound, which will open at the Science Museum on 20 May and has at its heart an “audio dinosaur”, a 27-foot horn loudspeaker.
Science Museum workshop staff Science Museum workshop staff working on the reconstruction of the giant horn. Photograph: Jennie Hills

The horn opens from an initial 4 sq cm to a 2.15 sq m mouth and is a reconstruction of one of the most popular exhibits in the Science Museum in the 1930s. The original was commissioned in 1929 by Roderick Denman, the Science Museum’s then curator of telecommunications, and was designed to reproduce the widest possible sound frequency range. Once a week this was demonstrated with broadcasts from the BBC’s London Regional Service and in Kolkowski’s installation the audio demonstrations will include sound art, new poetry and archive radio footage, with broadcasts from the BBC and Resonance FM (http://resonancefm.com/) as well as new work.

Audio nostalgia? Perhaps, but, like me, Kolkowski is interested in the way technology affects the processes of recording and listening. He is, he says, “very ambivalent about recording” and, because he wants to make “recordings that sound like recordings”, he chooses to work with technologies that very obviously impose themselves on what is recorded and how it is heard. For him the fascination of the Science Museum’s giant loudspeaker is not only its power and fidelity but also its limitations; there is, he says, an “incredible sound presence in front of the horn, almost three-dimensional” but as soon as one steps away “the sound changes dramatically”.

In 1972, in Ways of Seeing (http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2012/apr/02/how-we-made-ways-seeing) , John Berger described how, “for the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free”. Some time in the last decade innovations in recording and distribution reduced music to a similar condition, but it may be that installations such as The Exponential Horn and the boom in LP sales will restore some of that lost tangibility and substance, music to value rather than to throw away.

• Christopher Fox’s re:play will be broadcast on Radio 3 in the summer.

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June 1, 2014 / No Comments / More

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Archive for Month: June 2014

News from The Duke Ellington Center

Vince Giordano @ ARSC Meeting Thursday, June 19th 7 P. M.

RIP Alan Douglas

Jimmy Giuffre’s Music Finds New Appreciation – NYTimes.com

Ways to Spend a Virtual Day With Louis Armstrong – NYTimes.com

Eric Offner, the founder & president of The Sidney Bechet Society, passed on, early Tuesday morning.

LondonJazzCollector | Adventures in collecting “modern jazz”

Doyle New York to Auction the Jazz Collection of Bruce Lundvall on June 25, 2014 – 2805 – Doyle New York

Buddy Bolden biopic to resume production, but without Anthony Mackie | NOLA.com

The art of noise: how music recording has changed over the decades | Music | The Guardian

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